The design essay series continues with Matthew McFarland telling us about Dust to Dust, a new story supplement for Vampire: the Masquerade from White Wolf. Dust to Dust is a story supplement using the Storytelling Adventure System designed for use with Vampire: The Masquerade 20th Anniversary Edition, and it acts as a spiritual successor to the classic story Ashes to Ashes.

Dust to Dust: Dirty Secrets

Probably more dramatic than absolutely necessary, but hey. You’re reading it now.

Dust to Dust wasn’t the hardest scenario I’ve ever had to write (that’d be “To Grandmother’s House” for Nights of Prophecy), but it certainly presented some strange challenges. The biggest and most obvious one, of course, was that I hadn’t touched Vampire: The Masquerade since 2004 or so (probably longer, since I think the last Masquerade material I wrote was for the Vampire Players Guide (well, other than the Vampire Translation Guide). The differences between Masquerade and Requiem are real (though much subtler than, say, the differences between the versions of Werewolf or Changeling) and I’d been working with Requiem and the rest of the new World of Darkness for six years. Getting myself back into an old — sorry, “classic” — World of Darkness headspace was harder than I expected.

And, to be honest, I resented that I had to do it at all.

When the 20th Anniversary Edition of Vampire was announced, I was thrilled. Not because I wanted to run right out and scoop up a copy — I didn’t have any plans to run Masquerade or any classic World of Darkness game. But I thought it was a cool idea, a great way to mark how far White Wolf had come and rekindle some of the fire that fans felt for such an influential game. Hearing about the Onyx Path, though, kind of annoyed me. I was afraid that White Wolf was backpedaling, like maybe the occasional Internet chatter (“NWoD sucks! OWoD is better! NWoD doesn’t sell — I was totally in my FLGS the other day and there were NO NWOD books at all! I talk mostly in letters!”) was getting to them. And honestly, too much blood, sweat and tears went into the new World of Darkness, in my opinion, for White Wolf to just give up.

But then I had a conversation with Eddy Webb at Origins (I think — maybe GenCon?) that set me straight. Eddy said that, in analyzing the sales, Requiem and Masquerade were selling about equally well. There was a fanbase for both games. They didn’t have compete.

We didn’t have to choose.

I often tell my daughter, “if someone offers you a choice of two things that you like, the correct answer is both.” Vampire just nicely underlined that.

So once I kind of got over myself, working Dust to Dust was a lot easier. At that point, all I had to do was write a Vampire scenario based on a 20-year-old supplement using mechanics, tone and metaplot with which I was largely unfamiliar. As they say on the Internet, facepalm. Dave Martin and the Wrecking Crew were nice enough to give me an outline to work from. The outline was pretty basic; it just suggested keeping Juggler and Modius (and Allicia, whom I wound up cutting), using Sullivan Dane as an antagonist, and raised the possibility of the “jar of ashes that turns out to be an elder Samedi” as a Macguffin, which I thought was just too cool to ignore.

I was thrilled to see Dane mentioned. I love Sullivan Dane. I used him in a lot of my old World of Darkness games, though I don’t remember him ever actually fighting characters, even in Vampire games. He was one of the first in a long series of Storyteller characters who were nominally antagonistic, but were too well-realized and useful to just kill (plus, my players really enjoyed the accent I used when playing him). He shows up in the very first thing I ever wrote for White Wolf (Giovanni Chronicles IV: Nuovo Malattia), just for a cameo, and I knew I wanted him in Dust to Dust in the same capacity I’d always used him: the unspoken threat. The guy had True Faith 8 in his original presentation, for crying out loud, if he wants a vampire dead, it’s dead. Even with the Faith rules cleaned up a bit for V20, Dane is a badass. The suggestion in the outline was for him to become blood-addicted, but that didn’t make any sense (again, True Faith). If Dane had fallen far enough to become a ghoul, the story would have to be about him to make any sense, and I didn’t want to do that.

