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 […]
The Dancing Plague of 1518
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 Dancing Plague of 1518, is one of eighty entries in Archive, each more gameable than the last! The Dancing Plague of 1518A Bad Case of Hot Blood […]
The Missouri Leviathan
In 1840, a self-described scholar named Albert Koch excavated a great many fossilized bones from the banks of the Pomme de Terre River in eastern Missouri. The bones were from mastodons: prehistoric elephants once found in the region. But Koch assembled them into a creature the world had never seen before! His story is bizarre, […]
The Mystery Coins of Marchinbar
In 1944, a soldier on a remote Australian island found a handful of copper coins. He dropped them in a tin and forgot about them. When experts learned of the find 33 years later, they traced some of the coins to medieval Africa – very much out of place and out of time. It’s a great […]
The Hinterkaifeck Murders
Once a month on the Molten Sulfur Blog, we have a post taken from our book Archive: Historical People, Places, and Events for RPGs. This post, about an unsolved German murder, is one of eighty entries in Archive, each more gameable than the last! The Hinterkaifeck MurdersParanormal Cold Case Located about 70 miles north of Munich, […]
Charles Domery
Once a month on the Molten Sulfur Blog, we have a post taken from our book Archive: Historical People, Places, and Events for RPGs. This post, about the Polish medical wonder Charles Domery, is one of eighty entries in Archive, each more gameable than the last! Charles DomeryMan of Unending Appetite Charles Domery was a man […]
The Poisoner Mollie Greer
The alleged 1884-1885 poisoning spree of Mollie Greer in Nashville, Tennessee presents some excellent complications you can use in a murder mystery at your table! Our story begins with Mollie’s common-law husband, Prince Greer. Prince was born enslaved in 1840. When his master rode to war in the Confederate army, Greer accompanied him. After his […]
The Murder of Monsieur Dorbain
This 1579 murder of a minor lord in rural France is great inspiration for a murder mystery. The case looks cut-and-dried at first, but the deeper the you look, the more complicated it becomes. An adventure based on the case may culminate in an ethical quandary and a readymade hook leading to your next adventure! April was […]
The Tomb of Genghis Khan
Genghis Khan, the founder of the Mongol Empire, was one of the most historically-significant humans to ever live. Yet we have no idea where he was buried. His lost resting place – and the possibility it contains the finest loot from a lifetime of conquest – makes a great adventure hook. The West remembers Genghis Khan […]
New Crop, New Jealousies: A Mystery
Back in February of 2018, I wrote about Tarang, a remote village of farmers and traders in the Nepalese Himalayas that serves as a ‘hinge’ between its Nepali Hindu neighbors to the south and its Tibetan Buddhist neighbors to the north. Back in 1968, Tarang was undergoing many changes, one of which was the introduction […]
Crime & Corruption: The 1927 Price Murders
In 1927, the murders of highway cop Lory ‘Slim’ Price and his pregnant schoolteacher wife Ethel shocked the people of southern Illinois. The same features that put the Price murders on the front page of newspapers across the Midwest still make the crime compelling today. It’s gruesome. It’s complicated. It features an intersecting network of […]
Encounters with Ghost Ships
A ‘ghost ship’ is a ship at sea with no living crew aboard. Some are found adrift. Others are still under sail or steaming along under power, but with no sailors to tend to the sails or engine. Many different kinds of incidents can kill off a crew but leave the ship intact or force […]
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 […]
A Most Peculiar Cottage
Mankby is an archaeological site in Finland, not far from Helsinki. In the 14th and 15th centuries, it was a fairly typical medieval village in what was then part of the kingdom of Sweden. There is one structure in Mankby, though, that has raised some eyebrows: a most peculiar cottage. The cottage consisted of three […]