2024/01/25

OSR: The Treasure Overhaul (?)

Some people have asked for a "Monster Overhaul but for treasure and spells." Here's a very early six-page draft attempt at compressing a lot of classic D&D items into an immediately usable format.

1. Magic Weapons
2. Magic Armour
3. Potions
4. Tools
5. Transport
6. Helms

PDF

Design Challenges

Organization

The plan for the Monster Overhaul eventually crystallized into 20 themed chapters of 10 monsters, an introduction, and indexes.

With magic items, the themes are more clear, but also less interesting. The draft PDF has six sections. The plan is to add themed section, such as:

  • Holy Items (holy avenger, holy symbols, icons...)
  • Wizardly Items (hats, orbs, staffs...)
  • Roguish Tricks (skeleton key, disguise kits...)
  • Elf, Dwarf, Gnome, Fey, Elemental, Dragonic, etc. Items (Boots/cloaks of elvenkind...)
  • Magitech / Sci-Fi (blasters, laser swords...)
  • Horror
  • Aquatic (harpoons...)
  • Mundane treasure (artwork, furniture, gems...)
  • Intelligent Items (talking swords, magic mirrors...)
  • Artifacts

I would also like to expand the current sections with "weird" followup tables. The current pages cover basic, standard, in-common-use items, but the real fun (for me) is weird items with highly situational uses. The compressed Magic Weapon page in the draft PDF could be followed by 1d100 (or more) specific magic weapons. They'll probably be less useful than +2 lightning greatsword, but that's part of the fun. 

This is why some sections repeat the Element d8 table; in the final project, they'll be separated by multiple pages from the next Element d8 table.

Duplicated Effort

The Monster Overhaul has a lot of items in it, and they're placed in a useful context. So does Magical Industrial Revolution, articles on this blog, and the rest of the internet. A book of magic items needs to rely on utility, density, and editorial choice to stand out.

Layers of Flavour

The monster entries in The Monster Overhaul follow a consistent pattern. Think of them as the sponge of the sponge cake. The generic locations are the icing or custard. The really weird tools, like Generic Life Cycle chart, are little bits of flavourful fruit. This isn't the best metaphor, but it will do.

With a book of items, there's a very real risk that the entire book is sponge, an endless series of unremarkable tables. Items do not have agency. They don't want anything.

(Well, intelligent swords might want things, but that's an edge case.)

Signposts

The chapter title pages of the Monster Overhaul serve as landmarks. They break up the text into manageable and navigable chunks. With a book of treasure, the chapters feel either too long (all magic items, all spells) or too short (magic weapons, potions, etc.). This might be alleviated as the project continues.

Readers should be directed to important information on a page. The trouble with tables is that they can blend together. A crucial table that should be used frequently looks, at a glance, like a table that's just for specific situations or optional flavour. In a book of tables, how do you maintain at-table utility while still providing high density?

Power Level

With I like to divide non-weapon and non-armour items into two categories:

1. An item a PC will use all the time, in all situations.

E.g. a Belt of Giant Strength. If a PC gets a Belt of Giant Strength, and it improves their Strength, there's no reason to ever take it off. It's pure enhancement.

2. An item a PC will use situationally. Ideally, in situations not envisioned by the designer.

E.g. a Portable Hole. It might allow for some cool and unexpected solutions to a problem, but it can't assist with every problem.

This is why classic items like a Belt of Giant Strength and Gauntlets of Ogre Power don't appear on these treasure tables. They will appear somewhere, but I'd like to place them with items that enhance a PC in equally permanent most-situations zero-downside ways. Some items from the Tools section might make their way to this proposed section eventually.

Description and Variants

Magic items should feel special. They should have an aura of mystery and wonder about them. This can be difficult to evoke in a game about small integer math and dying in a hole for treasure.

I also want to balance utility with density. Yes, I could make a full-page magic armour description with dozens of adjective prompts and historical references, but is that actually helpful?

