Dyson’s Dodecahedron Quest for Fun! CRRPG Addict Fantasy Cafe Lynn’s Book Blog Sitrep Hex and Violence Grumble Jones Desperation Morale Banzai!! Let’s GURPS The Collaborative GamerA common problem with generic role-playing systems is that they often have non-generic answers to important questions. For instance, Traveller was originally meant as a generic SFRPG, before it started generating a setting that pretty well took over the line[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Ages ago, I started reading Kate Elliot’s Crown of Stars series, but lost track of just which book I had gotten up to, and so kept putting the rest of the series off. I’ve just started rereading the books to[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Douglas Porch’s book on imperialism and warfare is meant as an introductory book on the subject, but I don’t think it serves that job very well. Organized around general subjects of how European vs non-European wars worked in the 18th[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Over the years, and the course of well over a dozen novels, there’s been a number of different… ‘periods’ or groups in the Vorkosigan Saga. There’s the Cordelia books, the Admiral Naismith books, the Lord Auditor Vorkosigan books… as well[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
In 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…