Molten Sulfur Podcast

Instead of doing short weekly episodes in this podcast feed, I'll now be doing hour-long episodes every two months on the Dicegeeks podcast! Find them at one of the following links!

Over the centuries, people have believed a lot of things about European megalithic sites: those monuments or temples of huge stones, intentionally placed by Stone Age people. Some of these beliefs are grounded in good scholarship and archaeology. Some are delightful tidbits of folklore. And some are the wild conjectures of ‘researchers’ with more passion than sense. All are great! Let’s look at some of the more gameable fragments, with a focus on a few particular sites!

The geological processes that created Bryce Canyon National Park inadvertently created an amazing large-scale battlemap for your party to fight in! Let’s look at how this natural amphitheater formed and how you can use this terrain for awesome adventures!

High-stakes politics meet domestic troubles in 14th century Mali!

When the crew of the French corvette Alecton sighted a giant squid off Tenerife in 1861, no one believed them!

Edwin A. Abbot’s 1884 novella ‘Flatland’ presents a remarkable cosmology that’s super applicable to RPGs!

How to turn ceremonies and rituals into adventures by channeling 19th century Bali!

W.J. Livingstone was the most hated landlord in early 20th-century Malawi. The story of his rise and fall is fascinating.

In honor of April Fool’s Day, let’s look at President Theodore Roosevelt’s most colorful pets, and turn them into a gang of silly NPCs!

The vices, luxury, and unusual geography of this classic Roman resort town make it a great site for adventure!

The Völsunga saga from late 13th-century Iceland is an amazing story of love, heartbreak, adventure, violence, and betrayal. It tells the story of a Germanic warrior named Sigurd, the treasure he wins, the politics he gets caught up in, and the bloody aftermath of it all. It’s incredibly gameable! Let’s look at the relevant parts of the saga and see how they lead to a moment that’s perfect for your PCs to show up, get involved, and probably change the course of this amazing story. Plus, it works in just about any setting, and can be easily inserted into an ongoing campaign.

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 when placed in the fictional setting of your RPG campaign, it’s an adventure site that is its own plot hook!

In the 16th century, Ming China was beset by coastal raiders from Japan. The Chinese army, defanged by two centuries of systematic degradation, was powerless to stop these ‘pirates’. It’s a perfect place for PCs to step in!

Caddo Lake, Texas, is a meandering swamp full of bayous and alligators. It has a nefarious history full of bandits, pirates, and warring vigilantes.

Part two of a two-part series on gameable, mythic details from the Medieval travelogue of Sir John Mandeville!

Folklore is full of villains and antagonists. By a striking coincidence, so are RPG campaigns! Here are four villains drawn from folklore: a Russian singer-sorcerer, a Roma witch-queen, a Persian hero-villain, and an Irish kidnapper-princess.

The mbojo lion-men of the Turu people of Tanzania are an interesting take on lycanthropes that have some cool baked-in plot hooks!

‘Ice captain’ Bob Bartlett was a fearless navigator and explorer – and makes a terrific NPC!

Part one of a two-part series on gameable, mythic details from the Medieval travelogue of Sir John Mandeville!

Legal dramas are an enormously popular genre, but they effectively don’t exist in the RPG space. Let's create a template for how to do a legal drama as an RPG adventure by looking at a fascinating and high-stakes case: the argument by the Lakota nation that the U.S. government’s seizure of their land was illegal.

This is part 4 of a 4-part series about the wars of Julius Caesar. The focus is on moments where individual people impacted the outcomes of battles and entire campaigns. They’re perfect to drop into your game in place of playing out entire battles! In this episode, we conclude our story with Caesar's African and Spanish wars.

In 1931, the International Olympic Committee awarded Berlin the privilege of hosting the 1936 Summer Olympics. Two years later, Adolf Hitler became chancellor of Germany. The 1936 Olympic Games had intense geopolitical, propagandistic, and ethical components, and are terrific gaming fodder!

Let’s talk about cave formations, more properly called ‘speleothems’, and how we can use them to make underground adventures awesome. We’ll focus on examples that are easy to describe (so they don’t slow down play), good combat terrain, evocative of something cool, or otherwise immediately gameable!

The 1808 shipwreck of the Russian schooner Nikolai on the shores of the Quileute nation (in what is today Washington state) is remarkable primarily for its aftermath: the collective efforts of the Quileute, Hoh, and Makah nations to deal with 22 armed and desperate shipwrecked Russian sailors.

This is part 3 of a 4-part series about the wars of Julius Caesar. The focus is on moments where individual people impacted the outcomes of battles and entire campaigns. They’re perfect to drop into your game in place of playing out entire battles! In this episode, we wrap up Caesar’s Civil War against his former ally Pompey.

The Akodessewa Fetish Market, in Lomé, Togo, is a place to buy talismans, pieces of animals, and other objects important to the practice of Vodoun. It's colorful, memorable, and very gameable!

From the 8th century to the late Middle Ages, the West African savanna was a gold-producing region for the distant Mediterranean. Vast sums of metal flowed along sinuous trade routes into the Islamic world and Europe. As the gold traveled, the merchants carrying it knew less and less about the source of this wealth. By the time it arrived in trade hubs like Cairo or Venice, the tales told of the source of the gold were tall indeed!

The ballad ‘Lulie Vars’, based on the 1916 murder of Lula Viers by her lover, is a jarring case. It’s got a particularly heinous killing, a unique getaway, a folk ballad, and a truly unusual way to seek justice for the crime.

This is part 2 of a 4-part series about the wars of Julius Caesar. The focus is on moments where individual people impacted the outcomes of battles and entire campaigns. They’re perfect to drop into your game in place of playing out entire battles! In this episode, we wrap up Caesar’s conquest of Gaul and segue into his Civil War against Pompey.

Balochistan is Pakistan’s westernmost province, and its largest and most sparsely inhabited region. It is a land of stony desert and sharp mountains.

In most fantasy RPGs, stone golems make no sense. It’s a giant hunk of animate stone, and you fight it with… swords? And fire spells? What exactly is your battleaxe supposed to do to this rock? But there’s a better way! And it comes from the amazing world of ancient Egyptian iconoclasm.

The Tiwi, an aboriginal group from northern Australia, have/had a unique way to resolve thorny disputes. This method – which involves old men throwing spears badly – is surprisingly gameable. If you introduce it in your campaign world, you can use it to resolve a whole bunch of loose plot threads quickly in a novel and memorable way. Plus, it has the added benefit of probably creating whole new set of plot hooks to keep the story moving!

This is part 1 of a 4-part series about the wars of Julius Caesar. The focus will be on moments where individual people impacted the outcomes of battles and entire campaigns. They’re perfect to drop into your game in place of playing out entire battles! We begin with Caesar’s conquest of Gaul.

Water and time have carved deep into the sandstone on Navajo land near Page, Arizona, forming a slot canyon with smooth, flowing walls. It’s a great adventure site!

Caravans are the ships of the desert, and they can wreck just as surely as an ocean liner. Not every camel train that went into the Sahara came back out. The discovery of a caravan wreck is a great jumping-off point for an adventure! Let’s piece together some cool bits of history to flesh out this hook!