Useful Articles

 

2024/01/05

OSR: Clerics of Pegāna

Here are some spells for Lord Dunsany's Gods of Pegāna (1905). If you need a ready-made public domain pantheon for your games and you don't want the standard Law vs. Chaos dualism of Anderson and Tolkien. It was a fun writing exercise, even if I chose to stick with the unfortunately gendered language of the original text.

 

The Testament of the Prophet Zoz

In the Temple in Aradec of All the gods save One, the High Priests of all the lands came to dispute and examine the matters of the gods. And a great debate arose touching on the games of the gods. Some said the gods play their games with dice, and some say they play their games with cards, and some said they use neither dice nor cards but only words and deeds. 

And the Prophet Zoz, who was the least of all the prophets, said that the gods play their games with dice, but rolled them only for the pleasing sound they make.

That night did the Prophet Zoz dream of a world where the gods attended to the prayers of men, and walked the Earth, and where the rattling of the dice of the gods could be heard on cold and still nights. Benisons and curses fell like rain upon the people, and they cried out: "Would that the gods did not attend to our prayers!"

When Zoz awoke, he wrote of this world, and would rebuke those who complained that the gods heeded not their prayers, saying: "Such a world have I seen in a dream, and it was not a pleasing world, for the prayers of men are foolish. Praise the gods, for they play their games in secret."

This is the testament of the Prophet Zoz, the least of all the prophets.

Raphael Lacoste

The Clerics of the Gods of Pegāna

Priests attend to the temples of the gods, but Clerics go among the people and do the will of the gods. One man may be a Cleric of Kib and a Cleric of Sish and a Cleric of Mung, if he thinketh he may please Kib and Sish and Mung and all other gods besides. For if he displeaseth the gods, they will set their faces against him, and his prayers shall go unheeded, and his hopes shall turn to ash.

These are the Workings of the Clerics of Kib

Kib, Sender of Life in all the Worlds

Best-loved of Clerics are the Clerics of Kib. They cut not their hair, nor their nails, nor wash, and yet they are welcome in every home. The aspect of the beast is evident in them.

The touch of a Cleric of Kib healeth the sick and restoreth life to the dying, if it be the will of Kib.

Kib may awaken the mind of a beast, likening it to the mind of a Man, so that the Cleric of Kib may converse with it or command it in the name of Kib. And thereafter the beast may again be a beast, or it may be a Man, if such is the will of Kib.

Kib, who made all beasts, may make another beast to answer the prayers of a Cleric of Kib, but whether it be a sheep or a bird or a serpent of the deep is according to the will of Kib.

The Cleric may look at a stick and say: “This is like unto a serpent,” and behold, Kib maketh the Sign of Kib, and the stick is a serpent. Or the Cleric may: “This stone is like unto a tortoise,” and behold, it is a tortoise. But the Cleric may not gaze upon a statue and say: “This is like unto a Man,” for Kib, who made Man, liketh not the presumption of sculptors, and will surely abandon his Cleric.

And the Cleric of Kib may speak all the tongues of men, for Kib was the first broke the Silence of Pegāna.

These are the Workings of the Clerics of Sish

Sish, the Destroyer of Hours.

The Clerics of Sish are aged before their years, and wear rent garments or ashen rags, for the breath of Time is upon them, and the teeth of Time pass near their flesh. And they are burdened by sad knowledge of days long past, or strange thoughts of days to come.

The Cleric of Sish may petition Sish to hold back Time, which is the hound of Sish, from harrying a beast or a stone or any other thing, and, if Sish wills it, the thing may stand untouched, while all around falls to ruin. And a thing untouched by Time may not move or speak or think or do any other thing, but may only be, and remain so until Sish lets loose his hound once more.

Sish may also let Time fall upon a thing with ravenous hunger and unconstrained strength. And a thousand, ten thousand, ten million years may fall upon the object of the wrath of Sish.

And Sish may turn his head to the right, and then the Cleric of Sish may walk as swiftly as an arrow. And Sish may turn his head to the left, and then the Cleric of Sish may walk as slowly as a tortoise or fall as a gentle leaf. But Sish easily tires of such prayers.

