The Flash Fire Mini-Reviews series continues this week with some new comic reviews from Decapitated Dan! Dan takes a look at a selection of horror titles from Antarctic Press.

“It’s Tom & Jerry meets 28 Days Later as the Littlest Zombie and the Littlest Vampire fight tooth and nail, hand-to-detachable-hand for scant sustenance! Their quarry, the Littlest Survivor, must pull out every trick in the Apocalypse Survivor’s Handbook to keep his two supernatural stalkers at each other’s throats and off his!”

Our next Vampire Retrospective Essay comes from Steve Wieck, former CEO of White Wolf and current head of DriveThruRPG. Steve tells us about some of the early days when White Wolf was dealing with printers, distributors and retail stores.

White Wolf in the early days of Vampire

“Steve, we have a problem with the Tzimisce book,” Rich Thomas, White Wolf’s head of design said, “but we think we have a solution for it.”

“Ok,” I said with some trepidation.

“Josh did the art piece for the back cover, and well, it’s probably going to be seen as a little inappropriate by some distributors and retailers.”

There aren’t many tales where the undead are the good guys; say what you want about Twilight or True Blood, but those aren’t in the same league as an undead schoolteacher seeking vengeance for the dead family of his pupil.
Thus we have The Grave Doug Freshley, about a tutor – Doug Freshley – in the Wild West who witnesses the death of his friend and his friend’s wife, and manages to save their son – his student – from the family farmhouse as it goes up in flames. The crime has been perpetrated by the Delancey family – a band of thugs, each one worse than the last.

The Delanceys are trying to expand their stake the easy way – by stealing from the locals and killing them so there’s no one to dispute the claim.

Flames Rising is pleased to present you with a special interview, just in time for Sweetest Day! Earlier, we asked you to help us come up with interview questions for White Wolf Publishing developers Russell Bailey and Eddy Webb. We’re happy to share their responses as they dive into your burning questions about Strange, Dead Love, the new paranormal romance sourcebook for Vampire: the Requiem that debuts in early December. Thanks to everyone who commented and shared their thoughts on this sourcebook. The questions below were pulled from your feedback!

Agents of Oblivion is the highly anticipated Savage Worlds setting book we like to call The Perfect Cocktail of Horror and Espionage. Within these pages grace everything you need to play the style of spy game you want to play from “The Company Line” where every nightmare and conspiracy you can imagine is real and you can wield the powers you need to drive back the darkness to “Spy versus Spy” where you can take things on in a gritty brutal fashion.

One of the cool things about “new” media is a company’s ability to bridge the gap between paper and pencils with technology. Neverwinter Nights on Facebook is a social game you can play.

The first thing you do is roll stats. There’s no character class, but this min/maxer (That’s right.. Me…) rolled a few times until I got… Well… Some decent stats. The game didn’t work on Chrome so off to Firefox I go… That’s where I found out that punctuation doesn’t work in the character name field. I have an elf name I often use (Lazy, I know, I know…) but the apostrophe didn’t take.

The Vampire Retrospective continues with an essay from Morgan A. Oviatt. Morgan tells us about his first character and making friends with “a guy in a beret playing an Assamite” which certainly sounds cool to me.

Vampire with Moon

My initial forays into the World of Darkness was a boy in my NASA-funded school in Texas nicknamed “Satan”. He was a goth, had sharpened nails and carried the Vampire Player’s guide everywhere but played with nobody. He struck me as a bit of a git, and so I was initially hesitant to consider Vampire as a real game.

Ashen Stars is the newest full-length, stand-alone GUMSHOE product from RPG legend, Robin D. Laws.

They call you lasers. Sometimes you’re called scrubbers, regulators, or shinestars. To the lawless denizens of the Bleed, whether they be pirates, gangsters or tyrants, you’re known in less flattering terms. According to official Combine terminology, the members of your hard-bitten starship crew are known as Licensed Autonomous Zone Effectuators. You’re the seasoned freelancers local leaders call when a situation proves too tough, too baffling, or simply too weird to handle on their own. In the abandoned fringe of inhabited planets known as the Bleed, you’re as close to a higher authority as they come.

