Brilliant!

[Owing to several copies and pastes from OpenAI to Discord and back, the mix of fonts in here is a bit crazy. Hope it's still readable.]

Michael Raston at the Lizardman Diaries blog has just written about using AI text and image generators to create characters for RPGs and online wargames.

I had no idea this was a thing. But this is a thing. And it's pretty awesome.

Two of my experiments, as run thru https://chat.openai.com/chat:

Prompt: Background and physical description of a hardbitten halfling adventurer. [Inspired by Tolkien's initial inspiration for what became Strider.]

The halfling adventurer in question is known as Jack "the Stalwart" Hammerfoot. Jack is a veteran adventurer, having spent decades exploring the world and facing all manner of dangers. Despite his small stature, Jack is known for his bravery, his strength, and his unyielding determination.

Physically, Jack is a typical halfling, standing only three feet tall. However, he is more heavily muscled than most halflings, with broad shoulders and powerful arms. His face is rugged and weathered, with a thick beard and piercing blue eyes. He wears his hair in a thick braid, which reaches down to the small of his back.

Jack is usually seen wearing a suit of battered plate armor, which he has customized over the years with various spikes and studs. He carries a massive warhammer at his side, which he has named "Thunderstrike". The warhammer is almost as tall as Jack himself, and he wields it with devastating force.

Jack has a reputation for being hardbitten and tough as nails. He has survived numerous battles and close calls, and has the scars to prove it. He speaks in a gruff, no-nonsense voice, and is not afraid to speak his mind or stand up for what he believes in.

Despite his tough exterior, Jack has a soft spot for the downtrodden and the oppressed. He has been known to take on quests and missions that others would consider too risky or too thankless, simply because he believes it is the right thing to do. He also has a love of good food and drink, and is always willing to share a meal and a mug of ale with his fellow adventurers.

Jack is a living legend in the world of adventurers, and his name is known far and wide. He has faced dragons, demons, and other fearsome creatures, and has emerged victorious every time. He is respected and admired by those who know him, and feared by those who would dare to cross him.

A little too heroic for my taste as a player-character, but might make a good NPC (and surprisingly dangerous opponent for a party). Also described a bit too much like a dwarf. (Halflings generally don't have beards.) Perhaps he has dwarf blood, which accounts for his unusual demeanor and strength?

Picture from Midjourney

The AI-generated pic of him is hilarious. Entirely dwarf (except the ears) with no armor or warhammer, but definitely rugged and, for some reason, illustrated by Disney. Reminds me a bit of Asterix, in fact. He definitely looks ready for a classic "you all meet in a bar(fight)" DnD encounter!

Prompt: Description of a band of toy soldiers lost in the sandbox. [Inspired by The Twelves.]

The band of toy soldiers in question are a motley crew of plastic figures, lost in the vast expanse of a child's sandbox. They are a diverse group, with soldiers representing different branches of the military, from the army to the navy to the air force.

Physically, the toy soldiers are all roughly the same size, standing at about two inches tall. They are made of brightly colored plastic, with intricate details on their uniforms and equipment. Some are equipped with rifles or pistols, while others carry binoculars or radio equipment.

Despite their small size, the toy soldiers are fiercely determined to survive in their new environment. They have formed a tight-knit community within the sandbox, with each soldier taking on a specific role and responsibility. Some soldiers are tasked with scouting the perimeter of the sandbox for potential dangers, while others work to fortify their position with makeshift barriers and defenses.

The toy soldiers are resourceful and creative, using whatever materials they can find within the sandbox to fashion new equipment and tools. They have built rafts out of twigs and leaves to navigate the sandbox's "ocean", and have constructed rudimentary bridges and tunnels to move between different areas.

However, the toy soldiers face numerous challenges in their new environment. They are constantly at risk from the elements, with sandstorms and rainstorms posing a constant threat. They must also contend with other creatures that inhabit the sandbox, from ants to spiders to the occasional curious cat.

Despite these challenges, the toy soldiers remain determined to survive and thrive in their new home. They have formed a strong bond with one another, and have developed a fierce loyalty to their community. They know that their survival depends on their ability to work together and support one another, and they will do whatever it takes to protect their fellow soldiers and preserve their way of life in the sandbox.

Pretty basic and expected, except for the ocean. Any puddle would dry up in short order, right? I love the touch of the "occasional curious cat."

Four choices. A little too busy.