Secrets hath Sish, but not Desires, for these are the domain of Yoharneth-Lahai, and not Causes, for these are the domain of Dorozhand.

Slid - Sidney Sime

These are the Workings of the Clerics of Slid

Slid, Whose Soul is by the Sea

The Clerics of Slid are fickle and restless, for the Song of Slid resounds in their ears and dances through their limbs. They find no rest in Slid, for the moods of Slid are felt in his Clerics, and Slid is never still. They that go down to the sea in ships offer gifts to the Clerics of Slid.

The chill of the deep is in the hands of the Clerics of Slid, and the warmth of the gentle sand. 

Slid may turn his Cleric to sea-foam and water for a time, so his will may be carried into dark and secret places. Or he may raise his Cleric on a column of spray, or preserve him from drowning, if that be the will of Slid.

And should the Cleric sing the Song of Slid, just as rivers and streams sing, it may pleaseth Slid, and beasts and men who hear the song may dance in joy, as waves dance upon the shore.

Slid may command the waters of the sea and the courses of rivers, calling them or forestalling them. Slid may call a spring from the rock and watereth the hills with his blessings.

Mung - Sidney Sime

These are the Workings of the Clerics of Mung

Mung, Lord of All Deaths between Pegāna and the Rim

Mung walketh behind the Clerics of Mung, and his hand resteth upon them. It is an awful thing to know the presence of Mung. For men forget that one day they shall meet with Mung, but the Clerics of Mung know this to be true always, and neither sleep nor drunkenness nor age will remove the dread of Mung from their hearts. Thus, whatsoever garment a Cleric of Mung dons, and whatsoever their practices, the knowledge and dread of Mung is plain upon their features.

Beasts and men mark the approach of a Cleric of Mung and know that Mung walketh behind, and know Fear in their hearts, and Terror at the Shadow of Mung. And the Fear and Terror of the Shadow of Mung maketh men blind, so that they flee heedlessly into the darkness, and may there meet with Mung.

And sometimes Mung maketh the Sign of Mung, and those before the Cleric know Death. And sometimes he maketh not the Sign of Mung. It is a hard thing, and terrible, to be a Cleric of Mung.

Yet the touch of a Cleric of Mung banishes Pain and Sorrow, for they flee when Mung appeareth. And also Pestilence, for where Mung is, Pestilence hath gone before.

It may happen that Mung maketh the Sign of Mung before a Man, and the Life of the Man goes forth among the Worlds, but the body of the Man persisteth in movement and speech, as if it were a beast. This is an abomination unto Mung.
 

There are no Workings of the Clerics of Limpang-Tung

Limpang-Tung, The God of Mirth and Melodious Minstrels

There are no Clerics of Limpang-Tung, or perhaps every minstrel is his Cleric, and every joyful heart does his will. When darkness falls upon the heart of Man, and he is troubled, the playing of the harp may sooth and refresh him.

Yoharneth-Lahai - Sidney Sime

These are the Workings of the Clerics of Yoharneth-Lahai

Yoharneth-Lahai, The God of Little Dreams and Fancies


The Clerics of Yoharneth-Lahai are full of gladness, and their rest is untroubled. Soft are their robes and soft are their feet, and soft too are their words, for sleep is the field wherein Yoharneth-Lahai sports.

The Cleric of Yoharneth-Lahai pray to direct the dreams of men, to send them pleasant repose or the Terror of the Shadow of Mung. Many secrets of the heart are known to the Clerics of Yoharneth-Lahai.

Yoharneth-Lahai may set a veil before the eyes of Man, such that they may wonder whether they dream or wake. For in the desert, the Mirage is the dwelling-place of Yoharneth-Lahai. And some men are not troubled for long, for they say “This vision is but a passing fancy.” But some men grow quiet, and wonder if they live or dream, or if aught before their eyes has substance or mere appearance.

Yoharneth-Lahai knows the desires of men, and may tell his Cleric if a man be just or unjust, wise or foolish. A lying tongue shall not avail a man before a Cleric of Yoharneth-Lahai.

