Reddit reviews Badass: A Relentless Onslaught of the Toughest Warlords, Vikings, Samurai, Pirates, Gunfighters, and Military Commanders to Ever Live (Badass Series)

Julia Agrippina. A black-widow type in Roman history. Not to mention by many accounts she was a major power player behind (1) her brother Caligula, (2) her husband Claudius and (3) her infamous son Nero. She was a bad, bad girl. Her story makes for a really interesting read.

Edit: for those reading this thread you should really check out this book. It's where I learned about our lovely lady Julia.

Did an amazon search for Badass this was the first book. Reading the description I would say that it definitely sounds badass.

This fact also appears in Ben Thompson's book Badass: A Relentless Onslaught of the Toughest Warlords, Vikings, Samurai, Pirates, Gunfighters, and Military Commanders to Ever Live"

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0061749443/ref=oss_product

One of their former writers, Ben Thompson, wrote a pretty great book called Badass. He's also the maintainer of badassoftheweek, which used to be great but is pretty well dead now. Not sure what he's doing nowadays, but that's about as much "fame" as most writers will ever achieve.

All this is true.

I say read up or watch anything about historical trivia and the like. There is a TV show called Horrible Histories and you can get a lot of it on youtube. There is also the Bassass books and the daily life books. Biographys are normally great source material.

http://www.youtube.com/user/horriblehistoriesBBC
http://www.amazon.com/Badass-Relentless-Onslaught-Gunfighters-Commanders/dp/0061749443
http://www.amazon.com/Daily-Life-Middle-Ages-Newman/dp/0786408979/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1398349874&sr=8-1&keywords=daily+life+in+the+middle+ages

Second, have your players do some footwork for XP. If the player comes in with a bit of culture that you can use for flavor, give them a goblins worth of XP. If they start using it themselves, give a bonus to the Role play award.

Something else that helps is start looking for jpegs and save them in a couple of files on the laptop or whatever you use. When you run the game, plug into the TV and when they run into say a 1479 era scallywag you just call up the pic.

http://wall.alphacoders.com/by_category.php?id=11

I also did. The one that I picked up was the book Badass. I have to say, I loved everything about it. It was just a fun thing to read and was very entertaining throughout. When I saw it I knew I had to grab it.