#211 – Compendium of Weapons Armor and Castles

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Today we're talking about a book that. we've been wanting to talk about, I think, for some time, at least since we had Matt on, Matt Ballant, when we chatted with him at WagonCon of last year. Matt Ballant, you folks might remember, is the author-designer of the Valley of the Pharaohs game. But he's also— his claim to fame, I guess you would say, or his major contribution to Palladium was helping kickstart it way back at the very beginning with the various compendiums of weapons. The ultimate collection of which, in my opinion, the one that you must get if you can only get one, would be the Big Blue Book, the Compendium of Weapons, Armor, and Castles by Matthew Balland.

Yes, when this came out, it was a bunch of individual little tiny handouts, splats. Today we call them splat books, you know, 50 pages, 60 pages. Kevin, when we've talked to him about it, he wasn't sure if they would sell and he sold out of them like at the first Connect convention in like an hour or two. And everyone was clamoring to find more of them. And the original ones were like a step above mimeofaxed stapled together handouts. And so I have a couple of the second or third printings. This compendium crams in information that I wish I would have had when it originally came out, because I didn't know about this book when it originally came out.

Mm-hmm.

At the time, of course, I was an AD&D fan. The content that was in this book for the price that this book was when it came out blew away 3 or 4 books that AD&D came out with. And it was much better. I just much better quality all over.

So I had this book, not this particular one, unfortunately, because I lost the vast majority of my Palladium books in a move cross-country. Back in 2005, so I had to reacquire this book. But the version I have is second printing here from 1991, and I want to say that the version that I had before that move was also a second printing from 1991 because I had this book pretty much hand in hand with the Palladium Fantasy RPG First Edition. Like these, the core rules book. And the Companion of Weapons, Armor, and Castles were the foundation of so many games that I ran. Like, we, you know, everybody talks about how, like, you know, the best weapon in the first book is the flamberge because it does 3d6 damage and stuff. We didn't limit ourselves to those. We had an entire world worth of weapons here from cultures throughout history. Really cool shit. Like, The lantern shield, just, you know, for one, one cool thing here, or the triple dagger. You know, all of this cool stuff to, you know, as Palladium says, unleash your imagination. Well, in this case, it's all pretty unleashed with great pictures and awesome collections of stats.

These pictures, most of them done by Kevin Long, it looks like.

I would well depends on what we're talking here. I think a lot of the weapons I think are Kevin Sambita.

Oh really?

Okay.

And Matt Ballant himself. What does it say? Weapon art by Dirk Johnston, Aubrey Bradford, Kevin Sambita, and Matthew Ballant.

Oh, I'm thinking it's the the castle items and the COVID were done by Kevin Long. A lot of them were done, and armor was done by Kevin Long, and it feels like Kevin Long.

Oh oh yeah, the COVID Yeah. Okay. Let's step back a bit here. So this is a book of weapons, armor, and castles, and it's basically divided into 3 sections. We start with the weapons and we get— okay, let's look at this. How many pages we got? We got 85 pages of weapons, and these are 85 pages crammed with pictures and stats, historical information, stuff about Egypt, stuff about different periods of time, every information that you might want.

Yeah.

about what Palladium calls ancient weapons, you can find in this book, in these 85 pages, just full of information. Good stuff. And this doesn't have much Long stuff in it. This, I think, is mostly, yeah, Dirk, Aubrey, Kevin, and Matthew.

Okay. It's the armor. You start getting into the armor and it feels very Kevin Long. The armor shots and the pictures of the body, which again, what timeframe would you like to play in?

Yeah.

Uh, you have, you know, medieval, you have Greek, you have Egyptian, Hittite, you have, uh, I think there's even some, uh, some, some Japanese influence in here.

Oh yeah.

Uh, you know, do you want to play in the Crusades? Do you want to play in, you know, Middle Ages? Do you want to like, where do you want to play? How much armor do you want? It's really intense. The one thing that I really like in here is there's no studded leather, really, which is the one kind of made-up armor in some ways that D&D has always had. And it's brigandine.

There's a couple. I think what D&D calls scale mail never actually existed. What scale mail— sorry, studded leather, I think, is what we would— what this book would call like brigandine.

Yes, that's what it is. It'd be brigandine. But the pictures that you see in D&D, that's actually an armor that's in D&D only. It doesn't— it wasn't— Like the leather with big chunks of metal that show up. You know, you're like—

Full body biker jacket.

