Underneath the earth blood is being spilled. A great war between the undead Cthonians and great Dwarven kingdoms has dominated the underground caverns for eons. Will you be the one to decide who faces the forces up above?

Or this is how I hoped it would have played out. In reality the players effect on the conflict between the underfolk is quite limited. The main reason for this is the very strict parameters for the forging of new Cthonians you need a geomantic node and death to be present in a tile to be able to make new ones. I think this could be answered by making the Cthonians act like a kingdom much the same way as the orcs so the player has more control over them. In most games I've played with this DLC the dwarfs are waaay too powerful to even sweat. On smaller map sizes they seem to work as a greater threat however it feels like the conflicts fate is sealed even before you start the game and all you can do is observe the outcomes. The underground layer is great for expanding your orc faction and building up their power base (I used the Orcs+ mod to get more content out of that).

Modding for this game is amazing and I was happy to see that many of my favorite mods had a day one patch for this DLC great coordination with modders however a couple mods did brake for example the Living societies mod.

The new god in the DLC is quite fun if you like a more hands on approach to plague spreading and corpse munching. At later stages of your awakening you can even destroy entire cities with your wast network of tentacles that stretch under the world using the "underdark". I recommend going very easy on your powers at the start and trying to build up some pandemics and ravaging orcs so you can tap into the corpses provided by those conflicts. If you are too aggressive with pushing in the underdark and too active with your abilities it will lead to Elf, Human, Dwarf and alliance armies crushing your tentacles swiftly and you loosing all the cool late game abilities. This god really pays off if you have long term schemes and can deal the finishing blows toward the end but you wont win with its powers alone.

The new supplicant for the new god was a bit underwhelming it would have been better if there were more to do in the underground areas so you could utilizes the +1 to all stats better.
The spellweaver is great but I had an issue with not being able to get arcane knowledge from secrets of death with them so getting more arcane knowledge is quite costly.
I got a little lazy playing this DLC and didn't test the other new agents but I'm sure they have cool abilities to be utilized, you'll just have to try them yourself.

Some problems with this DLC:
Your elder tomb spawning underground really changes the spread of shadow quite a lot so you cant rely on passive spread as you infiltrate areas around it anymore.
Underground awareness doesn't effect world panic for lost settlements underground so destroying the dwarfs before you start the proper creep to the surface makes world panic jump quite a bit maybe 20-30% depending on their size. In my opinion awareness of the underdark should work as a modifier for panic that has been caused there.
On max size maps 64x64 the game really starts to chug like it has never before so the addition of the second layer needs some more optimization.
Maybe making the deep one settlements appear on the underground layer as cities could be cool.

I think this DLC is worth around 10-15€ so getting it for only 7.80€ is a steal. Anyway it's amazing to see more content for such an amazing game as the Shadows of Forbidden Gods. I can recommend this for anyone who is looking for more content for this game. I think getting this as a newbie to the game is valid too but you should start with the base game because this is not the easiest of games on the market or it at least doesn't have the most intuitive interface so learning that before you jump into this is very important.

Overall I'd score this a solid 8/10.


Edit: THERE'S NO ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ ACHIEVEMENT FOR WINNING WITH THE NEW GOD 0/10