The Compendium of Weapons, Armour & Castles.
Palladium Books.
By Mathew Balent; 1989.

Over 700 weapons, 40 types of Armour, 40 Castles with floor plans
Siege weapons, laying siege tactics and plan layout.

Soft cover, 224 pages.
Original Price $19.95

The book has hundreds of sketches and even more descriptions of almost every type of ancient weapon one might think of.
Five pages are dedicated to the knife alone and for some folks here who love to talk CLUBS; Clubs take up two pages as a type of weapon and even more clubs are sprinkled about in the weapons library as well.

Many types of amour are listed with sketches, including several for horses and one type for elephants.
For Japanese Samurai Armour (c. 1500-1700 A.D.) the book shows step by step donning instructions, with Japanese names for each piece of Armour.
(Pg. 138, see scan below)

Castles and fortifications, with plan view pencil sketches and overhead ground floor plans, some also include every floor and dungeon level plans.
Many examples of actual European Castles, both ancient and still standing.

At the end of the book, there are a few pages dedicated to gunpowder weapons, Cannon and handguns (Powder).

My inexpert review;
Where else can you find combat instructions for a Halberd?
("Meyer's School of Halberd Combat" Page 23, see scan below)
The book is very well laid out.
The format is very good.
The information is very detailed and with the sketches well understood.
The details are amazing to me (Of course I am no expert in the field of weapons, castle, and Armour)
IMO: This book would be a great boon to the games master for any RPG system dealing with the ancient subject matter in this book.
This book would be an excellent supplement to ANY fantasy or history re-enactment game.

I will place my copy right next to my AD&D and C&C Rules books, so I can show the kids what a Bagh Nakh looks like and what it can do.

Front cover scan.


Polearms, specifically on this page; Halberd.
Many other polearms (Yes, Glaives too) are shown on other pages.


How to don Japanese Armour

Normally I think of Palladium books as a cheap source of toilet paper if you don't mind the ink stains.  But this one I have kept in my collection.

Great book.  Also not all Palladium books are bad as I rather enjoyed the High Seas one (and of course TMNT RPG).

ShaneG.

Traveller wrote:The other book if I'm not mistaken was incorporated into a revised larger work on contemporary weapons

It was.  I had a copy for a while but either gave it away or sold it off.  I don't recall anymore.

It was really, erm, dry and of marginal usefulness...  Page upon page of 'systemless' stats for weapons with no real details provided about them.

The section on putting on Japanese armor comes directly from"Secrets of the Samurai: The Martial Arts of Feudal Japan" By Oscar Ratti, Adele Westbrook.  Were they given credit for it?  

Stuart

I saw some of the other illos in other historical books as well. Fair use from using historical references of sufficient age maybe?

Got a copy many years ago. Thought it was the neatest thing since sliced bread when I was trying (and failing) to write my own system. Sat unused afterwards for years. Sold it off last year.

Interesting bit: My copy had a major print error. The pages dealing with stats for the bows was missing. Not torn out, as the page numbers were sequential.