PCs on the Battlefield- Caesar’s Wars (Part 2)
This is part 2 of a 4-part series about the wars of Julius Caesar. We started with his nine-year conquest of Gaul. This week, we’ll finish up the Gallic War, then move move into the civil war against his former ally Pompey! Future entries will cover his involvement in an Egyptian civil war that placed […]
The Secret Basque Fishing Grounds
In the high Middle Ages, the Basques – an insular people of western Europe – quietly experienced an economic miracle. Basque fishermen brought huge quantities of preserved cod and whale meat from secret fishing grounds somewhere in the Atlantic. As Basque communities prospered, the rest of Europe scratched its head. Figuring out where the Basques were getting […]
Stealing Tea From China
The British theft of tea from China in 1848-1851 ranks as one of the greatest acts of industrial espionage in history. It also makes a fresh, original RPG adventure. It’s not likely your players will have ever before stolen live plants from a foreign land! In the mid-19th century, England made enormous sums of money […]
Spying on English Slavers
RPG adventures about social causes can be hard to pull off. How do you mesh the traditional adventure format with the mass action needed to address large-scale problems? One answer is by modeling your adventure on the efforts and obstacles of abolitionist Thomas Clarkson. Clarkson tried to go undercover to investigate the slave trade. He […]
The Cruel, Prophetic Witch of Northern Greece
Ancient Greece was full of legends about witches in Thessaly, a wild region in the north. The Roman poet Lucan (39-65 A.D.) channeled the most horrid of these in his Pharsalia. This epic poem about the Roman civil war between Caesar and Pompey includes an aside where Pompey’s son consults a monstrous fortune-teller: the cannibal […]
The Zeigler Strike
The 1904-1909 worker’s strike at a coal mine outside Zeigler, Illinois was the closest thing to open warfare you’re likely to see in a country at peace. American strikes around the turn of the century were notoriously violent, but Zeigler was noteworthy for the military-style tactics both sides used. On one side, you had a […]