Just for fun, "Children's book illustration of The Biplane Evermore, an anthropomorphic De Havilland Tiger Moth."

I got biplanes all right, but with tiger stripes. And two of them with cute animal pilots instead of faces. The lower right one might work for what I had in mind, but isn't expressive enough for purposes of the song.

I've always wanted to do my own illustrations for that song, a family favorite that my brother and sister refused to sleep without my singing it to them. Another is The Beaches of St. Valery, a stone-cold classic by the late Davy Steele.

"So I huddled all night, in a hammered old house,
While the shells and the bullets rained down."

And it just occurred to me:

I can't cartoon, but if I could use this to get something close to what I want, and sketch it...

Dang. This has possibilities!

Another delivery

Ordered a handful of gaming tools and bits from Games Workshop, and received them remarkably quickly for the free shipping (I was quoted nine business days, got it in three).

• Some 25mm bases for the Ork Boyz I've been sorting.

• A drill to help assemble the metal Ork Nobs. I've never needed to pin a mini before, but superglue isn't working this time. The tool doesn't come with instructions, so I'll need to find some and learn to use it properly. Probably also need a vise.

• A painting handle. Might seem superfluous, but I've watched it in action on Youtube for a while now, and I understand the appeal. Looking forward to trying it.

• A painting-water cup. I threw it in mostly to get to the point of free shipping, but it's got a couple of handy features. Scores in the inner face to keep your brush pointy, and a curious "lip" that can hold a brush or two out of the cup (all those reminders of not leaving them in the water or smushed against the bottom!).

• And a free book - a sampler of five short stories from the latest series. A fine taster for the Warhammer worlds - when I finish it I might try passing it around the teens at work.

More Rocky Hills

My missing package of rocky hills turned up, two weeks late. Wonder where they were; maybe in the back of a warm truck or something, since two of the pieces were stuck together and "popped" apart, losing paint in the process.

This is more jagged and "realistic" terrain compared to the first, very rectangular batch.

There are five larger, flat-topped, angular pieces, and ten smaller, "messier" rubble pieces.

The larger pieces have some jutting bits on top marring the total flatness. While a nice, realistic touch, it makes them harder to stack. But generally all that will fit on them are the rubble pieces anyway.

I like the rubble - the smaller pieces will make good cover anywhere on a table, even for my 18mms. They are heavier than the hills, or at any rate rattle satisfyingly when they hit the table - I think actual rocks were used in their construction, not just foam.

Here's the damaged parts - quite minor:

I'm open to suggestions about repair. At this point I'm thinking of trying a textured "basing" paint from Citadel. A thin layer might obscure the pink without rising above the surrounding rock, and if so, look like a proper chip in the stone. Or perhaps just plain black or dark grey, with sharp highlighting like that visible elsewhere on the pieces.

Had a bad day, but this little thing makes me feel that little bit better. Thanks for reading.

Civil Wars

More reading - two histories and a ruleset. I was hoping to go to a "MicroCon" that the club was running this weekend, but schedules and other commitments conspired to stop me at the last moment. So I'm even more P'O'd at present. My dad has offered to help me move to a larger apartment, and a game room of my own is tempting, but my job is difficult enough right now that I'm not sure it's worth the effort.

"...Afghans proudly thought of
their land as Yaghistan -- 
the land of rebellion."

It repeats in greater detail some of the character descriptions and events of Peter Hopkirk's The Great Game. While it is more focused on Shah Shuja's story, it also details the Western intrigue that both helped and hindered him in his ambitions. The British prejudice (not in a racial sense) of the situation led them to support Shuja, who had been defeated already four times trying to regain his throne, rather than Dost Muhammad who held a much more commanding position. Their fear of Russian expansion in fact led the (previously disinterested) Russians to court Persia.

Worse were the British efforts to control Shuja and his government in order to prop him up. There are Catch-22 parallels here with South Vietnam; on the one hand, Shuja could not survive without British support - on the other, that very fact made him anathema and increased the interest in bringing him down. If all that your allies can do to help you is to literally take over and set you aside, what is the use of them? Like the presidents of South Vietnam, it was a damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don't position - and the US had the same problem in Afghanistan in the 2010s. They could raise a new, more effective and conventional Afghan military - but that in itself repulsed the more traditional population and made them more likely to resist the obvious usurpers. As in Vietnam, they could only be sure of the cities (barely even those) and whatever areas they controlled directly - the rest was a sea of dissent. The country was too poor to support itself, so millions of foreign aid were poured in to little effect. The parallels with 2001-2021 are starkly laid out - and a bit terrifying.

