The NPC Guest List at Babur’s Last, Greatest Party
This week we return for our final intriguing moment in the autobiography of Babur (1483-1530), the founder of the Mughal Empire in India. In 1528 he threw an enormous party with an astonishing cast of characters. Having all these people – all with their own reasons to love and hate one another – in the same place […]
The Siege of Lal Masjid
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 […]
A Disastrous Game of Buzkashi
Buzkashi is a Central Asian sport analogous to polo, if polo were played in a wild scrum of thousands of mounted players, all shoving one another aside to grab hold of a decapitated calf carcass. It’s an intense game! Our source, G. Whitney Azoy, studied buzkashi in northern Afghanistan before the communists seized power in […]
Earnest Pleas in Early Muslim Poetry
Khalifa ibn Khayyat was an Arab historian and religious scholar active in the 800s A.D. His history of the Umayyad and early Abbasid caliphates is one of the oldest to have survived. It records a lot more poetry than you see in Western histories. Most of these poems are put in the mouths of people […]
The Fall of Caliph Uthman
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Ibn Battuta’s Maldivian Coup Plot
We’ve talked twice before about Ibn Battuta, the medieval Moroccan traveler. This time, we’re going to talk about his adventures in the Maldives, a paradisiacal tropical archipelago south of India. In the Maldives, Ibn Battuta got pressed into service as an Islamic judge, let his bad attitude get him into political trouble, and plotted a […]
Wild Adventures Mapping the Khorasan Border
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The Ruins of Ungwana
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The Capitalist Cannibal Butthole Bird
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Djenné
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David Alroy, the Wizard-Messiah
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Palace Intrigue in the Mansa’s Mali
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Shrine of the Cloak
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The Wall Against Gog and Magog
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Mali’s Real-Life Adventurers’ Guilds
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