Get ready for Osprey Adventures

My own role-playing campaigns are frequently set in historical periods rather than outright fantasy settings. The research is half the fun, and usually the first place I'll look is Osprey's military books, a series I started collecting as a board wargamer. In the last couple of years Osprey have woken up to the overlap between wargamers, roleplayers, history buffs and SF readers, leading them to buy up punky sci-fi imprint Angry Robot. And now they're launching a couple of new series under their Osprey Adventures imprint.

Myths and Legends (quoting from the 2013 Osprey Books catalogue now) "examines the great stories that have echoed down through time and have helped to shape our cultures. Each title in the series focuses on a specific legendary figure, such as King Arthur, or upon a collection of myths, like dragon-slayers, and presents their story in a straightforward, entertaining style. Alongside the narrative is factual information about the history behind the stories and how these legends developed and changed over time. The books also contain Osprey’s usual array of illustrative material, including specially commissioned artwork plates."

This is actually almost word for word a concept that Jamie and I came up with fifteen years ago. We called it Legendary Sourcepacks (previously discussed here) and spent the better part of a year pitching it to publishers. In hindsight we would have had more success if (a) we hadn't started with medieval Japan, (b) had waited at least a decade, and (c) approached Osprey first! But every cloud has a silver lining, and the way it turned out we don't have to write the books, we can collect them instead.

The other series that's launching Osprey Adventures is Dark Osprey. These are titles such as The Nazi Occult:

"In the dark dungeons beneath Nazi Germany, teams of occult experts delved into ancient and forbidden lore, searching for lost secrets of power. Ordered by Hitler to discover new weapons that could be unleashed on his enemies, the occultists experimented with dark magics, mystical artifacts, and creatures thought only to exist in nightmare. This book tells the complete history of the Nazi occult programs, from their foundations in Hitler’s early esoteric studies and the quests for the Ark of the Covenant, the Spear of Destiny, and the Holy Grail, through their experiments with lycanthropes and zero-point energy. It also includes sections on the shadow war fought in the dying days of the Reich as the Nazis sought to stave off defeat through pacts with diabolic entities, attempts to preserve the Fuhrer’s brain, and the deployment of the strange flying saucers that battled to save the final Nazi stronghold in the Antarctic.  For years, the Allied governments worked to keep this information from reaching the public, and sought to discredit those few who dared to seek the truth. Now, using a combination of photography and artwork reconstructions, the true story of the most secret battles of World War II can finally be told."

Now, even in a fantasy, it's not really feasible for the Nazis, who were the batty New Agers of their era, to have got within a million miles of investigating zero-point energy, having kicked all the good quantum physicists out of Germany in the mid-thirties. But the other stuff sounds coherent and should fuel an alternate WW2 role-playing campaign if you like Hellboy or Iron Sky.