Drumming the Scandal
In the first half of the 20th century, the Tiv people of east-central Nigeria developed a way to air their disputes called “drumming the scandal.” The quarrelers each wrote catchy songs about what a scumbag their rival was, then performed them so loud they could be heard from other villages. This technique tended to escalate […]
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 […]
The Convenient Tyranny of Judar and Mahmud
In 1590 the Saadi Sultanate in Morocco invaded the Songhai Empire in what is today Mali and Niger. The man the sultan sent to oversee the conquest and occupation did a good job, but had the temerity to question one of the sultan’s decisions and was replaced by a new guy. These two successive Saadian […]
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, […]
The Scam to Move the Mississippi Headwaters
In 1881, Willard Glazier enacted a scam intended to sell books and make his name immortal: he would find the headwaters of North America’s biggest river, the Mississippi. The trouble was, American geographers already knew where the river’s headwaters were, and had for 50 years thanks to the help of the region’s Ojibwe nation. Glazier […]
The Songhai Prince in Hiding
In the 1580s, a prince of the Songhai Empire in what is today Mali fled into hiding after completing a sensitive mission on behalf of the emperor. He remained undercover for five years, hidden in plain sight, until the coast was clear. Finding the prince without blowing his cover could be a really fun short […]
Rewriting the Gospels for Germanic Barbarians
The Hêliand, composed about 830 A.D., is a tale of the life of Christ in the Old Saxon language. It takes the form of an epic poem, a saga in verse, and was part of a missionary effort to convert the Germanic, early Medieval Saxons from the worship of their ancestral gods to Christianity. It’s […]
The North Rona Island Rat Apocalypse
North Rona (or just Rona) is a tiny island in the icy waters far off northern Scotland. Its geography and animal life would make it a cool adventure site on their own, but its real claim to fame is that in 1685, a plague of rats wiped out all human life on the island, with […]
The Sudden Succession Crisis and the Fall of Askia Musa
In 1531, the askia (emperor) Musa I of the Songhai Empire in what is today northern Mali was overthrown by his brothers. But when they went to place one amongst themselves on the throne, they found one of their cousins beat them to it. This brief power struggle, its actions restricted almost entirely to close […]
Spotted Tail and the First Lakota Teamsters
The Lakota Sioux leader Spotted Tail was a remarkable – and controversial – figure in the 19th-century Great Plains. Among his many accomplishments, Spotted Tail got his band into the freight business, getting paid to haul wagons across the plains. The man himself makes a compelling NPC, and his efforts to get some of his […]
Language Windows Into the Vagrant Underworld
Since I was first exposed to D&D, I’ve thought it was neat that one of the languages you could be proficient in was “thieves’ cant,” a language for rogues. Real life and real languages are more complicated, but secret languages do exist, and they have been used in criminal activity. One such is Rotwelsch, a […]
Ports of the Erythraean Sea
The Indian Ocean has been a hub of trade as far back as we have records. Merchants have long traveled its coastlines and—in ancient eras where leaving sight of land was often a death sentence—taken advantage of its predictable annual monsoon winds to cross the ocean itself in long, daring journeys. While we know ancient […]
Ben Franklin’s Almanac Prank
In 1730, future American founding father Ben Franklin published his first almanac. While Poor Richard’s Almanack is famous today, Franklin had to do something to stand out in a crowded market. So he used a gimmick: he predicted the death of the author of a rival almanac, then kept the gag going for years, absolutely […]
Akbar’s Hunt
The court hunts of the Mughal Empire in 16th-century India were remarkably gameable affairs, where the army beat the bushes to gather a forest’s worth of animals into a ring for courtiers to fight. They were also tools of geopolitics, used to quell rebellions before they arose. Money changed hands, hunters fought tigers and elephants, […]
Herald-Inspectors
The role of the herald in Medieval western Europe was multifaceted: messenger, diplomat, announcer, and an expert in the system of personal and family insignia called “heraldry”. Starting in 1530 in England and Wales, royal heralds were sent out to verify that everyone using a coat of arms was approved to be doing so and […]