Palace Intrigue in the Mansa’s Mali
The palace intrigue between Suleyman, the King of Mali, and his senior wife Kassi is a brilliant little historical anecdote. Involving the PCs in a life-or-death game of power and legitimacy between two NPCs based on Suleyman and Kassi would be an amazing adventure. As a bonus, the story is bound up in some major […]
Shrine of the Cloak
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 Shrine of the Cloak in Afghanistan, is one of eighty entries in Archive, each more gameable than the last! The Shrine of the CloakStyle for the Powerful […]
The Wall Against Gog and Magog
There’s a long-running tradition in the West and in the Middle East of a wall someplace far to the east that holds back the hideous forces of Gog and Magog. The story originates in the Bible, continues through an ancient history, and winds up in its final version in the Koran and in fictional tales […]
Mali’s Real-Life Adventurers’ Guilds
Timbuktu is an ancient crossroads town in northern Mali, in the dusty Sahel between the Sahara and the green lands farther south. Its scholarly institutes make great adventurers guilds. Seriously – the libraries of Timbuktu have everything a good adventurer’s guild needs: an interesting ideological reason for existing, tension, high stakes, plot hooks, and quests […]
Help! My roommate is a genie!
Robert Lebling, in his wonderful book Legends of the Fire Spirits: Jinn and Genies from Arabia to Zanzibar retells a bit of Bangladeshi creepypasta about a coed who was revealed to be a jinniya, a female jinni. If Lebling repeats the story a little credulously, well, it’s a good story. The yarn, reportedly found on […]