The Contemptible NPC You Can’t Say ‘No’ To
At first glance, the U.S. government’s war against the Modoc nation was a fairly typical Indian war. White settlers in California and Oregon wanted the Modocs’ land, so the federal government forcibly relocated the Natives. When the Modocs tried to move back, they were killed. But from that war emerged a figure – a treacherous, shameful […]
The Alecton Encounter
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 […]
Ritual as Adventure in 1800s Bali
Grand, ornate rituals are a wonder to experience in real life and thrilling to read about in fiction, but usually boring in RPGs. There are no interesting decisions for the players to make: you just sit there listening to the GM narrate the spectacle. But it doesn’t have to be that way! To show how […]
The Scheming Landlord of Magomero
W.J. Livingstone operated a plantation in Malawi in the early 20th century. He was ruthless, capricious, exploitative, and cruel. He worked within the system, leaning on the letter of the law when he could and enforcing the spirit of the law when he couldn’t. His schemes make him a fantastic villain, and he can be […]
Caddo Lake
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 Arthur Brown. Thanks for helping keep […]
Bob Bartlett
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 […]
Legal Dramas and the Black Hills
Legal dramas are an enormously popular genre, but they effectively don’t exist in the RPG space. Who has five friends with enough knowledge of the law to improvise a good episode of The Practice? Who can ad lib a twenty-minute opening argument that doesn’t make the other players claw their eyes out? The key is […]
Shipwrecked Sailors: Armed and Desperate
The 1808 shipwreck of the Russian schooner Nikolai on the shores of the Quileute nation (in what is today Washington state) is remarkable primarily for its aftermath: the collective efforts of the Quileute, Hoh, and Makah nations to deal with 22 armed and desperate shipwrecked Russian sailors. In 1808, the Russian-American Trading Company was looking […]
Echoes of the Meeks Murder
The American South has a tradition of murder ballads: narrative songs that recount the events of killings. We’re going to have a look at one mostly-nonfictional ballad in particular, The Meeks Murder, and how you can use it to build an adventure with the song itself as your opponent! The story begins in 1894 in […]
Minik Wallace
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, about Minik Wallace, is one of eighty entries in Archive, each more gameable than the last! Minik WallaceNew York Inuit In September of 1897, American explorer Robert Peary docked […]
The Missouri Leviathan
In 1840, a self-described scholar named Albert Koch excavated a great many fossilized bones from the banks of the Pomme de Terre River in eastern Missouri. The bones were from mastodons: prehistoric elephants once found in the region. But Koch assembled them into a creature the world had never seen before! His story is bizarre, […]
PCs on the Battlefield: the Caste War
As I’ve written about before, the best way to make a party of PCs stand out in a large war or battlefield is to put them in special situations where they can really shine. Before, we looked at three such situations during the Crusades that you can model an encounter on. Now we’re going to […]
Valladolid in the 1840s
Valladolid is a city on the Yucatan peninsula in Mexico. In the 1840s, it was a remarkable town: remote, hollow, cruel, and left behind by the passage of time. It was also a town whose days were numbered. A town based on Valladolid at its most extreme, in the years before its reckoning, is an […]
Making the Enslaved Come Alive
Slavery is common to a lot of RPGs, especially fantasy ones. From drow slavers to mul slave-gladiators, there’s a real chance your PCs might meet, be, or become slaves. How do you make that feel real? We’re all familiar with the forced labor, the whippings, the families torn apart. Americans learn about it in school, […]
The State of Muskogee
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, about the State of Muskogee, is one of eighty entries in Archive, each more gameable than the last! The State of MuskogeeThe Little Nation That Tried The State of […]