Societies, especially cities, have handled the enforcement of laws a lot of different ways in different places and times; the ubiquity of police in the 21st century can make it hard to imagine what other systems might even look like. One particularly gameable institution was the ‘night watch’. This system was found in a few European cities in the high Middle Ages, and by the end of the Renaissance it had spread to almost all cities in Europe and North America. Let’s look at what made the night watch weird and different – and the ways that putting one in your fictional campaign setting can lead ..read more

From 1723 to 1725, the French asylum at Charenton held a patient named Hu John, a Chinese Catholic. How Hu got to France and how he came to be committed is a remarkable story. Springing him is an even better adventure! This post is brought to you by beloved Patreon backer Justin Moor. Thanks for helping keep the lights on! If you want to help keep this blog going alongside Justin, head over to the Patreon page – and thank you! Hu was born around 1681 near Guangzhou, in southern China. He converted to Catholicism at age 19 and took ‘John’ as his baptismal name. By age 40, Hu John (family names ..read more

In 1814, a band of the Sauk Indian nation led an attack on three U.S. Army keelboats on the Mississippi River. The resulting Battle of Rock Island Rapids is an excellent template for a combat encounter at your table. It’s got an interesting geopolitical context (the three-way tug-of-war between America, Britain, and the Sauk), interesting consequences, and all the action takes place at the human scale at which most RPGs thrive, not the battalion-level action that can often fall apart at the table. This is part eight in a continuing series about PCs on the Battlefield where I look at human-scal ..read more

The earliest known joke book, the 15th-century Facetiae of Poggio Bracciolini, is a fabulous window into how this late Medieval/early Renaissance Italian saw his world. It’s also legitimately very funny. This week we’re going to look at seven jokes from the Facetiae, each of which has at its heart a character who makes a great poor or peasant NPC. This post is brought to you by beloved Patreon backer Colin Wixted. Thanks for helping keep the lights on! If you want to help keep this blog going alongside Colin, head over to the Patreon page – and thank you! Poggio Bracciolini was born near Flor ..read more

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 lights on! If you want to help keep this blog going alongside Arthur, head over to the Patreon page – and thank you! Limnic Eruption Killer Fog On the evening of August 21st, 1986, there was a deep rumbling beneath Lake Nyos in Cameroon, Africa. Within an hour, 1,700 villagers, 3,000 l ..read more

The Hellenistic Greek geographer, government official, and military officer Patrocles conducted two voyages of exploration in the Caspian Sea. His account of what he saw had a major influence on European geographers into the Middle Ages. The only problem is that most of the important stuff he reported was flat-out wrong. How he got to that point is an interesting mix of history and speculation, and the fallout of his false discoveries make a great RPG adventure. This post is brought to you by beloved Patreon backer Robert Nichols. Thanks for helping keep the lights on! If you want to help keep ..read more

Marie-Thérèse Chouteau was one of the founders of the city of St. Louis, Missouri. She was a powerful and unusual woman, existing both inside the Franco-Spanish colonial system and outside it, depending on what suited her needs. The way she obtained her inheritance from her not-husband screams to be turned into an adventure, and she herself makes a complex and compelling NPC! This post is brought to you by beloved Patreon backer Justin Moor. Thanks for helping keep the lights on! If you want to help keep this blog going alongside Justin, head over to the Patreon page – and thank you! Chouteau ..read more

We got a weird one this week, folks! This time, we’re going to look at the principle of apostolic succession in the Catholic Church, how it underpins the authority of the pope, how that triggered a revolt in the fourth century, how it impacted the Western Schism of 1378-1429 when there were three rival popes (including a hidden pope), and how all of this can be used to make strange and memorable RPG adventures. Buckle up, because this ramble is going to get bizarre! This post is brought to you by beloved Patreon backer Joel Dalenberg. Thanks for helping keep the lights on! If you want to help ..read more

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 Colin Wixted. Thanks for helping keep the lights on! If you want to help keep this blog going alongside Colin, head over to the Patreon page – and thank you! Image credit: Duncan Harris from Nottingham, UK. Released under a CC BY 2.0 license. Highgate Cemetery Home of the (Un)dead Highgate Cemetery in north London was opened i ..read more

It was 1695 in Surat, a large seaport city in what is today northwest India and was at the time the Mughal Empire. Every year, ships from Surat sailed west across the Indian Ocean to the Red Sea. They carried goods to trade in Yemen and Muslim pilgrims on the hajj: the pilgrimage to Mecca every Muslim healthy and wealthy enough must undertake at least once a lifetime. Now it was September and the ships were returning, carrying homeward-bound pilgrims and rich cargo. But when one of the ships arrived late, bearing news it was attacked and robbed by British pirates, it would set off months of un ..read more