A Cleric of Yoharneth-Lahai may cry “Rest!” And the Man will rest, if it be the will of Yoharneth-Lahai.

These are the Workings of the Clerics of Roon

Roon, the God of Going

Footsore are the Clerics of Roon, and strangers in any land, for they never cease to wander. Loath are they to return to a place or cross a threshold twice, save by a strange and winding road. Yet weariness is not in their limbs, nor the agony of toil, for Roon walks with them.

Before the face of Man a Cleric of Roon may cry “Go!” And, if Roon so wills it, then shall go, and walk the Earth without rest, until they meet with Mung. And some may become Clerics of Roon on this journey, for the ways of Roon are long and arduous.

Knowledge of paths and roads hath Roon, and of far-off lands and distant deeds. No lock may bar a Cleric of Roon, nor rope bind him, nor snare entrap him unless it is the will of Roon.

The winds are subject to the word of Roon, and may be called up or sent away at the will or Roon.

And the Cleric of Roon may walk upon the water as if it were land, or the air as if it were stone, should it please Roon.

These are the Workings of the Clerics of Dorozhand

Dorozhand, Whose Eyes Regard the End

All men are slaves of Dorozhand, but some are chosen for purposes known only to Dorozhand. A man may be a shepherd one day and a Cleric of Dorozhand the next, and knoweth it not.

While Yoharneth-Lahai knoweth the secret of dreams and vain ambition, Dorozhand knoweth the secrets of times yet to come and times gone before, and the causes of things. Nothing save the secrets of MĀNA-YOOD-SUSHA̅I̅ is kept from Dorozhand.

The knowledge of Dorozhand is terrible and true, and the Clerics of Dorozhand see much that they do not understand, or tremble to know. Great engines and the rustling of paper trouble the sleep of the Clerics of Dorozhand, and the Doom of Man, and the Last Fires, and the Slaying Mists, and other prophecies which the Clerics of Dorozhand keep from the ears of men lest they grow restless with foreknowledge. The fall of the dice of the gods sounds like thunder in the ears of a Cleric of Dorozhand, and they see what is writ thereon.

Dorozhand may whisper in the ear of his Cleric, saying what will happen, whether it be the outcome of a great battle or the fall of a die. Or he may withhold his knowledge, for the schemes of Dorozhand are subtle.

Dorozhand may make the Sign of Dorozhand before a man, that he may know both his beginning and his end, and all things between, and for what purpose he was made, and from whence sprang his joys and sorrows. And this knowledge crushes the Life of Man, as a millstone grinds meal. For Knowledge is the gift of Dorozhand, but never Hope.

And it may come to pass that a Cleric of Dorozhand enters a new city in a foreign land and finds a table prepared for him, and knows that it is the will of Dorozhand. For when the Prophet Ṣalmu-āru walked in the desert, he found a stick to aid him in his weariness, and he gave praise to Dorozhand, who planted the seed that became the tree that grew the branch that fell to the ground in the path of the Prophet Ṣalmu-āru. 

But when the Prophet Ṣalmu-āru fell into a pit, he did not praise Dorozhand, though Dorozhand had stirred up the men to dig for riches in that place, and set clouds before the face of the moon. And Dorozhand waxed wroth, and the Prophet Ṣalmu-āru swiftly perished.

MĀNA-YOOD-SUSHA̅I̅ - Sidney Sime

And whether there be Clerics of Hish and Jabim and Bofa and Triboogie and all the other gods save one, Zoz saw not, but he knew that there were no clerics of MĀNA-YOOD-SUSHA̅I̅.

2024/01/03

Tank Scratchbuild: Painting the Schneider FA

In the previous posts (1,2) I designed and scratchbuilt an alt-history interwar tank, the Scheider FA. Now, I've painted and weathered the tank.

I used the French WWI and Interwar Camo set of airbrush paints from Vallejo for the base colours. I marked out the camo areas with putty, put down a colour, waited for the putty to dry, then

I wanted to use a canonical Schneider scheme for this tank, but interwar French camo schemes are not consistent or well-documented. After many hours of research, I decided to go with a made-up scheme, vaguely based on a Schneider CA1 scheme from 1918.

