Inside GMT Playing at the World Dyson’s Dodecahedron Quest for Fun! Bruce Heard and New Stories CRRPG Addict Fantasy Cafe Sitrep Hex and Violence Banzai!! Dungeon Fantastic Gaming Ballistic Let’s GURPS The Collaborative GamerEveryone knows of the Age of Exploration, and the Portuguese efforts to find a sea-route around Africa to India. If you know a little more history, you know something of their efforts related to controlling trade in India and the[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
This is the second book I’ve read recently about the Thirty Years War, both of which have the same informative, if unimaginative, title of The Thirty Years War. Cicely Veronica Wedgwood’s history is considered a classic English-language history of the[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Jessica Day George’s sequel to Princess of the Midnight Ball is every bit as good as the original, and in some ways more interesting. The book successfully juggles two main point-of-view characters, Poppy (the ‘roughest’ of the twelve princesses), and[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
I actually don’t know much of fairy tales past the ones that Disney has engraved on popular culture, but I actually ran into “The Twelve Dancing Princesses” in the webcomic Erstwhile a year or so ago, which was just long[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Sir Jens’ (‘Sir’ seems to be his first name…) In the Shadow of Empires is an amateur history book about Vlad Dracula (as opposed to a sensational book about the fictional ‘Dracula’). It shows its amateur status in some uneven[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Danielle Jensen’s first novel reads fast, but has quite a bit going on in it. At the start of the story, the main character (Cécile) is kidnapped, and taken to a hidden city of trolls, where she is ‘bonded’ to[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Published by Didactic Press, Gardiner’s The Thirty Years War is another cheap ebook of a public-domain work. The normal price seems to be a buck or two, and I think I picked it up for free. In general, this is[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
I’ve generally been liking Osprey’s turn towards specialized subjects in their Elite line, and this is no exception. The book takes a look at what is known of Roman sieges from the fall of Carthage to the siege of Cremna[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Prussia weighed heavily on the collective mind of Europe during the 19th and 20th Centuries. My history classes generally blamed the formation of Germany for throwing off the structure of international power in Europe and causing two World Wars. And[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Barbara Hambly is a name I saw a fair amount of when I was haunting SF&F bookshelves as stores as a teenager, but I never got around to trying any of her books. I later found that I indeed had[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…