Molten Sulfur Blog

First—super exciting! The Molten Sulfur Blog was nominated for a 2025 Ennie award for Best Online Content! This is the third time the blog’s been nominated, and I couldn’t be happier about it. Thank you, Ennie judges!

In 401–400 B.C., when ten thousand Greek mercenaries had to escape the Persian empire, the land of Mesopotamia through which they traveled was already ancient. The people of what is today Iraq lived amid the ruins of empires older still. The Ten Thousand (as those escaping Greek mercenaries are called) encountered several ruins on their way out of Persia, some of them inhabited. The way these Greeks interacted with these cities, walls, and crumbling ziggurats makes a terrific starting place for RPG adventures.

This post is brought to you by beloved Patreon backer Arthur Brown. Thanks, Arthur—you rock!

This is my third and final post about these Greek mercenaries. See also PCs on the Battlefield: Kill the King! and PCs on the Battlefield: Xenophon on the March.

The greatest of the ruins the Ten Thousand encountered was Nimrud, capital of the former Assyrian Empire three hundred years before, from circa 880 to 715 B.C. The Assyrians called the city Kahlu and the Bible calls it Calah. Xenophon, a leader among the Ten Thousand and a historian, said that when the Greeks marched past the city, its wall was still a hundred feet high and twenty-five feet thick, with a perimeter six miles long. At one corner of the city there was a ziggurat a hundred feet wide and two hundred feet high.

As the Greeks marched past Nimrud, villagers watched them from atop the ziggurat. Xenophon identifies them as people who fled their farms to get out of the way of the army, but as the Ten Thousand never actually entered the city, he didn’t know there were still people dwelling in the ruins, as modern archaeology has suggested. Many of the people living in and around the ruins were likely Assyrians, descendants of those who’d built Nimrud in the first place.

The Assyrian Empire fell to the Medes, who fell to the Persians. Xenophon gives an interesting story for how the Persians came to take Nimrud from the Medes. We can infer he heard this story from a local, but as it was rarely the custom for Greek historians to cite their sources (except for my beloved and oft-maligned Herodotus), we can’t know for sure. The Persians were unable to take the city until the god Helios laid a cloud upon it. This fog was so thick that the besieged residents could not abide it and left of their own volition. In ascribing this miracle to Helios, Xenophon was following a common Greek (and later Roman) convention of equating the gods of foreigners with his own gods. Xenophon’s hypothesized source likely ascribed the miracle to Mithra, a Persian sun god who can also bring moisture.

Today, there are still Assyrians living near Nimrud. They’re mostly Christians, and consequently suffered terribly under ISIS rule. ISIS also bulldozed most of Nimrud, including the dirt pile that was all that remained of the ziggurat.

The other city ruin the Ten Thousand marched past was that of Nineveh, the Assyrian capital until 612 B.C., and once the largest city in the world. Xenophon describes it as being deserted and once inhabited by Medes; it’s not clear to me whether he recognized a distinction between Medes and Assyrians. Xenophon mentions a deserted citadel beside the city and describes city walls 50 feet thick and 150 feet tall: the lower 50 feet of dressed stone, the upper 100 feet of brick.

Xenophon has a fun story for the fall of Mede-ruled Nineveh to the Persians too. He reports that one of the Mede king’s wives fled to the city during the Persian conquest of the Medes. He gives her name as Medea. It’s not clear to me whether Xenophon means the Medea, the legendary witch who meets Jason and the Argonauts. There are some classical Greek traditions that associate Medea with the origin of the Medes in one way or another. In any case, the King of Persia besieged Ninevah and Medea, but couldn’t capture the city until the inhabitants were thunderstruck by Zeus himself. Xenophon’s use of “thunderstruck” is also ambiguous. In the Greek, that could mean Zeus hit the residents with lightning and killed them, or that he made a great noise and rendered them mad—or both! As before, Xenophon is probably repeating a story he heard that referenced a Mesopotamian or Persian sky god, whom Xenophon helpfully translates as “Zeus” for his Greek readers.

One final ruin I want to briefly touch on before we talk about gameable applications is a wall just north of Babylon, originally built by the Babylonians in the early 500s B.C. to deter raids by the Medes. The retreating Ten Thousand briefly used it as a barrier between themselves and the Persian army.  Xenophon says he heard the wall was about 60 miles long, though he only saw a piece of it: twenty feet thick and a hundred high, made of brick on a base of asphalt. That height is unusual; the section the Ten Thousand briefly used may have originally served a special purpose. Most of the wall is long-gone today, though a little bit of it is still visible.

What I love about Xenophon’s portrayal of these three ruins is that he’s viewing them through his own idiosyncratic lens. He clearly finds them astonishing; his history of the Ten Thousand has almost no sightseeing in it, but he makes room to talk about these ruins and the legends around them. He equates local gods with his gods. And, as a soldier on campaign, he notes features relevant to his life: the building material of fortifications, high points for scouting, and where the civilians have gone.

I’m a big fan of ruins in almost any genre of TTRPG.  At your table, Xenophon’s observations make a great framework for a “go into the ruins” session. The PCs might need to venture in search of someone who lives in the ruins (or has fled there) and possesses needed information. And you can always put your favorite short dungeon under the ziggurat. Xenophon’s stories about how the two ruined cities fell are also relevant. Place a cloud-maker or a thunderbolt as treasure left behind by the conquering army as a trophy, then gathered up and hidden by the people who returned.

There’s also the matter of Xenophon equating foreign and domestic gods. If your fictional campaign setting has real gods, you can play with it. You might have the gods who ruined these cities be familiar to your players, but have NPCs refer to them by unfamiliar names—whether that’s because the party is in a foreign land, like Xenophon, or because the chronicles were written by far-off or long-ago people and the names changed. Figuring out which god is which can be important for how the party interacts with the ruins.

Finally, I want to bring up an unexpected treasure you might put in the ruins. A bit later in the Ten Thousand’s escape (so sadly after the ruins), the Greeks started fighting off Persian slingers with slings of their own. While the Persians were hurling slingstones, the Ten Thousand loaded their slings with bullets of lead. Lead thrown from a sling goes farther than stones and deals considerably more damage. Lead bullets appear in the Persian archaeological record for the first time a few years after the passage of the Ten Thousand. It’s possible the Persians learned the technology from having it used against them. As they traveled, the Ten Thousand plundered what lead they could, usually from civilian uses like fishing weights. Your ruins also might have lead your characters could melt down to make particularly deadly ammunition.

Make sure you don’t miss a blog post by subscribing to my no-frills, every-other-week mailing list! I also have a signup that’s only for big product releases!

Looking for material for your game tonight? My back catalog has hundreds of great posts, all searchable and filterable so you can find something from real history or folklore that fits exactly what you need!

Come follow and chat with me on social media! On Bluesky, I’m @moltensulfur.bsky.social. On Mastodon I’m @MoltenSulfur@dice.camp.

Check out Shanty Hunters, my award-winning TTRPG about collecting magical sea shanties in the year 1880, then singing them at the table with your friends. The lyrics of the shanties come to life and cause problems for you and for the crew of the ship you sail aboard. It’s up to you to find clues in the song and put things right!