Geoff Manaugh is an interesting writer — his book A Burglar's Guide to the City is something everyone should read — and he has a fascinating blog called BLDGBLOG. The most recent post (as of this writing) is about some ambitious projects to do large-scale surveys of the subsurface environment using ground-penetrating radar, sonar, and other techniques. Read it here.
This set off my writer/game designer's "spider sense" like a fire alarm. This is a roleplaying campaign or a series of technothrillers just ready to be written! From here on I will discuss it in terms of a game campaign, but most of the same ideas and concepts could be turned into fiction or film.
The obvious campaign frame is to have your heroes as scientists and specialists working for the International Subsurface Exploration Agency. They go to exotic places around the world and find out what's underground. There are several "lenses" one can apply to this, ranging from least to most fantastic.
Action Thriller: While archaeologists are looking for sites of historical interest, so they can go through them in painstaking detail, there are a lot of other people who hear "buried" and immediately think ". . . treasure." Put your ISEA researchers in some lawless region, then send in a gang of looters and you've got a modern-day Raiders of the Lost Ark. The looters can be crooks, corrupt officials, mercenaries, or whoever. There's also the danger of people who just don't like anyone poking around under the ground in their neighborhood. They could be religious fanatics, drug growers or terrorists who don't want their operations exposed, governments who don't want their operations exposed, or people who have buried something they don't want dug up (toxic waste, bodies, etc.).
Caper Story: Or maybe the "heroes" are the bad guys — freelancers who are looking for loot and have to evade or distract those pesky ISEA eggheads (and the cops) long enough to disable the giant boulder traps and get the gold. They also have to cope with all the perils and adversaries the legit archaeologists have to worry about (see above).
Paranormal/Science Fiction: Maybe there's something really weird buried in an out-of-the-way corner of the world. Ancient alien space probes, remnants of lost civilizations with strange powers unknown to moder science, dinosaurs in suspended animation, caves holding weird cultures . . . This is the "Saturday Afternoon Monster Theater" campaign. The ISEA might be part of a larger secret investigation into weird stuff — and when there's one clandestine conspiracy there's likely to be others, all trying to be first to dig up the latest uncanny find.
Horror: The heroes' investigations keep turning up buried things which are scary and dangerous and really shouldn't be dug up at all. Vampires, Elder Gods, ghouls, grumpy mummies, and cultists who want to keep the world from finding out until the stars are right. Both this campaign and the Paranormal one above might cast the ISEA as archaeological "men in black" who not only have to deal with the weirdness, but also keep it under wraps. Either way, it's a great frame for a modern-day dungeon crawl with monsters, traps, villains, and treasure. Just don't disturb the context!
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