By Order of General Ludd and His Luddites
The Luddites were a British labor movement active roughly between 1811 and 1817. They opposed the growing mechanization of the British textile industry by smashing machines, burning buildings, and threatening – and sometimes killing – business leaders and magistrates. They had a secret, probably fictional, leader. And they’re more relevant now than ever. Let’s look at what […]
The Scandalous Memoirs of Regency England
For the upper classes, the early 1800s in Britain were an elegant and glamorous age. This is the time of Bridgerton, Emma, and Pride and Prejudice. In London high society, it was an era of lavish balls, fabulous outfits, and not thinking too much about the ongoing Napoleonic Wars or the growing poverty in the […]
The Lavish High Society of 1888 Vienna
In 1888, the Austro-Hungarian empire was in its decadent final decades. In Vienna, the capital, baroque splendor was on full display. Yet while ‘baroque’ can mean glitzy and overwrought, it also refers to an artistic style then over a century out of date. And that’s late 1800s Vienna: a cultural Mecca that was also the […]
Judah P. Benjamin
Once a month here on the Molten Sulfur Blog, I run content taken from our book Archive: Historical People, Places, and Events for RPGs. This post is one of eighty entries in Archive, each more gameable than the last! This post is brought to you by beloved Patreon backer Joel Dalenberg. Thanks for helping keep […]
The Feuding Goldmine Boomtown Choirs & Annual State of the Blog
The adjoining towns of Ballarat and Sebastopol in Victoria, southeast Australia, were gold rush boomtowns in the second half of the 19th century. They were home to a thriving Welsh immigrant community and a number of Welsh cultural institutions. Among these were two mens’ choruses: the Gomer Choir and the Cambrian Vocal Union. These choruses, […]
The Wreck of the Convict Ship ‘George III’
In 1835, the British convict ship George III struck an unmapped rock off Tasmania and sank. 134 people died, most of them prisoners being transported to Tasmania to serve their sentences at hard labor. The story has some interesting wrinkles that make this a very gameable template for a sea voyage at your table, and […]
The Pirate King of Iceland
In 1809, a British merchant ship carrying the former Danish pirate Jørgen Jørgensen arrived in Iceland, a Danish dependency. The pirate overthrew the Danish governor without bloodshed and proclaimed himself king of an independent Iceland. Two months later, a British warship arrived, arrested Jørgensen, and restored the Danish governor – even though Denmark and Britain […]
PCs on the Battlefield: the Rock Island Keelboats
In 1814, a band of the Sauk Indian nation led an attack on three U.S. Army keelboats on the Mississippi River. The resulting Battle of Rock Island Rapids is an excellent template for a combat encounter at your table. It’s got an interesting geopolitical context (the three-way tug-of-war between America, Britain, and the Sauk), interesting […]
Fort Jefferson
Once a month here on the Molten Sulfur Blog, I run content taken from our book Archive: Historical People, Places, and Events for RPGs. This post is one of eighty entries in Archive, each more gameable than the last! Fort JeffersonRemote Tropical Fortress The Dry Tortugas are a group of seven small islands 70 miles […]
Wild Adventures Mapping the Khorasan Border
An 1880s joint expedition to map the border between Russia and Iran provides an amazing template for a surveying adventure. “Surveying?” you say. “How dull!” But hear me out! This joint expedition is full of smuggling, religious confrontations, international incidents, small-scale domestic politics, pride, feuds, and maybe even a secret villain operating from the shadows. […]
The Jicarilla Escape and Blog News!
In 1883, the Jicarilla Apache nation was forcibly moved from land they’d been promised as their reservation to the reservation of a sister nation, that of the Mescalero Apaches. Neither group was happy with this state of affairs. Three years later, the Jicarilla Apaches snuck out of the Mescalero reservation in a blinding blizzard to […]
The Great Whiskey Fire of 1875
Once a month here on the Molten Sulfur Blog, I run content taken from our book Archive: Historical People, Places, and Events for RPGs. This post is one of eighty entries in Archive, each more gameable than the last! This post is brought to you by beloved Patreon backer Justin Moor. Thanks for helping keep […]
The Puzzling Genesis of the Piasa Bird
Rocky bluffs line the Mississippi River near Alton, Illinois. Painted on one is a terrible dragon with golden scales, red wings, antlers, and the face of a fanged man. It’s just a replica. The original painting wore away centuries ago – if it ever existed it all! This creature, the Piasa Bird, is a contentious piece […]
The South Sea Scam Colony
From 1879 to 1881, a French nobleman found several hundred willing dupes, took their money, and packed them off to a nation he’d made up. Dazzled with promises of land and ease, these peasants found only pestilence and death beneath the hot Pacific sun. The audacity of the scam, the ambiguous motives of the scammer, […]
Four Machine Puzzle Rooms
This week, I’m deviating from the blog’s usual history-and-folklore content! Instead, let’s talk about four simple pieces of hardware and how they work: a faucet, a rotary vane pump, a pin tumbler lock, and a chain hoist. Each works in a clever fashion, and when enlarged to the size of a room, it has components […]