Standoff at the Mine

[The1True]

This story is metal as hell. Presented below are excerpts from "Hell Under Earth" from the July 26th-August 8th 2025 issue of The Economist. It's worth it to read the whole article if you can. I am presenting these excerpts without judgment of the cast of criminals, desperate men, crooked politicians and complacent police. I'm not inviting social commentary or discussions of politics. I should however acknowledge the human tragedy of these men trapped leagues underground, watching their friends starve to death, battling eachother for food and finally over human flesh, taking unimaginable risks to survive. This story is full of deeply evocative descriptions of life in essentially an enormous megadungeon inconceivably deep underground, as well as a fascinating array of factions, including what could be described as a criminal gang run by bards. The seeds here for a grimdark scenario are fertile:

The miners had known hunger before, but
never like this. Afterwards they would talk of
cracked skin, sores that would not heal, an
emptiness that stopped you from sleeping or
ever being fully awake. George and Alfred
called it “the grief of hunger”, a numbness that engulfed
you from within. Once they didn’t eat for 18 days. Although
what was a “day” anyway, when they had not seen
sunlight for months?
Their job was to sit in one of the middle tiers of the
37-level Buffelsfontein gold mine, about a kilometre
underground, collecting the food that was lowered
through the concrete shaft on arope, then sending it on
to the levels below.

At the mine’s deepest point,
3km underground, the natural temperature of
the rock was 58.6°C. Not for nothing were the men who
dug illegally in the labyrinth of abandoned tunnels
known as “zama-zamas”, the ones who “try their luck”

In November a fellow zama-zama
entered the mine on a rope and told them that the South
Aftican police were camped at the top of the shaft and had
taken control of what went in and who came out. By cutting
off supplies, the police hoped to force the miners to the
surface. But they had also blocked access to the clandestine
rope crews that the men relied on to pull them out.
The police said the miners could walk underground to
another shaft, where it was possible to leave, and that
they were refusing to come out because they feared arrest.
The miners said the other shaft was unreachable.

The deposits were so far from the shafts that it took miners hours
of their shift just to reach them.
This didn’t put off the zama-zamas, who were prepared
to live underground for months at a time. They moved in
as soon as the mining companies moved out. Security
footage released in 2015 shows scores of men, some carrying
machineguns, ransacking buildings at Buffels for
scrap metal. At some point they took over the tunnels. It
. was not hard to do, if you had a very long rope and a head
for heights.
Some of the men were familiar with the maze of tunnels
because they and their forefathers had helped to dig
them. “Nobody today knows the mine better than the
miners who built it,” said a police officer who requested
anonymity. “If we try to chase them underground they
literally disappear.”

 

[The1True]

Continued:

The gangs force miners to pay exorbitant prices for
food, equipment and sometimes even entry to the mine.
In some cases the gangs refuse to hoist a miner to the
surface until he has found enough gold to pay off his
debts. Three teenage zama-zamas told journalists last
year that they were given false promises of work, then
forced into Buffels at gunpoint. Other miners interviewed
by police said that the going rate to be pulled out was 25
grams of gold, worth about 25,000 rand ($1,400) at blackmarket prices.
Khuma, a township near Buffels, was ruled by a faction
of Terene (the Train), one of the most feared gangs in
Lesotho, whose leader was wanted for murder. Terene,
like the other gangs from Lesotho that control the mines,
is ostensibly a syndicate of famo musicians. In the old
days the famo singers serenaded the gangsters (“like Frank
Sinatra singing for the mafia,” said David Coplan, an
anthropologist who has studied their music). But over the
years, the gangsters and their troubadours became more
closely entwined. “You can’t differentiate the famo gangsand
the illegal miners. They are working together now,”
explained Lesotho’s deputy police commissioner,
Moghebi Likhama. There’s a widespread assumption in
Khuma that the gangs have bought off and intimidated
police officers, security guards and magistrates.
Rival famo gangs insult each other in song and kill
each other on the streets, pursuing vendettas and fighting
over the mineshafts. The mob in Khuma was in a turf
war with another in Kanana, a township about 20km
away. Last year a group of men walked into a tavern
there, asked for “the Basotho” (as people from Lesotho
are known), and shot eight people dead. There are stories
of grotesque violence: murders celebrated like a football
triumph, corpses found with severed genitals, tunnels
booby-trapped with explosives. “These are not Robin
Hoods trying to help the community,” said a mining
engineer from Klerksdorp who used to work on Buffels.
“They are vicious fucking murderers.”