The black crosshatches near vision slits were meant to disguise their location from enemy snipers and anti-tank rifles.


The interior of the engine bay was primed with a dark red oxide primer, while the fighting compartment started with black primer, followed by a white layer, to create a few false shadows.

The crew models fit inside perfectly. I'm glad the sculpted uniforms and helmets turned out. I need to touch up a few interior details, but I wanted to get the bulk of the tank assembled first.


Loader, commander, and gunner in the turret, driver, backup driver/radio operator, and backup loader/mechanic in the hull.

Here's how the tank compares to two other classic French interwar tanks: the Char B1 and the Renault FT.

The Char B1 was converted from the Tamiya B1 Bis kit to resemble the Char B1 101 prototype created as a partnership between Schneider and Renault. The twin machine turret seems to be a Schneider specialty, as it (or derivatives) crop up a few times in the literature. 


The conversion involved replacing the engine deck, towing hook, and turret, as well as a few minor adjustments to the hull. This article from Panzerserra was very helpful. You can see how a good modeler would tackle the project, instead of my ambitious but somewhat eccentric approach.
The turret was sculpted using apoxie sculpt over a bottle cap, then detailed with plasticard and wire.
The towing hook was built from wire, plasticard, and spare bits of photoetch brass.
The Renault FT is a superb kit from Meng. I didn't convert it at all, except to add some more stowage to the trench-crossing rail.

"What's with the crudely painted yellow stars?" I hear you ask. You thought this post was just going to be tank pictures? Wrong! Time to learn.

The European Civil War, Continued

Alternate history is a good excuse to learn about actual history, provided you start with a plausible end goal and don't take shortcuts. If you want to answer the question "Why Didn't X Happen?" you need to be able to explain "What Did Happen And Why." Since no historian has ever successfully managed this feat, you're in for a delightful exercise.

To briefly summarize this alternate history (and to avoid overloading this post with citations and quotes), the Paris Peace Conference collapses in early 1919, partially due to the sudden death of President Wilson after the kidnapping of Kaiser Wilhelm. President Marshall is unwilling to enforce Wilson's vaguely explained Fourteen Points by force, and even less willing to keep American troops in Europe. Colonel House and Secretary of State Lansing are left to salvage the Peace Conference with only their economic and logistic support cards to play.

The prospect of renewed total war, on (as the public sees it) flimsy and bloodthirsty grounds, leads to mass desertion, unrest, and rebellion. The UK tries to extract her army from the continent to fight the spectre of Communism at home and abroad (and very real uprisings in her colonies). France and Belgium attempt to garrison the Rhineland with insufficient and demoralized troops. Grasping for an unambiguous victory to offset the moral opprobrium of the blockade, the Kaiser's kidnapping, and the tragic muddle of the Conference, Lloyd George commits to "expelling the Turk from Europe," with catastrophic consequences in India, Syria, and elsewhere.

These alternate 1920s are at least as tumultuous as the real world, but with the added chaos of a divided France. Communist uprisings (including the Three Day Soviet of Paris), the militant National Front created by Marshal Pétain in the Rhineland, the battered Third Republic, and a variety of industrial/technocratic corporate states vie for control of France.

Western Europe becomes a mirror of Mexico and China, prompting John Gunther to write, with some exaggeration, that "An unbroken belt of warlordism stretches from Lisbon to Shanghai."

Yellow Socialism, Eugene Schneider II, and The War That Will End Peace

Yellow Socialism, or Syndicalisme Jaune, sought to avoid dreaded Communism, or any form of collective bargaining, by the creation of corporate-funded (and essentially domesticated) unions. The movement (if it can be called that) was created and largely funded by Eugene Schneider II. Incidentally, you may notice very different tones in the English and French Wikipedia articles on the topic.

Eugene Scheider II was also interested in empire-building. In this alt history, he makes the leap from building with capital backed by state power to building with capital backed by borrowed state power. Le Creusot and Rhône basin pay lip-service to whatever central government is currently recognized. A shadow-state, more flamboyant than most.