Hilariously, Shah Shuja, who the British had been undermining and ignoring ever since they arrived in Kabul, was the first and only man to respond quickly when the rebellion started. Yet, without control of his own government or army, he could do nothing. His most loyal followers, when they saw the tepid British response, practically had no choice but to go over to the rebels. The political and military leaders failed to respond to the uprising when it happened, and were practically quiescent throughout until the retreat. This only encouraged the Afghans, who noticed quickly that the soldiers were even forbidden by their own officers to fire on robbers in the streets. They lost the moral high ground when the political officer, MacNaghten, was murdered while trying to double-cross the Afghan leaders, who declared Jihad.

And then they marched out of the cantonments towards the high passes, despite all the warnings of the few friends they had left (including Shah Shuja himself, who despite their condescension still considered himself their ally). Shuja held out in the Bala Hisar fortress nearby, and would continue to do so for a year. The best the British could have done was to retreat to it, but it's obvious their leaders just wanted any excuse to go home - even if that meant abandoning virtually all their followers in the process.

As pointed out by the author and one of the more pragmatic survivors, there was betrayal in this, but also breathtaking stupidity. I am inclined to go back and read the first Flashman novel, now I've gotten the full details.

A fine sample of the farcical reasoning behind much of the fighting: Governor Ellenborough read a (fictional) report that the gates of Ghazni had been stolen from an Indian temple, so as revenge, he ordered them brought back to India in triumph to avenge this "insult". The officers who took the gates recognized the evidence of their original Islamic construction, and neither the Afghans nor the Hindustanis cared. A cutting quote:

"As the saying goes, real power does not need tawdry propaganda! A more lasting monument until today is the quantity of rotting corpses of the English troops that still block the highways..."

Dalrymple uses contemporary Afghan historians and epic narrative poetry to characterize how the Afghans felt about what was going on, using the latter frequently in place of a conventional narrative. Many of these writings, available for the first time in English, were published in the 1850s in India, possibly to incite the Mutiny (which, the author pointedly notes, first broke out among regiments whose officers had abandoned them during the disastrous retreat). Almost like fiction, it brings out the atmosphere of the place and time. Characterful sketches and paintings of the principal characters are included as well.

Compares and contrasts the lives and combat experience of William Oates of the 15th Alabama, and Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain of the 20th Maine. I had not considered Oates before, but he wrote just as well as Chamberlain despite a more desultory education. His early life was in the Wild West, but since this is antebellum, that means what is now the Deep South, and Texas, all of which were much more frontierish in the 1840s and '50s. A generation later and with different luck, Oates might have become a gunfighter. But despite his scrappy history, he worked his way up and, like Chamberlain, became a teacher.

Chamberlain, points out the author, did not have quite the heroic upbringing that hagiographers have ascribed to him. His father went bankrupt a couple times, and Chamberlain himself struggled against stuttering all his life. Though a brilliant junior professor at Bowdoin, he felt compelled to join the Army, going so far as to find a pretext - leave to study in Britain - to get away with it, and his coworkers were surprised and disgruntled. His feeling towards the war was more idealistic - Harriet Beecher Stowe was a neighbor, and Jeff Davis spoke at Bowdoin before the war.

The narrative here is fairly bare-bones, even in the combat writing, and the few maps are not of much use. But then, the book is less a military history and more an exploration of character. Chamberlain's relationship with his independent-minded wife was particularly fraught - she was uninterested in being the First Lady of Maine, for example, and lost three children in infancy. While Oates, curiously enough, was one of the few Confederates who urged his government to arm slaves and offer them freedom to join the beleaguered rebel army, which like the more famous Patrick Cleburne retarded his career. This is the same man who defended one of his veterans from a charge of murdering a black man. Basically, both men were ambitious to the point of being willing to put other considerations aside - Chamberlain his wife's needs, Oates his distaste for the KKK and other overt signs of white supremacy. Both initially moderate in their views, they ended up on directly opposite sides of the aisle politically, because Chamberlain, to keep his office, leaned into the Radical Republican agenda which otherwise was not his style.

So while they were both successful, there was also a sort of unrecognized tragedy in their lives.

