Treasure Maps from an Older Era
I comically misunderstood a question in an advice channel earlier today, but my misunderstanding gave me a few ideas of fun ways to use treasure maps as hooks to facilitate play.
The Map is in an Ancient Language
Pretty basic premise here. The annotations on the map can't be revealed without finding the monk whose order has preserved some intermediate version of the ancient language. What does the monk need before they will help you to decipher the instructions? Alternate/equivalent is that the map is protected by arcane seals or sigils from an older tradition of magic than what is contemporary for the setting.
- Her livestock have escaped the pen
- Her spring appears to have run dry, which doesn't make any sense since it just rained. What's gumming it up?
- The map is older than her order's historical records stretch and she needs another sample document from the period to complete the cypher
- She desires a gift of food that she can't otherwise obtain in her hermitage
- She needs components for a necromantic ritual to contact a spirit from the underworld to help translate
- The language of the map cannot be meaningfully spoken or conveyed by a human tongue and must be translated through birdsong or some other beast speech.
The Map Predates a Major Geological Event
Can you imagine being the first person to realize that the east coast of South America fits up against the west coast of Africa? Crazy. This idea came to me from Benign Brown Beast's Puzzle Collector's Problem, which posits a totally different idea, but it would be cool to organically realize that the current state of the terrain is different from the state of the terrain described by an ancient map.
The complication is that geologic time is such a different scale from something like the history of written language in our timeline. Maybe rather than continental drift, you have a map that predates a major:
- Earthquake
- Sinkhole
- Meteor impact
- Volcanic Eruption
- Flood
- Magnetic Field Reversal