Fantastical Islands from a Roman Novel
Lucian of Samosata was a second-century author writing in Roman Turkey. His best-known work is A True History, a satire of ancient historians who breathlessly repeated whatever half-baked tall tales they’d been told about foreign lands. Much as it pains me to see my beloved Herodotus so ill-treated, A True History is both funny and […]
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 Wonders of Sir John Mandeville (the Mediterranean)
Sir John Mandeville was an English knight who claimed to have traveled broadly in the mid-14th century. Among other things, he reports soldiering in the service of the Fatimid Caliph in Cairo and for the Emperor of the Yuan dynasty in China. The actual extent of his travels is unknown, but along the way he […]
PCs on the Battlefield: The Crusades
Many RPG campaigns involve wars. But wars are enormous affairs, with tens or hundreds of thousands of combatants on each side. How do you make a single party of PCs stand out? The received wisdom is not to put them in the center of the battle, where gameplay is repetitive and the PCs can’t contribute […]