Bob Bartlett
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 […]
PCs on the Battlefield- Caesar’s Wars (Part 3)
This is part 3 of a 4-part series about the wars of Julius Caesar. Previously, we wrapped up his nine-year conquest of Gaul and began his civil war against his former ally Pompey! This week, we’ll wrap up the civil war. As before, my focus is on moments when individual people impacted the outcomes of […]
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 […]
A Play During Travel and Blog News
1607 saw the world’s first amateur performance of Shakespeare – and not where you might expect. It occurred aboard the British merchant ship Red Dragon off the coast of West Africa. The cast and crew were all sailors. And it’s a wonderful example of how you can run a play at your table. Let’s take […]
Icelandic Sea Monsters
In 1570, the Belgian mapmaker Abraham Ortelius published Europe’s first atlas of maps: the Theatrum Orbis Terrarum. The book is remarkable for its accuracy (relative to the maps that had come before), but it’s also full of monsters, both in the descriptions and in the illustrations. The seas in his map of Iceland are particularly […]
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 […]
White Squalls
Now it’s a thing that us old-timers know, in the sultry summer calmThere comes a blow from nowhere, and it goes off like a bombAnd a fifteen-thousand-tonner can be be thrown upon her beamWhile the gale takes all before it with a scream. – Stan Rogers, White Squall It’s been a hot minute since we […]
A Logic Puzzle on the Ebro Delta
This week, we have a cool logic puzzle that can be easily inserted into any ocean journey! Failing to solve it has memorable (but not catastrophic) consequences. And at the end, we have a way to turn the logic puzzle into the start of an easy-to-improvise adventure! Noted sailor, writer, and delightful liar Tristan Jones […]
Deception Island
The high black walls of Deception island rise above the storm-tossed waters off the Antarctic peninsula. It’s a volcano, its rim broken in a single spot, permitting ships to sail into the flooded caldera. Its history, remote location, and strange features make Deception Island a great adventure site for RPGs! The horseshoe-shaped island is 9 […]
Monsters of the Devonian Sea
Everyone loves sea monsters. Let’s take a look at two real-life sea monsters from the Devonian period (419-359 million years ago), and then talk about how to use them at the table: the hideous spider/crab/scorpion hybrid Sytlonurids and Dunkleosteus, an armored, beaked predatory fish larger than a great white shark. The Stylonurids were a kind […]
A Too-Convenient Ship
It’s enduring trope in RPGs that the PCs often need to escape the consequences of their actions. This encounter – which assumes only that the party must flee somewhere they might find a boat – takes the trope and turns it into a trap. What a stroke of luck that the fleeing party stumbles upon a cutter, […]
The Maps of the Pilot Rodriguez
In 1512, a ship’s pilot in service to the King of Portugal penned a real-life treasure map. The story of the map’s production is a bizarre tale, and the map itself makes excellent inspiration for your own adventures. In the Middle Ages, the spices nutmeg, clove, and mace were grown only in a handful 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 […]