The Lost City [REPACK]
Not all sites were drowned by the Lake, but the most representative, Pueblo Grande de Nevada (Lost City) was. Luckily, hundreds of sites remained above water and various artifacts were saved from the Lost City to be housed in the Lost City Museum of Archaeology in Overton, Nevada. But for every discovery saved, myriad others were lost. All future study of the area would be limited to the hastily assembled collections and notes of the pre-Lake Mead archaeologists. By the 1950s it was already obvious to historians, archaeologists and anthropologists that the surviving artifacts of Lost City raised more questions than answers. Answers that would remain lost at the bottom of Lake Mead.
The Lost City
Lost in the desert! The only hope for survival lies in a ruined city rising out of the sands. Food, water, and wealth await heroic adventures inside and ancient pyramid ruled by a strange race of masked beings. This module includes a cover folder with maps, and a descriptive booklet with a ready-made adventure for the Dungeons & Dragons Basic game. It also includes enough information to continue the adventure beyond level 3, using the Dungeons & Dragons Expert game rules.
The Last Introductory Adventure (for Now). As with each of those other Basic adventures, "The Lost City" focused not just on how to be an adventure for starting characters, but also on how to be a learning tool for GMs. Whereas earlier "B-series" modules had given extensive notes on running games or had let gamemasters fill in monsters and treasures, "The Lost City" takes an entirely new tactic: It depicts the first three levels of a pyramid hidden beneath the desert sands, and then lists monsters to appear in the remaining levels of the pyramid; notes major locations in the underground city that lies below that; and suggests further adventures once the players had reached the underground city. Thus, a GM has complete and polished dungeon levels to run while he's getting started, and then gets more freedom as he gains confidence in his game-running skills.
Future History. Though not as well known as some of the earlier Basic adventures, B4 is nonetheless considered a classic by many who began gaming in the '80s, and as a result it has been revisited many times. "Masque of Dreams" in Dungeon #142 (January 2007) explicitly returns to the plight of the underground Cynidiceans and their hungry god, Zargon. They also show up in Wizards' Elder Evils (2007), though that book moves everything from The Known World to the default Greyhawk setting, as was typical for the era. More recently, Open Design produced their own Lost City (2011), which is more of a thematic successor than a literal one, also featuring a lost city beneath the sands, though this one populated by lizard folk.
About the Creators. Following his work on the Dungeons & Dragons Basic Set, Tom Moldvay entered a period of extensive adventure design. "The Lost City" was the third book in what James Maliszewski calls Moldvay's "Pulp Fantasy Trilogy." It's a pretty apt name, as X1: "The Isle of Dread" (1981) contains a dinosaur-filled island, X2: "Castle Amber" (1981) directly references the pulp writings of Clark Ashton Smith, and B4: "The Lost City" (1982) features a city beneath the desert sands.
Smack in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, atop an underwater mountain rising over 10,000 feet above the seafloor, sits Lost City. Hundreds of white spires jut into the dark ocean, spanning the area of a city block and towering between 30 and 200 feet tall. Hot alkaline fluids filled with hydrogen gas spew from the tops of these natural towers into the waters just east of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge.
