Pyramid Review
Eric Flint's 1632 Resource Guide & Role Playing Game
Published by Battlefield Press Inc.
Written by Jonathon M. Thompson
Cover by Brent Chumley
Illustrated by Richard A. Spake
Cartography by Cheryl Daetwyler & Anna Dobritt
212-page B&W softcover; $34.95
Eric Flint's 1632 and its sequels (co-authored with David Weber) have proved to be popular tales of an alternate history that in their way are a variant of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. They open in the year 2000 in the West Virginia town of Grantville, which suffers an inexplicable calamity that came to be known as the "Ring of Fire." An exact spherical area centering on the town is transposed in time and space with a location in the Northern Germany of 1630. The 3,000 inhabitants of the town find themselves in the midst of the Thirty Years War, the conflict that ravaged a Europe split by religious differences. On the one side is the Catholic Holy Roman Empire while the leading proponent of Protestantism is Gustav II Adolph, King of Sweden.
Fortunately the townsfolk of Grantville have some advantages in terms of technology and knowledge, equipment, and of course, an enlightened, modern attitude. Thus, led by members of the local chapter UMWA, the United Mine Workers of America, is enough of a basis for Grantville to not only survive and protect itself, but also go on to adapt itself to its newfound circumstances, forging alliances and establishing the new United States of America. All of this is detailed in . . .
This article originally appeared in the second volume of Pyramid. See the current Pyramid website for more information.
Article publication date: January 27, 2006
Copyright © 2006 by Steve Jackson Games. All rights reserved. Pyramid subscribers are permitted to read this article online, or download it and print out a single hardcopy for personal use. Copying this text to any other online system or BBS, or making more than one hardcopy, is strictly prohibited. So please don't. And if you encounter copies of this article elsewhere on the web, please report it to webmaster@sjgames.com.