There are a lot of resources on the net that are not gaming related but still work wonderfully for games. Museums, especially are more and more getting on-line, and lots of people are writing about their favorite historical period.
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- Alien Planet Designer
- You can design your planets here and get back technical information about each one.
- Alternate Histories
- Links to alternate worlds of all kinds, from Tsarist Russia (1996) to the Brewpubs of New Amsterdam.
- Dungeon Downloads
- Download PDFs that you can print out and use to create staircases, bridges and walls. Pretty cool stuff. Helps to have a color printer and stiffer paper.
- Edict of Prices
- “When studying Ancient Rome, it is only natural to wonder what the price of everyday items might have been.” A summary of prices and wages in 301 AD Rome.
- Glossary of Castle Terms
- Very cool, it contains not only short descriptions of parts of castles such as “battlements” and “crenelation”, but it also contains photos of those castle parts from real castles.
- Hell’s Angels• (paperback)
- The Hell’s Angels scare of the mid-sixties is an example of how mainstream media reacts: if you don’t understand it, be frightened of it. Get law enforcement on it right away. Make sure there’s lots of press coverage. “Hell’s Angels” is as much a case study of the press as it is of the Hell’s Angels. (Hunter S. Thompson)
- Internet Medieval Sourcebook
- Lots of links to medieval texts and translations, organized by time period.
- Legends
- “Exploring Legends in History, Folklore, Literature, Fiction, and the Arts.” Robin Hood, the Three Musketeers, and other heroes of legend explained. Pirates and more! Wonderful site.
- Magic in Antiquity
- At the University of Michigan, on-line exhibit. This is real stuff, folks, not Players’ Handbook junk.
- Map Generator
- This is pretty impressive. Not only will it provide the village map as a PNG, but it provides a Persistence of Vision file so that you can easily add your own features, adjust the lighting and perspective, and render your own 3D map.
- Medieval Demographics Made Easy
- “Unless the kingdom is quite young, it is likely riddled with villages, a mile or two apart, covering every (farmable) inch of the countryside. Agrarian communities on the scale of the village or hamlet exist in vast networks. The only notable exception to this rule is frontier country, where isolated towns have no choice but to exist.”
- The Medieval Technology Pages
- Wildly cool listing of various technologies such as the compass, mirrors, windmills, even the wheelbarrow, and when they came into use around the world, although mostly in reference to the European middle ages. Includes drawings from the time illustrating usage.
- Poking people with a sharp stick
- “Before we can understand the development of the sword we need to understand what a sword is intended to do. Basically, when you hit someone with a sword, the intension from a physics perspective is to transfer all the energy in the sword and sword arm into the body of your opponent.”
- Ravensgard Medieval Cultural Background
- Lots of links to things like “Sex in the middle ages” and “Plague and Public Health in Renaissance Europe”. This is apparently from the perspective of a family that does medieval stuff.
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