I haven't finished this one yet, but it's increasingly depressing. Chamberlain had a couple minor scandals in his leadership both of the state and Bowdoin, and as his career wound down, Oates' burst into flower. He went to Congress (in the process marrying a woman who had been born into the house where he recovered from wounds while he was staying there) by building and leading the Democratic political machine, grinding down the black man to do it, and learning to filibuster.

A smaller and shorter ruleset than I expected. I'm interested in the premise, but so far as I can tell, most of the available volumes are more pictures than "fluff." I'm torn between:

• using my SCW-ish figures on a small scale (changing inches for centimeters), which would allow me to use full-sized platoons and a few light vehicles on my small tables.
• or using some of my 54mms. Like the SCW, none of these are really for the period, but WWI Scots and Western Desert British will work, while Germans can be Fascist foreign legion and Japanese could suggest skirmishes in "the far pavilions". On my tables I'd only really be able to have ten men a side.

There is no fluff at all in the rules here, not even army lists. (A generic recommendation of a command section, three ten-man squads, and optional vehicles and a "special" squad is provided.) Clearly players are expected to add flavor themselves. Gradations of experience help here. Royalist regulars would be better trained, while the socialists of Manchester would be poorly equipped but have greater swings in morale.

The rules themselves are not that complex, but there are a lot of variables to keep track of. This is part and parcel of having a Spanish-Civil-War-esque feel, where the training, equipment and origin of troops must widely vary. Vehicles are the same way, as they can be commandeered civilian, hastily-militarized, or proper armoured cars and tanks (in varying types and with varying armament). Thankfully the damage chart is the same for all, albeit with modified rolls for different types. For less than 25 pages, this is pretty packed. I will need a Quick Reference Sheet, for sure.

The only portion that contains the atmosphere of the "period" in play is a list of Random Event cards on the back cover. Suggestions like "Bike has a flat tyre or phone lines cut - one unit out of communications", "Nice weather for ducks - a downpour reduces shooting range by 6", or "Ha ha, they forgot to fill it up - an enemy vehicle runs out of fuel and may not move." Except for the front cover and a cheerful man with colorful scarf, pipe and teacup (who seems to be the rules' mascot), the only illustrations are color photos of minis.

Overall, though, I am quite interested in the game and the theme. I think my next purchase will be the Concise Sourcebook, but it's clearly possible to play without it to begin with. I have the feeling Spanish Civil War rules can work in a pinch as well, as there is clearly that same heterogenous mix of political and religious views bouncing off each other - a little more chaotic than Spain, even.

Running ragged

Three weeks of not wanting to do anything except sleep, stare at the computer or read when I got home from work.

Two still to go.

The one good day of the last few weeks was when I received the Games Workshop "Warhammer Alliance" box. Here's the contents:

Ten base paints and a dozen starter brushes. The package didn't
come out of its box intact.

Box packed with twenty-four sprues, each with two push-fit minis.
They can also be pressed off the sprue - no clippers needed!

Card terrain, rulers and tokens. Sadly, the fold-points aren't
scored, which makes them harder to fold.

A dozen basic dice, same as the ones that come in the commercial
starter sets.

Two assembled sprues. The Marines are easy, the Necrons a 
little more spindly. I'll probably undercoat with a tan or
bone color.

A quick skirmish played through as an example.

Not pictured: Some nice laminated paint palettes, one in each magazine. The magazines make it clear these are aimed more at the under-12 crowd, but as I said, this was the ONE good day and I dunno when (or if) I'll get a chance to get something going with the kids or teens. They certainly won't be used as intended by the series of activities within, and the teens are more interested in gaming anyway. The most likely end for them is a paint-and-take I'm planning during our Summer Reading kickoff. I've also got Fort Wagner to run this month - if only I can get three hours straight and an audience!

We have talked desultorily about reinstating the weekly gaming period - maybe combining it with the board-gaming we're already doing with younger kids - but so many other things are going on I haven't had a chance to think about it. The theory is that if we run DnD every week for months on end, the early weeks will see little activity but interest and notice will grow as we keep doing it. But we need to make time for it.

One other thing I did get from work - these War of the Pacific
ship prints. The masts are too supported and unusable, so I'll have to 
find another solution.

Finally, I ordered another small batch of foam hills, which were listed delivered online but not in my mailbox or at my door. Gotta report them lost - hopefully they will have been shipped back to the maker. Urgh.

Have a happier weekend.

