DriveThruComics.com has partnered with over 30 comic book publishers to offer a $20 bundle of digital comics for charity. Proceeds of the charity bundle, which has a retail value of $95, will be donated to the Hero Initiative. Participating publishers include: Top Cow Productions, Archaia Entertainment, Moonstone Books, Dork Storm Press, and a number of creator-owned and small press publishers.

Filip Sablik, Top Cow’s publisher says, “Top Cow has been a proud supported of the Hero Initiative from the beginning, with Jim McLauchlin, the current director of the charity being a former editor-in-chief at the Cow. We’re always thrilled to support Hero in any way we can and it’s very cool to see DriveThruComics stepping up to participate in this way!”

John Carter hit theaters this weekend and we’ve got plenty of Mars products for you explore at DriveThruRPG!

Adamant Entertainment’s entire line of MARS: The Roleplaying Game of Planetary Romance ebooks are 50% off for the rest of the month!

Be sure to check out Heliograph’s Space: 1889 line for even more Mars adventures!

Also available is Skirmisher’s Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Mars: Shadows of a Dying World for OGL and Pinnacle’s Space 1889: Red Sands for Savage Worlds!

Before he secured his place in the annals of international pop culture with the Tarzan stories, Edgar Rice Burroughs offered up the initial adventure in the far more interesting and inventive Barsoom series. “Under the Moons of Mars,” later to be retitled A Princess of Mars for book publication, first saw print in the Munsey pulp The All-Story, from February through July of 1912. The six-part serial chronicles the adventures of Confederate veteran Captain John Carter, who stumbles across a cave in Arizona through which he is transported via psychic projection to Mars, or as the locals call it, Barsoom.

Once deposited on Barsoom, Carter treks across the dying planet and encounters an imaginative assortment of races and creatures, from the four-armed warrior Tharks to the super-speedy dog-lizard things called calots (one of which, naturally, becomes the hero’s faithful companion), to the humanlike red Martians.

Over the years, FlamesRising.com has played a number of Munchkin games including Munchkin Cthulhu, Munchkin Bites and Munchkin Bites 2: Pants Macabre, and Munchkin Zombies.

Today, we get to offer you a sneak peek at the latest expansion to classic Munchkin.

Dubbed Munchkin 8 – Half Horse, Will Travel, this is the first expansion in two years and it offers new types of cards for players to use in the game. You’ll find Centaurs and Lizard Guys, two classic fantasy races that finally get a full color Munchkin treatment. You’ll also receive brand new Race and Class Enhancers like the one pictured here!

In Plague of Shadows by Howard Andrew Jones, the half-elf Elyana and her companions must race across the ravaged land of Galt, scale the Five Kings Mountains, and scour the Vale of Shadows for the cure that will save the cursed Lord Stelan.

Prepare yourself, for Plague of Shadows, dear reader, is fast-paced, sword-and-sorcery at its best.

“Friendship and loyalty lie at the heart of Plague of Shadows,” said Jones. “In whom can you really place your trust, and what does friendship really mean? Not that I’m ever on a soapbox about it. But loyalties, choices, and friendship drive the plot.”

In the short form or long, Jones has been praised frequently for his lightning quick pacing and irresistible plotting—pacing that does not sacrifice character development but depends upon it. Indeed, as Jones says below, “plot is character.”

The Halloween Tree is the audiobook version of the 1972 publication by Ray Bradbury. The story is a fantastical look at the history of Halloween. Spanning several cultures, the characters experience the customs of people from Ancient Egypt, Rome, Mexico, the British Isles and others.

The story is impeccable and Bradbury does what he does best: social commentary through the guise of a story. Here, he teaches us about our own customs by forcing us to peer into the past without beating us over the head or giving boring explanations. I’m not the only one who thinks The Halloween Tree is spectacular. In fact, the story is so popular the animated version of The Halloween Tree was featured on Cartoon Network and it’s also been incorporated in Disneyland‘s Halloween decorations.

The Vampire Retrospective Project continues today with an essay from Craig Oxbrow. Craig tells us about his experiences with Vampire: the Masquerade 1st Edition.

I had been playing and GMing roleplaying games since I was eleven or twelve, and I’d always wanted more focus on the players’ characters than most RPGs and adventures encouraged. Too many missions where it didn’t really matter what you were like as long as you could pick locks or use a sniper rifle. I was approaching seventeen and already jaded.

The Pathfinder Tales novel Winter Witch by Elaine Cunningham and Dave Gross tells the story of Declan, a magical mapmaker, and Ellasif, a diminutive barbarian from the Lands of the Linnorm Kinds.

“Some people are born knowing what they’re meant to be,” said Cunningham. “Ellasif is one of them, and from a very early age she was determined to become a fighter despite her apparent physical limitations.”

Together, Declan and Ellasif search for a missing child and in the process discover a lot about what it means to be a hero.

A veteran of shared world settings, Cunningham has written extensively in the Forgotten Realms. Her Realms work includes the Songs and Swords pentalogy, Starlight and Shadows trilogy, and the Counselors and Kings trilogy, as well as Evermeet: Island of Elves and City of Splendors: a Novel of Waterdeep (with Ed Greenwood). Her Realms stories were collected in The Best of the Realms, Book III: The Stories of Elaine Cunningham. She contributed Dark Journey to the New Jedi Order series set in the Star Wars Expanded Universe.

I like to think of “The Wicker Man” as the greatest Hammer film never actually produced by the venerable studio. Despite the fact that it was in decline, Hammer was still the foremost name in English horror cinema at the time of the film’s release. While it was originally distributed by British Lion Film Corporation, “The Wicker Man” shares Hammer’s penchant for beautiful landscapes, lush production values, and its franchise star, Christopher Lee, who portrayed Dracula, Frankenstein’s monster, and the Mummy in numerous films for the studio.