Expelling the Jesuits from Mexico: Order 66?
In 1767 King Carlos III of Spain decided to expel the Jesuits—a religious order within the Catholic Church—from Spanish lands. But the Empire of Spain spanned the globe, from South America east all the way to the Philippines, and Carlos wanted to make sure none of them escaped to go underground. So he sent secret […]
Weird Treasure: Letters of Introduction
In the seventeenth century, an Iraqi named Elias al-Mûsili traveled throughout Latin America, armed with a thick stack of letters of introduction from some very prestigious people. With these letters, he was welcome just about anywhere ruled by Spain – and he accumulated more letters as he went. Historically, letters of introduction were boilerplate, a […]
Mount Roraima
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! I’m running a Kickstarter campaign right now for an early-access zine edition of Ballad Hunters, my RPG about magical […]
PCs on the Battlefield: the Siege of Cartagena
The 1741 siege of Cartagena, in what is today Colombia, featured a really interesting variation on the normal siege framework. The British attackers knew going into it that they would likely suffer a devastating outbreak of yellow fever, and that the Spanish defenders would likely be unaffected. Thus, they were racing the clock: they had […]
The Trans Conquistador, Lieutenant Erauso
This week we’re going to look at a series of bloody, hair-raising adventures from the autobiography of a 17th-century nun, conquistador, murderer, and transman. Lieutenant Erauso was a celebrity in his own day, and his tales of mischief and mayhem across South America make terrific templates for RPG adventures! I’ll talk more about identifying Erauso […]
Sentenced to Burn in Effigy
We’re all broadly familiar with the Spanish Inquisition, that fanatical office of the Spanish monarchy that used the Church to hunt down anyone who deviated from Catholicism. And we all know how fond the Inquisition was of burning people at the stake. But what did they do when somebody needed burning, but wasn’t around to […]
The Rubber-Cutters’ Outdoor Disease Dungeon
The Amazon rubber boom (1879-1912) was an explosion in the export of rubber, mostly from Brazil, driven by an equivalent explosion in demand. The rubber companies lured men to the farthest reaches of the Amazon with the promise of striking it rich. In their tiny, isolated camps deep in the jungle, countless rubber-cutters labored and […]
PCs on the Battlefield: the Caste War
As I’ve written about before, the best way to make a party of PCs stand out in a large war or battlefield is to put them in special situations where they can really shine. Before, we looked at three such situations during the Crusades that you can model an encounter on. Now we’re going to […]
Valladolid in the 1840s
Valladolid is a city on the Yucatan peninsula in Mexico. In the 1840s, it was a remarkable town: remote, hollow, cruel, and left behind by the passage of time. It was also a town whose days were numbered. A town based on Valladolid at its most extreme, in the years before its reckoning, is an […]
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 […]
Traveling Through a Central American Rainforest
Rainforests are breathtaking, beautiful, wondrous – and actively hostile to human life. The conquistadors called it the ‘green hell’. Here, then, is a table to roll on to better evoke the experience of traveling through one. This was designed with a Central American lowland rainforest in mind, but it’s not too much work to adapt it […]