Maroons of the Great Dismal Swamp
Before the American Revolutionary War, slavery was legal in all thirteen colonies. There were no slave states and free states, no Mason-Dixon line that people fleeing slavery could cross and find freedom. Still, there were places you could go: English Florida to live among the Seminoles, a big city to lose yourself in the crowd, […]
Hunting the Wilderness Fop
In 1773, failed architect William Mylne fled his creditors in Scotland by absconding to the backwoods of the American colonies: a little shack outside Augusta, Georgia. He had a vision of setting himself up as a farmer, but a lack of funds and his own incompetence foiled his plans. He abandoned Georgia and traveled overland […]
Five Old Ibibio Women
The homeland of the Ibibio people is the delta of the Niger River in southeast Nigeria. In the mid-1960s, anthropologist Iris Andreski visited Ibibio villages in the rainforest and swamps between Calabar and Port Harcourt to interview the oldest women she could find. Her book, Old Wives’ Tales, is a collection of biographies of these […]
The Confucian Village of Misfortune
The village of Dachuan – in Yongjing county, Gansu province, China – endured great suffering between 1948 and 1991. It also saw just a little bit of redemption. 85% of households in Dachuan claim male-line descent from Confucious, China’s foundational moral philosopher. This quirk of ancestry hurt the villagers under Mao, failed to save them from […]
The South Sea Scam Colony
From 1879 to 1881, a French nobleman found several hundred willing dupes, took their money, and packed them off to a nation he’d made up. Dazzled with promises of land and ease, these peasants found only pestilence and death beneath the hot Pacific sun. The audacity of the scam, the ambiguous motives of the scammer, […]
The Holy Crown of Hungary
Surprisingly little of the Medieval royal regalia of Europe has survived. One exception is the Holy Crown of Hungary. This lovely piece has seen almost a thousand years of history, and was itself history at a few points. It’s a marvelous bit of treasure, and it has a remarkable number of plot hooks baked right […]
Dartmoor
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 […]
Spells of Ecological Succession
Nature is never static. Land that was one ecosystem this century may be another next century – or even next year. Every acre is, ecologically speaking, always coming from somewhere and going to somewhere. So let’s use this principle of ecological succession to devise some cool spells! Flesh to Stone and Earth to Mud are […]
Caddo Lake
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 Arthur Brown. Thanks for helping keep […]
The Wonders of Sir John Mandeville (Asia)
Last month we started our trip through The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, and this week we’re going to finish! As before, Sir John Mandeville was an English knight who claimed to have traveled broadly in the mid-14th century. He reports soldiering in the service of the Fatimid Caliph in Cairo and for the Emperor […]
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, […]