Yeah, the full body biker jacket with studs, right? And you're looking at it now. What's great— small, small diatribe— that showed up in fantasy because of D&D, and it looks really good in film. It looks impressive. It's useless, but it looks impressive. Now, brigandine, you know, that's real armor. That's a sheet of metal, little plates underneath leather and underneath a really good Wool-reinforced suit of armor, right?

Well, or— or— so there's a couple things going on there. First of all, you have the jack, which was actually a really common armor for, like, you're better than a peasant levy, but not good as anything else, which was metal plates connected at the corners to each other, sewn between 2 pieces of leather, and made into a jacket.

Yeah.

And then you have scale mail, which did not really exist as shown in most supplements in Europe, but did exist relatively close in India and what used to be that section of the Spice Road. It was cheap iron. There's actually some versions that showed up in China. But so, so it's one of those things where You're trying to group families of armor that grew up independently through different cultures.

That you wouldn't have seen in the same battle probably at all. Right, right.

But it's like people talk about lamellar, and my first question is, are we talking about Roman lamellar, which was used for a very, very brief period because it was too expensive to manufacture?

Yep.

North African lamellar, which was how it had very little metal in it, or are we talking about Japanese metal armor, lamellar, Korean lamellar? Right.

The concept was used in multiple places with different materials. But the one that everyone thinks of is Roman laminar armor. And you're like, ah, which it was cool, but expensive.

It was cool. It was worked incredibly well, but had very short lifetime on in deployment because it was too fucking expensive to make.

So anyway, there are certain words that have just come up that in my 3+ decades of gaming, especially with Palladium, certain words I've heard in use talking about armor. And every single time I've heard these words, it has been in the context of or surrounding a conversation about this book.

Yeah.

And those words are Jazzeraint, Lamellar, Cuirbouilli. These words that, you know, armor people are probably pretty used to, but I'm not an armorsmith. I am a gamer, but it is fascinating that of all mainstream gaming, Dungeons and Dragons related kind of stuff and whatever, but these words never come up again.

No.

You don't see these, these more historical descriptions of how armor is made anywhere else except in like those particular games that cater to a very niche Very hardcore or simulationist kind of player.

And that's, and that's mostly to do to Matt Ballance's detail on the armor and really detailing it out and going, hey, use this in your game. This is way more descriptive of what's going on and gives you a whole period of time to play with, like hundreds of years, thousands of years.

But the only other time you're going to run into these terms is if you get really involved with the Society of Creative Anachronism or get into medieval combat sports, which, I mean, if you want to, If you want to like watch a bunch of people just go absolutely out of their minds, introduce a bunch of Palladium players to a bunch of medieval combat sports participants and watch 2 sides who will talk right past each other because they think the other is using the same terms and they are not.

Nope. So Kevin Long, as we've stated, is a technical master. And all of these look fantastic. Some of the patterns at least look a little, he could have put a little bit of more emphasis, I guess, in musculature or the way the armor would actually sit upon somebody, but he's really damn close. Like really, really close. Like some of the woven armor especially looks fantastic. Or just like the Thracian peltast foot soldier. That's beautiful. That is just a beautiful picture. Things that most gamers who are just used to something like D&D might not picture as being a portrayal of someone in armor ready to get into a knockdown, drag-out, stab-out war.

Yeah, I have run a couple games where in order to get players in the mood, and this is gonna date me so bad, um, Xeroxing copies of images from that book and then using a high-end Xerox machine to blow the picture up and then transferring it to an overhead projector transfer so I could project it against a wall during a game so players could understand what they were going up against.

The, the detail in here in this book was something that just didn't show up before. Like, like when someone goes, oh yeah, I can don my armor real quickly. It's, it only takes me a couple of seconds to put on my suit of plate mail. You know, you're like, really? And then on 121, they go through the process of what it would take to put on your plate armor. And you're like, oh, one, you need a dude who knows how to put it on with you.

Right.

Two, it's going to take you 15, 20, 30 minutes maybe if you're really lucky to get all that on. And that's if you had your underlayers already on, right? It's— and you're not sleeping in this shit.

No, you're not.

You're not. You're not sleeping in it. It's like, I'm gonna sleep in my full plate. It's like, really?

So I have a reenactor friend who, uh, also has a— had a major and had been working on their master in medieval history. Who got a total replica half plate set of the French style. So uncommon, but what did exist was used. And he tried to sleep in it one time. He's like, first of all, it took me forever to fall asleep. Second of all, I woke up an hour later with pain in places I did not know existed.