So at that point I knew I wanted to use Dane, that I really liked the notion of a dormant elder Samedi in ash form, and that I had to make some kind of use of Gary’s political structure as presented in Vampire: The Masquerade and Ashes to Ashes. This isn’t an easy starting point. Political scenarios are hard to write, because they’re boring to read. Heck, opinion is sorely divided, in my experience, as to whether they’re any fun to play (my own opinion is yes, they can be fun to play if you have a group of players that favors dialog and improvises well, but if your players would rather go see supernatural craziness or have bloody brawls in alleys, politics is a poor substitute). And the other problem with political Vampire scenarios is that they’re slow. I needed a sense of immediacy.

From that need was born the theme that Gary is dying, and the characters aren’t fighting over a vibrant city so much as trying to use every part of the beast, so to speak. I tried to think like a vampire — vampires don’t care whether the city thrives, but they do want people to be in the city, so how to get them there? By increasing traffic, and then feeding off that traffic. The actual residents of the city are incidental.

That conflict let me rope in Modius and Juggler, but I needed, I felt, a good way to bring in my dusty old elder Samedi. Plus I wanted something more overtly supernatural. The notion of a city dying made me think of the idea that cities have souls and identities (very true in the World of Darkness, which is kind of animistic), and so if a city has a soul, it can have a ghost and thus be affected by necromancy, right? I have a soft spot for the Giovanni. I ran the first Giovanni Chronicles for my friends when I was in college, and it was a really awesome experience. I know the clan has some wonkiness about it (really, what in Masquerade doesn’t?), but the fusion of the Mafia and necromancy always seemed really cool. So I fused it with a slick, Los Angeles movie producer would be a good front for a Giovanni. I had her working on a zombie movie, complete with a zombie walk, because I wanted to highlight what vampires have become in the 20 years since Masquerade. Interesting, they’ve become something that the Camarilla might like — they’re sympathetic, non-threatening romantic figures. Sure, we get some threatening or dangerous bloodsuckers here and there (Colin Farrell in the recent remake of Fright Night, I thought, was pretty damned creepy, and though I haven’t watched much True Blood, I think there’s some good inspiration there), but for the most part, mention “vampire” to people nowadays and one of the first things that comes to mind is “sparkle.”

So maybe vampires aren’t relevant anymore? Maybe, as a monster, they’ve been usurped by their dumber, lurching cousins, the zombies? I didn’t want to make it an overt theme of Dust to Dust, but I did want the hint there that, perhaps, it’s time for the vampires to pass the torch. (Do note, though, that the scene following the zombie walk is Jean Lisle bursting out of his prison and killing everyone in the area, which I think is my answer to the question of whether vampires aren’t relevant anymore.)

I recognize that Dust to Dust is busy. Going through it again now, I’m thinking maybe I put a bit too much in the stew. But honestly, that was deliberate — Dust to Dust was meant to be, as the outline from the Wrecking Crew said, a sandbox. A troupe isn’t going to get through it in one session, not if they want to experience everything in it (this is why, when run at the Grand Masquerade, certain elements tended to get excised — I think Dane, sadly, was one of them). I’m happy with the way it turned out, though. As I was writing it, I found my mind separating Requiem (which I’d been running for several months at that point) and Masquerade, and thinking back to the games of Masquerade I ran before the end of the original World of Darkness. I think Dust to Dust is pretty representative of Masquerade rather than Requiem, and that, I think, was really the biggest challenge of the assignment.

Matthew McFarland – 2012

Dust to Dust is available now in PDF and Print editions at the Flames Rising Shop.

Related posts:

1. Vampire: The Masquerade 20th Anniversary Edition
2. Open Grave: Secrets of the Undead Review
3. Another One Bites the Dust Review

In the near future, on the western coast city of New Metropolis, an evil that has lain dormant for centuries is about to be awakened to the 21st century. Forces of darkness and magic strive to unleash a horror upon the Earth unlike any mankind can remember. The only forces capable of stopping it are rendered impotent by an age-old fear and hatred. Will humanity set aside their differences and stand as one against the darkness? Or will this be humanity’s Final Twilight?

