Excavations

Final Fantasy VIII

As my Holy Selmat game involves a lot of religious archaeology, I expect there will be a couple of times when the party is investigating a generally unimportant tomb. Getting ahead of this, I've come up with a few interesting-but-short tombs that can fit almost anywhere in Selmat. I also have a couple of war camp ruins that would be at home in the battlefields around the city of Gath. Each bullet point is its own room/area.

TOMB

• Tomb. Rows of dead clutching holy symbols. Bas relief of a warrior, holding out a sword. Blood on the sword pulls it back, an intricate mechanism, into the next room. Dried blood on floor/blade.
• Bookshelf, all rotten. An altar. Blood spilled on it is designed to flow and pool underneath in the next room. Stairs leading down. There is a confused, ancient, hostile familiar.
• The indent of a female form in the ground. Heaving half-formed venous. Will love and serve anyone who feeds it enough blood to fully form. If attacked, will defend itself, confused.

WAR CAMP RUINS

• Frames of petrified wood on a hill. Once a great forest of tents.
• In the center, the confusing remains of a thing of bone and tin. Once contained a demon, now inhabited by the demon. Rows of iron-tipped spikes swing out at PCs.
• Stone ruins, once the command’s HQ. Some old but masterwork armor, a little model of armies. Inhabited by a murder of vultures, who are in the process of eating the aardwolves who used to live here.
• Adjunct’s tent, now a frame of petrified wood. Stone tablets describing the capture of the demon (written in antediluvian.)
• Barracks tent. Mostly picked clean.

Cameo Creepster

TOMB

• Basic catacomb. Families buried together. Clearly marked door to tabernacle for the dead.
• Behind door stands a skeleton who will close it after the first person enters it, then attack after quickly wedging a doorstop. Simple altar, shrine. Door to left and right.
• Left door leads to squat library, with water constantly falling through the middle of the room, shining if there is any light. One intact random tome.
• Right door leads to a large sarcophagus, guarded by dozens of skeletons fused together in some kind of bone wall. Within is a thin layer of gems and bottles of wine. Opening unleashes dangerous gas.

TOMB

• One large shrine incorporating a corpse, looking out with pearls for eyes. Pulling the left pearl pulls a wire behind the skeleton that parts a section of wall to reveal an old, but masterwork sword. Its pommel is poisoned, but the poison is dried so that it comes out when the wielder’s hand sweats.
• Left door. A series of reliefs depicting daily life. A small coffin containing a dog.
• Right door. Large description carved in wall in Selmati, describing how they were saved by a certain kaf-tsadhi, and want history to know of their goodness.

WAR CAMP RUINS

• A wall of recovered junk used to obscure this place from the gaze of Gath.
• A pile of rubble. In a crevice, a hermit sorcerer who babbles incoherently and blasts people with embery goo. Has a scroll of some weird scroll like speak with locks or forget item.
• An old campsite. Some rotted food, plus a sack of lentils. A dead body, picked clean by hyenas. A pitchfork.
• A broken chariot with a small bag of jewels in it. Covered in fire ants, whose nest is only ten feet away.

Torstein Nordstrand

TOMB

• Chamber with a shrine to the prophet Tizrah. Some coins and simple offerings.
• Sarcophagus containing a gigre user. Murals on the wall show scenes of leisure in gigre dens and acts of public charity. In pots by the sarcophagus, there is expired gigre. Smoking it would make you terribly sick and roll on your favorite mutation table, but a good craft (drug) check can show you how to create that particular form of gigre. It gives a practitioner normal paladin abilities, plus the ability to transmute metals, but it has the following commandments: must do favors when requested on holy days, must shun lawyers, cannot commit violence against animals, miserliness is a mortal sin.
• Two bodies, now home to a giant bat creature and its shrieking spawn.

TOMB

• Two statues, a small soldier, unarmed, with a plowshare at their feet, and a cat standing at attention.
• An inscription on the wall, in Selmati. It is a diatribe against the use of iron weapons.
• The body of a child, with several gold jewels and expensive items set around it. The child was slain by an iron dagger