Oh, absolutely.

And this doesn't just do European armor. No, heavy focus on European armor. But let's look at some Polish. Well, Poland, you know, it's in Europe, but let's look at some Indian armor. The Rajput armor, armored Indian warriors from 1600 to 1780. Elephant armor.

Oh yeah. Whoever thought?

As someone who has run a bunch of games set on the Indian subcontinent, I have, like, even if I'm running in a completely different system, this book is coming with me.

Aztec armor, South Pacific armor, African stuff, and his samurai armor. Samurai armor is Tsubita.

Yeah, Tsubita. And it's one of the most detailed pictures of what all the components are of your Japanese samurai armor. I mean, just look at the detail. You know, outside of this book, Unless you're pulling up like reference novels, reference books for that period, you're not going to find this. This is just one page in this book that's going, here's every different little piece in this set of— oh, well, that's just wicker armor. No, no, it's really not. It's really not. It's really not.

And then we look at page 138 talking about donning armor. Yeah, I can do this in a couple of actions.

Right, right.

In the first round of combat. No, no, no, no, no, you can't.

Now it's impressive that they're showing that you're doing it all by yourself because it's It is lighter than the plate, but it's giving you just as much protection, give or take, as steel. It's maybe not as durable, but it's going to give you just as much protection in the engagement. Which, of course, that leads you right into castles and fortifications.

Fortifications.

As someone who used to love to make up castles for D&D and just because I was weird, I so wish I would've had this book when I was much, much younger. Because it has every example of every major castle across the world, right? Like, what is that castle? Oh, well, that is the Ludlow Castle, and here's how it was used, and here's how it was designed, and this is when it was built, and this is what it was designed to defend against.

And we're not just talking maps, folks. No, no, no. We're not just talking floor plans. We're not just talking stats for durability of walls. We have detailed talks about the Construction of castles. How much things might cost a person living in this world to build a castle. What kind of efforts go into building the castle? The purposes of the castle, how the castle gets used in the day-to-day life of the people that live in and around the castle, the day-to-day life of the people that live in the castle, how you would furnish it, sanitation.

Yep.

Yep.

How many times do you find details of how bathrooms work in an RPG? Well, you need to know this because in a castle, if you're besieging it, you know, sanitation's gonna become a problem. It's these—

And an opportunity.

Yeah.

When did the— I know you're holding the compilation, but do we recall off the top of our heads when the castles individual book came out?

Not sure, but at the beginning of this book, uh, Palladium's actually been pretty good of when they do their copyrights, of having those copyrights represent printings of books that created whatever. So this, we got '81, '82, '83, '84, '85, and '89.

I opened up my legally purchased PDF of Weapons and Castles. The original copyright was '82. So it's somewhere around that period that's that I think Ballant put this together.

Oh shit. And Fantasy was '83, right? That was out first.

Yeah. Well, Kevin said that Ballant came to him with these, I think before Fantasy came out and it was, it actually gave them that initial, we call it a Kickstarter now, but it gave them the nesting that they needed to keep going.

So. I had just been introduced to Dungeons Dragons in around '82, '83. And simultaneously, the PBS series Castle, which is based on the book by David McCully, which he wrote the book in 1977.

Yeah.

The Castle by David McCully was originally aired in '82 or '83. And so it's— there was something in the water right then.

Now, okay, I said that this is more than just floor plans. Let's talk about these floor plans.

Oh, no.

Yeah.

Okay, so I jumped to 170 and 171. I have been to the Tower of London several times. I've been to Trim Castle several times. That's what they look like, right? Like, I visually had never been there. If I just looked at this, I'd go, oh, so Trim is basically just these huge monoliths all crammed together that are very big. And it was almost more of a keep than a castle. And the Tower of London was the center of British power for several hundred years, right?

Uh, yeah, at least.

And then became like basically a prison. Right.

Right. Well, I mean, even when it was a prison, it was still serving as a point of power.

Yep.

There's so many good drawings of castles. Like, no, first off, beautiful line drawings of the outside of the castle, like a scene of the castle.

These are beautiful.

But then really intricate floor plans, almost blueprints of these castles. Right. I've used so many of these. In games.

And while the, the compendium does not specifically call it out, it does give you that general feel that the reality of castles, uh, during the period they were constructed were very much like modern warships. A country is spending a relatively significant percentage of their gross domestic product to build this thing, and that's part of why it's important. Very rarely were castles vanity projects.

