Books | The Download Munkey

Random Monday : Rogue Trader – Forsaken Bounty (Free Warhammer 40,000 Roleplay Adventure)

August 31st, 2009

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Rogue Trader is a new Warhammer 40,000 Roleplay series (essentially a pen & paper RPG) published by Fantasy Flight Games, where you play as a titluar rogue trader – a swashbuckling spacefaring explorer/merchant of the 41st millenium or as one of the specialist crew members that accompany these courageous individuals on their journeys into the unknown searching for undiscovered worlds, lost civilizations and loot in the form of ancient relics or alien xenotechnology.

Cover art by Sacha Diener

The game probably can be played solitaire but the best experience should be with 3 or 4 friends – five characters including Rogue Trader Sarvus Trask (below) are detailed in the sample adventure Forsaken Bounty which you can download as a glossy high resolution PDF for free at Fantasy Flight Games.

Arch-Militant Lorayne Thornhallow. A lovely lass who reminds me of Elizabeth Swann from Pirates of The Carribean movies

No time for pen & paper RPGs? Maybe these delightful wallpapers or the preview pages about the Explorator career path from the upcoming Core Rulebook may interest you then

If inquisitorial scenarios are your cup of tea, try the demo adventure Shattered Hoper for the Warhammer 40,000 : Dark Heresy series instead (also published by Fantasy Flight Games).

While I don’t have the patience or time to try out these Warhammer 40,000 Roleplay adventures, I do hope that Games Workshop will eventually turn some of these series into tactical turn-based computer games – I still have very fond memories of SSI’s Warhammer 40,000 : Chaos Gate, an X-COMish squad-based game where a company of Ultramarines square off against the hated Chaos Space Marines from the Word Bearers.

Download Rogue Trader : Forsaken Bounty and other assorted goodies from the official Fantasy Flight Games website. Credits go to Warhammer 40,000 blog Bell of Lost Souls for the info on this game.

MORE @ THE DOWNLOAD MUNKEY:
Warhammmer 40,000 : Dark Heresy Pen & Paper RPG
Warhammer 40,000 Wallpapers from Firebase Magazine
Favourite Illustrators of Warhammer 40,000 (IV) – Andrea Uderzo
Favourite Illustrators of Warhammer 40,000 (VI) – Kevin Chin (King Mong)
Urban War Wallpapers

Random Monday : H. G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds

August 17th, 2009

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Controlling a death-dealing Necris Darkwalker in the Unreal Tournament 3 demo (yeah, I know it’s old but I only recently got a new PC that doesn’t turn every game into a slideshow) while Steven Spielberg’s 2005 film War of The Worlds was coincidentally showing on TV a few months back led to the sudden impulse to read H.G Wells’ original sci-fi classic that inspired the movie and most probably the game too. Published some 111(!) years ago, it’s available for free download at Project Gutenberg and was also one of the first few books released there, being book number 36 out of the current total of 29689 at the time of writing. (yes, I did check )

Wallpaper from the 2005 movie adaptation. The Project Gutenberg edition of the book doesn’t come with illustrations.

Set in Victorian England more than a century ago, when airplanes were non-existent and heavy firepower meant batteries of horse-towed 12-pounders (probably the Ordnance BL 12 pounder 7 cwt), the Martians must have seemed far more terrifying and invincible to the people of that age than to the Americans in Steven Spielberg’s modern-day adaptation – the American M1 Abrams tank fires rounds of a larger caliber than the shells fired by those 12-pounders artillery.

How the Martian invasion came to an end shocked me – I always remembered that we humans eventually beat them off with sheer firepower at the cost of immense sacrifices in lives – probably got mixed up with ID4 instead

Download H. G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds.

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Exterminate the Alien Threat in Area-51
Dark Horse Comics Goodies (V) – Alien vs Predator
Dan LuVisi’s Portraits of Movie Characters & More!
UFO Aftermath vs X-COM (Early Impressions)
Explore 3000 Rooms & Kill 10000+ Monsters in Meritous

Tags: Books Movies

Art Friday : Learn to Draw for Free with Brenda Hoddinott’s Drawspace.com

May 29th, 2009

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Drawspace.com was founded by Brenda Hoddinott, author of Drawing for Dummies and The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Drawing People Illustrated and hosts free drawing lessons covering basic to advanced topics, jointly developed by Brenda herself and a team of Drawspace.com instructors.

Lesson F10 – Serene Scene under Hatching category

By registering for a free account, visitors get to view all available lessons online and learn how to draw by following the clearly illustrated (pun intended) instructions. Just don’t expect these lessons to be a miracle for obtaining impressive drawing skills Drawing, like any other skill, requires lots of constant practice to develop and perfect, but these online lessons from Drawspace.com (and plenty of time for practice) should significantly ease the journey

Lesson I8 – Tuttle Turtle under the Cartoons and Critters category

If you crave the convenience of viewing these lessons offline or printing them out for handy reference, you can opt for quarterly or lifetime subscriptions for Drawspace.com at 25 or 125 USD which allows you to download high resolution PDF versions of each lesson as well as any future additions to the regularly updated collection of lessons during your subscription period.

