The Tomb Switchers

A Trail of Cthulhu Scenario Hook

Some pharaohs lived in easier times than others. In turbulent eras, when war sapped the economy and royal coffers emptied, indignities might strike your earthly husk even after death. Though your nine-sectioned soul had made its way to the Western Lands, your mummy wasn’t safe from interference. Never mind tomb robbers. Should it occupy a lavish tomb too expensive to duplicate, your successor might pluck up your sarcophagus and stash it in some lesser tomb, hijacking the one you spend so much of the treasury to construct. As evidenced by a recent discovery in the ruins of Tanis, this appears to have happened to Shoshenq III, who reigned from around 841 to 799 BCE. Archaeologists found the tomb of this battler with rival kings in 1939, without locating the sarcophagus. Now, judging from the funeral statues arrayed around it, it has turned up — in the tomb of Osorkon II, who ruled a couple of generations before him. Apparently, in a not unprecedented switcheroo, Shoshenq IV appropriated his predecessor’s tomb complex for himself, shuffling him to an alcove of Osorkon’s. As III was most likely IV’s father, this frankly feels like an unfilial act. But hey, tombs famously don’t build themselves.

Or so the sane explanation goes. For the horror answer, let’s retreat back in time to Trail of Cthulhu’s 1930s. At that time, certain hashish-addled expatriate Egyptologists whisper that the ghoul-queen Nitokris, whose living reign predated Shoshenq’s by a more than a millennium and a half, has been interfering with Pierre Montet’s dig at Tanis. Who else would be moving tomb contents, from gold coffins to obedient ushabti figurines, both within sites and from location to location?

Montet scoffs at these ravings. Alerted to their reputation for discretion by colleagues at Miskatonic University, the French archaeologist invites the Investigators to Tanis to conclusively disprove rumors of supernatural meddling. He charges the team to find the human saboteurs, perhaps members of his own expedition, who have been disappearing and rearranging the artifacts. Why, absent proper documentation of items as found in situ, doubt will riddle Egyptology forever!

Sadly for Montet but happily for group members seeking confirmation of their outre theories, ghouls and mummies have emerged from undiscovered lower dream-tunnels. Skulking through the tombs in the dead of night, they rearrange numinous artifacts in a ley-pattern specified by Nitokris. When enough statues and sarcophagi have been disturbed, the field of reeds separating the living from the dead will part, disgorging an army of millennia-old ghosts to ravage the mortal realm. Only by locating the lair of ghouls, mummies, and crocodile priests, driving them back to the dream tunnels, and sealing them up, can the Investigators stop this from happening.

How much they tell Montet about it afterwards is up to them.

Trail of Cthulhu is an award-winning 1930s horror roleplaying game by Kenneth Hite, produced under license from Chaosium. Whether you’re playing in two-fisted Pulp mode or sanity-shredding Purist mode, its GUMSHOE system enables taut, thrilling investigative adventures where the challenge is in interpreting clues, not finding them. Purchase Trail of Cthulhu and its many supplements and adventures in the Pelgrane Shop.