Dungeon Room Index: Tombs

Last time I did Shrines.

Today I'm doing tombs. Graves, crypts, mausoleums, so on. Places where dead things are laid to rest. (Or in games like this, to guard their earthly spoils from would be grave robbers. It doesn't sound that restful to me...)

This is a classic staple, I think.

Here are the rooms:

Tombs (and other burial sites)

There are quite a surprising number of words for "place where a dead person is tucked away", so I'm going to start by running through those and providing definitions (summarized from Wikipedia):

• Grave: a location where a dead body is buried. (The emphasis seems to be on actual burial, like in the ground.)
• Tomb: any structurally enclosed internment space or burial chamber. (So probably the true catch-all for the style of resting places we'll cover here. Go me.)
• Crypt: a stone chamber beneath the floor of a church or other building. (May also contain relics, not necessarily the dead. Interesting that an above floor building seems to be an important companion feature.)
• Mausoleum: an external free standing building constructed as a monument to enclose a burial chamber. (Interestingly a "cenotaph" is a similar monument without the actual remains present. The more you know!)
• Sepulcher: psych, this is apparently just a Latin equivalent to the Greek-originating "tomb". But it sure is flavorful.
• Catacomb: man made underground passages used for religious purposes, especially burial. (In my mind this is "tight cramped corridors where raw corpses hang out in little wall alcoves".)
• Barrow: the technical term is "tumulus", and its basically a hill dug up over bodies. That's not nearly as gameable as the versions where open-air burial chambers are dug or buried into a hill.

And there's even more! I was pleased in my Googling to also come across dolmens, kists, and Zoroastrian "Towers of Silence". Neat stuff.

But, ultimately, I don't share this trivia in order to be prescriptive--perish the thought--(ha! pun intended)--no, mostly I'm just... looking for vibes.

Tombs can be ornate and hewn from marble, or they can be scratched from the stone, or dug into the earth; they can entail coffins/sarcophagi, urns, little-corpse-shelf-things, or just a hole in the floor. 

The point of these blogs is to help me and you expand our vision of what these rooms can look like to ease the cramp of writer's block.

Building blocks

To that end, I want to take a second to do something a little different and lay out some of the levers we have to pull.

Coffins and alternatives

There are many containers for a dead body. Let's look at some and how they might be represented on a map.

 

There are many options here: standard sized coffins made of wood or stone; large sarcophagi; short coffins in which bones are arranged in tight bundles, or just tossed in haphazardly; mummified bodies on exposed tables; simple headstones, with coffins buried vertically or horizontally beneath; kist tombs (basically a vertical hole, closed over); urns, caskets embedded in wall shelves; bones arranged in dug out wall holes, or laid on shallow wall shelves.

Considering side chambers

Tombs, or at least the people they contain, vary in "importance". Typically, the biggest fanciest tombs are reserved for the richest or most venerated person entombed. (And as always, flipping that on its head could be fun. Think along the lines of the scene in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade where they're looking for the Holy Grail). So consider how much wiggle room you give that coffin, and what that evokes: 

 

Room Notes

Simple mausoleums The most basic image in my mind of a "tomb" is a single, prominent stone box. Pillars give it an increased sense of importance. I would hope that such a resting place has some interesting imagery carved into the box and/or the walls.
I would also hope that if a sarcophagus is going to be this lonely that the being entombed must be somewhat important.
Embalming rooms