Our next entry in the Vampire Retrospective Project comes from Andrew Peregrine, developer of the Victoriana RPG by Cubicle 7 Entertainment. Andrew tells us about hist first experiences with Vampire, joining the Camarilla and the friends he has made along the way.

Masquerade and Me

Have I really spent 20 years playing vampire? Not only is that half my life, but twice as long as I’ve been with my partner. Is it wrong that Masquerade is one of my longest relationships? It isn’t even the first role-playing game I played. Like so many other gamers, Dungeons and Dragons claims that dubious honor, and Call of Cthulhu was my first horror game. So why do I feel like I owe Vampire anything special? In my case, it’s because I owe so many friendships to this game.

We have a new design essay today from Michael Jasper, author of the In Maps & Legends comic series. In Maps & Legends was the winner of the November 2009 Zuda Comics competition hosted by DC Comics. Today Michael talks about the craft of writing the series and the things he learned along the way.

Want to know what one of the best things that happened to me while I was scripting out the nine issues of In Maps & Legends, the digital comic I wrote with artist Niki Smith?

A lot of great things happened, but the best side-effect of the whole experience is that it made me a much better—and hopefully more effective—writer.

Our first entry in the Vampire Retrospective Project comes from Michael Holland, who is one of the Moderators on the White Wolf forums. Michael tells us about his first discovery of Vampire: the Masquerade.

It is not every day that a game like Vampire the Masquerade comes along and changes everything. For the most part, the list of revolutionary role playing games is a very short one. In 1974, Dungeons & Dragons served as the veritable genesis of the table top role playing game phenomena. In 1977, Traveller successfully brought the subgenre of the science fiction role playing game into its own space so to speak. The work of H.P. Lovecraft had always been a major influence on role playing games, but in 1981 Call of Cthulhu took us deeper into the realm of horror than we had ever gone before.

“That house is not fit to live in. No one’s been able to live in it. It doesn’t want people.”

As Flames Rising is looking for ghost related posts for this year’s Halloween season, I found this to be an opportune time to dive into some ghost flicks. And while I’m the kind of mook who’s all about “saving the best for last”, I’m going completely opposite with this one. “The Changeling” was chosen as my first ghost story flick to review, and honestly, it’s the movie that I hold all ghost movies in terms of masterpiece quality.

The story centers around John, whose wife and daughter die in a tragic accident before his very eyes.

Flames Rising is celebrating the 20th anniversary of the Vampire: the Masquerade. We have reached out to the community of fans and asked them to tell us what Vampire means to them. We know that this game has brought friends and family together, changed lives, and created lasting memories in the minds of players and fans around the world. The Vampire Retrospective Project is not only a chance to hear some of those stories, it’s an opportunity to record them for future generations.

Since our original post about the project, we have received essays from several people ranging from people who’ve worked on Vampire: the Masquerade, played a character in the Camarilla, or who remember how this game has influenced popular culture.

Dungeons & Dragons: Heroes of Neverwinter enters open beta phase

The first name in roleplaying games is taking another step in its storied pop culture history as Atari brings Dungeons & Dragons to the Facebook platform. Atari, one of the world’s most recognized publishers and producers of interactive entertainment, will release Dungeons & Dragons: Heroes of Neverwinter into its “open beta” period on September 15, bringing the ultimate RPG brand to the ultimate social platform.

FR Press, the publishing arm of popular horror site FlamesRising.com, announced today that its debut anthology is entitled Haunted: 11 Tales of Ghostly Horror. The anthology will feature stories from Alana Joi Abbott, Georgia Beaverson, Jason L Blair, Alex Bledsoe, Bill Bodden, Richard Dansky, Preston P DuBose, Nancy O Greene, Jess Hartley, Jason Sizemore and Chuck Wendig. The collection of spooky stories also includes an introduction penned by Jaeson K. Jrakman, a ghost hunter who hails from Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

Edited by Monica Valentinelli, Haunted: 11 Tales of Ghostly Horror will debut just in time for Halloween. The anthology will be available in both e-book format and print. Readers will be able to pick up a copy from DriveThruHorror.com and other online retailers.