Loopy Tombs

a traditional 'Dungeons and Dragons' post - not yet extinct!

This post was inspired partly by reading James Holloways 'Tome of Tombs' - a zine of Tomb creation which you can find here; https://james-holloway.itch.io/

An aid to generating tombs based partially on the creators IRL historical knowledge. Reading this I realised that the most interesting thing about most pseudo-real tombs, in terms of exploration and dungeoneer Ing, is the context.

In real-life tombs, at least anything under a pyramid in size, you go in and come out. The 'flow cart of possible exploration is very linear, though the paths within the tomb might seem winding.

Holloways Zine deals well with the creation of this context, but I was interested in crossing the streams somewhat, and thinking about reasons a pseudo-real Tomb might have the loops and choices we often desire in dungeon design.

What follows starts with pseudo-real reasons a Tomb might 'loop' with subjects like; 'Living Beings', 'The Touch of Time' and 'Architectural Reasons', but rapidly spirals out of control into the whackiest possible sources for complex tomb layouts. If you want the actually-fun part then skip to the end.

LIVING BEINGS

Giant Sloth - In an adventure beloved by few, I used the giant south American ground sloth burrowing in and about the tomb, creating a series of alternate passages which wove in and around the 'natural' pathways of the tomb. Many creatures burrow but few IRL creatures make man-sized burrows. If you wish to confine yourself to creatures that have lived, or that do live, I think its either the sloths or the Honey Badgers. (Place your answers in the comments). (Of course one living creature that does produce man-sized burrows, is man, which leads to the next entry.)

Lair of intelligent creatures - Its a classic for a reason. Clever beings lair, or have done, in the tomb, they have expanded the place, putting in their own obvious and hidden routes.

THE TOUCH OF TIME

Massively overbuilt - Multiple religions or cultures have occupied this site and all built on it, or the same religion over a thousand years, (St Peters in Rome has an insane number of underground levels, each of which used to be the main level). This can also expand the 'tomb' laterally as the buildings placed over it expand.

Built onto, and partially collapsed into, deeper tomb or necropolis - They either didn't know it was there or simply forgot. Now the floors and stuff have fallen through into the deeper levels.

A river ran through it - or a stream really is all that’s necessary, and it may well have dried up since, but at some point during the life of the tomb, a water-course has shifted and run into it, drowning some areas, breaking through some walls, finding its way between places, and leaving unexpected routes.

Banyan forest - tomb is in a tropical environment, huge marvellous trees have infested the place, layering over and around, teasing aside the great stone blocks and opening strange ways between their complex root systems.

ARCHITECTURAL CHOICES

Maintenance Spaces - another thing I tried using in DBS; designer/creator access/trap reset tunnels for the architect themselves. If you want traps or any kind of complex 'effect' you may need complex mechanisms, or at least weights. To organise and set those up, you might need crawlspaces or other access spaces, that let you into the rear or back of rooms or setups.

Escape Route - the classic fear of being buried alive. Leaving an actual potential escape route for the 'corpse' should they be buried alive would effectively make a secondary network of tunnels or paths in the structure, leading directly from the body to the outside, but presumably very well camouflaged and perhaps only openable from within.

Spiritual Labyrinth - either to make sure the dead do not find their way out again, or to baffle and disturb any negative spirits who might try to reach them, you build a complex labyrinth between the body and any possible exit. Spiritual - and therefore a bit different from a 'tomb robbers' labyrinth in that there may be no actual lethal traps or mortal deceptions, but may be a lot of complex religious trickery.

Double or triple fakes - I have used this myself previously. Just build a fake tomb, with fake treasures, then for people smart enough to see through that, build ANOTHER tomb, also fake, then an even-more-hidden third tomb, the real one, (this does not guarantee LOOPS though).

Palace for the Dead. It’s not enough to just have, for instance, a room or something, whoever is buried here will need an entire dead palace full of dead luxuries, all mirrored and replicated from the living world, which means their tomb will be a buried palace, with all the corridors and extra ways implied by that.

Mandala Map - the tomb has to be a physical map of the spiritual world as imagined by the deceased, so it’s like a giant mandala, embossed into physical reality. (Having some knowledge of this belief system would really help).

I should be able to think of something better than this, what are the...

VERY STRANGE, UNUSUAL AND MYSTERIOUS REASONS?

