Human Cave Features
The U.S. state of Missouri is full of caves. In the 1800s and early 1900s, Missourians put their caves to all kinds of uses. This human activity in caves is really useful when designing your own natural dungeons. Stick the interesting, gameable things Missourians did in their caves into your dungeons as hazards, obstacles, scenery, […]
An Investigative Dungeon Crawl in the Royal Art Mine
Herculaneum was a Roman town buried in 79 A.D. by the eruption of the volcano Mt. Vesuvius. These days, it’s a bit of an afterthought to the neighboring buried ruin of Pompeii. But from 1738 to 1748, before excavation began at Pompeii, the excavation at Herculaneum was the big exciting hotness of Europe. Except it […]
Mendenhall Ice Caves
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 Colin Wixted. Thanks for helping keep […]
Derinkuyu Underground City
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 Time-Dungeon of Rock-Cut Churches
The rock-cut churches of Lalibela, Ethiopia, are a marvel. They also have a unique, hard-to-study history that make them well-suited to the gaming table. Let’s take a look at these architectural wonders, then see what a dungeon inspired by Lalibela might look like! This post is brought to you by beloved Patreon backer Arthur Brown. […]
Speleothems
For a genre so in love with caves, dungeon crawls sure spend a lot of time in some awfully barren caverns, geologically speaking. To help make your underground adventures awesome, let’s talk about cave formations, more properly called ‘speleothems’. We’ll focus on examples that are easy to describe (so they don’t slow down play), good […]
The Zeigler Strike
The 1904-1909 worker’s strike at a coal mine outside Zeigler, Illinois was the closest thing to open warfare you’re likely to see in a country at peace. American strikes around the turn of the century were notoriously violent, but Zeigler was noteworthy for the military-style tactics both sides used. On one side, you had a […]
What Tundale Saw in Hell
The Vision of Tundale is a 12th-century vision of Hell and purgatory reported by the Irish knight Tundale. Unlike in other visions of Hell, Tundale actually experiences many of Hell’s torments rather than simply witnessing them. Because Tundale isn’t just a spectator, his vision is better fodder for RPGs than, say, Dante’s Inferno. Much of […]
The Dunhuang Manuscripts and the Mogao Caves
In the early 20th century, an itinerant Daoist priest in the deserts of western China discovered a treasure trove of medieval documents, hidden for a thousand years behind a false door in an abandoned Buddhist temple. The discovery would give historians a corpus of documents they still use to this day – and the discovery and […]
What Aeneas Saw in Hell (pt. 2)
Last month, we looked at four memorable things the Trojan hero Aeneas saw in the Underworld, and we turned them into encounters fit for dungeons and extraplanar adventures. Let’s look at four more! After Aeneas enters the cave to the Underworld, he encounters a cluster of minor Roman deities. Most fall into the standard Roman […]
What Aeneas Saw in Hell
Virgil’s Aeneid was Rome’s sequel to the Iliad and the Odyssey. Written almost a thousand years after the first two works, it continues the story of Trojan hero Aeneas after the end of the Trojan War. At one point, his wanderings take him down into the Underworld. Much of what he saw there makes great […]