Shipwrecked Sailors: Armed and Desperate
The 1808 shipwreck of the Russian schooner Nikolai on the shores of the Quileute nation (in what is today Washington state) is remarkable primarily for its aftermath: the collective efforts of the Quileute, Hoh, and Makah nations to deal with 22 armed and desperate shipwrecked Russian sailors. In 1808, the Russian-American Trading Company was looking […]
Mount Roraima
I’m starting something new here on the Molten Sulfur Blog. Once a month, we’ll have a post taken from our book Archive: Historical People, Places, and Events for RPGs. This post, about Mount Roraima in South America, is one of eighty entries in Archive, each more gameable than the last! Mount RoraimaTabletop Mountain From a […]
Yarsagumba
This is the fourth in a four-part series of vignettes from the rural Nepalese village of Tarang. You can find the previous three entries here, here, and here. Even if you’ve read them, it’s worth revisiting the pages, as I’ve updated them with great photos of Tarang taken in 1968 by anthropologist James Fisher! This […]
Standoff in the Mud
This stretch of terrain between two branches of a river in Mongolia offers an excellent site for a standoff. Whether you want a social encounter, a combat encounter, or one that can shift between the two, this site’s combination of difficult terrain and exceptionally long sight lines promises to create a tense situation. Mongolia’s Gorkhi-Terelj […]
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 […]
Local Elections as Adventures
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 recent […]
Origin Stories & The Lake of Milk
The inhabitants of the remote Nepalese village of Tarang tell an interesting story about how their village came to be. Tarang is a hamlet of a few hundred souls clinging to the mountainside in the out-of-the-way Tichurong valley in the Himalayas (check it out at these coordinates: 28°52’47.3″N 82°58’52.0”E). Tarang’s origin myth is a great […]