Inspired by The Library of Ashurbanipal and its collections of cuneiform scholarship
The Burned Library of Nine Gates
Fire preserved the empire's knowledge and released its commands.
What the party believes
A museum asks the characters to recover cuneiform tablets stolen from a storage room. Their consultant, Ashur, says the thieves are joining broken fragments from Ashurbanipal's library and selling the completed texts. When the first tablet is restored, a modern border gate hundreds of miles away closes by itself.
Ashur reads the tablets without notes and treats royal commands as personal insults. He leads the party beneath Nineveh, where fire hardened thousands of records instead of destroying them. Every complete sentence changes something outside.
Recover the stolen tablets and stop the library from enforcing ancient commands in the present.
Where the trail leads
- Track a collector who used an omen tablet to make every prediction in his favor come true.
- Enter a burned archive where spoken words pull matching fragments through the rubble.
- Find Ashur's face carved beside the royal catalog and watch him deny the resemblance.
- Choose which medical and literary tablets to save before the command texts awaken the palace guard.
- Reach the throne archive as Ashur names himself Ashurbanipal and orders the library to classify the party as enemies.
What actually happened
Ashur is Ashurbanipal, the king who assembled the great library. In this version of history, the collection was also an imperial control system. A restored order becomes law wherever the empire once claimed authority.
The chief scribes broke the tablets during Nineveh's fall to free conquered peoples from those commands. Ashurbanipal arranged the thefts so outsiders would rebuild the library for him. He intends to restore his empire one sentence at a time.
Where it can end
- Defeat Ashurbanipal and distribute the surviving texts to the cultures they came from.
- Destroy the command tablets while preserving medicine, literature, and records.
- Rewrite the catalog so no single version of a law can rule every place.
The history behind the story
More than 30,000 cuneiform tablets and fragments were found at Nineveh in collections associated with Ashurbanipal. They include literature, omens, medicine, ritual, administration, and intelligence. Fire hardened many clay tablets. The magical authority of rejoined texts is an invention.
Content notes
war and conquest, cultural theft, destruction of archives. Change or fade any element that does not suit your table.