Trinity, the first series, follows a trio of souls whose fates are intertwined. Mark Jarus, the last classically trained mage, fights the good fight as a vigilante in city overrun by crime! Kerra Neil, a young woman and skilled hunter stalking the shadows for murderers and magic-using blights upon humanity! And the enigmatic Charles Faust, whose cool and calm demeanor belie a centuries old heart of darkness and unnatural lust for power!

Final Twilight is an urban-fantasy expandable card game. In it, players take on the role of characters, modern knights and mages, dueling in the shadows, carrying on a war that has lasted for centuries! Players construct their own decks with characters from the setting, each with their own skills, powers, and tactics, in a wide assortment of cards, competing to take back the night or to claim it for themselves!

Final Twilight is NOT a Collectable Card Game! Each series allows players to select just what they want and not buy another thing! Trinity opens with a 2-player starter kit and from there players can purchase Expansion Packs, containing four copies, the playable limit, of an array of cards suited to that theme. Build any deck you can imagine quickly and easily from your own collection or share your collection and duel with friends!

Game Play

Players construct decks around the major characters featured in Final Twilight’s storylines. These characters determine the powers, abilities, and cards the player can utilize. Game play takes place within the city of New Metropolis with a series of Location cards, set up at the start of the game as a game board. Cards are played at a given Location as both players navigate the city in search of their opponent for a final showdown.

Cards are played using a pair of resources: Money, for “real world” allies, effects, and abilities; and Moren, a mage’s life force, for special powers, supernatural creatures and effects, and more. Players start with a base amount and grow and weaken as they play cards and abilities and win and lose in combat.

Combat is performed with a die roll. Modifiers from weapons, armors, ancient devices, and more influence the outcome. Each player tallies their totals and compares results; the winner is the one who deals damage, not just an “attacker”, making combat risky and uncertain and giving even “weak” characters a fighting chance.

The winner is the last player left standing: players who run out of Moren (life) lose, as do players who exhaust their deck of cards. Additional play-modes allow groups of four to play teams or even allows one player to go solo against an opposing character!

Download an Introduction at RPGNow.com!

Find out more about Final Twilight at Kickstarter.com:

Related posts:

1. Shroud of the Ancients RPG Kickstarter
2. Fantasist Enterprises launches Kickstarter Campaign for Fantastical Visions V
3. The Final Kill

The design essay series continue here at Flames Rising with a new entry from author Edward McKeown telling about his novel Was Once a Hero.

Reluctant privateer Robert Fenaday searches the stars for his lost love, Lisa, a naval intelligence officer whose ship disappeared near the end of the Conchirri War . He’s joined by the genetically engineered assassin, Shasti Rainhell, whose cold perfection masks her dark past. Both are blackmailed by government spymaster, Mandela, into a suicidal mission to the doomed planet Enshar. Leading a team of scientists and soldiers, they must unravel the mystery of that planet’s death before an ancient force reaches out to claim their lives.

Was Once a Hero

Once upon a time there was a science-fiction fan who loved Andre Norton, CJ Cherryh, Larry Niven, Mike Resnick, Catherine Asaro and many others. He gathered their adventures to him and traveled the star lanes with their characters. But something was missing, a connection that had not been made. Then he realized what it was, however wonderful their visions were, there were THEIR visions, not his. He wondered if he could bring his visions to life.

Well I’m that fan and from the day I realized that I have been practicing and growing in my craft in the art of writing. I began with a blizzard of short stories from what came to be the Lair of the Lesbian Love Goddess series then the Jeremy Leclerc Knight Templar series.

But the novel beckoned and unlike my other efforts it called out to be a story of deep space, of aliens, starships, artificial intelligences and deadly danger. In short I wanted to do what I thought of as a “Planet Story” creating new cultures, worlds and species.

