Smudge Marks & Engel Werks Flash of Steel Playing at the World Dyson’s Dodecahedron Quest for Fun! Bruce Heard and New Stories CRRPG Addict Fantasy Cafe Lynn’s Book Blog Sitrep Hex and Violence Grumble Jones Banzai!! Dungeon Fantastic Let’s GURPS The Collaborative Gamer Don’t Forget Your BootsI started listening to podcasts at just the right time: There was a minor explosion of good historical subjects going on. This was largely due to Mike Duncan, and his History of Rome podcast. Not that you can tell by[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Julian the Apostate is known for his disastrous defeat by the Sassanids in 363. d’Amato and Frediani go back six years to show Julian’s very successful campaign in Gaul. This is a typical Osprey Campaign book with its conventional format,[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Gillian Bradshaw is one of my favorite historical authors, and this one does not disappoint. She admits up front to distorting the timeline slightly in the interests of the plot, which spans about seven critical years in the Fourth Century.[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
The second volume of Osprey’s survey of Roman Centurions is a bit better than the first. Most likely, there’s just more source material to draw from. There is less of the individual career profiles, so if you thought that was[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Ian Hughes’ books on the period where the Western Empire dissolved into nothingness have been very good at providing a clearer picture of the process. I think this volume might be the best one of the lot. Like his earlier[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
I was a little skeptical of a Men-at-Arms sub-series dedicated only to the Roman Centurion, but it does make some real sense. Mostly, they’re the lowest rank that is going to regularly come to the attention of prominent people, so[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Hughes provides a good overview of the end of the western Empire in this volume. He does analyze things, and come to conclusions, but the primary focus is providing a chronological outline of events. That latter is the primary value[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
You’ve probably never heard of this war. There’s a good reason: John Harrel is the only one calling it that. This book covers what is usually considered two wars, neither of which seems to have any sort ‘official’ name. “Nisibis”[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
This basically a follow-on to McLaughlin’s study of trade across the Indian Ocean. Despite being almost the same size, it feels like an appendix to it. Whereas his former book spent a lot of time giving specifics of particular trade[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
This is mostly a reconstruction of the Sertorian War. There’s also some notes of the larger history of the Iberian peninsula, and people with an interest in the history of Iberia in general may want to pick this up too.[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…