DaFedora
New member
Okay, I'm in a pretty creative mood right now and I definitely want to share my wild ideas with you Raveners... You know, I should really first assert my copyright on this plot idea !?... I'm just teasing ya, George and Steven 
(P.S. hire MEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE !!! LOL)
I've just been reading a piece about the Etruscans (you know, that mysterious Italic pre-Roman culture whose language has a morphology strange to the Indo-European languages and isn?t quite deciphered). Even the Roman chroniclers and ?historians? in their age weren't agreeing on their origin: Herodotus (5th century B.C.) wrote that they came by ship from Asia Minor. Dionysius of Halicarnassus claimed they were instead of Italic origin and had lived on the peninsula from time immemorial.
The Etruscans, from what archaeologists know, seem to have been quite obsessed about what came before birth (the unknown, opaque origin of life) and the afterlife itself. In life they were true mystics, living for fun hedonistically because they valued more what came after their deaths.
What I've now read from an article by Gaither Stewart (http://onlinejournal.com/artman/publish/article_2773.shtml), the annals by Pliny the Elder are SERIOUS PLOT MATERIAL for an Indy (V) film !!
Apparently, there's a documented tale about 'Porsenna's Gold'. After death, the good Etruscan king was buried in a stone mausoleum, 300 feet wide and 50 feet high. Crowning the monument were five 150-foot tall pyramids, across the points of which was fixed a bronze globe from which bells hung, whose ting, ting, ting echoed through the surrounding hills of Etruria, today?s Tuscany. And atop the bronze globe, four more 100-foot pyramids, and on top of those five more, and so on and so on.
You still with me? Has the story whetted your appetites yet?
Now, just like the 'invisible bridge' in TLC, I was thinking that this place is somewhere along the plot of an Indy film, but it requires a mythical McGuffin to actually make the adjacent upper pyramids on the globes visible from the 'mortal eye'. That's where Porsenna's Gold comes in. Let's say there's one item of Porsenna's burial artifacts that Indy requires to open this 'visual afterworld' - maybe some 'Mirror-of-Dreams' device? Okay, it'll need some of your imagination... think of the final chapters in the Indiana Jones and the Tomb of the Emperor PC game. (Also, don't forget Indy allowed Belloq to unleash demons of the afterlife to kill Nazi's on that island at the end of Raiders... pretty 'after-lify' too)... It's kinda spooky, but could work I think!
Apparently, the nice Italian town of Orvieto DOES hold some of the evidence from how the rest of Pliny's story in Labirinto italico goes:
Inside the base of Porsenna's monument and deep under the hill of the Tuscan town of Chiusi was concealed the fabulous labyrinth of the legendary king. There are actually interesting labyrinths in rock bed in Orvieto, (which can be toured on request with a guide only).
Hold on... labyrinths ? That sounds like a fairly good place to start putting booby traps, trapdoor mechanisms and puzzles along the storyline, dontcha think? The labyrinth in Chiusi is reportedly a true underground city spread over several levels with tunnels, caves, cisterns and so on. (I'm getting visions of the chase scenes from TOD in the caves again...). But imagine that they thought the Italian archaeologist 'found all of it', but good Dr. Jones knows better (and has this one missing piece of the puzzle directing him to an unknown 'labyrint level'), where the progeny of the long-lost civilization - supposedly eradicated by the militaristic Roman culture - hid for centuries to safeguard their deep secret of how to communicate with their ancestors and future offspring in the afterlife (and perhaps 'cheat time' to have an advantage in the future with wars etc.). No, I'm not saying these guys learned how to 'time travel', but they did find a way to become ephemeral ghosts or something and hand down knowledge on the future down in tiny tiny bits (due to 'translation problems' their offspring never could interpret the messages).
I hear the critics coming: "WTF, you're saying Indy should get in contact with ghosts or something? Throw in Bill Murray and we'll have Ghostbusters IV" ... NO NO! Don't spoil this one yet, give me a shot at it!
Let's say the hidden labyrinth stuff in Italy actually leads out to an underground complex on a submersed island or something (so here could be a potential tie-in with the Atlantians, that's a possibility).
Taking the story a step further (yet I can't say I'm really happy about this) Indy thus has to discover that the supposedly 'vanished' Etruscans are planning to make a 'historical' come-back -centuries in the making- by using their 'secret', with some alchemy added, to regenerate their anger and all who were victims of the Romans, to avenge themselves somehow on the current predominant culture (taking place back in the 1940s, that being Mussolini's fascist regime)... Of course you might think: OK, but what would Indy care - he's a Nazi-hater himself, right? But the catch is that the Etruscans aim to recover an artifact of high mystical value themselves, that is being kept secret & hidden by the Vatican and also being sought after by Mussolini himself... a tool that allows total control over life and death (much like the Sankara stones that gave the power to rip a heart out and stuff).
The Vatican part involves breaking an entry into the Vatican Secret Archives where Indy uncovers never-before-seen Etruscan artifacts and a 'reading board'. He won't know what the purpose of this thing is, only knows it has Etruscan signs on it and some incomplete markings (like a Rosetta Stone that has one complete text and one with only half-visible markings)... After analysis Indy learns to translate the Etruscan text to English, putting the words together and find the path to.... a WELL.