A Month of Reading

I've actually avoided tabletop this month. Stayed home two Saturdays that Tactical Combat was on at Das Krieg Haus because this has really been an exhausting month that I am glad is over (though I still need to finish my monthly report for work). I'm hoping to get off work February 18th for a mini-convention at the club, but it doesn't look likely. When I get home at the end of the day, I mostly just want to rest and read. So I've gone through quite a bit.

One of the games I've missed, from Sitrep Podcast:

Anyway - reading.

Mark Bowden is best known for Black Hawk Down. Hue 1968 is broader in scope but just as gripping - if you're interested in city-fighting (plenty of ideas for scenarios here) or in the Tet Offensive, check this one out. There are actually three or four other books already on the topic, but none where the author interviewed participants (civilian and military) from both sides and delved into what it was like on the ground. The smell and desperation of civilians and soldiers alike comes through in these pages. Hue was the longest and heaviest battle of Tet, because it was the only one where the initial Communist objectives were met. This is a very intense story, particularly for the Vietnamese civilians who were trapped between the Communists and American-South-Vietnamese. The Communists had lists of enemies to round up and kill (they shot thousands and even buried some alive), and were disappointed when those they left alone did not rise to support them as expected. Unfortunately, those civilians who escaped to Allied lines were crammed into badly kept refugee camps, and those who didn't were shot at by the Americans as assumed VC. We learn what it was like to smuggle weapons in and people out of the city, and what it was like to survive among the rats and rubble.

The American civilian perspective is well-represented, particularly by the press, many of whom were present and a few trapped in VC-taken territory. The "turning point" of political discourse is clearly visible here, and when Walter Cronkite turned up the writing was very much on the wall. There is also an undercurrent of American frustration that they seemed to be doing all the fighting for the South Vietnamese; an elite ARVN "tiger" unit actually stemmed the initial assault and held its own throughout the battle, but was not publicized and not in sight of the Marines who were grinding their way through Hue.

The urban combat was fatiguing. One of the interviewees was a woman VC who started out singing and looking forward to liberation, then spent several weeks hiding in trenches from bombing runs, watching friends dismembered. American and French civilians caught in the area also had harrowing stories to tell; some captured and sent North, others making it to American lines. Attacking Hue by air was at first outlawed, because it was an ancient cultural touchstone - but its own fortress construction made it a perfect defensive position, so restrictions were gradually lifted and the city was pounded into rubble.

The battle, despite actually being the largest and with the heaviest casualties of the Tet offensive (most of them civilian), was relatively small, with only a few US battalions fighting at any one time, and a mere handful of tanks and Ontos vehicles. Barring the cultural and political aspects, there is plenty of inspiration for small-scale city-fighting scenarios here. A worthy successor to Black Hawk Down.

The Vietnam Experience is a series I've always wanted to read, and Hue made me go hunting for it. Only a couple volumes were available online, so this was a taster. It is not, despite my initial impression, a Time-Life series, but by Boston Publishing Company. There is more text and fewer images - primarily photographs with a few maps and graphs. Appropriately given my most recent reading on the war, I found Nineteen Sixty-Eight. This was, of course, the watershed year, both in America's time in Vietnam and on American politics, both of which this volume spends equal time on. There are volumes specifically on North and South Vietnam, so I expect the emphasis on the "home front" is not typical. Plenty of space is given to protests, assassinations, and "flower children;" almost none to my favorite, tactics and equipment. No real gaming interest here. It's more an overview of society (in Vietnam as well as the US) as they recognized the weakness of South Vietnam. We tend to talk a lot about how Tet made the US recognize the futility of the war, but (to a greater if more general amount than Bowden's book), the South Vietnamese perspective is also shown. Its citizens increasingly lost confidence in the capacity of their government to protect them, and the NVA and VC deliberately targeted civilians to engender this.

Just as important to this period is the South Vietnamese government. There was still plenty of factionalism and corruption, despite a brutal crackdown on the latter. The initial peace negotiations are also discussed, and put into context the memetic claim that they foundered over the shape of the table. There really was difficulty over that table, because North Vietnam wanted the southern insurgency represented, while South Vietnam did not want to give the impression that it recognized that insurgency in any way. Given its political struggles, this seems entirely understandable under the circumstances!

Less enjoyable in some ways than the Time-Life Civil War series I'm also working through, mostly due to a simpler graphical style, but still a good read. I will order more of the series.

