Ephesus University Museum - Landmark
The Ephesus University Museum is rated among the worst museums in Titan City guidebooks. It is off the beaten path for museum goers and its dark, slightly dank exhibition halls are the opposite of modern museum practice. The current rumor is that none of the museum’s exhibitions have changed in the past twenty years. It’s almost as if the Ephesus University Museum doesn’t want visitors at all…
The Ephesus University Museum is a repository for all of the cultural artifacts collected by Ephesus University staff. Objects from mysterious civilizations are interspersed with magical artifacts and strange scientific devices from the ancient world. Virtually any object in the museum’s collection can inspire a story, either through an attempt to steal it or a PC being charged to figure out its mystery.
The Ephesus University Museum is a rather boring building amidst the architectural gems of Old Bradford. It is a three-story red-brick building with white stone trim. The museum’s entrance is marked by a pair of white columns.
History of the EU Museum:

The Ephesus University Museum was acquired by the university in the 1930’s. The museum, originally the Bradford Museum of Antiquities, had been a private institution created by a wealthy Titanite. The museum was part of his endowment to Ephesus University on the condition that it not be relocated into the neighboring Alexandria. The University was willing to accept his terms given the size of the gift.

With the rise of villainous factions like Scorpion at the time, the first Director of the Museum, John Wells, took site security to a whole new, paranoid level. Convinced that supervillainy would be the downfall of Titan City, and Western civilization as a whole, he invested in the most advanced mystical and scientific protections available at the time. The museum’s brick facade hides a building that is built like a bunker. Thick concrete walls with super-metals insulate the museum and remain hidden to the public eye. Mystical wards are tied by blood into the building’s foundation, excavated for this express purpose. Although the outer face of the museum remains the same, the changes have turned the Ephesus University Museum into an impregnable bunker for the arts.

Over time, the Museum has turned from a place to display the Ephesus University’s cultural treasures to a place to hoard them. The vast majority of the museum building today is dedicated to object storage. Although Ephesus University does not collect at the same rate it did in the early part of the twentieth century, objects keep appearing in the museum. Record keeping on site is incredibly spotty as the spirit of John Wells’ paranoia seems to have taken root in the museum’s very structure. Computers are seen as anathema and graduate students sent to the museum for research projects fear they will never return from the cluttered, labyrinthine stacks.

Heroic groups like the Arcane Sentinel have used the museum and it’s culture as a hiding place for a number of years. Slipping a dangerous artifact into the collection is fairly easy, especially given their on-site representatives, and the chance of it seeing the light of day ever again is fairly slim. The museum is out of sight and out of mind.