A common auxiliary room for crypts is an embalming room! A table, jars of embalming fluids and shelves of other embalming tools. Perhaps removed organs are kept nearby in canopic jars. It's a nice change of pace from room after room of coffins in various arrangements.
Wall crypts A simple room, lined with shelves. Coffins are embedded deeply within the wall. (It seems like a skeleton or a ghoul would have a hard time climbing out in that case, unless the bodies are just laid in there exposed). This sort of layout always reminds me of a morgue. Could dungeon builders have a need for a morgue?
The walls can be full of caskets, but it's also common enough for endless shelves to filled with urns. In this chamber I added a fire pit with benches in the middle; perhaps someone comes here to reflect and remember the dead by telling their stories.
Prominence Most often, when I imagine a tomb, there will be many coffins but one or a few of them clearly have higher status then the others. It's a good setup for undead to behave hierarchically and strategically.
I imagin this particular coffin is to some lord who wished to be buried surrounded by his favorite servants; their tombs are befitting of their station, but he honored them nonetheless by their proximity to his own grave. Of course, he had them all killed on his death, and they are bound to him still; they might take very kindly to someone freeing them from their service, but they are bound to prevent such an attempt in the meantime.
Upgrade that mausoleum with some adjoining tombs. Four adjoining advisors; one of them was treacherous and the proof is in the coffin.
A large statue prays over a solitary casket. The surrounding statues take defensive postures, pointing their stone spears at the box...
A statue of determined angelic being crouches to place one hand firmly over this casket's lid, it's wings stretched dynamically upward. The scene is best admired from the upper balconies.
This layout is very similar to one I used in Great Halls and Shrines. I'm sure I'll use it again; it's just such a good pattern. However, if I were to do this particular room again I think I'd try for a version that makes the room rounder, and places the statue and it's tomb in the middle to mix things up.
A long walkway through a dark, watery room leads to a solitary tomb. Adjacent rooms also contain coffins, but you will probably have to swim across to reach them; the doorways are too low to jump for it, and there isn't enough room for a running headstart.
The central sarcophagus stands on a solitary pillar in the middle of the room, connected to the outer wall by a short bridge. Perhaps the bottom is not visible, or perhaps there is water far below. If the latter, I imagine a hidden door somewhere down there that leads to something worth finding.
I am just so enamored with water; this tomb stands in a gazebo in the middle of a watery chamber; elevated terraces flank the long walkway and contain the tombs of highly respected advisors. Dim magical lighting set low reflects eerily off the water, casting rippling lights dramatically on the chamber walls.
These sub-tombs are each surrounded in a "room" of pillars, and the main sarcophagus rises high above the rest, hardly even visible from the entryway. The room is all white marble, with ripples of black.
Almost more of a hallway (I'll use that idea again later), three tombs line this long hall. The outer two are simple stone coffins, the middle is a table bearing a mummified corpse. Each statue is of an unnaturally tall humanoid baring a long necked vase by the throat in a firm grip.
Mass graves and "graveyards"

The opposite of respect; bodies were tossed haphazardly into a heap, and now it's just a massive tangled pile of bones. Alternatively, look up "excarnation": perhaps this isn't a show of disrespect at all; instead, this is pre-burial process for cleaning the bones (...by letting something come along and eat the flesh off of them!)

The other opposite of "prominence" is for each tomb to be of apparently equal importance. Of course, once I drew the first one I thought "but what if the tombs just kept going in this looong chamber?" With enough, you could feasibly make a cool puzzle that amounts to basically figuring out which tomb in the "grid" holds something special. (The correct "coordinates" are hidden elsewhere in the dungeon.)
It's a little funny that the first thing I think of when I consider "death" (a graveyard) is also really not an obvious pick for an interior dungeon. Even so, that doesn't mean you can't use headstones in your dungeon! Perhaps the bodies are buried vertical beneath the headstones, or perhaps the headstones are large enough to function as basically haphazard bone-boxes.

These subterranean dwellers place their forebears bones into short tunnels in terraced chambers. Perhaps one of these is actually a secret tunnel or the layer of something gross. (I'm thinking back to that Wall of Doors from the Entrances post.)
Traps Tombs lend themself so well towards undead encounters, and undead are good surprise foes. In this room, the upper terrace and it's dusty books draw the player's attention, but if they take the bait they've effectively cornered themselves against three high ranking undead.
Put some distance between the players and the door. In this room, there are many tombs between the players and their escape. Unless they can safely dive from the terrace, or find the secret exit behind the book cases.
I also like hiding another exit within one of the adjacent rooms. If there are enough rooms, and something important to distract them, players may skip searching adjoining rooms; but if they're thorough they may just find a useful passage!
Miscellaneous Y'know Peter Jackson's Hobbit movie? Well, it kind of sucks (though, if you cut out a lot of the fluff there's actually a pretty good Hobbit movie hiding in there). Anyways, one of the things about that movie that did not suck was the graves of the Nazgul that Gandalf seeks out; basically a bottomless pit in a mountain (cave?) with little cave tombs branching off the main shaft, connected by too-narrow walkways. That's pretty sick, and I wanted to reminisce about that here.
In a similar vein, putting tombs along a narrow ledge over a sheer cliff in any context is a pretty compelling idea. (Though it does raise the question of how they got these coffins in here; you don't strictly need to have an answer for that, but also its still a cool idea if the ledge/walkway is a bit wider.) Whether this is an exposed cliff of a dungeon carved into a mountain cliff face, or this is a dark ravine beneath the earth, it works well either way.
Four large sarcophagi sit between thick pillars through this long hall. Heavily faded life scenes are painted across the walls and pillars, and one section is completely obscured by a thick splattered brown stain.
This barrow style tomb, dug into hard packed earth, features a central fire pit surrounded by shallow chambers, each featuring a single kist tomb. A single blackened skeleton decays in the middle of the firepit. A sacrifice? Or did a fight break out here?
Three kist tombs are aligned between six monolithic stones. The stones are carved haphazardly with jagged runes in swirling patterns. The tombs are covered over with chunks of rough black obsidian.
I'm sure at some point I'll have to focus entirely on sewers, but this entry is simply a sewer tomb. Water pours from six pipes lined up on either side of each tomb; one of the pillars of falling water hides a secret exit, detectable by anyone who thinks to ask "where does this water drain to?".
While we don't have to limit our notion of what a catacomb is to what's traditional, I would be remiss if I didn't produce an example that represents that stereotype. The walls here are rough and uneven; multiple rows of shelves cut into the wall contain tightly packed skeletons. The tunnels are occasionally punctuated with side chambers featuring more significant graves.

