Dyson’s Dodecahedron Quest for Fun! Bruce Heard and New Stories Sitrep Hex and Violence Desperation Morale Banzai!! Dungeon Fantastic Gaming Ballistic Let’s GURPS The Collaborative GamerOriginally written in English in 1974, this is apparently still one of the basic studies of Italian Renaissance warfare in English or Italian. Mallett spent some time studying the original sources and came to what were at the time non-traditional[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
The fourth (and kind-of final) volume of Shannon Appelcline’s massive history of the RPG industry finishes up the project well. However, I can’t help a feeling that this one is less important, and unpolished. Some of this is my prejudices,[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Nancy Goldstone’s The Rival Queens is one part biography of Marguerite de Valois, half a part biography of Catherine de Medici, and half a part outline of the French Religious Wars. Catherine getting first billing the in subtitle, the focus[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Osprey’s book on fortifications in the Kingdom of Wessex is a well-done introduction, but didn’t quite dive into some detail I’d like. At the end, Lavelle admits that the book is even more limited in scope than it could be,[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
The third volume of Shannon Appelcline’s history of the RPG industry maintains the same general format as before: about four hundred pages, separate chapters for each publisher, covering (essentially) a decade of time (1990-1999). I tend to be fascinated by[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
The second volume of Shannon Appelcline’s history of the RPG industry is every bit as large as the first. It’s a much bigger subject though, since the 1980s saw a lot of activity up and down. But TSR and GDW[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
The title of Palmer’s book is generally familiar, and he acknowledges directly that he’s writing a similar book to Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire in the introduction. However, this is a ’90s book for a more casual audience,[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Shannon Appelcline’s Designer’s & Dragons is a truly massive undertaking: A history of the entire roleplaying game industry from its beginnings to about 2010. Just the first volume, covering six years (1974–79), is 400 pages. However, the structure is such[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Crowley’s book on the fall of Constantinople doesn’t disappoint. He leads off by giving a good overview of the rise of Islam, and various failed sieges of the city over the centuries, showing how it became something of a recurring[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
It’s an act of hubris to be able to pronounce the ‘greatest’ anything, much less the ‘greatest’ knight, a class of people that was fairly large and existed over centuries, but it is certainly fair to say that William Marshal[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…