There were a dozen shafts in the area, many of them
used by zama-zamas. Hundreds of kilometres of tunnels
ran off from the shafts, like the roots from a tree trunk.
George and Alfred would be working in shaft 10. They
dropped into it on a rope, trying not to think about the
17 seconds they would fall if the rope snapped. Below
them, at a depth of 1,500 metres, an old rail track led
laterally to shaft 11, about 3km away. These two shafts, as
far as they knew, were cut off from the rest.

The men
lived shirtless in the heat, their way lit by head lamps, their
beds fashioned from discarded rope. One abandoned
tunnel was designated as a toilet. Another was used to
wash in. It was never hard to find water, which flowed
everywhere, even when it was not raining above ground.

Each shaft had a “shop”, run by the gang that controlled
the mine, in which miners could buy food, alcohol and
medicine. The shop at shaft 10 was a few hundred metres
below where George and Alfred worked, in a cavernous
space as big as a church. At these depths, a sixpack of
Heineken went for the equivalent in gold of 800 rand
($40).

“Entire mining
infrastructure...is just being abandoned and plundered,”
said David Van Wyk of the Bench Marks Foundation, a
research group. Roads in Johannesburg were sinking into
the ground, as the city of gold was literally undermined
by zama-zamas in tunnels below.

 

[The1True]

Last one:

In December 2023 the government launched a nationwide
crackdown, calling it Vala Umgodi, or “Close the
Hole”. The idea was to force the miners to surface by cutting
off their supplies - to “smoke them out”, as one minister put it.
The police considered this the only way to clear
the tunnels without engaging armed miners in dangerous
battles underground.

George and Alfred were still
underground, a mile beneath our feet. Like most of the
other miners they had come to shaft 11, which was the only
place where rescuers were sending down food. They had
walked for hours to get there, balancing on top of a pipe
in the flooded tunnel where locomotives once ran.

There was another way out, so perilous that only a starving
man would risk it. Back in shaft 10 were the remains
of the metal frame which had once carried a mechanical
cage. It might just be possible to climb up the rusted ruins,
a vertical ascent of more than a kilometre. George had
seen other men try it, tying loops of rope into dangling
steps. He had also heard some of them fall.
Fourteen men began the journey with him. In George’s
telling, they climbed short sections at a time, resting in
alcoves that had once housed electrical transformers. In
one they found a soggy packet of potato crisps, which
they dried on a fire of burnt rope. Otherwise they consumed
nothing but water and a little salt. They slept when
their watches told them it was night. The next morning
they stood in a circle and prayed, before setting off again.
On the first day one of the men fell. In the darkness,
the others could not see what became of him. As they
climbed they passed the bodies of nine men who had tried
this way before, only to slip or succumb to exhaustion: a
tangle of rope and metal and bones, suspended above the
void. George whispered to the spirits of the dead men as
he passed. “Please guys, we are not the one that caused
this,” he said. “We are not responsible for your death, but
if your spirit catches us, guide us to the surface so that we
can tell what is happening in here.”
On the fifth day, George said, he and his 13 surviving
comrades reached the surface. Their limbs were scratched
and bruised. Their hands were rigid with cramp.


__That final ordeal of climbing a 2km shaft with a 17 second fall yawning beneath you for 5 days is chilling. The shear scale of their underground world is mind-boggling. Literally km's of tunnels undermining cities and towns. Flooded tunnels with piled corpses. Gang-controlled stores 1 km down an elevator shaft. 58.6°C rock walls. GOLD. This shit is WILD!
Once again, the full story, and it's a beauty, can be found here.

 

[Beoric]

I could see that starting as a fetch quest in the upper tunnels, morphing into an attempt to eradicate the gangs above and below, then city streets sinking in to the mythic underworld, while the zama-zamas dug "too greedily and too deep", awakening a bound demon prince or some Lovecraftian horror. Which is probably foreshadowed by the earlier awakening of its minions, as fiends start to roam the tunnels and prowl the city above.

 

[DangerousPuhson]

The concept is one of my favorites: makeshift settlement falls to ruin as mainstay supply lines are lost. The island colony who can't get supplies by ship anymore (either they've become isolated by storm, forgotten by time, or by the collapse of the outside world). The prison whose guards have all fled apocalypse, leaving inmates to run amok. The city sunk into the earth, assumed obliterated when really just trapped deep within. The abandoned asylum of locked-away exiles, the long-drifting generation ship, the xenophobic monastery of the inbred, the lawless pirate strongholds, the Lord of the Flies style adultless refuge - always good settings for some anarchy to shake things up a bit, to give the players a chance to indulge in their inner murderhobo with minimal consequences.

I think every setting needs some pockets of anarchy, where the danger is omnipresent but navigable to those in the know. A fresh slate for the players to make new inroads and measurable headway, perhaps even carve out a small fiefdom from the lawless chaos.

