A Real 17th-Century Dungeon Delve

Earlier this year, I read An Ottoman Traveller: Selections from the Book of Travels by Evliya Çelebi, in part following a very exciting and happy trip to Istanbul in December/early January. Evliya Çelebi was a seventeenth-century Ottoman nobleman, muezzin, Qur'an reciter, and possible Sufi initiate who embarked on a life-long endeavor of travel following a dream wherein the prophet Muhammad, the Rightly Guided Caliphs, and the muezzin Bilal vouchsafed him and gave him the mission of travel. It's a really great book, a super fun read that puts into English translation most of the majorly important, interesting, and sometimes shockingly humorous scenes from Evliya Çelebi's travels (it doesn't feature all of his Seyahatname, which has never been fully translated into English). While there are more tidbits which I think are worth sharing, I wanted to highlight a specific episode which was so surprisingly relevant to this blog and to OSR, location-based adventure design... Evliya's description of what amounts to a real dungeon delve from the seventeenth-century Ottoman Empire!

I finished the book months ago and have been sitting on a draft of this post for a full month, if that tells you where I've been at any. Procrastination central over here.

1839 painting by Francis Arundale

Anyway! I'm not going to quote the entire section in full, because its actually quite long. The dungeon in question are the ancient depths of the pyramids of Giza, which have fascinated people with their age, grandeur, and mystery for just about as long as they've existed. If you're curious as to what medieval Muslims before Evliya's time thought about the ancient Egyptian pyramids, check out this very informative video on the topic from the Islamic history channel al Muqaddimah (while you're there, also check out this video on how the Mongol khans became Muslim sultans, which I wrote most of the script for!). Evliya calls the pyramids of Giza "three mountains," lauding them as the man-made versions of Mount Qaf, the mythical cosmological mountain so large it encircles the world, and even gives names to each of these mountains (these are Mt. Balbahith (aka Belhib), Mt. Malhawiya (aka Belhube), and Mt. Abu'l-hawl (which actually refers to the Sphinx)). He also goes over the many conflicting accounts for why the pyramids were created, which (at least in this translation) reads very much like the kind of fantastical yet purposefully uncertain worldbuilding that is widespread in these circles:

There are thousands of stories about these artificial mountains. Some chroniclers say they were built before the Flood by Ad ibn Shaddad. Others maintain that before the flood, King Surid, at the urging of his soothsayers, built them as a tomb for himself. When they were finished he filled the three pyramids with treasure, put in weapons, and also placed therein the books of all the sciences written by the prophet Idris. He set up talismans and guardians (?) and covered the pyramids with brocade, making them a hidden treasure. He also built a great city on the shores of the Nile where the guards of the pyramid resided. Every year, in spring, all the people of the world came and circumambulated the pyramids, as they do the Ka'ba.

Even now, in the northern pyramid, there is a south-facing gate, inside of which, on the right side, is a Hebrew inscription carved on the rocks. It reads, "I who built the pyramids completed them in six years. May those who come after me be able to tear them down from their foundations in 600 years. Indeed, it is easier to tear down than to build up. And I covered them with brocade. May the kings who come after me be able to cover with them reed mats."

Further, Evliya recounts a tale of the Caliph Ma'mun, who came from Baghdad to Giza to uncover the treasures of the pyramids, and whose efforts to do so proved the above inscription, because after spending seven months just to excavate 20 cubits from the pyramid, his workers only uncovered a jar containing enough gold pieces to exactly cover the exorbitant costs of the excavation thus far and nothing else. But, lest he let his own ego be overcome by this, he boasts his plan to overcome the ancient mountains:

As for the saying of Surid - "I built the pyramids in six years. May the kings who come after me be able to tear them down in 600 years" - the interpretation of this humble one is: If I were to mine the pyramids with 100 quintals of black powder and one 'six-treasure' mine that was used in the siege of Candia castle, the mountains of Ahram (the pyramids) would be blown sky-high like an ihram (pilgrim's garment) and no trace would be left of the building, not even the foundation, but all would crumble to the ground and melt into the Nile.

But, to tell the truth, I have never seen such a huge building on the face of the earth...

