The Legend of Tam Lin
Tam Lin is a faerie knight from an old Scottish border ballad. You can see full text of several variants collected by Francis James Child here. He was once human, but was captured by the Queen of Faeries. While a faerie, he impregnates his human lover, Janet, and she rescues him from his fey condition. […]
Punishing PCs: the Pillory!
What do you do when your PCs break the law? In-world actions must have in-world consequences if player choice is to be meaningful, but most in-world punishments make poor gaming. For example, prison is usually resolved with a flash forward, so it doesn’t feel ‘real’. Fines (and confiscation of property) strip the player of toys […]
Origin Stories & The Lake of Milk
The inhabitants of the remote Nepalese village of Tarang tell an interesting story about how their village came to be. Tarang is a hamlet of a few hundred souls clinging to the mountainside in the out-of-the-way Tichurong valley in the Himalayas (check it out at these coordinates: 28°52’47.3″N 82°58’52.0”E). Tarang’s origin myth is a great […]
What Aeneas Saw in Hell
Virgil’s Aeneid was Rome’s sequel to the Iliad and the Odyssey. Written almost a thousand years after the first two works, it continues the story of Trojan hero Aeneas after the end of the Trojan War. At one point, his wanderings take him down into the Underworld. Much of what he saw there makes great […]
Crime & Corruption: The 1927 Price Murders
In 1927, the murders of highway cop Lory ‘Slim’ Price and his pregnant schoolteacher wife Ethel shocked the people of southern Illinois. The same features that put the Price murders on the front page of newspapers across the Midwest still make the crime compelling today. It’s gruesome. It’s complicated. It features an intersecting network of […]
Ambush in a Barn
This encounter is meant to turn a relatively straightforward fantasy combat (a fight with a wizard and her goons) into something a little more challenging and dynamic through the use of mundane terrain. Lure the PCs into a barn, then trap them inside with opponents who are ready to make good use of the terrain. […]
Chelm, the City of Fools
In Jewish folklore, the city of Chelm, Poland, is a city of fools. The ‘wise men of Chelm’ overlook laws of nature, fail to perform basic tasks, and just generally make silly and inappropriate decisions. There are many stories explaining why Chelmers are so foolish. One says that the angel responsible for seeding the world […]
Abandoning Saint-Octave-de-l’Avenir
The abandoned village of Saint-Octave-de-l’Avenir in Quebec, Canada, makes great inspiration for the site of a haunting in your campaign. A rural village near the mouth of the St. Lawrence River, its declining, aging population led the government to forcibly resettle the village in the 1970s. Later, the area was opened to tourism. At your […]
The Maps of the Pilot Rodriguez
In 1512, a ship’s pilot in service to the King of Portugal penned a real-life treasure map. The story of the map’s production is a bizarre tale, and the map itself makes excellent inspiration for your own adventures. In the Middle Ages, the spices nutmeg, clove, and mace were grown only in a handful of […]
Gravity Puzzle: A Ring-Shaped Dungeon
I mentioned before that I love dungeons whose layout is a puzzle for the players to solve. This is one of them. This dungeon is built along a single straight passageway. Rooms branch off from the passage, and you may have encounters in the tunnel itself. It’s important that the passage appears natural. The floor […]
House-to-House Combat Encounter from 1756
Lieutenant Thomas Blagg’s defense of a British mansion in the 1756 siege of Calcutta was a footnote in the overall battle. Though valorous, it had no real impact on the siege’s outcome. Still, it makes a great template for a setpiece combat encounter in your own campaign. The siege was a relatively brief affair marked […]
Encounters with Ghost Ships
A ‘ghost ship’ is a ship at sea with no living crew aboard. Some are found adrift. Others are still under sail or steaming along under power, but with no sailors to tend to the sails or engine. Many different kinds of incidents can kill off a crew but leave the ship intact or force […]
An Inscrutable Ruin
This inscrutable ruin is a backdrop for a puzzle and a combat, making both more colorful and more memorable. Its backstory is left intentionally mysterious. What function did it originally serve? How is it so well-preserved? What value did it hold for its creators? There is no way for the PCs to answer these mysteries. […]
Tin Pest
Tin pest is an odd phenomenon where the atoms in pure tin at low temperatures change how they’re arranged relative to one another. Your chunk of tin will turn from silvery and ductile to gray and brittle. The new tin is also less dense, meaning it expands, often crumbling away to powder in the process. […]
A River Crossing With a Tiger
This encounter can be dropped into any overland travel through the wilderness. It features a colorful one-off villain who can easily become a recurring miniboss if you so desire. A lot of people know the villainous tiger Shere Khan from the 1967 animated Disney adaptation of the Jungle Book or from the 2016 live-action Disney […]