“Now let me correct you on a couple of things, okay? Aristotle was not Belgian. The central message of Buddhism is not ‘every man for himself.’ And the London Underground is not a political movement. Those are all mistakes, Otto. I looked them up.”

— Wanda, A Fish Called Wanda

Also known — perhaps better known — as the Tube, the Underground is London’s world-famous rapid transit system, the origins of which stretch back 1863 and the Metropolitan Railway. It covers much of central London on the north bank of the Thames, and some (though much less) of the southern half of the city as well.

In the real world, the Tube system is composed of 11 lines that serve 272 stations, both above and below ground, that cover 400+ kilometers of track and serve nearly a billion passengers per year. Suffice to say, modeling this system at this level of detail on a MUX would be daunting to say the least, while offering little opportunity to cultivate roleplay. It would also be nearly unusable, requiring either a map or extensive real-world experience to get from one place to another. So, like the above-ground city, the Tube will be set up as a representational space aimed at providing the experience of the Underground while being easy to navigate.

Our Tube system will consist of a central hub room for the entire Underground, connected to multiple “borough hub” rooms — one for each of one of the city boroughs. The hub rooms will be general IC spaces evocative of the overall Underground for that particular borough, rather than specific locations — players who encounter each other at a hub can opt to play as though they’ve met on a train, or met on a platform while changing lines, or whatever other scenario they like that’s appropriate for taking a trip on the Tube.

Each of the borough hubs, in turn, will have a mixture of access types: there’ll be exits directly to and from the hub to most rooms that are part of the borough’s street-level rooms. Additionally, we’ll build a limited number of well-known or distinctive Tube stations as on-grid locations, which will connect both to the local hub, and to the street-level room where it’s actually located.

For instance, if we choose to build the Sloane Square station:

• For purposes of this discussion, a “borough” is comprised of “areas”, each of which represents a portion of that borough — Whitechapel is an area within the borough of Tower Hamlets, for instance. Within an area, there can be multiple “locations”, which represent specific IC areas in the game — a pub, a bookstore, a coffee shop, etc. In MUX terms, both “areas” and “locations” are represented by the “Room” construct, differentiated through their specific attributes. Hence, a “borough” can be thought of as either a group of “areas” or a group of “MUX Rooms.”
• The “Knightsbridge and Belgravia – Westminster” area will have an exit leading to a “Sloane Square Station” location. These, and other exits associated with the Underground, won’t be directional exits — north, south, east, west, etc. — because they represent abstract transitions to and from their destinations, rather than literal movement in a particular compass direction.
• The “Sloane Square Station” location will in turn have exits leading to “Knightsbridge and Belgravia – Westminster” and to the “Westminster Hub – London Underground” location.
• “Westminster Hub – London Underground” will have an exit leading back to “Sloane Square Station” and one that leads to “Central Hub – London Underground.”
• “Central Hub – London Underground” will have, for each borough, an exit leading to a “<borough> Hub – London Underground” room.
• Areas on the street-level Westminster grid that we are not building stations for will connect directly to “Westminster Hub – London Underground” and vice versa. “Queen’s Park – Westminster”, for example, will have an exit with the name of a local station — but that exit will go directly to the hub. An exit back to Queen’s Park in the hub will also be created.

In this way, every area of the street-level grid that contains an Underground station will have access to the system, without requiring us to build dozens of mostly identical stations, but with the ability to do so when one is of sufficient interest.

Some built stations will have access to Subterranean London, which exists alongside but separate from the rapid transit system.

The result is that a PC, by entering the Tube at any point on the map, could travel from one end of the city to the other in a small number of clearly navigable moves. In a world of vampires, magicians, and werewolves, making sure the trains run on time — or not run on time, as sometimes happens! — helps with a sense of immersion. Characters from different spheres can use the Underground to get from one place to another as they need to, and potentially find serendipitous roleplay along the way — almost anyone can run into almost anyone at some point on the line.