Frontier Poltergeist: The Bell Witch
The Bell Witch is an old piece of creepy Tennessee folklore that presents a gameable variation on the standard haunting: a dangerous, powerful, profoundly malicious spirit with whom you can nonetheless hold a normal conversation. The story was codified in the 1894 book An Authenticated History of the Famous Bell Witch. Much of the book […]
Weirder Xenomorphs: Strepsipteran Insects
You know the alien from the movie Alien? The creepy, scary one with the shiny black carapace and the chest-bursting larval form and the well-regarded RPG by Free League? If you’re like me, you want to put that monster (the ‘xenomorph’) in your ongoing campaign, but you don’t want to use exactly that same monster; […]
Cotton Mather’s American Ghosts
The Puritan clergyman Cotton Mather (1663-1728) is one of the boogeymen of early American history. Among his many sins, he helped fuel the Salem witch trials that executed 20 people for witchcraft. In the trials he successfully argued that the contents of magical visions should be considered legally admissible evidence. Mather was a prolific writer. […]
Outer Space Adventures from Ancient Rome
Lucian of Samosata was a second-century author writing in Roman Turkey. He’s best-known in modern geek circles for his novel A True History, which some hold out as the earliest known work of science fiction. Last week we looked at some fantastical islands from this very silly story, but this week we’re going to dive […]
Fantastical Islands from a Roman Novel
Lucian of Samosata was a second-century author writing in Roman Turkey. His best-known work is A True History, a satire of ancient historians who breathlessly repeated whatever half-baked tall tales they’d been told about foreign lands. Much as it pains me to see my beloved Herodotus so ill-treated, A True History is both funny and […]
A Wedding to Remember: Three Lais by Marie de France
This week we’re going to look at three lais: courtly Medieval short tales of love and adventure. Their author is a mysterious and engaging figure, and their contents are perfect for the gaming table: secret twins, secret parents, schemes, adultery, murder, and werewolves! This post is brought to you by beloved Patreon backer Robert Nichols. […]
The Olympic Spirits of Arbatel’s Grimoire
Arbatel de Magia Veterum (Arbatel: Of the Magic of the Ancients) is a 16th-century Swiss grimoire: a book of magic. It purports to be the revelations of an angel named Arbatel “concerning the greatest secrets which are lawful for man to know, and to use them without offense unto God”. It may contain the earliest […]
The Puzzling Genesis of the Piasa Bird
Rocky bluffs line the Mississippi River near Alton, Illinois. Painted on one is a terrible dragon with golden scales, red wings, antlers, and the face of a fanged man. It’s just a replica. The original painting wore away centuries ago – if it ever existed it all! This creature, the Piasa Bird, is a contentious piece […]
The Capitalist Cannibal Butthole Bird
In northern Cameroon, there exists a belief in a particular kind of cannibal witch. Each such witch has a bird living in their butt that crawls out to eat other people through their butts. It’s weird, wild, creepy, deeply intertwined with local values systems, and super gameable. Also, I’m going to alternate between clinical language […]
Weird Japanese Monsters
Monsters aren’t just for fighting! They’re also for roleplaying with, puzzling out, and adding color to your campaign. Back in 2019, I wrote a post about four weird historical monsters from medieval Europe. This is a long-delayed sequel, with four monsters (yokai) from four different periods of Japanese history: one beneficial, one villainous, one morally […]
The Mos Teutonicus and the Excarnates
If a Medieval European aristocrat died far from home, what was to be done with the body? His family usually wanted it returned to be buried with his relatives, but that could entail a weeks-long Faulknerian trip with an ever-riper corpse. Embalming was one solution, but it was frightfully expensive. Enter the mos teutonicus, a […]
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 […]
The Flatland Multiverse
This blog mostly talks history and folklore (and sometimes science), but this week we digress into geometry and literature: Edwin A. Abbott’s 1884 novella Flatland. The book’s first half is a combination of social satire and speculative fiction, describing a society of talking shapes that inhabit a purely two-dimensional world. The second half recounts a […]
The Agate House
In the remote desert of Arizona, in Petrified Forest National Park, there sits an odd structure. It looks like a Native American pueblo. But instead of being made of adobe or stone, its walls are made from chunks of quartz the size of your head. This is the Agate House. It’s an archaeological marvel, and […]
Folkloric Villains
Folklore is full of villains and antagonists. By a striking coincidence, so are RPG campaigns! Here are four villains drawn from folklore: a Russian singer-sorcerer, a Roma witch-queen, a Persian hero-villain, and an Irish kidnapper-princess. This post is brought to you by beloved Patreon backer Arthur Brown. Thanks for helping keep the lights on! If […]