Inside the great pyramid of Khufu

And now, the dungeon delve proper: 

God be praised that, during the governorship of Ibrahim Pasha, I spent five or ten days partying next to the pyramids, while our horses were grazing in the nearby meadow, and I had occasion to tour them several times and marvel at them.

On one occasion there were forty-five of us, including some in the retinue of the Master of the Horse and Behlul Agha and other officers. We brought torches, oilcloth lanterns and wind-tapers. After clearing away the sand and rubbish from the door on the northern side of the large pyramid, we took refuge in God and entered with a besmele. This humble one kept an eye on the compass and the watch.

The first 700 paces in a southern direction was a broad highway, fifteen cubits wide and surmounted by vaults 20 cubits high. There were numerous caves on either side, also man-made halls with domes carved from the soft rock stratum and gilded and decorated as though just emerged from the hand of Bihzad. Every cell was full of human bones, and every skull could hold 100 bushels of wheat. Only God knows how many skulls there were, both large and small. In our path lay a shinbone, still covered with its skin, that was 71 spans as measured by this humble one's hand. There were an abundance of such bones.

One large cave was full of human corpses that lay shrouded in date-palm fibres. And there were several hundred skeletons (or mummies), each 70 or 80 paces tall. But we nearly suffocated from the smell of bat droppings, the bats being as large as crows and hanging from the rocks by their claws. Some hurled themselves at the lanterns and torches and scorched their wings. Some struck us in the face.

At this juncture, a few of our companions got frightened and went back with one or two lanterns. The thirty-five of us who were left summoned our  courage and went on for another hour, along a gently descending slope, our compass pointing south. We saw vaulted halls like the Vault of Chosroes, each containing mummified human corpses, and near them, trampled in the dust, rotted reed mats and pieces of cloth woven of date-palm fibre.

Fifty paces further on, continuing on a downward slope, we came upon a large pool of clear water. But all around the edge sat frightful birds, as large as eagles or geese. As soon as they saw us, they flapped their wings and produced a thunderous noise that made our brains ooze from our ears. And the bats besmirched us and our clothes with their droppings. Meanwhile the torchbearers informed us they were running out of kindling. The noise produced by those eagles' wings was particularly dreadful.

We had no heart to advance a single step beyond that pool, and had just decided to turn around when a freezing-cold wind from the direction of the birds made us shudder with apprehension. What would we do if our torches and lanterns went out? The bats meanwhile, that were the size of pigeons, kept fluttering at the flames like moths and brushing against our faces with their wings. It nearly drove us crazy.

To make a long story short, guided by the piles of stones we had set up along the way, we somehow managed to make our way back and emerged safe and sound. Our companions who had fled earlier teased us, saying, "Where did you get these filthy faces and strange looks?" God knows, though we emerged safely, we were completely exhausted. But it was a tremendous experience! Only God knows what lies beyond that pool.

Thus this humble one saw the inside of one of the pyramids. There was no buried treasure, only buried men. But there is no doubt that it is under a talismanic power. For when we came to that pool, all of us were confounded, and we remained in this stunned condition until we came out into the air, when we recovered our souls. God save us! May I never be vouchsafed to enter it again.

After returning to our tents for breakfast and coffee, we surveyed the pyramids from all sides. Two of them have a square base with each side 200 paces long, making the circumference 800 paces. Each of the stones is 20 or 30 cubits. The large pyramid has a door on the northern side through which we entered, but the other two have no visible entrance. The Abu'l-hawl pyramid (the Sphinx) is quite small, but both are mountains with square base and pointed tip reaching up to the sky.

I climbed up the pyramid that we had entered. At the top there isa square or arena large enough to pitch a pup-tent with ten flaps. In some of the crevices I found jesses and hoods and pigeon rings and anklets. All Cairo was spread out beneath my feet - so lofty are these mountains. There are also structures built of black stone and guarded by talismans all around the pyramids. I would need an entire volume to describe them all.