Peter C. Smith is a very prolific writer on the topic of dive-bombers, as I discovered when I looked up the Blackburn Skua. Since I discovered it in a book on WWII naval aviation in childhood, it's been one of my favorites. I'm not sure why, though it might be owing to my Anglophilia. It also appeared in a propaganda-adventure series my dad introduced me to, the adventures of Dave Dawson and Freddy Farmer, red-blooded teenagers who join the RAF. In the third volume, they serve in the Western Desert shortly after Operation Compass, and fly a Skua up against six Italian and German planes, shooting four of them down.

The Skua, sadly, turns out to have not been that impressive as a fighter plane. If any Skua crew had shot down more than one plane in a single action, it would have been prominent in this book, and the crew would have gotten Distinguished Flying Crosses. It was designed as a dual fighter/dive bomber, a bit like the better known Dauntless, but wasn't especially good at either role as a result. It wasn't a terrible interceptor, but could not in any way hold its own against genuine fighters. However, it was innovative as a dive bomber, in particular equipped with the first "swing-out" device to push the bomb away so that it didn't strike the propellor when dropped during a steep dive.

The British - particularly the air force - were very resistant to dive-bombing. Smith provides plenty of detail on the Skua's fraught gestation immediately before WWII. One problem was that the standard dive before the war was only of 45 degrees - not nearly as accurate and safe from flak as the steeper 70-75 degree dive the Skua was capable of, or the 90-degree dive true dive-bombers could make.

Smith delves deeply into engineering specifications, construction details and testing phases, as I've discovered while starting his equally comprehensive volume on the Vultee Vengeance. He writes not just about combat histories, but about the design aspects that make a dive-bomber good at its job ... or not. So I learned more than I thought possible about wing-folding, self-sealing fuel tanks, and safety equipment. The Skua, as a naval aircraft, included watertight compartments and an integral dinghy. As a carrier plane, it required folding wings and tough landing gear, but most of its combat operations were from land - it had the range to fly from Scotland to Norway, although a couple squadrons also operated from Norway itself. This is why the only extant Skuas remaining have been recovered from there - also because one of them was buried under ice for a while.

Every single combat sortie of a Skua and Roc (the turreted-fighter version of the Skua) is covered, complete with crew names and aircraft serial numbers. (X, Y, and Z flew to Narvik on this day, etc.) This builds up a comprehensive look at the ongoing routine of a combat squadron, which is interesting in itself. A couple chapters are devoted to the Skua's one real success - sinking the German light cruiser Konigsberg in harbor. Only a couple of direct hits were scored, and I was interested to learn that the worst damage was from a near miss that exploded in the water and buckled the ship's hull. The Skua, however, had a short combat life, being used only as target tugs from late 1941 on. Almost nothing is said of the Roc, like the Boulton-Paul Defiant an ineffective turret fighter that also saw primary duty as a tug.

There are copious photos and diagrams. Smith's books are much wordier and more technical than Squadron/Signal volumes - an engineer's dream but a book to make a more casual reader's eyes glaze over with specifications and statistics. Still quite good - there is plenty of operational info, and the technical detail, though complex, provides a history of development and its difficulties that you don't often get in "lighter" volumes. I enjoyed it, but admit that it is for a specialist interest. I've started reading his volume on the Vultee Vengeance, another aircraft that isn't as famous as it probably should be.

A last volume I almost forgot:

An excellent volume on the Muslim-Christian struggle for the Mediterranean, the story is packed with character and, dare I say, adventure. Starting in 1520 with the siege of Rhodes that drove the Knights of St. John to Malta, and ending with the tremendous clash of galleys at Lepanto, the tale is tensely told. Slavery was, for both sides, both a means and a purpose of battle, but religion - vicious in its hatreds - played the greatest role. Here are the emperors Philip and Suleiman, the pirate Barbarossa, the admirals Don Juan and Andrea Doria, and Pope Pius V. For them, the Mediterranean was just that, the center of the world, where if it could be taken all roads of conquest were open. It's illustrated with period etchings, vistas and maps. There is plenty of inspiration for a gamer here - it makes me want to break out the galleys and fortifications. Especially at Malta, there is scope for ambushes, betrayals and forlorn hopes. I did learn that Lepanto was not actually all that decisive - it was not quite a disaster for the Turkish fleet. There are many points, both there and at Malta, where chance (or perhaps the will of God) changed the fate of many, or, as the author would have it, the fate of Christian Europe. Highly recommended.

Finally, I received the Games Workshop "Warhammer Alliance" school/library kit. I hope to try building some of the figures tomorrow with the teens at work; will post pictures if I do. Happy February.