Hiroo Onoda
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 […]
Zheng He’s Alien Invasion
Zheng He was a diplomat/explorer/admiral for the Ming dynasty of China. In 1410, he felt compelled to invade the far-off island of Ceylon (modern Sri Lanka) and overthrow the king of Kotte. At the time, few Ceylonese people had even heard of distant China. Nonetheless, a fleet of enormous Chinese warships came from out of […]
Epic Tier Threat: The Year Without a Summer
In 1815, Mount Tambora in modern-day Indonesia erupted catastrophically. The ash and gasses it released reduced temperatures in some distant parts of the world so much that 1816 has come to be called ‘The Year Without a Summer’. It was an agricultural disaster, and the follow-on effects of the famines had a non-trivial impact on […]
Chand Baori
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 […]
Ritual as Adventure in 1800s Bali
Grand, ornate rituals are a wonder to experience in real life and thrilling to read about in fiction, but usually boring in RPGs. There are no interesting decisions for the players to make: you just sit there listening to the GM narrate the spectacle. But it doesn’t have to be that way! To show how […]
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 […]
Balochistan
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! BalochistanLand of Remote Villages Balochistan is Pakistan’s westernmost province, and its largest and most sparsely inhabited […]
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 […]
The Marquis de St. Jacques and 1-Year Anniversary
An obscure figure from Indian colonial history, the Marquis de St. Jacques (pronounced ’Sa Jack’) was a French renegade, a mercenary, a scoundrel, and a great inspiration for a similar NPC at your table. The Marquis de St. Jacques (all the sources I can find refer to him only by that name) was a soldier […]
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 […]
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 […]
House-to-House Combat Encounter from 1756
Lieutenant Thomas Blagg’s defense of a British mansion in the 1756 siege of Calcutta was a footnote in the overall battle. Though valorous, it had no real impact on the siege’s outcome. Still, it makes a great template for a setpiece combat encounter in your own campaign. The siege was a relatively brief affair marked […]
A River Crossing With a Tiger
This encounter can be dropped into any overland travel through the wilderness. It features a colorful one-off villain who can easily become a recurring miniboss if you so desire. A lot of people know the villainous tiger Shere Khan from the 1967 animated Disney adaptation of the Jungle Book or from the 2016 live-action Disney […]