Yeah.

Except in Germany, and that was during the later end of the castle period.

And the detail that they talk about castle life, like you get into this and you're like, okay, here's some castle fortifications. They start reading, why were they built? How were they built? You know, what types were there? What types of things would you see in a castle? How were they used? As you were saying, how does sanitation work? Because you're dead on. Like, we're going to do a siege scenario where we're trying to go into a castle and it's like, well, it's no big deal. We're going to just blow down the walls. Are you?

Well, if you want to know what a siege looks like, start on page 214 and then 216 to 217 is a map of a fucking siege.

Yeah.

So like, this is fantastic.

It really hammers home the fact that sieges, even before or after the medieval era of fortified positions was an endurance match between the defender and the attacker.

Absolutely.

Oh no. Well, it also highlights the, the reason for the existence of the mathematics skill in the Palladium game. Yeah, because a siege, a siege is not a matter of throwing a shitload of people at a wall and hoping that you can climb over the bodies. A siege is simply What it was like 98% a mixture of mathematics and willpower, right? Yeah.

Mathematics, willpower, logistics.

Yep.

And then they start going into the, the really the downfall of castles, which was when the advent of gunpowder.

Yeah.

When guns, which, which they still hung around for a couple hundred years, but pretty quickly the massive castles, right, just wouldn't hold up.

Yeah. It's, I mean, you saw the conversion from castles to star forts, which They dabble a little bit, and I wish they had gone more because some of the most quote-unquote beautiful castles, in my opinion, are the ones that were converted over into the post-early gunpowder era. And some of the modifications they made specifically to take that into account are great, but there is some in there.

Yeah, I would love to see— Matt Ballantyne, if you're listening and you want to do something really cool, Make a book like this focused on the castle— castles, I'm sorry, on the forts of 1700s to 1800s, or 1600s to 1800s colonization.

Oh.

The French and Spanish forts in the New World.

Yeah.

All that kind of stuff. Like, I grew up in a place— I grew up in Alabama, and from my— from where I live, There were 5 different French and Spanish forts within a 1-hour drive, some, some within 10 minutes of my house that you could go and do tours of. And these were the ones that were specifically set up in that angular star pattern designed to be a little bit more effective against cannon fire and to cover like greater distances with cannons. So you didn't have the super high walls.

Instead, you had the lower walls that Yeah, I would push it back to like 1500 just because then you can get all of the wonderful versions of that that were in Florida and the Caribbean but still have the same things, including the ones that had super high walls so they could mount cannons up high to shoot over what would be sea level horizon.

Okay.

And, and so that— and Matt's exploration on that would just Matt, please.

But if you do start it, Matt, finish it before someone else has to come in and ghostwrite it for you. But, uh, because that would be years of research, I'm sure.

It really would.

Yeah.

And it'd be interesting if you, as you go further south, because the war zones were different, it was much more Portuguese versus Spanish, whereas, and the force, like Brazil has some forts from when the Portuguese controlled Brazil. They look very different because no one really attacked them for a long period of time.

If you want to see some amazing fort castles, and I do mean the word castles, look at the ones for when the Portuguese Empire's seat of power was Brazil.

Oh, that could be really interesting.

Speaking of which, you know, it's— that's an amazing period of history. They made some very interesting fortifications during that period. And because they were having to deal with 2 separate issues at once, potential internal revolution and external invasion, you had, you had structures that hearkened back to medieval castles because of, due to the limited industrialization of Brazil at the time. And you were dealing with something that looked almost more like late medieval, early interperiod, 30 Years' War-style siege warfare.

Things that didn't take into account gunpowder, but more of mass manpower charging you.

Because neither side had the industrial base present in Brazil to, you know, run a gun-primary army.

Right.

And if you are interested in guns, last 5 pages of this book go into cannons and gunfire.

Yep.

Again, it's a kind of a footnote in this huge book, but it is still good information. And what they don't do is they don't go into stat breakdowns.

No.

Talk about the history and the evolution, how it changed things, changed warfare and sieges.

The biggest stats you get are how heavy the ammo was, 6-pounder, 3-pounder, 14-pounder. And how far the ammo was considered to go. Yeah, which gives you some stuff to play with there, and then you can handwave how much damage it is or what have you.

