Dyson’s Dodecahedron Quest for Fun! CRRPG Addict Fantasy Cafe Lynn’s Book Blog Sitrep Hex and Violence Desperation Morale Banzai!! Dungeon Fantastic Let’s GURPS The Collaborative GamerPatricia Wrede’s novel is basically a farce of fairy tales; this is something that’s been popular to do over the last few decades. There’s kingdoms in a land with magic, and fairy godmothers and curses and the like are part[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Crowley’s book on Venice is about the Stato da Mar, and as such, is exactly one of the things I’ve been on the lookout for. The first section starts with Venice’s mercantile rise, and then goes into the story of[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
This is less a novel, and more a fictional memoir. There’s no real plot, and a barebones structure. The entire story is told first person by a young German soldier in WWI who describes the horrors of the Western Front[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Effectively, the full title of this is “Against Stupidity, the Gods Themselves Contend in Vain”, a quote that is spread out across the three sections of the novel. I was a bit worried at first, as the book starts with[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Clavell’s Shogun is certainly a very good book, but it doesn’t quite seem to know what it wants to be. It’s a historical novel, but instead of presenting historical personages doing what they historically did, and then filling in a[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
It is possible for there to be more Firekeeper novels after this (and the ending is an obvious lead-in for the ability to have more), but there wouldn’t be as much point. This one deals with the biggest Macguffin of[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Tom Pocock posits the Seven Years War as the first world war (an assertion that he’s not alone in, and that I can get behind), but his book on the subject doesn’t really develop this. Instead, each chapter is about[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
This was created as a Kickstarter stretch goal, and while good, is smaller and much more limited than the main four books. The first part is a collection of four essays done as a result of the Kickstarter that funded[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Originally 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…