A scenario premise for 13th Age
A while ago a news item about a pharaoh’s sarcophagus shuttled off to a lesser tomb inspired thoughts of a Trail of Cthulhu scenario hook featuring Nitokris, as naturally it would.
As need not be said, Mythos Investigators aren’t the only PCs who adventure in tombs. F20 heroes have been busting into ancient burial complexes and stripping them of loot since the invention of roleplaying. Typically they’re plundering sites from the ancient past. In a fantasy setting with an ancient-leaning vibe, like 13th Age’s Dragon Empire, the characters might be interacting with tombs of living cultures. The patrons who point them to their mission might be more like the pharaoh finding a spot for himself in a complex than the diggers who show up two thousand years later to cart everything off to museums.
An active family tomb can still require the help of adventurers to access. If it lies deep beneath the surface or in a distant ruin, or has been overrun by enemies, getting there can easily require a string of fights.
When a local monarch or powerful duchess dies, their family might need to hire slingers of swords and spells to get the remains to their mandated site of rest. Maybe they’re traditionalists who believe in following old protocols even when their tombs take great effort to reach. In a magical realm the potency of their artifacts, their luck in commerce, or the fertility of their lands might depend on placing their departed in their proper crypt. A revivalist might attempt to restore her family fortunes by transferring centuries worth of ancestral remains to a long-inaccessible crypt. Or, like the pharaoh who originally inspired this, they might want a magically or ceremonially important tomb cleared out for their own coffins, when the time comes. In this instance the patron could need the heroes to find the tomb complex before rendering it fit to receive new remains. A fatal disease or prophecy of doom might inspire patrons to speed up the quest, after years of partially revealing research that provides the adventurers a staring point.
Maybe it doesn’t matter if the tomb can be permanently rid of monstrous or rival inhabitants. Simply getting the remains to the correct resting place completes the ritual loop, satisfying the client and entitling the party to a handsome reward. We might not be talking about a literal tomb at all, but perhaps an underground whirlpool that carries souls to the world beyond, or a magma fissure that transforms them with sacred heat.
As someone whose F20 games run to the picaresque, I’d be tempted to saddle the group with a heavy sarcophagus complete with preserved body, playing up the logistical challenges of hauling a large and weighty but fragile object through a precarious dungeon environment.
For the epic grandeur favored by the rules set, a simple urn of cremains minimizes the comic travails. As either a bonus or a drawback, it also skips player speculation as to when the mummified body will animate and rise against them. In the big boss fight in the crypt chamber, the spirit of the deceased might, when the urn is tossed into the whirlpool or lobbed into the lava, manifest long enough to buff the heroes with spells, or briefly wade in as an allied combatant.
Even in a less spectacular moment of triumph accompanying a dignified placement of the urn on its designated shelf, the heroes have reversed a longstanding F20 trope. Instead of taking goods out of a tomb, they’ve put something in.
13th Age combines the best parts of traditional d20-rolling fantasy gaming with new story-focused rules, designed so you can run the kind of game you most want to play with your group. 13th Age gives you all the tools you need to make unique characters who are immediately embedded in the setting in important ways; quickly prepare adventures based on the PCs’ backgrounds and goals; create your own monsters; fight exciting battles; and focus on what’s always been cool and fun about fantasy adventure gaming. Purchase 13th Age in print and PDF at the Pelgrane Shop.