Iktomi: The Selfish Sioux Trickster
Iktomi is a trickster spirit and culture hero in Sioux legend. He’s no villain, but he’s a terrific antagonist for RPGs. He’s easy to insert where you need some complications for your adventure. His natural selfishness is sure to disrupt your PCs’ plans! This is specifically the version of Iktomi presented in the 1901 collection […]
Impossible Tasks From Arthurian Myth
One of my favorite things to do as a GM is to set my players against a problem I don’t have a solution for. The answers they come up with are always cooler than mine, and the lack of a prescribed solution guarantees they’re engaging in fun, creative problem-solving, rather than playing ‘guess-what-Tristan-is-thinking’. Medieval stories […]
The Grail Castle
A remote castle that appears and disappears at will. A bedridden lord who lives like an emperor. And an unknown inhabitant with possibly supernatural attendants – the grail castle in the 12th-century Arthurian tale Perceval is a great way to inject a bit of adventure on the road in your fantasy campaign. On the way […]
Encounters With the Medieval Dead
This post is exactly what it says on the tin: three encounters suitable for an undead-themed dungeon or any fantasy campaign where undead are present! We’ve got three stories from 1100-1200 A.D. – one from Denmark, one from Britain, and one from Italy. To start with, we have a tale from The Deeds of the Danes, […]
More Visions of Hell to Use as Encounters
I’ve done two or three posts before about how historical visions of Hell can be turned into encounters that fit well into dungeons and extraplanar adventures. This time, let’s look at facets from four different visions of Hell, not just one! To start with, we’ve got First Enoch, a non-canonical Jewish text. First Enoch 18:12-16 […]
The Cruel, Prophetic Witch of Northern Greece
Ancient Greece was full of legends about witches in Thessaly, a wild region in the north. The Roman poet Lucan (39-65 A.D.) channeled the most horrid of these in his Pharsalia. This epic poem about the Roman civil war between Caesar and Pompey includes an aside where Pompey’s son consults a monstrous fortune-teller: the cannibal […]
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 Three Fates
In Greek mythology, the Three Fates are a triad of goddesses who dictate human destiny. Weirdly, they make great recurring villains in RPGs! Classically, the three fates are depicted as three women of three different ages: maiden, mother, and crone (a common motif). Together, they weave the thread of each mortal’s destiny. The first, Clotho, […]
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 […]
The Legend of Tam Lin
Tam Lin is a faerie knight from an old Scottish border ballad. You can see full text of several variants collected by Francis James Child here. He was once human, but was captured by the Queen of Faeries. While a faerie, he impregnates his human lover, Janet, and she rescues him from his fey condition. […]
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 […]
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 […]
Chelm, the City of Fools
In Jewish folklore, the city of Chelm, Poland, is a city of fools. The ‘wise men of Chelm’ overlook laws of nature, fail to perform basic tasks, and just generally make silly and inappropriate decisions. There are many stories explaining why Chelmers are so foolish. One says that the angel responsible for seeding the world […]
The Men For Whom The World Exists
There exists a belief among Jewish mystics in a group of 36 humble righteous men for whom God permits the world to continue to exist. There are many names for these men. One is ‘lamedvavniks’. Their profound goodness, even in the face of a degenerate world, shows God that the world is worth perpetuating. For […]
Help! My roommate is a genie!
Robert Lebling, in his wonderful book Legends of the Fire Spirits: Jinn and Genies from Arabia to Zanzibar retells a bit of Bangladeshi creepypasta about a coed who was revealed to be a jinniya, a female jinni. If Lebling repeats the story a little credulously, well, it’s a good story. The yarn, reportedly found on […]