"I guess it's not dank. That's something right?" I was looking up at the ceiling of a featureless cube of a room.

My buddy Reyn was next to me watching a tour group filled with elderly Japanese people. "We are in the middle of the desert."

"Yep we are." I looked at the floor a bit. "Maybe they put the deathtraps back in on the weekend."

"Probably wouldn't get a lot of repeat business."

"I guess."

So you're playing some of the old D&D and are planning up a classic tomb robbing expedition. A laudable goal. Now where could you get some inspiration for this endeavour? Of the famous tomb complexes in the world I've been to a couple.

First and most famously let's talk about Egypt. We've seen the TLC specials about how the ancient Egyptians may or may not have created those gigantic pyramidical monuments to death, but TV doesn't convey the whole sense of a place.

Let's talk size. We know that these things are big. We can see how they dwarf camels and people in the pictures, but that doesn't mean a thing when you're confronted by them. One of the best experiences in Cairo was taking the bus out to Giza. You sit there minding your own business when suddenly off to the left behind the regular homes and businesses there are giant looming geometric shapes. With a perfectly normal sized scene to throw the gigantism into sharp relief there is a chance your mind may be blown.

The trickiness with pulling this off in game is that it will often seem really fake. If you're describing a town and say "Oh yeah, there's also a giant dodecahedron that almost blocks out the sun behind the blacksmith's shop" you might be facing a bit of disbelief.

Inside the pyramids themselves it isn't that interesting. Big shaped stones, stairways and blank rooms. Of course today we're only seeing the long since raided tombs while your adventurers are getting in on the action. Even though I knew before hand that the pyramids were boring inside I still held out some sort of irrational hope. Part of that may have just been from the grandness of the exterior. I only mention it because it might be a feeling you could manipulate in your players.

Much more interesting on the inside is The Valley of the Kings up the Nile in Luxor. These are the tombs that look like Egyptian tombs. They've got their hieroglyphics everywhere and cavernous rooms and fake passages and everything. I didn't get into Tutankhamen's but there were plenty of others to poke around in.

Now, bearing in mind that seeing these things as a tourist is much different from seeing them as an adventurer/archaeologist since there are places you just can't go, the thing that struck me again was how simple these tombs were. They basically went on a straight descent through different shaped rooms. I only remember one pseudo-branch that was labelled as a fake passageway. As a gamer wandering through these things I could see so many places for putting secret doors leading into intricately patterned passages to the real tomb.

I guess these are the archetypes that we're building on when we create our fictional tomb complexes, especially in the Valley of the Kings where there's the disconnect between the unassuming exteriors and lavish insides.

In a completely different vein there's the Taj Mahal. Here we've got the epitome of a lavish monument to death that's beautiful inside and out. This kind of thing is designed more as a piece of art than a mere statement of power or hidden cache of treasure. As such, there's a lot of maintenance that needs to be done. I've been to the Taj a couple of times, with a five year gap between and haven't seen the place without scaffolding up and restoration work going on. This is sort of connected to the thing I talked about a few months ago in the Pilgrims Welcome column. These things don't stay pretty without help, and in a non-magical universe that means you need people to do the cleaning.

The last (and my favourite) tomb I want to share about is the Nabatean tombs at Petra in Jordan. You might not know what I'm talking about but you'd recognize it. This is where Indiana Jones found the Grail in The Last Crusade. There is no Canyon of the Crescent Moon, but the facade that the adventurer archaeologists ride up to is real.

There are dozens of tombs that have been carved into the cliffs. They tower over you and are generally amazing. My buddy and I sat on a rock overlooking the Indiana Jones one for hours. On the top of it is a carved ornament that looks like a big urn. There was a long standing rumour that the urn was full of treasure so it's very pockmarked from people trying to break it open by shooting at it.

Petra is all about the facades though. Inside, the tombs are bare and featureless, just like inside the pyramids. And they're small. There's not even room for one good death trap. But this doesn't stop it from being a good site for adventuring. The tombs are spread out through a largeish valley dotted with people's homes. There are narrow canyons leading to and dried out streambeds. (If you're looking for more Petra in gaming there's a Dungeon adventure from the early days of D&D 3.0 set there.)

So there we have it the excitement of real life tomb raiding. Probably not the best inspiration for a two-fisted game of Adventure! but good places to visit, nonetheless. See you next month.

J Unrau
Hungry J Propaganda
www.djs5.com/hjp