Human Cave Features
The U.S. state of Missouri is full of caves. In the 1800s and early 1900s, Missourians put their caves to all kinds of uses. This human activity in caves is really useful when designing your own natural dungeons. Stick the interesting, gameable things Missourians did in their caves into your dungeons as hazards, obstacles, scenery, […]
Old Essex County Jail
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 Murder Castle
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 […]
An Investigative Dungeon Crawl in the Royal Art Mine
Herculaneum was a Roman town buried in 79 A.D. by the eruption of the volcano Mt. Vesuvius. These days, it’s a bit of an afterthought to the neighboring buried ruin of Pompeii. But from 1738 to 1748, before excavation began at Pompeii, the excavation at Herculaneum was the big exciting hotness of Europe. Except it […]
Mendenhall Ice Caves
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 […]
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 […]
Derinkuyu Underground City
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 […]
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 […]
The Time-Dungeon of Rock-Cut Churches
The rock-cut churches of Lalibela, Ethiopia, are a marvel. They also have a unique, hard-to-study history that make them well-suited to the gaming table. Let’s take a look at these architectural wonders, then see what a dungeon inspired by Lalibela might look like! This post is brought to you by beloved Patreon backer Arthur Brown. […]
Three Unusual British Castles
Castles are a must-have for any traditional fantasy campaign. They’re great fun to infiltrate, they lend ambience to everything, and when fallen into ruin, they make terrific dungeons. Unfortunately, castles in RPGs can wind up feeling a little generic. Here, then, are three real (and real cool!) British castles to shake up your citadel game! […]
Speleothems
For a genre so in love with caves, dungeon crawls sure spend a lot of time in some awfully barren caverns, geologically speaking. To help make your underground adventures awesome, let’s talk about cave formations, more properly called ‘speleothems’. We’ll focus on examples that are easy to describe (so they don’t slow down play), good […]
Antelope Canyon
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 Antelope Canyon, is one of eighty entries in Archive, each more gameable than the last! Antelope CanyonCorridors of Flowing Stone Water and time have carved deep into the […]
Crop Marks, Dungeons, & An Announcement!
First, an announcement: something enormous just happened in my life. Thursday was my last day in the U.S. Navy! After six years of service, I’m on to new challenges. Joining the Navy was the best decision I ever made, and I think leaving will be up there too. I’m going to be doing a lot […]
More Visions of Hell to Use as Encounters
I’ve done two or three posts before about how historical visions of Hell can be turned into encounters that fit well into dungeons and extraplanar adventures. This time, let’s look at facets from four different visions of Hell, not just one! To start with, we’ve got First Enoch, a non-canonical Jewish text. First Enoch 18:12-16 […]
What Tundale Saw in Hell
The Vision of Tundale is a 12th-century vision of Hell and purgatory reported by the Irish knight Tundale. Unlike in other visions of Hell, Tundale actually experiences many of Hell’s torments rather than simply witnessing them. Because Tundale isn’t just a spectator, his vision is better fodder for RPGs than, say, Dante’s Inferno. Much of […]