Inside GMT 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 Gaming Ballistic Ravens N’ Pennies Let’s GURPS The Collaborative Gamer Don’t Forget Your BootsBook three of Crown of Stars introduces Zacharias as the new viewpoint character to help hold the book together as a separate unit. His story is largely passive, as he follows Sanglant’s mother, who re-enters after her exit in the[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
GURPS Powers: Enhanced Senses is an interesting project. Technically, it looks at all the possibilities for perceiving the universe, and shows how to represent them in-game by re-packaging the existing abilities. In actuality, it mostly limits itself to what is[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
The Bloodstone adventure series came to a conclusion with H4 The Throne of Bloodstone in 1988. While nowhere near as elaborate a production as H1, with its thin box, BattleSystem counters and 3D-Adventure buildings, it was still more elaborate than[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Charles Spenser is certainly correct in his assertion that the Battle of Blenheim is one of the more important battles of history that is not well remembered today. This is more surprising in the English-speaking world since it was an[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
As GURPS initially evolved, a few different subsystems started getting added on to the core attribute-advantage-skill package. One of the very early ones was the magic system in GURPS Fantasy that added spells as a complex series of skills with[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
The second book of Crown of Stars definitely suffers from a fracturing of the plot, with eight different viewpoint characters, most of which get turns from the get-go. Only one of these is a completely new character, and Anna’s story[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
In 1985 TSR released Oriental Adventures, a new AD&D hardcover geared towards adventuring outside the normal tropes of Western Medieval Fantasy. Unusually for TSR and AD&D, it also contained the outline of a setting, called Kara-Tur, instead of saying as little[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
A 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…