Just Say No To Mummy Dust

Where mummy dust comes from

Foul-tasting “Mummy Dust” supposedly made of a fungus that grows inside mummies- price: 0-5gp. Available: at the Agora, in streets outside the Incubation Tunnels, under-the-counter from Merkarei’s Incendiary Shop in the Pyramid outside the Desert Gate, or from Tefnut

MUMMY DUST EFFECTS – Roll percentile dice

00-70 - DM shows Player a random part of the PICTURE APPENDIX. Roll d30 for Fig. #

71-99 – Upsetting visions.  Cross each vision out as they are seen.  Once all visions are seen by at least one PC, this roll result means the mummy dust only causes a stomachache and no visions this time, as well as -2 to all die rolls for the next 24 turns/4 hours. 

Visions:

1. The Pale Corruption (See Catacomb Map Area 15) enveloping victims;

2. A hooded, misshapen figure smashing an amphora in an underground room. Something small, slimy and luminous skitters away.

3. Veiled woman feeding a jewelry-festooned crocodile a bundle;

4. Tomb doors thumping and shaking;

5. Screaming, decayed face of a mummy lying in a tomb- after a moment, it chokes, vomits up a white viscous goo, screams more;

6. PC feels like he or she has just awoken, wrists crossed, inside a mummy case.

As Much of the "Pilgrim/Tourist Map" as I Can Stuff Into This Page...

Thank you Braun/Hogenberg Cities of the World!
and MS Paint!

The Paw of Sehkmet

The party finds this on a papyrus in the catacombs, tucked inside the wrappings of a mummy...



                                                             The Paw of Sekhmet

 1. Cut off a fully-grown, healthy lioness’s paw in combat wherein the opponent is under a disadvantage to the lioness.

 2. Cut up into fine hamburger.  Grind the claws into dust.  Mix dust with the hamburger.  

 3. Mold into patty. 

 4. Marinade nine nights in tincture of moly root. 

 5. Soak mummy wrappings nine nights in tincture of cardamom, mead and blood spilled in anger.

 6. Wrap patty in mummy wrappings.  

 7. Bury nine months 1 pharaonic cubit deep (7 palms deep) undisturbed in the desert sand.

 8. Unwrap patty and discard the mummy wrappings.

 9. Feed patty to target beast.  Although unappetizing looking and smelly to humans, it will be irresistible to carnivorous animals. The lioness’s paw will reconstitute itself, complete with muscles, bone, fur and claws, inside the target’s stomach and will attempt very violently to scratch and batter its way out.  The paw will disintegrate into black and white dust once it emerges.

Top 10 Reasons I Wrote "He Who Watches"

1. I wanted an excuse to use the Papyrus font in Word.

    Matthew Carpenter at Webdesignerdepot.com is by no means alone when he writes:

Papyrus is the king of bad fonts. Equal parts childish, kitschy and irritating...Papyrus isn’t bad because it is overused: it’s bad because it just doesn’t look good. Kitschy, cheap and vile.

     How could I resist!

2. I wanted to use the Papyrus page background in Word.
    Love > Fear. Kitsch > Class.

3. I was inspired reading about the city in Egypt: Faiyum, Phiom, Shedet, Arsinoë or Crocodilopolis
    As you can imagine, just the name itself hooked me.

4.  I bought a used book on Egyptology for my kid, and like all the best presents for one's kid, I borrowed it back and read: "Sobek, the crocodile god, was known as 'He Who Watches'; Bast or Bastet, the cat goddess, was known as 'She Who Scratches'."

5. At night, with my wife snoring beside me, no light in the room but the glow of my laptop, I saw Kom El Shoqafa The Catacombs of Kom El Shoqafa  on Wikipedia:

The necropolis consists of a series of Alexandrian tombs, statues and archaeological objects of the Pharaonic funeral cult with Hellenistic and early Imperial Roman influences. Due to the time period, many of the features of the catacombs of Kom El Shoqafa merge Roman, Greek and Egyptian cultural points; some statues are Egyptian in style, yet bear Roman clothes and hair style...

I had misremembered the name for a while thereafter as "Mother of Shards", but "Mound of Shards" is still a fine name.  Kom El Shoqafa - "Mound of Shards"-  is called this because the trinclinum funebrae (three-couch funeral room) in which people holding funerals and commemorative feasts in the underground necropolis would smash the amphorae of wine and food plates they had brought with them and just leave the terra cotta shards to accumulate on the floor.

6.  I resolved to not write about Old Kingdom Ancient Egypt, but to write about Late Ptolemaic Egypt, when Macedonian/Greek-descended Cleopatra was courting Julius Caesar of the up-and-coming Romans and certain cities in Egypt were home to overlapping traditional Egyptian and Hellenistic Greek cultures.

7.  I saw a "hobo nickel" carved into a Death's Head image.  I had to make these into "Charon's Obolus" kinds of coins in what I wrote.

8. As described by Tony Perottet, the religious spoiling rotten of crocodiles in Crocodilopolis, but also their gilded cage vulnerability.  Tourists/pilgrims, say Tony, would visit these tame crocodiles in Antiquity and demand the chance to feed them, even if the crocs weren't hungry.  They had filed+ down claws and jeweled bracelets around their limbs and tail.

9. Tony's great book in general: Route 66AD AKA Pagan Holiday  It has been reviewed as "Bill Bryson meets 'Gladiator'" + I highly, highly recommend it.

10. Vodka which comes in glass skull bottles.  I saw it at Yarmo's.  I wanted to drink it and then have an ominous bottle I could write into an adventure, as well as a real-life LARP prop from which my friends could drink in the game, in parallel with their characters drinking an in-game potion, if they dared!

He Who Watches

    

An adventure for characters of 1^st to 3^rd level

Crocodilopolis is famous as the home of the Shrine of Sobek the Crocodile God, “He Who Watches”. Thousands of pilgrims come to the city each year bearing costly gifts worth millions of drachmae to the shrine and its priests.

But now the sacred “Son of Sobek” has been found dead in his pen with mysterious internal wounds, and many pilgrims who perform the traditional ritual of sleeping or “incubating” in the shrine’s catacombs have disappeared.

He Who Watches is displeased.  

This could get very bad for business!