Temple of 1,000 Tombs

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The Temple of 1,000 Tombs.

The Temple of 1,000 Tombs is a location in the Lost Desert. It consists of eighty to eighty-five corridors, three libraries, and (despite its name) 288 tombs. All but one of the tombs is booby trapped, the final one contains a statue of the Fire Faerie Nuria. It also features a gift shop.

Its layout is randomised for each user. The location was featured as part of the puzzle in the Lost Desert Plot, and players had to return to it several times over the course of the puzzle. Activating a trap in the Temple ejects the player and bars them from re-entering for half an hour.

Tomb doors may be one of six colours and four shapes. For each combination of colour and shape, there is one door for each of twelve Sakhmetian hieroglyphs.

Plot summary[edit]

Lost Desert Plot[edit]

One of the tombs contained the statue of Nuria.
Main article: Lost Desert Plot

The player had to visit the Temple several times during the course of the puzzle: in order to retrieve the tiles for the Mysterious Tablet, to gain access to the Scroll Repository, to recover four Useless Crystals, and to speak the prophecies they discovered to the statue of Nuria.

Certain tombs in the Temple contained the tiles the player needed to complete their Mysterious Tablet. The clues the player received from visiting each location as directed by the Fortune Teller corresponded to a certain tomb door. For the first stone fragment, the player had to find the clue after playing a game of Pyramids, and visit the tomb door described on it in the column starting with one dot (i.e. first piece). For the second fragment, the player had to retrieve the clue by playing a game of Snow Wars, and then visit the tomb door described in that clue under the column beginning with two dots (i.e. second piece) and so on.

In order to gain access to the Scroll Repository, the player had to return to the tomb and read the scroll in one of the three libraries that corresponded to the symbol on their statue of Nuria. They then could give the Repository's guards the reason corresponding to the name of the scroll they read and be let in. For example, if the player's symbol was ahn ahn - an ankh - they would have to read The Joy of Burnt Desert Food, which was sealed with the ahn ahn symbol. They could then say to the guards, "I'm here with extra charcoal for the caterers." and would be let in. The player could find which of the libraries their scroll was in by looking up the item's description, which contained a clue.

After the Repository was unburied, excavated, and furnished, the player had to return to the Tomb to retrieve several Useless Crystals. The first one was obtained from The Foreman in return for a souvenir from the Gift Shop of 1,000 Trinkets. The second could be found in a spike trap at the Tomb, the third in a gelatinous non-cube trap, and the fourth in an unsolvable riddle trap.

One tomb in the Temple, random for each player, contains the statue of Nuria and invites the player to speak a prophecy: "Whosoever shall speak the prophecy here, shall be rewarded with treasures beyond compare." The player had to return here several times over the course of the plot to give Nuria several prophecies. The riddle inscribed on the door to the Temple cryptically describes the colour and shape of the door to Nuria's tomb. This narrows down the 288 possible tomb doors to twelve, one for each Sakhmetian hieroglyph.

The first prophecy came from clicking the hieroglyphs in plot comics one, two, and three in the order they appeared on the player's tablet. These hieroglyphs were added in to the comics when chapter four was released. There were several variations of the first prophecy, but all essentially predicted that Jazan would make Sakhmet disappeared. Giving this prophecy to Nuria would result in the player being buried under a pile of scarabs.

After translating their tablet to Qasalan, the player could discover a new prophecy by clicking the Qasalan symbols in comics twelve, thirteen, and fourteen. Clicking the symbols left-to-right gave the player the prophecy, "The golden eye shines truth upon those who would do evil" - when spoken to Nuria, this would bury the player under a mountain of scarabs. Qasalan is in fact read right-to-left, bottom to top. Clicking the symbols in this order would give the player the prophecy, " The father of the prince will destroy the great desert".

This was the true prophecy, and would give the player their choice of one of three weapons they could use to defeat Razul.

Trivia[edit]

  • The Temple was not linked to on any of the plot pages or accessible from the Lost Desert map - it was made accessible through a banner ad, reading, "Greetings from the Temple of 1,000 Tombs".
The link to the Temple.

External links[edit]