This is a radar image of the region around the site of the lost city of Ubar in southern Oman, on the Arabian Peninsula. The ancient city was discovered in 1992 with the aid of remote sensing data. Archeologists believe Ubar existed from about 2800 B.C. to about 300 A.D. and was a remote desert outpost where caravans were assembled for the transport of frankincense across the desert. This image was acquired on orbit 65 of space shuttle Endeavour on April 13, 1994 by the Spaceborne Imaging Radar C/X-Band Synthetic Aperture Radar (SIR-C/X-SAR). The SIR-C image shown is centered at 18.4 degrees north latitude and 53.6 degrees east longitude. The image covers an area about 50 by 100 kilometers (31 miles by 62 miles). The image is constructed from three of the available SIR-C channels and displays L-band, HH (horizontal transmit and receive) data as red, C-band HH as blue, and L-band HV (horizontal transmit, vertical receive) as green. The prominent magenta colored area is a region of large sand dunes, which are bright reflectors at both L-and C-band. The prominent green areas (L-HV) are rough limestone rocks, which form a rocky desert floor. A major wadi, or dry stream bed, runs across the middle of the image and is shown largely in white due to strong radar scattering in all channels displayed (L and C HH, L-HV). The actual site of the fortress of the lost city of Ubar, currently under excavation, is near the Wadi close to the center of the image. The fortress is too small to be detected in this image. However, tracks leading to the site, and surrounding tracks, appear as prominent, but diffuse, reddish streaks. These tracks have been used in modern times, but field investigations show many of these tracks were in use in ancient times as well. Mapping of these tracks on regional remote sensing images was a key to recognizing the site as Ubar in 1992. This image, and ongoing field investigations, will help shed light on a little known early civilization.Spaceborne Imaging Radar-C and X-Band Synthetic Aperture Radar (SIR-C/X-SAR) is part of NASA's Mission to Planet Earth. The radars illuminate Earth with microwaves allowing detailed observations at any time, regardless of weather or sunlight conditions. SIR-C/X-SAR uses three microwave wavelengths: L-band (24 cm), C-band (6 cm) and X-band (3 cm). The multi-frequency data will be used by the international scientific community to better understand the global environment and how it is changing. The SIR-C/X-SAR data, complemented by aircraft and ground studies, will give scientists clearer insights into those environmental changes which are caused by nature and those changes which are induced by human activity. SIR-C was developed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. X-SAR was developed by the Dornier and Alenia Spazio companies for the German space agency, Deutsche Agentur fuer Raumfahrtange-legenheiten (DARA), and the Italian space agency, Agenzia Spaziale Italiana (ASI), with the Deutsche Forschungsanstalt fuer Luft und Raumfahrt e.v.(DLR), the major partner in science, operations, and data processing of X-SAR.
The first trip upriver is a harrowing and mortally costly one for Fawcett and company, but at the farthest point, he stumbles onto an archeological find that convinces him of a great, lost civilization that's waiting to be discovered. His argument meets skepticism and mockery from some circles back home, but Fawcett changes his approach on a subsequent expedition and develops an appreciation for the achievements of the so-called "savages" en route. Then World War I breaks out and Fawcett is thrown headlong into what "superior" peoples are capable of doing to each other.
Yes, it probably was a tremendously socializing experience, because you came from a village of a few hundred people to a city of tens of thousands. It was like a Cecil B. DeMille epic, with this huge structure rising on the horizon in an era when there were no big structures anywhere.
It's difficult. Excavation can happen in the Lost City that is beneath the modern town only through salvage archeology. That is, when buildings are built and construction crews penetrate into ancient layers, parts of this ancient city, archeologists can go in and rescue evidence before the construction happens.
In fact, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, a sewage system was put into the Cairo West Bank, which included the zone immediately below the Pyramid plateau at Giza. A British-American consortium named AMBRIC dug a whole network of trenches. That work showed that there is settlement out there underneath the modern city that covers an area about three kilometers north to south and one or two kilometers east to west. So this is a 300-hectare or larger site. [One hectare equals 10,000 square meters.]
Now, some of the largest cities in the third millennium that we know elsewhere from archeology, such as Ur and Uruk, are 300, 400 hectares. So there's a very big city out there. The Pyramids were not out in the desert as sentinels and mausoleums of these deceased kings; they were the skyscrapers of downtown Egypt for the time.
Ha! That is a good question, probably the central question of all: How did these pharaohs pull it off? In an age when it took one to two weeks to get from one end of Egypt to another, when there were no bar codes, no cell phones, no Internet, no electricity, no refrigeration for the meat. How did they know how many people were out there, who had done their rotation and who hadn't, and so on?
Since the days of conquistador Hernán Cortés, rumors have circulated about a lost city of immense wealth hidden somewhere in the Honduran interior, called the White City or the Lost City of the Monkey God. Indigenous tribes speak of ancestors who fled there to escape the Spanish invaders, and they warn that anyone who enters this sacred city will fall ill and die. In 1940, swashbuckling journalist Theodore Morde returned from the rainforest with hundreds of artifacts and an electrifying story of having found the Lost City of the Monkey God--but then committed suicide without revealing its location.
Three quarters of a century later, bestselling author Douglas Preston joined a team of scientists on a groundbreaking new quest. In 2012 he climbed aboard a rickety, single-engine plane carrying the machine that would change everything: lidar, a highly advanced, classified technology that could map the terrain under the densest rainforest canopy. In an unexplored valley ringed by steep mountains, that flight revealed the unmistakable image of a sprawling metropolis, tantalizing evidence of not just an undiscovered city but an enigmatic, lost civilization. 041b061a72