Wednesday, April 26, 2017
The [REDACTED] Gem
I'm a sucker for goo and glowing props, so this piece from Astanael is a real treat. I don't want to spoil it, but he created it for a run of Chaosium's classic "No Man's Land" WWI scenario. The "gem" itself is made from an airsoft gel target. Click through the link, or even hover over it, to find out exactly how it fits into the adventure.
For the past several months, I have been reading accounts of WWI Allied POWs, those primarily those from the Siege of Kut and their incarceration in Anatolia, although I did range wide on occasion. I won’t rattle on about my reading, but a couple standout works of interest for the casual WWI reader, reenactor, and RPG fan might want to read are below.
ReplyDeleteThis fascinating read is about some POWs incarcerated in Yozgat and their amazing plan to con their way out as spiritualists. Hill wrote this book to expose spiritualists that were preying grieving people who lost loved ones in the Great War. He fully explains his techniques to debunk the practice. It gets so weird that it seems to be fantasy or fiction, but it’s a factual book. It’s called, The Road to En-Dor (1920) by Jones & Hill. There is also a later companion book Endor Unveiled (2014), that has a number of the referenced coded postcards plus good scholarship and some period photography. Road to En-Dor can be downloaded for free at Archive.org https://archive.org/details/roadtoendor00unkngoog and at Project Gutenberg https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/51754 . Also. En-Dor Unveiled is a free ebook by Hesperus press available here http://www.hesperuspress.com/the-road-to-en-dor/download-free-ebook.htm
You might also consider reading, A Yankee in the Trenches (1918) by R. Derby Holmes. It is one of the few American narratives that was available before the war was over and tells the story truthfully. Holmes was an American served with the British army before the US got into the war and tells a pretty unvarnished story about how horrible it was in the trenches. Available for free download from Archive.org https://archive.org/details/yankeeintrenches00holm and from Project Gutenberg https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/13279
Of some more general interest is a book about early strategic bombing by the British in Handley-Page aircraft, Night Bombing with the Bedouins, which is the nickname of their unit. It contains a lot of aviation information that I hadn’t turned up before. It pretty much corroborates the cliché films about WWI aviators. Archive..com https://archive.org/details/nightbombingwith26879gut and Gutenberg https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/26879 .
As far as music goes for your scenarios, I can recommend Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings. It’s available in many variations and flavors on YouTube.