Right. I mean, one of the realities is, is that when you get to the point where handguns are appearing, which is the earliest version of handheld firearms in Europe, in Western Europe, You, you're dealing with a weapon that was either designed for mass fire, and so it wasn't shoot that guy, it's shoot that group of guys and hope it hits, or cannons which are pointed in that general direction and every— and something on the other end is either destroyed or somebody on the other end, usually multiple somebodies, is dead. You know, it's—

It got me thinking, like, I don't know if Matt could do this. He might, maybe. I know he was really big into Egypt and he seems to know something about Japan in this book. We haven't really talked about it with him, mainly the whole, you know, we did some gaming with them and a lot of heavy focus on Egypt, but I'm just going to assume that he might have some additional knowledge of Mongolia. I would love to see something like this, but dedicated to nomadic warfare where the castle isn't stationary, where the fortifications are mobile fortifications, where your empire is in motion.

Right.

And you make use of things like what they used to call, I guess, hand cannon. This isn't, you know, simply a stick that they could drop a firework down and fire that off.

Right.

Those kind of things that the Mongolians, I believe, really pioneered.

The portable fortified yurt.

Firestorm? No, fire stick?

There was several versions because like they had the—

Fire lance.

They had the fire lance, and then there was the ones they had prepped to invade Japan and had already used on Korea, which were giant slings filled with what amounts to a gigantic hand grenade. There were a whole bunch of ideas that the Mongols basically, oh, China, you have some great technology. Let's figure out how to make it just absolutely terrifying.

Yeah.

Um, and like fortified yurts, true composite bows, uh, all of that stuff.

Like, oh, horse cavalry. And then cavalry archers.

Yeah. And I would love to see light cavalry archers with, with a bunch of detail and some of their tactics.

Light cavalry archers running around with bows that, uh, could penetrate almost as well as an English longbow?

Some indicate better. Some indications better.

I will say, as a side note, Palladium unfortunately gets shortbows and longbows wrong. Palladium, I get it, they want to kind of jerk off over how cool the English longbow is, but the longbow is not superior to the shortbow in every single way. The shortbow exists for a reason.

A reason.

The short—

they give the long— the longbow fire quicker. They make it more accurate. And I'm like, no, actually, the whole purpose of a shortbow is that it's a shorter range. It's significantly more accurate. Doesn't have as much penetration power, but you can just fling, fling, fling, fling, fling, especially if you are a trained Japanese or Mongolian horseback warrior.

I will put a thing— a point out for, uh, in defense of Palladium on this. In the '70s, we were just starting a renaissance in looking at ancient weaponry— or sorry, I'll say early historical weaponry across the world. And we were cribbing notes from how penetration and rate of fire worked. from the, all the existing and established firearms industry. And there's a whole bunch of studies from the middle '60s through the late '70s and into the '80s that, using methodology that we have since realized was absolutely wrong—

Yeah.

—showed that the English longbow Could be fired faster, did penetrate better than a lot of things. And so they were working with what the experts were providing. So I give companies a pass on that.

However, you have to look back at those experts. You're like, yeah, all of this is true in a clinical trial in a lab.

Right, right. Or using—

But what about in a fucking war?

Well, yes. The importance of Being earnest? Well, not even being earnest, but like—

Sorry, I couldn't help. I had— yep.

The, the, one of the realities for armor is it wasn't until really the early '90s that everybody realized that how important the arming coat, which was the padded coat that people wore underneath their armor, were for penetration resistance and all of that. They thought, and part of it was from writings from the period, that people wore them mostly for comfort. The penetration of a plate of French cavalier long armor— sorry, French cavalier plate armor is worlds different when they have the woolen padded underarmor on it than when you're just shooting at a plate.

Oh, absolutely.

And so there's, it's one of those things where we evolved the science and we've reconsidered things, but it takes a while for that to populate back, especially in underfunded, under well-researched areas like medieval weaponry. It's, it is what it is.

One thing that this book did for me as a young gamer, I remember in my early days of gaming, reading in this book, Specifically the stuff about armor and armor assistance and the stuff about sieges and the roles that people played in sieges. I've had multiple character concepts that were spawned from ideas that were planted in my brain that took seed and grew. I'm going to play a character who's not the knight, but the squire.

Mm-hmm.

Now the squire being one of the actual character classes in Palladium Fantasy 1st Edition. But something like a squire, I am the reloader. That's, that's my character. I am not the longbowman. I'm the guy who reloads the longbowman's quiver.

