The Eleventh GM Inspiration: Archaeology

The Eleventh GM Inspiration: Archaeology

Similar to the post on using mythology and folklore for inspiration, I feel it almost goes without saying that archaeology is a valuable resource for a GM looking for ideas, and similar to real world myths, has the added bonus of lending some real-world veneer of credibility to your scenarios and campaigns.

I have used archaeology as a resource for gaming for decades (my degree was in Archaeology, after all). There are several useful ways you can do this, and while it can be fairly easy in the internet age to just trawl for random ideas, I suggest going to the books for the best stuff. Some useful ways you can do this:

Artifacts - you can grab low hanging fruit like the Antikythera Mechanism, the Bagdad Batteries or pretty much any wacky concept rolling around out there. There are no shortage of interesting real curiosities out there, and you can also dive into the stranger side of things with the world of "weird archaeology," also known as pseudo-science, but it often provides great resources for the more fantastic worlds of fantasy and horror gaming. Hell, Call of Cthulhu's core conceits are based entirely on the pseudo-scientific principles of concepts such as Lemuria and Mu, as an example. This sort of stuff can easily be filtered from the ether of the internet. 

Cultures, Concepts and Ideas - if you dive a bit more deeply into archaeological texts (and also anthropological texts) you can glean some interesting ideas for world building, maps for site locations and if you are willing to dig deep into the world of actual site records and material published on excavations at different locations throughout the world you can get entire lists of the sorts of in situ artifacts found at actual real world locations that can in turn spruce up your dungeon or ruin delve of choice. At the most basic level picking up a few issues of Archaeology Magazine can give you some easily accessible resources and maps. My favorite general purpose texts for this sort of research comes from a bewildering array of books on my shelf, but I will post a bit more about that in the final Inspiration blog.

For a good resource on actual inventions and technologies, I recommend Ancient Inventions by Peter James and Nick Thorpe. This is the single most useful volume I have on a practical overview of various technological inventions and breakthroughs, with a concise rundown on the whats, hows and whys. An excellent game-focused secondary resource would be GURPS Low-Tech. 

If weird and wacky archaeology is more your muse, I definitely suggest that GURPS Warehouse 23 is a great gaming-focused resource, and a it happens one of the best pragmatic resources on the subject that is still written with a real archaeological focus is Ancient Mysteries, also by Peter James and Nick Thorpe. I have found this to be a much more useful resource than, say, books such as Forbidden Archaeology which are not written from a real academic perspective.