I hope that you may forgive the lengthy quotation! I just loved this whole episode from the moment that I read it. It is so completely unlike what we now know to be inside the pyramids at Giza, to the point that clearly it must be fabricated, but none of the details surrounding the actual expedition into the pyramid appears fantastical or fabricated at all. The talismanic power that surrounds the pyramid fits very well into the aca'ib literature in the Ottoman Empire at the time, the literature of the fantastic and miraculous, more or less the early modern Ottoman equivalent of paranormal literature. But on top of that, the imagery here is just so unsettling! Giant, looming skeletons and desiccated corpses, a pool of dark water thronged by huge uncanny birds (birds explicitly compared with eagles and geese especially, for some reason roosting in this completely closed-in space, just feels so fundamentally wrong). It's just too good!!

Thinking through Evliya's description as an actual dungeon, it reads very much like a classic dungeon where the main concerns are resource depletion brought on by the systemic exploration of large ancient spaces which may have rather monotonous architecture. Not quite a fair comparison, but reminds me some of good ol' megadungeons like what we have of Gary's notes for Castle Greyhawk, or the early OSR favorite Stonehell. None of the giant corpses come to life like something out of Barrowmaze, but they very very effectively set the tone (alongside the giant "vaults of Chosroes" (Khosrau Anushirvan)) for the methodical exploration. This is then capped off with a room that seems to be half "special" (i.e. the mysterious pool with the birds posing a particularly sound-based challenge for Evliya and the other adventurers) and half a monster lair. I love the birds so much dude.

That's all I wanted to make this post for :) It's just a very very cool OSR-y episode from an extensive collection of such evocative anecdotes and descriptions which document a life of travel in the seventeenth century. I would love to run a dungeon with even half the rich oozing darkness of Evliya's description here.

Ottoman miniature of the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus (they slept in a cave which is underground like the pyramid dungeon is, so its thematically appropriate)

Joesky tax for this otherwise non-gameable post:

Frightful Birds of the Pyramid 

Number Encountered: 4d8

Hit Dice: 1+2

Attacks: 1 bite (1d6) + 1 claw (1d6) OR frightful flapping

Armor: as leather

Morale: 8

Bat symbiosis: Frightful birds of the pyramid have a mutualistic relationship with the guano-producing bats which dwell in the pyramid and which have the uncanny ability to crawl through the paper-thin gaps in the masonry. They subsist on the bat's guano, given few other food sources. When frightful birds of the pyramid are engaged in frightful flapping (see below), they agitate their bat partners and prompt them to release guano on the birds' interlopers, which applies an additional -1 to the save vs. noise required as well as having a chance to spread disease.

Frightful flapping: When there are six or more frightful birds of the pyramid in close proximity, they may produce a frightful flapping which overwhelms the senses and disempowers those who hear it. Those within earshot must save vs. noise or be overcome with a terrible sense of impending doom and anxiety that prompts them to flee. This save has a penalty of -1 for every 6 frightful birds which are present.

Appearing like great looming shaggy geese, pallid and sickly with uncannily wide and arm-like wingspans and feathers choked with occasional spats of grey, the frightful birds of the pyramid were trapped within this ancient structure long ago, when it was first closed up. This is typically attributed to the long forgotten god of knowledge and writing having decided to do so on a whim. Now, the things are adapted to the darkness within the great pyramids. They subsist on bat guano and linger around deep dark pools of stagnant water. When threatened, they use their numbers to their advantage, flapping violently to produce a horrible echoing noise; when this fails, they attack with their beaks from their long flexible necks and slash with one webbed foot, the other foot comically hopping on the ground like an animal that never properly learned how to walk. They do not guard treasure. "There was no buried treasure, only buried men."

GO VOTE IN THE BLOGGIES OR ELSE

 HI HELLO HI

I'm posting this like a day late but that's okay that's whatever.

My unnecessarily long-running post series Goin' Through the Fiend Folio has been nominated for a BLOGGIE for Best Series, and I am formally requesting that YOU vote for it! You can vote for up to three blog series so it's okay if you vote for other ones too, but PLEASE vote for the humble Fiend Folio too!!!

TBH though I'm just happy to be included :) Like, what do you mean my little monster review series is nominated side by side with Josh's Designing Dungeons Course??? Are you forreal????