Right.

I have a soldier that I'm attached to, that he and I were in the army together, and all I did was stuff arrows out there for him to use. That's my character concept. Or I am the person who reloads the rifle for the soldier, right? Or, or one of his 5 rifles that we cycle through as he's doing it. And then I've lost my soldier. Yep. That's my character. I've played so many of that and it was all put in my brain because of concepts that young me would have never considered were it not for this book.

One of the games I really enjoyed because I got to play it with people who were big, as big historical nuts as I am, was playing a group of characters that were the squires of a knight who died.

Right.

And right at the, like their entire, the entire first adventure was watching their lord go down. And because the reality was you had more than one squire unless you were a really Low on the totem pole lord.

You were like a race car. Yeah, you had a team.

You had a team. Yeah, I mean, especially in the French context because they did things far more complicated.

Yeah, well, and if you were, you were that really poor knight, your squire was probably your brother or your son or maybe a cousin or nephew. Like, it could have been someone that you really knew was a family member, and so them watching you die, yeah, And then they're like, oh.

Or it could have actually been your dad or your uncle.

Right.

Probably someone older who was putting a lot of investment into you succeeding.

Right.

So I once read a translated account, and I cannot speak to the accuracy of translation, but it seemed relatively solid, of a French chevalier who was— one of the sections was him writing on preparing for battle. and he's literally talking about his elderly uncle, his nephew, his wife's sister's son, and the 3 of them preparing him for battle, because there's no way you could do it for himself. And he's remember— he's also talking about how 2 of them would be sitting on the edge of the battlefield in case he got dehorsed, because he could stand up on his own, but not quickly.

Mm-hmm.

During that period, which was the late medieval period, a lot of that super heavy plate armor was so you could have a shot, and only a shot, at surviving a lance impact.

Yeah, I know. I think for the most part that armor was only used in tournaments.

I believe.

Lances just weren't a thing outside of—

And the armor we're talking about is the Maximilian plate armor-like stuff on page 125.

Which is in this book, and it's a great picture.

It looks painful, though.

Yeah. Lances were indeed used in warfare, but it was a calculated break out the lances.

Right.

Everybody get on your destrier warhorse, mass up, and at this particular point in time, do a massive cavalry charge to break that line. It was—

Yeah, frequently it wasn't cavalry against cavalry. No, no, no, no. It was cavalry against ground troops.

Right. And if the ground troops didn't have pike, they were, they were shish kebabs, right? They were done.

Right. You had basically, you were overwhelming them with 2 weapons, a stabby thing and a smashy thing in the form of— oh, or smashy things and a stabby thing.

A stabby thing to hopefully that the stompy thing would make it through the line. Right.

I, if I remember reading accounts correctly, more people were unhorsed by their own lances Oh yeah, happened all the time. Yeah, than they were by anybody pulling them down. Like, I mean, they would pull the lance and they would either aim too low or whatever, and they would hit something and it would just— and they would not let go or something, and it would knock them off.

Yep, absolutely. It was a reality of combat. And it— the, the issue was the lance was an intermediate stage of the cavalry charge, which really developed in with lighter horses using spears, still couched under the arm for maximum impact, and then evolved into the lance, and then into the more modern cavalry charge, which existed all the way up and into World War I.

Yeah. Oh yeah.

The Poles, the Poles had the best mounted cavalry in the world at the beginning of World War I.

Right. And they were mixing— they were using a mixture of the Polish saber, which I'm not going to attempt to insult them by pronouncing the name of, and spears.

And now I think 2 months into World War I, they didn't have a mounted cavalry anymore because they ran into machine guns.

Yeah.

Yeah. But well, so this is a great conversation and I want to continue it, But we've veered way off course here. So I will close with a note. Folks, if you don't really have time to go out and get books and read them, aside from this one, which you should, you need to get it, it's great. But if you don't have time, but you want to absorb some of this and you want to learn things about battlefields and warfare and sieges that have happened in our history, there is a service you can find either.

Yeah.

through your local public library, or I think some regions Amazon includes it, maybe Hulu. Anyway, it's called The Great Courses.

Mm-hmm.