Start drawing at Drawspace.com today

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Fun Drawing Tools For The Masses
Artzmania – Free Arts E-Mag
Discovering More Art With 2DArtist Magazine
Create Your Own Graffiti Masterpiece with Graffiti Studio 2.0

Tags: Art Artists Books Recommended

Military Tuesday: Desider Magazine

April 21st, 2009

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desider, the monthly corporate magazine for DE & S or Defence Equipment and Support of UK’s Ministry of Defense, offers an interesting insight into the varied and increasingly high-tech support required for any modern armed forces, from the high-profile weapon and munitions research and development to more mundane but equally important services – logistics, medical and even clothing and catering.

Some of the more interesting articles from the past issues.

The Future Carrier Class in the June 2008 issue. Two ships of this class, HMS Queen Elizabeth and HMS Prince of Wales, each displacing 65,000 tons, will enter service in 2014 and 2016 and remain in service for half a century thereafter.

Bulldogs, uparmoured versions of the FV430 series of vehicles which entered service in the 1960s. See June 2008 issue.

The Banshee unmanned aerial target for live gunnery training for air defence units of the Royal Marines and Royal Artillery as featured in the July 2008 issue.

The October 2008 issue shows the Royal Logistic Corps using Virtual Battlespace 2 developed by the same guys who created Armed Assault to train military vehicle commanders, drivers and gunners on convoy operations.

The procurement of the “Golden Hour” container as seen in the Nov 2008 issue, designed to transport blood products and other temperature-sensitive medical supplies

The December 2008 issue contains an article on the Commando Logistics Regiment of the Royal Marines who organize Combat Logistical Patrols of up to 150 heavy vehicles each to provide vital supplies of food, fuel, ammunition and equipment to 3rd Commando Brigade troops in Afghanistan’s Helmand Province.

In the first two months the regiment commpleted:
• 11 Combat Logistical Patrols – through some of the toughest terrain in the world.
• Transported more than 2,000 tonnes of stock and supplies
• Covered more than 3,000 miles – mainly through desert and mountains.
• Delivered 680,000 litres of vital military fuel

Also in the same issue, >Gordon Ramsay of Hell’s Kitchen fame gives the new Defence Food Services recipe book a thumbs up

Download desider magazine.

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MINDEF Commemorative Books – Apaches, Crewcuts & Detention Barracks
Steve Mumford’s Baghdad Journal
PEO Soldier Portfolio 2009
Armada International’s Complete Guides

Tags: Add new tag Books Military

Military Tuesday : British Commemorative Booklets for World War II

April 07th, 2009

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These booklets commissioned by Great Britain’s Ministry of Defence to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the end of World War II in 2005, are the perfect introductory material for Company of Heroes players (me included ) looking to learn more about the contributions and sacrifices of the Western Allies in defeating Axis militarism across the globe.

A total of nine books are available in this freely downloadable series chronicling the events and important facts of selected World War II operations in which British or Commonwealth (Canadian, Australian, New Zealand, Indian, etc) units participated in.

1. The Battle of Kohima, North East India (4 April – 22 June 1944)
2. The Battles For Monte Cassino, Central Italy (12 January – 5 June 1944)
3. The D-Day Landings, Northern France (6 June 1944)
4. The Drive on Caen, Northern France (7 June – 9 July 1944)
5. The Final Battle for Normandy, Northern France (9 July – 30 August 1944)
6. The Advance from the Seine to Antwerp (25 August – 30 September 1944)
7. Operation Market Garden, Netherlands (17–25 September 1944)
8. The Clearing of the Scheldt Estuary and the Liberation of Walcheren (2 October – 7 November 1944)
9. The Liberation of the Death and Concentration Camps, Europe (June 1944 – May 1945)

As seen above, seven of the books detail battles fought during and after the amphibious landings at Normandy on D-Day (6 June 1944) – the other two being the battle of Kohima which halted Imperial Japanese plans to invade India and the costly fighting for Monte Cassino around the histroic monastery of St. Benedict in Italy.

As for Company of Heroes players, a suggested reading list would be booklets 3 and 5 for the American campaign (Invasion of Normandy), booklets 4 and 5 for the British campaign (Liberation of Caen) and finally booklet 7 for the Panzer Elite campaign (Operation Market Garden).

Maps and photographs are liberally sprinkled throughout each booklet for illustrative purposes. Above shows British infantry and a Churchill tank advancing through Normandy’s distinctive bocage.

At the end of each booklet, accounts detailing the actions of recipents of the Victoria Cross (the British Commenwealth’s highest award for gallantry in the face of the enemy) highlight the valour, tenacity and often self-sacrifice of these heroes who fought against all odds. The ninth booklet about the liberation of the concentration camp at Bergen-Belsen includes an corresponding section for the Special Operations Executive recipients of the George Cross.

Download these British Commemorative Booklets for World War II.

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Pobediteli : Soldiers of the Great War
MINDEF Commemorative Books – Apaches, Crewcuts & Detention Barracks
US Army Center of Military History Prints
German WWII Atlantic Wall Bunker Photobook PDF
Conquer Monte la Difensa in Devil’s Brigade Lux
Military History Books @ Focal Point Publications