But uhhh if I want to win I've gotta be cutthroat uh uh uh if you don't vote for Goin' Through the Fiend Folio for best series then I'm going to burn down your crops and give your wife/husband/spouse a debilitating illness. If you're not married yet, you're lucky that my debilitating illness doesn't work on girlfriends and boyfriends

Go HERE, click VOTE NOW, and on the page for best series vote for GOIN THROUGH THE FIEND FOLIO !!!!!!!

 

EDIT: didn't win it :( but that's okay :) congrats to Josh and elmcat and all the others who did win!! and thank you if you voted for me at all! 

Fish-Eaters of the Enlightened Empire (A Character Background for King of Kings)

  These Ichthyophagi subsist on what their name is derived from, — fish. Yet only a few of them fish out in the deep, for boats to do it with are scarce, and the art of fishing is unknown. Generally speaking, they are indebted for their fish to the ebb-tide. To take advantage of it, they make for themselves nets which are mostly two stadia in length. These they weave from the bark of the palm-tree, twisting the fibres like flax, Now when the sea retires from the land, the parts left dry are generally found to be without fish, while the hollows, which of course retain some water, swarm with them. The fish are generally small, though some are of considerable size: these they catch with their nets. The more delicate kinds they eat raw as soon as they are taken out of the water, but the large and coarser kinds they dry in the sun, and when sufficiently dried grind into a sort of flour, from which they make bread. They bake also cakes from this flour. The cattle, as well as the men, eat the dry fish, for there are no meadows in the country, nor grass at all. But in many parts they fish also for crabs and oysters and mussels. Natural salt is found in the land [...] from these they make oil. Some of the tribes inhabit desolate tracts which are so utterly sterile that they bear neither trees nor even wild fruits. These poor wretches have nothing but fish to live on. A few of them, however, sow some part of their land, and use the produce to eat for zest along with their fish, which forms the staple of their diet. The better classes build houses of whale-bone, which they collect from the carcasses of whales cast ashore, and use instead of wood. The doors are formed of the broadest bones they can find. The poorer members, who form the great majority of the population, construct their, houses with the backbones of fish.

-Arrian, The Indica

O Commander of the faithful!
It's a land where the plains are stony;
Where water is scanty;
Where the fruits are unsavory;
Where men are known for treachery;
Where plenty is unknown;
Where virtue is held of little account;
And where evil is dominant.
A large army is less for there;
And a less army is use less there;
The land beyond it, is even worse

-Messenger to the Caliph 'Umar, 
quoted in The History of the Prophets and Kings by al-Tabari

 

The coast of modern-day Makran, in southern Iran

 On the far southern littoral of the Enlightened Empire, where the mountains slope almost suddenly into the salt-flats and scorching beaches by the southern sea, dwell the Fish-Eaters. This nation of subject barbarians are the southernmost subjects of the most enlightened King of Kings, living in a land second only to the Kavir-e Bozorg in terms of heat and oppressive sunlight, and thus the most distant from civilized habits like farming, honest trade, bricklaying, slavery, and misogyny. Constantly living on the brink, there is no time for Fish-Eaters to care for such things. As the geographers of the First City describe, the Fish-Eaters are so called because their blighted land cannot grow any meaningful crop, and so the people there rely on fishing, even grinding dried fish into flour and building houses out of the bones of sea serpents, whales, and sharks. Even the few domesticated animals they (occasionally) keep feed on fish, and the flesh of dogs and scrawny cows from the littoral regions of Mahestan have a repugnant oily quality and rotten smell even when freshly killed.

Since the Fish-Eaters are well known for their vagaries and treachery, the office of satrap of Mahestan has been left intentionally vacant for several generations (he would, naturally, be too vulnerable to bribes, coercions, and assassinations by his own benighted subjects) -- instead, terrible Mahestan is de facto governed by the policeman-general of Parch (the closest thing to a city along the coast), the constantly cycling-out Sub-satrap of Lesser Mountain Passes (an administrative position that seems to only exist to punish those who fall out of favor in court), and the Middle Herbad Over the Eternal Flame of Chelonis. The temple at Chelonis is a fully-stocked temple of Truth, complete with an Eternal Flame that is constantly at the brink of going out due to the region's lack of forests for good fuel. This Flame was lit under the auspices of a temple faction which had preeminence under a previous Shahanshah, and which had a broader conception of which nations were truly good and eligible for religious virtue. They wished to redeem the immorality of the Fish-Eaters by introducing the light of Truth to their midst; now, a few generations later, the priesthood has changed its orientation and finds the Eternal Flame out on the edge of the sea to be a liability in a swarm of barbarians that Truth disdains. This sputtering Eternal Flame is fueled by turtle shells and charcoal made from the bark of sickly date palms.