Total war proved to be unprofitable for everyone; almost as unprofitable as total peace. Laws capturing excess profit (and were) circumvented by investing in capital, which was not taxed. All that built-up capital in factories, machine tools, raw goods, and skilled labour would go to waste (or require costly readjustments, or be sold below its war-inflated purchase price) if the threat of war vanished completely. 

There is a limit on what the consumer will pay for a refrigerator, even if it is stuffed with features. It's a big box that makes things cold. Diminishing returns kick in. But if there is a development limit on a "kill-someone-waaaay-over-there-machine" we have yet to reach it.

The most desirable state, from the perspective of post-WW1 industrial conglomerates, seems to be peace at home (the circumscribed model factory-home, where wages pass through a worker like rented beer), a lopsided peace with major trading partners, war scares on the borders, and a few wars in unprofitable and unsympathetic parts of the world to serve as testbeds, advertisements, training, and cautionary tales. That this system, in this alt-history thought experiment, accidentally slipped into warlordism cannot be surprising.

Eugene Schneider II seemed to want to create a model community to match his ideology, like Henry Ford's Fordlandia or Pullman's Pullman. In this alt-history, he added an army to defend it.

These two hundred men, the cream of financial France, are an  amazing plutocracy. They are as snobbish as a vintage sardine or a Rue de la Paix hat. Mere wealth cannot buy its way into this  velvety inner circle. The two most flagrantly conspicuous of modern French millionaires, Coty the perfume man, Citroen the automobile manufacturer, were not members of what is customarily called merely the ‘oligarchy’. The chosen insiders combine the 6hereditary distinction of family as well as the contemporary command of wealth. They rise straight from pre-Revolutionary times; they were the upper bourgeoisie during Napoleon; they worked  together, consolidated their power under Louis Philippe and Napoleon III. The last person really ‘taken in’ by the oligarchy is supposed to have been Eugene Schneider, the steel and arms merchant, about thirty years ago.

-John Gunther, Inside Europe, 1940, pg. 167.

The root of the munitions problem is the fact that only highly industrialized countries can profitably manufacture appreciable quantities of arms. These countries sell to those less industrialized. Ninety eight per cent of the total arms exports of the world comes from ten countries; about sixty-five per cent comes from Great Britain, the United States, France, and Sweden, the four greatest exporting countries. France, typified by Schneider-Creusot, supplied in 1932 no less than 27.9 per cent of the world’s total output of arms.

Schneider-Creusot, like all great arms companies, is several things — an arms firm, a myth, a steel works, a microcosm of the munitions industry, a national institution, a nightmare to pacifists, an idol to patriots, a military necessity to more than one country, and a whale of a good business. The directors of Schneider and the other firms in the Comite des Forges which do munitions business are quite mild-mannered gentlemen. They do not seem ferocious; but their business is the invention, manufacture, and sale of implements of death.

The arms companies are as incestuous as white mice. They play together and breed. This is because they are in a signal sense noncompetitive; good business for one means good business for the others; obviously if Schneider, say, gets a big order from Country X, other companies will have a better chance of business from Country Y, which is X’s unfriendly neighbor. As soon as one country buys a new military invention, other countries must buy it also. Arms firms may underbid one another for a contract in a single state; but internationally they all stand to gain.

Extraordinarily interrelated and intertwined, the arms firms lace the whole world in their net. Schneider and Vickers were connected through Sir Basil Zaharoff, munitions salesman extraordinary. Schneider controls Skoda, the great Czechoslovak munitions firm, through a French holding company, the Union Européenne. An allied bank finances a big Hungarian bank, which provides loans for Schneider sales. The Schneider interests are believed to  control an Austrian bank also, which is interested in the chief  Austrian steel company, the Alpine Montangesellschaft. But the Alpine concern is ‘owned’ by the German Steel Trust! And through a Dusseldorff firm, Rheinmetall, Schneider is believed to be linked to Krupp.

