Dyson’s Dodecahedron Quest for Fun! Bruce Heard and New Stories CRRPG Addict Fantasy Cafe Sitrep Hex and Violence Desperation Morale Banzai!! Dungeon Fantastic Gaming Ballistic Let’s GURPS The Collaborative GamerIn 2009 a highly unusual map was found in the Bodlean Library archives. Unusual enough that it might have been considered a fake, if not for the fact that the records of the Library receiving the map in 1659 still[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Michael Payne’s latest book is a bit unusual. It’s broken into four uneven parts, each of which contains several short or very short stories, each of which is preceded by quote from some work from that world. These smaller stories[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
My knowledge of Renaissance Italy is about as minimal as it can be and still have studied Western history. That is, I know a number of very famous names associated with some artwork just as famous; I know of a[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Poul Anderson’s A Midsummer Tempest starts out with a fairly straight telling of the Battle of Marston Moor. There is a difference: Prince Rupert of the Rhine is captured at the end of the action. And then, the second chapter[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
The “Pike and Shot” period that marks post-medieval warfare is one that I’ve never known a lot about, and so Osprey’s Elite book on the subject looked like just the thing. It actually deals with a just a portion of[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Osprey’s book on Byzantine infantry covers from around the reign of Emperor Leo VI, which saw a revival of interest in military matters, to the fall of Constantinople in the Fourth Crusade, which interrupted tradition, and very effectively brought the[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
David Potter’s book on Constantine is at first a little hard to pin down. It’s not really a biography, and despite the title, only about half the book is about the reign of Emperor Constantine, with the first half being[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
I was expecting something of a detailed look at the Greek myths of Amazons with modern archaeology put in to start telling us just how much of it might have been true. Instead, this is a bit more wide-ranging, largely[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Osprey’s Fortress book on ancient Troy is not a bad guide to the history of the site as known to archaeology as a whole, but the bulk of the book concentrates (understandably) on Troy VIh, which is one of the[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
It’s hard to figure out where I should start with this book, because there’s a lot of places where I could start. The Name of the Rose is set in 1327, and the struggles of the Christian church in northern[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…