Bonus 1: Unexpected things to find in a coffin

I feel I've skimped on you recently, so here are a few inspiring ideas for unusual things to find inside a coffin other than yet another dessicated corpse:

• A fresh corpse. Yes, yes; what a twist! How did that get in here, and who killed them?...
• A secret descending stair. This feels like a classic; it's such a great discovery, and has a great ominous air to it.
• An ooze. At least technically speaking; what I imagine is more like a black-tar-plague-ooze. Something that gives off "this tomb is very cursed" vibes. But a run of the mill ooze is cool, too.
• An animal skeleton. Particularly if it's an unusual animal; something rare or predatory or mutated perhaps.
• Just water/acid. In my head it's a common and totally reasonable fantasy thing for water left for a millennia to become acidic (and dramatically so, because rule-of-cool), but ya they put water in this tomb. What does that mean? I hope it doesn't have a corpse melted in it. Ewww.
• A solitary weapon or totem. Instead of a body its a keepsake of a person. Maybe resting atop that person's ashes or something.
• A construct. Like a robot or a magic-stone/wood-automaton, or just something clearly humanoid, artificial, and apparently dead (whatever that means for a creation of this sort)
• A hive. I love bugs. This maybe shouldn't defy explanation too much, but it's just so unsettling in my mind to flip that coffin lid and have something swarm out because it's nice safe box-home was disturbed.
• A vagrant or cultist. I'm spoiling the next section a bit, but ya what a twist, right? You open a coffin and someone fully alive is chilling inside!
• Empty--save for a note. A well known grave robber taunts you for making it here second. How annoying!

Bonus 2: Unexpected tomb denizens

In a similar vein, because your classic skeletons and ghouls can sometimes feel so pedestrian, here are some ideas for alternative creatures you might encounter in a tomb:

• Bone Golems. It's not humanoid, it's a tumbling ball of bones, or perhaps bones reassembled from multiple skeletons into something entirely inhuman, like a gross bone spider.
• Ash Specters. Why use a ghost when the literal ashes of the dead could be rising from their urns and taking shape?
• Living Organs. Y'know those canopic jars where they stored the organs of people during the embalming process? Well, the organs like to move. And if you disturb them they'll wrap their arteries, or intestines, or whatever around your throat, or spew acid, or something else gross.
• Grave Beetles. Swarms and swarms of shiny black beetles that feed on flesh, rotting or otherwise (remember those horrifying flesh eating scarab beetles from The Mummy?). They hibernate or lay their eggs and die when food is scarce, then wake from the sweat and pheromones of living creatures. (This could be a fun ticking time-bomb if they have to hatch and rapidly mature to be a threat)
• Death Cultists. They live down here. They worship death. They only come out to eat, but the worst of them actually sleep in tombs and become undead themselves by way of dark rituals.
• Anguished Souls. Less ghost and more angry shadowy personification of regret who's miserable and wants you to be miserable, too, and their favorite thing to do is to throw themselves onto torches, snuffing out all light, literal or metaphorical.
• Skeleton Caretaker. Maybe I'm cheating; I've alluded to this before, but just so funny to me I have to repeat it: there's a skeleton in the dungeon who just sweeps up after scuffles. It's very sarcastic, and it has a nice little leather bag where it keeps a wet tongue and vocal cords that it shoves into it's throat then it needs to tell off the fleshies.