It is, of course, an old story that arms firms maintain an extreme  political impartiality in their business. They sell to each side in  any war. They sell to friend and foe alike. Pluck a bullet out of  the heart of a British boy shot on the North-west Frontier, and like  as not you will find it of British make. Paul Faure, deputy in the  French chamber, is in possession of photographs showing representatives of Turkey and Bulgaria buying arms at Creusot before the War which during the War were used against French troops; he has also a precious picture of Eugene Schneider on a yachting party with the Ex-Kaiser Wilhelm. French munition traffickers helped arm Abdel-Krim in his Morocco campaign against the French. The Turks used British cannon to beat the British at the Dardanelles; British battleships were sunk by British mines. 

-John Gunther, Inside Europe, 1940, pp. 172-173


Management and paternalism

Whilst capitalising on technical innovations and diversifying the productions (steel, iron ships military machine guns, tanks and artillery, then electricity and civil nuclear power), each generation of Schneider contributed to extending the factories and improving the town’s urban development.

In addition to their economic achievements, the Schneiders developed Le Creusot into a model industrial community by introducing a paternalistic policy and enforcing it in all aspects of the workers daily lives: housing, education, recreation, healthcare. Their visionary, philanthropic business model was paternalistic in the sense that the Schneiders provided employees decent and affordable houses, amenities, welfare provisions and overall improved living conditions.  They shaped the town’s architecture and at the same time, ruled the economic and social life of Le Creusot. . Within a few years, they acquired a worldwide reputation and hosted many visits from customers and Heads of States from France and around the world.

Until today, Le Creusot celebrates the memory of the Schneider family, the paternalistic leadership and culture they left behind. Doted around town, a series of statues immortalize each of the iron masters, while streets and working-class districts echo their names. Boulevard Henri-Paul Schneider for example is named after a tragically lost family child, or the miners’ district called Jean and Françoise Schneider. Throughout town, you will find evocative street names that plunge us back to industrial times.

To get a deeper insight into this charismatic family of iron masters and understand the scale of their impact on Le Creusot, a visit to the Chateau de la Verrerie, their former residence, is highly recommended!
-Creusot Montceau Tourisme (accessed 2024/01/02)
The Wipers Times
aka
Tumblr Shitposts (1916 edition)
Further Reading:
  • 'European Diplomacy Between Two Wars, 1919-1939', (1972), Quadrangle.
  • 'The Secret International: Armament Firms At Work' (1932), The Union of Democratic Control.
  • Fredrick Manning, 'Her Privates We', 1930, Serpent's Tail Classics. (Which, as an aside, contains the first appearance of the phrase "fucked up" in print.)
  • Harold Nicholson, 'Peacemaking 1919', (1933), Constable.
  • Papers Relating to the Foreign Relations of the United States, The Paris Peace Conference, 1919 (1942), particularly Vol. 3.
  • Jamie Camplin, 'The Rise of the Plutocrats: Wealth and Power in Edwardian England', (1978), Constable.
  • John Gunther, 'Inside Europe', (1940), Harper & Brothers.
  • Robert Lansing, 'The Peace Negotiations', (1921), Houghton, Mifflin Co.
  • William A. Schabas, 'The Trial of the Kaiser' (2018), Oxford.
  • Samuel Kalman, 'The Extreme Right in Interwar France: The Faisceau and the Croix de Feu', (2008), Routledge.  
  • Modris Eksteins, 'Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age', (1989), Lester, & Orpen Dennys.
  • James E. Sheridan, China in Disintegration: The Republican Era in Chinese History, 1912-1949, (1975), Macmillan.
  • John Gunther, 'Inside Asia', (1939), Harper & Brothers.
  • Edward A. McCord, 'The Power of the Gun: The Emergence of Modern Chinese Warlordism' (1993), University of California Press.
  • Carol Willcox Melton, 'Between War and Peace: Woodrow Wilson and the American Expeditionary Force in Siberia, 1918-1921', (2001), Mercer University Press.

I am also working through:

And knocking billowing clouds of rust off my French in the process.