The Agate House
In the remote desert of Arizona, in Petrified Forest National Park, there sits an odd structure. It looks like a Native American pueblo. But instead of being made of adobe or stone, its walls are made from chunks of quartz the size of your head. This is the Agate House. It’s an archaeological marvel, and […]
Speleothems
For a genre so in love with caves, dungeon crawls sure spend a lot of time in some awfully barren caverns, geologically speaking. To help make your underground adventures awesome, let’s talk about cave formations, more properly called ‘speleothems’. We’ll focus on examples that are easy to describe (so they don’t slow down play), good […]
What’s It Like to Witness an Eclipse?
Two years ago, on August 21, 2017, a total solar eclipse fell across a narrow band of mostly rural America, stretching diagonally across the United States from Oregon to Georgia. Folks said the Great American Eclipse would bring about the largest migration of people to see a natural phenomenon in history. I witnessed the eclipse. […]
The Missouri Leviathan
In 1840, a self-described scholar named Albert Koch excavated a great many fossilized bones from the banks of the Pomme de Terre River in eastern Missouri. The bones were from mastodons: prehistoric elephants once found in the region. But Koch assembled them into a creature the world had never seen before! His story is bizarre, […]
Dallol Hydrothermal Fields
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, about the Dallol hydrothermal fields in Ethiopia, is one of eighty entries in Archive, each more gameable than the last! Dallol Hydrothermal FieldA Neon Hell The Dallol Hydrothermal Field […]
Crop Marks, Dungeons, & An Announcement!
First, an announcement: something enormous just happened in my life. Thursday was my last day in the U.S. Navy! After six years of service, I’m on to new challenges. Joining the Navy was the best decision I ever made, and I think leaving will be up there too. I’m going to be doing a lot […]
Stealing Tea From China
The British theft of tea from China in 1848-1851 ranks as one of the greatest acts of industrial espionage in history. It also makes a fresh, original RPG adventure. It’s not likely your players will have ever before stolen live plants from a foreign land! In the mid-19th century, England made enormous sums of money […]
White Squalls
Now it’s a thing that us old-timers know, in the sultry summer calmThere comes a blow from nowhere, and it goes off like a bombAnd a fifteen-thousand-tonner can be be thrown upon her beamWhile the gale takes all before it with a scream. – Stan Rogers, White Squall It’s been a hot minute since we […]
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 […]
Monsters of the Devonian Sea
Everyone loves sea monsters. Let’s take a look at two real-life sea monsters from the Devonian period (419-359 million years ago), and then talk about how to use them at the table: the hideous spider/crab/scorpion hybrid Sytlonurids and Dunkleosteus, an armored, beaked predatory fish larger than a great white shark. The Stylonurids were a kind […]
Tin Pest
Tin pest is an odd phenomenon where the atoms in pure tin at low temperatures change how they’re arranged relative to one another. Your chunk of tin will turn from silvery and ductile to gray and brittle. The new tin is also less dense, meaning it expands, often crumbling away to powder in the process. […]
Methanol Fires
Methanol – wood alcohol – is a clear liquid used as a solvent, an antifreeze, and a fuel. It has the uncanny property of burning without smoke and without color. In daylight, a methanol fire is effectively invisible. Let’s talk about how weird this stuff is and how to use it in games. Methanol fires aren’t […]