Anyways, the majority of the Fish-Eaters have always been disinterested by the Eternal Flame at Chelonis. For one, they do not make fire themselves, and have no respect for it. The sun itself is half of Truth, for them. It dries their catch, after all! On the other hand, its heat is half of the Lie. To the Fish-Eaters, the sun is a malfeasance, a duplicitous god that gives with the same hand he takes with. No, the only thing that can be trusted is the Sea. The Sea is a distant but ever-present mother, who they are constantly taking from, accruing a beautiful debt they can never repay. The Fish-Eaters have no boat-making culture of their own, and view the surface of the wine dark sea as the skin of their own mother, who should never be cut or injured. They shoot down diving birds, and would also shoot at every single sailor that crossed their stretch of coast were it not for the policeman-general at Parch. They especially distrust Froglings, in their fly-powered dhows. A sailor that leaves the sea is, after a certain length of time, forgiven as a gift of hospitality. The scars from his ship's rudder heal over, and he can be forgiven, at least until he sets out to sea again. They sacrifice elaborate scrimshaw effigies of children and dogs in burying rituals on the beach, letting the tide come in and take away the sympathetic magic of whatever they wish kept safe.

They also disdain the Eternal Flame at Chelonis because the area around it is inhabited by their sworn enemies, the Turtle-Eaters.

In the angle of Carmania are the Chelonophagi, who cover their cabins with the shells of turtles, and live upon their flesh...

-Pliny the Elder, Natural History Book VI, Chapter 28

The Turtle-Eaters are identical in all respects to the Fish-Eaters, at least as far as those from the rest of the Enlightened Empire can tell, other than that the one builds huts of fish bones and the other of turtle shells. They get into shouting matches that quickly escalate to brawls practically on sight.

An Ichthyophagus, from (I believe) the edition of Wonders of the East bound in the Beowulf manuscript (Nowell codex, Anglo-Saxon, circa 1000 CE)

CHARACTER BACKGROUND: FISH-EATER

Fish-Eater (fish-skin loincloth, net, short knife, near-encyclopedic knowledge of southern sea fishes, lack of upper class niceties, a scrimshaw effigy)

What does my scrimshaw effigy depict?
Roll 1d12:
1: A whale caught in a net
2: A baby strangling a bird
3: A man eating a fish eating a turtle
4: A sumptuously dressed dog-headed man with a spear through his chest
5: A mother holding a fish like a child
6: An eel all tied up in knots
7: A mer-man with fish's tails for feet, holding a date palm in one hand
8: A mother with multiple breasts, a fish suckling on each one
9: A fat woman with an oyster shell for a head
10: A sea serpent holding a sleeping man in its mouth
11: A dugong with a metaphorical map of the world carved on its back
12: A crab with a human face

Fish-Eaters, in any King of Kings game I run, are inevitably foreigners to wherever the game is taking place (although a game set in Mahestan could be interesting!). It'd be a neat line of thought to have to think over both how your Fish-Eater character got to wherever the game is set, as well as how they entered into their character class. A magic-using priest trained at the Temple of Chelonis, or perhaps someone initiated into local sea-mysteries; fighters and thieves seem like easier bets given the reputation of the region, but if making a Fish-Eater fighter it could be worth asking, if your fighter character had military experience, in what war was this distant province conscripted into? The Kingdom of the Southern Dog-Headed Men is right next door (keep an eye out for a future post about them), so maybe a Fish-Eater character had to face off against dapper cannibal kings and their retinues and, having spent so long away from the sea, feels unable to return home. OSR games might not encourage the development of deep character backstories, but this sort of thing is always an interesting avenue to connect characters in with the rest of a living world :)

Actually ngl an all fish eater campaign set in Mahestan would kinda go hard