Cover to Manor of Infinite Forms by Tomb Mold

Time Loops – it’s a classic. If you die in the tomb you *don't* die in real life, you just time loop back to certain 'save points', but some of these are so horrible - bounded on every side with impassable traps and dangers, that being trapped in them is a form of eternal undying madness.

Doors into Dream - certain symbols send you to sleep where you must navigate the tomb in dreams (the dream structure is significantly bigger).

Size Alteration and Rat Tunnels - rats have made their own paths, at the same time, eating the strange flesh of the tomb will shrink you down to their size, for a while.

The Statues Came Alive - and, unable to find their own way out, carved their own tunnels in the earth for their own reasons (seeking perhaps to get away from each other). It seems reasonable that the spirit of a god, or part of it, might come to inhabit, for a while, an image made for it, and perhaps it would be really annoyed at being stuck.

Reality-Distorting Artefact - Sword of Leaves, or similar, is buried with the corpse. In combat and legend it simply cut through the space around it, granting semi-anime powers to its holder. After being stored for a few centuries doing nothing, its nature to warp space around it is creating labyrinthine structures from simple ones, nesting excess space in unobserved corners. Now residents are appealing for someone to actually go and rob the tomb; the extra space is leaking out into the surrounding community and breeding labyrinths and impossible spaces in corners. The sword should be fine so long as someone keeps it on the move, only starts leaking if you leave it in place for a century or more.

Builders Buried Alive - perhaps to keep the tombs location secret, its builders were buried alive within, but they reanimated and, consumed with their last memory, have kept digging and building in ghost and skeleton form, weaving the tomb ever deeper into earth and stone over the centuries.

Hell Itself - the resident was so exceptionally evil that the forces of hell tunnelled directly up from hell to grab their physical remains to which their soul was attached, the tomb is now fully interwoven with the distant outskirts of hell.

Religious Teleport – it’s a linear, maybe EXTREMELY linear, single long straight path with various doors, alcoves and statues along the way. The doors and other stuff can teleport you forward and back along the main route, meaning that 'in effect' the path is looped. We could call it 'The Long, Straight Dungeon', or the 'Five Mile Dungeon'.

Dickhead Teleport - tomb is physically linear though not to such an extreme sense as the five mile dungeon, but various items and interactions teleport you back to the 'starting area', meaning you have to keep transiting the same space trying to work out how to avoid or subvert the teleport effect.

Mirror World - various bronze mirrors in the tomb give access to the 'mirror tomb' which is basically a different (now spooky) version of the same thing, there are always two or more ways of encountering or dealing with everything now. When you leave, try to make sure you are in the actually-real-for-you version of reality.

Cancerous Brick - through curse, fluke or magical overflow, one particular brick or tile used in the construction of the tomb, has meta-cancer, meaning it will just keep replicating itself and the context of its placement over time, this means at a certain point the tomb now just dissolves into an insane mycelium web of brick or tile tunnels. The purpose of these tunnels is to *be tunnels*, simply to hold replications of the brick or tile. Dungeon chemotherapy might involve finding that one cancerous brick and smashing it, or smashing ALL the bricks or tiles - locals may have started invading the tomb to harvest the superfluity of bricks/tiles which now makes up their main local building material. Nothing can or will go wrong with this idea.

Djinn Dumping Ground - for whatever reason, whenever a certain Djinn or family of them are ordered to build or disassemble a castle or something, they need somewhere to store the stone, and have chosen here - they have built huge warrens and caverns of utterly random shit based on building materials from over many millennia covering the whole world, if they are uncorked somewhere and ordered to make something, they may turn up and start disassembling this stuff.

Gravity Shift - the long, spiralling yet linear way has a super-high ceiling and there are certain gravity shifting things in the tomb, or just ladders between the up and down, so that there are in essence two corridors or paths through, with one set of things and challenges on the 'bottom' and one on the 'top', meaning everything is technically looped.

Paths of Memory - various mosaics etc in the tomb represent the memories of the inhabitant and staring at them for a while can drag you into those memories AND - they are made too well so, like real memories, they interact and meet up at points, based on theme, mood, strong emotion or sensory factors (smell especially, which often unites memories), so that you can, deliberately or accidentally, move from one memory to another and emerge somewhere else in the tomb.