Inside GMT Playing at the World Dyson’s Dodecahedron Quest for Fun! Bruce Heard and New Stories Fantasy Cafe Lynn’s Book Blog Sitrep Hex and Violence Desperation Morale Banzai!! Dungeon Fantastic Gaming Ballistic Let’s GURPS The Collaborative GamerNick Holmes is doing a very good job writing a clear beginning-level series on Roman history. This also has the advantage of being recent (2022), and so has access recent findings. There is one short chapter two-thirds of the way[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
The Golem and the Jinni was a very good historical fantasy with a very character-driven focus. It also had a very intricate plot with a lot of moving parts that don’t come into alignment until the end. That is still[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
I haven’t read Tom Holland’s Rubicon, but I also know the civil wars period better than the Julio-Claudians (I have to admit that the BBC production of I, Claudius is still the bedrock of my knowledge of the period). This[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
One of the lesser gaming hubs of early RPGs was Rockville, Maryland. Little Soldier Games started in a game store there, and Phoenix Games in a book store around the corner. Details are obscure, because there are contradictory statements, but[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Despite having its origin in the same writing project as the first part, this is a fairly separate section and the break helps emphasize that. In-fiction, the bulk of the stories here all intertwine even more than the first part.[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
The subtitle “James K. Polk, the Mexican War and the Conquest of the American Continent” is on point. This primarily about Polk, and takes the view from the White House for the bulk of the book. After that in importance[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
So, book 2 of a YA fantasy horse series. Warning: there is a cliffhanger ahead. The fact that this leads directly into book 3 explains a few things, because on its own the plot is a mess. Even as the[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Platt’s book is really about the relationship between Britain and China before the Opium War, and shows why a conflict was unexpected, almost right up to when it did happen. The two had a stable trading relationship for about two[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
This is the fifth in a series of reviews looking at the evolution of Stellaris. See the previous reviews here: Stellaris: Paradox Among the Stars Leviathans: There Be Dragons Here! Utopia: No Place Among the Stars Synthetic Dawn: Synthetic Intelligence[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
The final Tomoe Gozen novel is much more cohesive as a novel than the first two. But it is broken into three parts, and they are somewhat independent. A sad repeat from the second book is that there’s an ad[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…