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 GamerNancy 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 Paladin’s Legacy series picks up, surprisingly, immediately after the end of the original Paksenarrion trilogy. There are a number of things left unsettled by Duke Phelan’s elevation to king of a different kingdom, and that is pretty much the[…]↓ 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 fifth Firekeeper book does an all-around good job of continuing the characters and exploring more of the world. It’s been a while since I’ve read the previous books, so I can say that this one doesn’t lean too heavily[…]↓ 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…
The second book of Protector of the Small picks up directly, and predictably, from the first. Kel is now a page, and no longer on any sort of probation. It also moves more into the usual tropes growing up, and[…]↓ 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…