And you can find it on Kanopy. You can find it on its own site. I think you can even get some of it through like Hoopla. There's multiple ways to get The Great Courses for free. You just gotta look out there. It changes every now and then with licensing and whatnot. However, In the Great Courses is a series. There's 2 series. Might not remember the exact names, but they're both done by the same professor. One of them are the Greatest Military Blunders of History, and the other one is the Battles That Changed the World. And those 2 together, and a few of them are the same. This massive fuck-up failed so disastrously that it changed warfare forever kind of stuff. Check them out. They are highly entertaining and highly educational. If you ever want to wonder, how did the phalanx come to be? Why did the phalanx fail? And things like that.

And an add-on that to help drive more sales for Palladium. If you have that friend of your— in your life who's that weird history person who's really into history but doesn't game, gift them a copy of this book. Yeah, it's a gateway drug from hell.

And even if they don't game with it, it has so much historical bits and pieces and descriptions you can't find in other— you'd probably have 5 or 6 other reference books to equal what's in this book.

Absolutely. Yeah. But, but it's a good gateway drug.

It's also, we keep talking about this because it's a Palladium book. This is a system agnostic book. Yes. It is geared in a way towards the d20-based, the 3d6/1d20-based games of that era of the '80s. But this is versatile. It does things in, it grades things in stages. Like if you look at a weapon description, it doesn't tell you damage. It gives a number that was— is sort of based on a scale that you can then take and compare to how your game does that kind of stuff. This is a system agnostic, versatile supplement that you can use regardless of what role-playing game you're playing.

Figure out what your game does as a dagger, match it up with dagger that best matches from the compendium and you have how to convert it from their scale to your game.

That's exactly how to do it. Final thoughts on this book, folks.

It's a must-have, period. If you do fantasy gaming or historical gaming or gaming like, like the number of times I've grabbed this for Call of Cthulhu, a game that's set in 1920 or later generally, It's, it's a mandate.

Absolutely. I wish I would have had it when I was much, much younger because it would have saved— well, it would have saved me a hell of a lot of money because it was way cheaper than anything else on the market. And 2, it had all the different weird weapons. I want something totally crazy, it's in here, and it— and I can translate it to pretty much any system I want.

Oh, by the way, you'll actually learn what the proper definition of a longsword is.

Yes. Yeah. Well, okay, so we're talking about cost. In 1991, when this printing came out, this book was $19.95. It's paperback. It is 224 pages packed full of information. Now, I would say that in 1991, that's about mid-range. We're starting to get into the $30s for some of the game manuals. This is a good one. This is worth it. This is as much as core game books were going for around then, it's necessary.

In 1991, the number of D&D players who only played D&D but owned this book was not inconsiderable.

Yeah, it now goes for about $25. So it's scaled up price-wise just fine. $25.

It beat inflation.

Yeah. If you order it from the Palladium website, You can even get it signed. Yep. You might even be able to get it at some point signed by Matt Ballant. He's still kicking. He hangs out on our Discord server, folks. Drop in and say hello. We'd love to see you there.

Yeah, give that love to Matt Ballant as one of the luminaries that gave us Palladium today. Uh, take every opportunity to give him a shout out.

And while you're doing that, buy a copy of Valley of the Pharaohs. Anniversary Edition is a fantastic game. You won't regret it. I'll see you on the Discord server, folks.

Starships, magic, mystic martial arts, romance. All of these can be found in A Cloak of Blades by Isaac Sher. You might've heard my name before. I've done a lot of voiceover work for Breakfast Puppies. And I've recently released my first novel. It's available on Amazon as an ebook and paperback. And you can get it for free if you have a Kindle Unlimited subscription. I do hope you'll support my work as you're supporting Breakfast Puppies. And it's been a pleasure talking with you today.

Have a good one! You've been listening to the Glitter Boys, a Palladium Books fan podcast. Glitter Boys, Rifts, the Megaverse, and all other such topics are the property of Kevin Sambita and Palladium Books. Please buy all their stuff and help keep them in print and making more games. You can order directly directly at palladiumbooks.com, and their entire catalog is available digitally at DriveThruRPG as well. Our opening music is 8-Bit Bass and Lead by Furbyguy from freesound.org. This closing music is Caravana by Philip Gross, available at freemusicarchive.org. All sound effects used are self-made or acquired via Creative Commons Zero license. If you like what you have heard, find us on Twitter and Facebook as The Glitter Boys. That's B-O-I-S. And check us out online at breakfastpuppies.com/glitterboys. And also join us on the Breakfast Puppies Network Discord at breakfastpuppies.com/discord. And if you want to help us out, please spread the word and help us build a community. Thanks again for listening. We'll catch you next time.