The Secret History of the Mountain Folk
This post starts out slow, but it goes to some awfully interesting places. I hope you enjoy it! In the late 19th century, Japan underwent a period of rapid change. Emperor Meiji seized control of the country from the military dictators who’d ruled it for centuries. He dragged the whole of Japan from feudalism into […]
Hoskinini’s Fugitives
This story does not begin happily. In 1863, U.S. troops under Kit Carson rounded up the Navajo people by force. The federals burned homes, shot resisters, and marched the 9,000 survivors three hundred miles to an internment camp at Bosque Redondo, New Mexico. There, 2,000 Navajo died of starvation and disease. In 1868, the U.S. […]
Weird Japanese Monsters
Monsters aren’t just for fighting! They’re also for roleplaying with, puzzling out, and adding color to your campaign. Back in 2019, I wrote a post about four weird historical monsters from medieval Europe. This is a long-delayed sequel, with four monsters (yokai) from four different periods of Japanese history: one beneficial, one villainous, one morally […]
The Ethiopian Sepulcher Letters
When Saumel Gobat, the Protestant Bishop of Jerusalem, died in 1879, an odd stack of papers was discovered among his effects. These were letters from the Ethiopian Emperor Sahle Dengel addressed to various Levantine and European powers, begging them for help with a peculiar and thorny problem. Judging by their text, Gobat was supposed to […]
Theobald Meyrick, Urban Villain
A good RPG villain often epitomizes the worst aspects of the game’s setting. For a campaign set in a big city, those might be crushing poverty or a rigged justice system. A good villain, then, might be a powerful person willing to take advantage of both. For your urban campaigns – Blades in the Dark, Harlem […]
Shen Fu’s Complicated Family
Shen Fu and Chen Yu were a married couple who lived in China in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Their relationship was remarkable in many ways, not least because they were able to marry for love. Nonetheless, their lives were not easy. Chen Yu and her in-laws were like oil and water. The […]
The Rubber-Cutters’ Outdoor Disease Dungeon
The Amazon rubber boom (1879-1912) was an explosion in the export of rubber, mostly from Brazil, driven by an equivalent explosion in demand. The rubber companies lured men to the farthest reaches of the Amazon with the promise of striking it rich. In their tiny, isolated camps deep in the jungle, countless rubber-cutters labored and […]
Henry Stanley’s Convenient Deaths
Of all the Western explorers in the ‘scramble for Africa’, Henry Morton Stanley was probably the most well-known and highly-regarded. Yet his expeditions had an odd habit of returning with him as the only witness. Let’s take a closer look at this peculiar figure and the bloody, glory-hunting swaths he cut across Central Africa. This […]
Zhang Xi and the Plot That Wasn’t
In 1728, a Chinese general received a letter offering to let him lead an imminent rebellion to overthrow the Emperor. But the messenger was deluded, the author was operating alone, the general was loyal, and there was no rebellion. The whole situation was the result of misunderstanding piled upon misunderstanding. Unraveling the mess took months, […]
Ching Shih
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 Colin Wixted. Thanks for helping keep […]
Epic Tier Threat: The Year Without a Summer
In 1815, Mount Tambora in modern-day Indonesia erupted catastrophically. The ash and gasses it released reduced temperatures in some distant parts of the world so much that 1816 has come to be called ‘The Year Without a Summer’. It was an agricultural disaster, and the follow-on effects of the famines had a non-trivial impact on […]
NPCs in Wooden Screens: the Duein Fubara
Duein fubara (‘foreheads of the dead’) are ritual screens used by trading houses of the Kalabari people of the Niger delta. These screens function spiritually as the bodies of important dead ancestors. Through the screens, the living can propitiate the dead to use their terrible magic powers for the benefit of the trading houses they […]
Easter Island Collapse
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 […]
Liberating the Edward A. Horton and Blog News!
As games like Shadowrun and Leverage have taught us, heists are great. But while heisting corporate secrets, priceless antiquities, or bearer bonds might come as no surprise, what about heisting a fishing boat? One impounded by the Canadian government? And working alongside the American fishermen she was seized from in the first place? I present […]
The Lies of Leopold
Leopold II, King of the Belgians, was one of history’s greatest mass murderers. Not in his own country, where he was a fairly benign ‘builder king’, but in the Congo, which he ran as his own personal colony, answerable only to him, and whose profits went directly into his private bank account. The tactics he […]