(P.S. hire MEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE !!! LOL)I've just been reading a piece about the Etruscans (you know, that mysterious Italic pre-Roman culture whose language has a morphology strange to the Indo-European languages and isn?t quite deciphered). Even the Roman chroniclers and ?historians? in their age weren't agreeing on their origin: Herodotus (5th century B.C.) wrote that they came by ship from Asia Minor. Dionysius of Halicarnassus claimed they were instead of Italic origin and had lived on the peninsula from time immemorial.
The Etruscans, from what archaeologists know, seem to have been quite obsessed about what came before birth (the unknown, opaque origin of life) and the afterlife itself. In life they were true mystics, living for fun hedonistically because they valued more what came after their deaths.
What I've now read from an article by Gaither Stewart (http://onlinejournal.com/artman/publish/article_2773.shtml), the annals by Pliny the Elder are SERIOUS PLOT MATERIAL for an Indy (V) film !!
Apparently, there's a documented tale about 'Porsenna's Gold'. After death, the good Etruscan king was buried in a stone mausoleum, 300 feet wide and 50 feet high. Crowning the monument were five 150-foot tall pyramids, across the points of which was fixed a bronze globe from which bells hung, whose ting, ting, ting echoed through the surrounding hills of Etruria, today?s Tuscany. And atop the bronze globe, four more 100-foot pyramids, and on top of those five more, and so on and so on.
You still with me? Has the story whetted your appetites yet?
Now, just like the 'invisible bridge' in TLC, I was thinking that this place is somewhere along the plot of an Indy film, but it requires a mythical McGuffin to actually make the adjacent upper pyramids on the globes visible from the 'mortal eye'. That's where Porsenna's Gold comes in. Let's say there's one item of Porsenna's burial artifacts that Indy requires to open this 'visual afterworld' - maybe some 'Mirror-of-Dreams' device? Okay, it'll need some of your imagination... think of the final chapters in the Indiana Jones and the Tomb of the Emperor PC game. (Also, don't forget Indy allowed Belloq to unleash demons of the afterlife to kill Nazi's on that island at the end of Raiders... pretty 'after-lify' too)... It's kinda spooky, but could work I think!
Apparently, the nice Italian town of Orvieto DOES hold some of the evidence from how the rest of Pliny's story in Labirinto italico goes:
Inside the base of Porsenna's monument and deep under the hill of the Tuscan town of Chiusi was concealed the fabulous labyrinth of the legendary king. There are actually interesting labyrinths in rock bed in Orvieto, (which can be toured on request with a guide only).
Hold on... labyrinths ? That sounds like a fairly good place to start putting booby traps, trapdoor mechanisms and puzzles along the storyline, dontcha think? The labyrinth in Chiusi is reportedly a true underground city spread over several levels with tunnels, caves, cisterns and so on. (I'm getting visions of the chase scenes from TOD in the caves again...). But imagine that they thought the Italian archaeologist 'found all of it', but good Dr. Jones knows better (and has this one missing piece of the puzzle directing him to an unknown 'labyrint level'), where the progeny of the long-lost civilization - supposedly eradicated by the militaristic Roman culture - hid for centuries to safeguard their deep secret of how to communicate with their ancestors and future offspring in the afterlife (and perhaps 'cheat time' to have an advantage in the future with wars etc.). No, I'm not saying these guys learned how to 'time travel', but they did find a way to become ephemeral ghosts or something and hand down knowledge on the future down in tiny tiny bits (due to 'translation problems' their offspring never could interpret the messages).
I hear the critics coming: "WTF, you're saying Indy should get in contact with ghosts or something? Throw in Bill Murray and we'll have Ghostbusters IV" ... NO NO! Don't spoil this one yet, give me a shot at it!
Let's say the hidden labyrinth stuff in Italy actually leads out to an underground complex on a submersed island or something (so here could be a potential tie-in with the Atlantians, that's a possibility).
Taking the story a step further (yet I can't say I'm really happy about this) Indy thus has to discover that the supposedly 'vanished' Etruscans are planning to make a 'historical' come-back -centuries in the making- by using their 'secret', with some alchemy added, to regenerate their anger and all who were victims of the Romans, to avenge themselves somehow on the current predominant culture (taking place back in the 1940s, that being Mussolini's fascist regime)... Of course you might think: OK, but what would Indy care - he's a Nazi-hater himself, right? But the catch is that the Etruscans aim to recover an artifact of high mystical value themselves, that is being kept secret & hidden by the Vatican and also being sought after by Mussolini himself... a tool that allows total control over life and death (much like the Sankara stones that gave the power to rip a heart out and stuff).
The Vatican part involves breaking an entry into the Vatican Secret Archives where Indy uncovers never-before-seen Etruscan artifacts and a 'reading board'. He won't know what the purpose of this thing is, only knows it has Etruscan signs on it and some incomplete markings (like a Rosetta Stone that has one complete text and one with only half-visible markings)... After analysis Indy learns to translate the Etruscan text to English, putting the words together and find the path to.... a WELL.