Hu in the Asylum
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...
About
I present cool stuff from real history and folklore – things worth learning about in their own right! – and show how to file the serial numbers off and add them to your ongoing RPG campaign tonight. I do adventures, NPCs, puzzles, political machinations, combat encounters, adventure sites, and more! Material grounded in reality, however fantastical, is richer and more vibrant. Your players will appreciate the difference.
Updates Tuesdays.
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Tristan Zimmerman
- May 10
PCs on the Battlefield: the Rock Island Keelboats
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...
Tristan Zimmerman
- Apr 19
Patrocles’ Caspian Exploration Fraud
The Hellenistic Greek geographer, government official, and military officer Patrocles conducted two voyages of exploration in the Caspian...
Tristan Zimmerman
- Apr 12
Madame Chouteau’s Clever Frontier Inheritance
Marie-Thérèse Chouteau was one of the founders of the city of St. Louis, Missouri. She was a powerful and unusual woman, existing both...
Tristan Zimmerman
- Apr 5
Apostolic Succession, Donatism, and the Hidden Pope
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...
Haley Lunde
- Mar 29
Highgate Cemetery
Once a month here on the Molten Sulfur Blog, I run content taken from our book Archive: Historical People, Places, and Events for RPGs....
Tristan Zimmerman
- Mar 22
Post-Pirate Politics in a Mughal Port
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...
Tristan Zimmerman
- Mar 15
Lord Thomas of Marle, the Wickedest Man of His Generation
Thomas of Marle (1073-1130 A.D.), the Lord of Coucy, was a Medieval French nobleman so evil that the King of France, the Catholic Church,...
Tristan Zimmerman
- Mar 8
Saving or Sacrificing the Substitute King
In and around Mesopotamia, from maybe 1900 to 300 B.C. (off and on), priests practiced a particular brand of human sacrifice meant to...
Tristan Zimmerman
- Mar 1
Bandits, Agricultural College, and the Century of Humiliation
In 1924, in Guangzhou, China, six bandits kidnapped thirty-six students and staff at an agricultural college. What might otherwise be a...
Tristan Zimmerman
- Feb 8
PCs on the Battlefield: the Siege of Cartagena
The 1741 siege of Cartagena, in what is today Colombia, featured a really interesting variation on the normal siege framework. The...
Tristan Zimmerman
- Feb 1
High Society NPCs from Aubrey’s Lives
Last month we looked at eleven bizarre scholarly NPCs from 1600s Britain, taken from a wonderful historical source: Aubrey’s Brief Lives....
Tristan Zimmerman
- Jan 18
The Pirate Mutiny that Made the ‘Fancy’
In 1694, a mutiny occurred aboard a British ship moored in a Spanish harbor. A group of sailors, led by the first mate, overpowered the...
Tristan Zimmerman
- Jan 11
The Fall of Caliph Uthman
Uthman was the third caliph: the third religious and political successor to the Prophet Muhammad. Uthman’s rule was contentious, his...
Tristan Zimmerman
- Jan 4
Scholarly NPCs from Aubrey’s Lives
Last month we looked at nine bizarre occult NPCs from 1600s Britain, taken from a wonderful historical source: Aubrey’s Brief Lives. This...
Haley Lunde
- Dec 28, 2021
La Tomatina
Once a month here on the Molten Sulfur Blog, I run content taken from our book Archive: Historical People, Places, and Events for RPGs....
Tristan Zimmerman
- Dec 14, 2021
Ibn Battuta’s Maldivian Coup Plot
We’ve talked twice before about Ibn Battuta, the medieval Moroccan traveler. This time, we’re going to talk about his adventures in the...
Tristan Zimmerman
- Dec 7, 2021
Occult NPCs from Aubrey’s Lives
Back in November, we looked at a weird ghost story from an even weirder source: Aubrey’s Brief Lives. This week we return to the Lives to...
Haley Lunde
- Nov 30, 2021
Fort Jefferson
Hey! You should check out the Kickstarter campaign for Shanty Hunters, my RPG about collecting magical sea shanties in the year 1880!...
Tristan Zimmerman
- Nov 23, 2021
Wild Adventures Mapping the Khorasan Border
Hey! You should check out the Kickstarter campaign for Shanty Hunters, my RPG about collecting magical sea shanties in the year 1880!...