My personal favorite is in a home setting I've devised within a damaged generation ship populated by descendants of settlers trapped drifting above their former home world (yes, it's Earth, but they've forgotten that). That in itself is already by-and-large a place of anarchy cut off form the outside world, but within said ship is is an even more dangerous pocket known as "Madbi" (formerly "Medbay") where the insane are locked away for the common good and where the proto-aristocrats exile the undesirables and the inconvinient. It makes for a good "reverse heist" kind of area, where the trick is not so much breaking out as it is breaking in (for the tying-up of loose ends, exploitative resource delivery, or for extraction of the unjustly imprisoned).

 

[The1True]

Like I said, for me it's the scale. Like the first Halo when you stumble into those first alien ruins and the ceiling and distant walls of the cavernous rooms just stretch off into the distance, dwarfing you.
Or that feeling that you're so far down a hole or up a mountain or through a portal that there's nowhere to do if things go sideways. I love the idea of an ORDEAL, but they're really hard to run in modern D&D. Players (me included) HATE the resource game, and keeping time can be a real bitch. Before this turns into an edition squabble, I remember experiencing resistance to this stuff when I ran a play clock and insisted on RAW encumbrance rules way back in AD&D, so it's not really a new thing you can point at and scoff dismissively...

But yeah, you stumble out of the Caves of Cuisinart overburdened with treasure (including a solid-gold coffin!) and carrying your dead paladin, to discover the horses are gone along with the cart full of supplies you left hidden in the cave nearby. It was a three day trek back to civilization and a Raise Dead, now you've got to slog for weeks through the deep woods, carefully working your way around the pickets of the humanoid army parked in your original path. The paladin's corpse is steadily rotting (and his player really REALLY likes him you guys), and the settlement needs to know the peril they're in. go.

 

[DangerousPuhson]

I'm with you on the resource management, and so have been most of my players throughout my... *checks watch* 30+ years of play history. One thing I've noticed in the trenches of edition warring is that between those who enjoy the minutiae of resource management and those who do not, they play very different styles of D&D. Simulationist versus Epic. Strategic versus Tactical. What folk call "old school" versus what folk call "new school" (though there exists no concrete definitions for either). It's probably their firmest line in the sand too, up there with GP = XP. I personally find it all too vestigial to the wargaming days of the hobby, so I omit it, but I know that some folk genuinely get a kick out of that stuff, as if being lost in the dark or making choices between what to keep and what to leave is the pinnacle of thrill for them. I don't see the fun in it, but far be it for me to say they can't do whatever they want at their own table.

 

[Beoric]

I think resource management, in the sense of tracking expendable equipment and weight of treasure, is a tool that is only useful in a module where those items are relevant and in limited supply, and only while the party isn't able to obviate those rules with continual light, create food and water, Tenser's floating disk and various inter-dimensional space-of-holding items. That pretty much limits it to only in (large) dungeons and deserts, and only at low level.

As a player, I enjoy the challenge of it in the early game, just as I enjoy getting those spells and items that mean it is no longer worth tracking. I do use this in my games at the appropriate levels, but I also make tracking resources easy, and to some degree automated (my VTT/framework includes a stopwatch, I have a macro I use to track the passage of time, ammunition use is automatically tracked, and players get an inventory macro to track gear, coins and weight). I think it lends itself to the feeling of danger I want players to experience in a dungeon at low levels. I don't do "gotcha" bullshit like players losing equipment because (for example) they didn't expressly state that they picked up their throwing axe after the last battle.

I do think checking equipment at the outset of an adventure, and once in a while during it, is a useful check on the "golf bag of swords" phenomenon, because (a) I think the game is more interesting if players have to make make meaningful choices, and perhaps more importantly (b) golf bag of swords slows combat by giving players too many options, which leads to analysis paralysis.

Also, most people do some sort of resource management in their games, in the sense that few DMs allow unlimited spell slots, hit points (and hit dice/healing surges) or cash. No, I don't make you track the coppers you used to buy a beer, but yes, I do make you track the gold you use to buy gear, magic items and high end stuff.

 

[The1True]

I have a macro I use to track the passage of time, ammunition use is automatically tracked, and players get an inventory macro to track gear

This is where 21st century technology gets to shine. There's definitely a style of D&D that's more playable with computer assistance. I'd love to be able to do this with my group (but we're pretty married to Roll20. It's survived several votes of no confidence now.)
There's only so much Tensers disc can do. The big one is that infernal Bag of Holding. All I can do is restrict access to it for as long as possible, and when they finally do get their hands on one, be a real stickler about what can and can't fit in there.
And yeah, I just Dark-Sunned Create Food and Water in the Vanished Wastes campaign. It is incompatible with a survival campaign. The players have been pretty passive-aggresive about managing their food and water resources ever since. It's one of those things that has to actively be made fun, like really play up the survival and starvation vibe going on in nature all around them, or it gets to be a real grind.

 

[Beoric]

This is where 21st century technology gets to shine. There's definitely a style of D&D that's more playable with computer assistance. I'd love to be able to do this with my group (but we're pretty married to Roll20. It's survived several votes of no confidence now.)

If it wasn't computer assisted, I would probably play either house-ruled 1e, or house-ruled 5e.

There's only so much Tensers disc can do. The big one is that infernal Bag of Holding. All I can do is restrict access to it for as long as possible, and when they finally do get their hands on one, be a real stickler about what can and can't fit in there.

By the time they are getting bags of holding they are probably pretty bored with the resource game, so I'm happy to let it slide. I do, however, pay close attention to the action economy for both stowing gear and withdrawing it from said bag, to fight the bag-o-swords. Heward's Haversack is worse for that.

And yeah, I just Dark-Sunned Create Food and Water in the Vanished Wastes campaign. It is incompatible with a survival campaign. The players have been pretty passive-aggresive about managing their food and water resources ever since. It's one of those things that has to actively be made fun, like really play up the survival and starvation vibe going on in nature all around them, or it gets to be a real grind.

I haven't played Vancian D&D since I learned about this trick, but I think what Gygax did was design scenarios where there is competition for spell slots. You obviously want to dedicate some slots to fighting and healing, but making situations where those divination spells come in handy was part of it. So I might also look through the cleric list and see what could compete for food and water. Dropping hints about your module creatures that do particular types of damage could use up slots for resisting poison, fire, cold, etc. Blindness, disease and curses all require very specific spells until Heal enters the picture.

I think the survival game, like the resource game, should probably be a once in a while or low level thing. People get tired of it.

 

[DangerousPuhson]

I think the survival game, like the resource game, should probably be a once in a while or low level thing. People get tired of it.

See, that's what I thought too, and common sense would agree with you. However, the sheer volume of modern blogs and substacks positing endless varieties of alternate rules for such mundane things as how often a donkey needs to eat in certain terrain during specific weather events also indicates that people, apparently, do not get tired of it. And I've been condemned for playing an edition with minimal darkness hinderance and de-emphasized consumable tracking so many times that I suspect a sizeable audience for these kinds of games may still exist out there.

Unless my detractors were just being hyperbolic nitpickers, angry that shiny new D&D was trouncing dusty old D&D in sales figures and popularity, and decided to take it out on me and my enjoyment of 5e. But it's probably the other thing - the confusingly sizeable number of "very special people" who regularly gather in their spare time to number-crunch in percentiles and pixel-bitch pieces of grid paper for fun.

 

[Beoric]

See, that's what I thought too, and common sense would agree with you. However, the sheer volume of modern blogs and substacks positing endless varieties of alternate rules for such mundane things as how often a donkey needs to eat in certain terrain during specific weather events also indicates that people, apparently, do not get tired of it. And I've been condemned for playing an edition with minimal darkness hinderance and de-emphasized consumable tracking so many times that I suspect a sizeable audience for these kinds of games may still exist out there.

Unless my detractors were just being hyperbolic nitpickers, angry that shiny new D&D was trouncing dusty old D&D in sales figures and popularity, and decided to take it out on me and my enjoyment of 5e. But it's probably the other thing - the confusingly sizeable number of "very special people" who regularly gather in their spare time to number-crunch in percentiles and pixel-bitch pieces of grid paper for fun.

Creating content is fun. I'm sure it will surprise noone for me to admit that I have gone down obscure simulationist rabbit holes and spent hours (days) creating byzantine rules for my own amusement. The difference is, I know better than to inflict them on my players. If the rule isn't elegant, meaning it serves its purpose while being simple and easy to use at the table without slowing down the game, I either don't use it or reserve it for out-ot-play content creation.

 

[The1True]

The difference is, I know better than to inflict them on my players.

I usually inflict it on my players for a session or two. I mean, what's the point otherwise. The groans and eyerolls as they slowly ignore the new rules into nonexistence are such fun on both sides of the screen!
To be fair, we usually discuss new rules between sessions in our group, so they're often a result of a democratic process. And we still usually forget or discard them. Like we worked out a whole system for spell criticals riffing off the 2.5e "Tome of Magic". I have no idea where that's gone...

 

[The1True]

angry that shiny new D&D was trouncing dusty old D&D

Alright alright, quit inciting the natives. There are simulationist nitpickers in every edition.