Too many characters in science-fiction are too heroic, too unafraid, and too matter-of-fact about danger. Those of us who have faced danger and triumphed over it usually did it either with our hearts in our mouths, fighting to overcome fear, or it was over so fast that we didn’t have time for panic. There are surely people of steely nerves and endless reserves of courage (check your local Seal Team) but they are not common. Most of us struggle to find courage and apply it. So I decided that my character would be a man, drawn from a more ordinary life, no Captain Kirk, no Captain Sheridan, but someone more like one of us.

This came out of knowing some World War II vets, genial men in the sunsets of their lives, many who seemed like they would not harm a fly. Yet these were the amtrac gunners at Tarawa, the crew in the B-17 from the mighty Eighth, the marine crouching in the darkness at the edge of Henderson Field when the banzai charges came in. But that geniality masked the fact that we ordinary MEN man are capable of deeds that scar the soul. However gentle and kind we are to friends and family, in the right situation we can be the instruments of immense destruction. So this would be a theme that I would explore in my book.

“Was Once a Hero” was born. I introduced Robert Fenaday, the son of a wealthy merchant family, something of an idle playboy in a family business. My character would be flawed, dealing with a domineering father, having not made anything of himself until he found the love of his life, Lisa Brenton, a Confederate Naval Intelligence Operative. The romance is threatened when the Conchirri, a carnivorous alien species bursts into the hitherto peaceful Confederation of Seven Species. Lisa, now his wife, is called to war and Robert stays to run the family shipping line in a reversal of the usual roles. She is James Bond and he is the one left behind. Then Lisa’s ship is reported missing.

This is the seachange for Robert; he will not accept that the universe can dispose of Lisa. He sells off his family business over much opposition and buys a captured enemy warship he names Sidhe, to become a privateer and search the stars for Lisa. But Fenaday is not fitted to the murky and dangerous world he now inhabits. He survives only because of a chance meeting. In the course of his searches, he rescues Shasti Rainhell, genetically engineered assassin. As cold and beautiful as February moonlight, Shasti is stronger and more perfect than humanly possible. Fascinated by his search for his wife, and hiding from her own past, Shasti serves on Sidhe, keeping the privateer crew in line.

The war ends without any sign of Lisa and Fenaday ends up broke on Mars desperately looking for a commission for his ship to continue his search. It comes in an unusual form. He and Shasti are blackmailed by government operative named “Mandela” into a suicidal mission to the murdered world of Enshar, accompanied by ace fighter pilot, Telisan, and the ancient Enshari scholar, Belwin Duna. Leading their crew of privateers and government soldiers, they struggle to unravel the mystery of a world’s death. In the crucible of battle and terror, Fenaday and Shasti Rainhell are driven across barriers both had set in their lives and into a new and deeper relationship.

Was once a Hero is the first of three novels on Robert Fenaday’s search for his wife, and his companion and sometime lover, Shasti Rainhell’s search for her humanity. The trilogy is written so the reader can pick up any of the three books and have a complete SF adventure in hand, yet all three books form an arc on the overstory of Robert’s search for Lisa and Shasti’s emotional voyage of self-discovery.

In writing what I hoped would be a page-turning adventure novel, things turned out somewhat differently then I envisioned at the beginning. Shasti Rainhell was the chief surprise. I originally created that character because I realized that someone from the “corporate world” wouldn’t last long on his own in the quasi-criminal trade of a privateer. He would need someone to watch his back while he learned this new role. I decided to go with a strong female character because the interactions between men and women are vastly more interesting and complex then those just between men. I wanted my female character to be totally believable in her role. Shasti became a six-foot-nine genetically engineered assassin far stronger than a “standard” human with abilities both mental and physical that made her incredibly formidable.

But Shasti would not stay a sidekick, or merely a hired gun. She was so strong that her past began to sneak into the book, her escape from her creator Jalgren Pard, from her homeworld of Olympia, her emotional scars from her childhood. She saw in Fenaday a determined love and gentleness that she had never experienced before. This fascination became the foundation of their relationship.

Ok you may have noticed that we stopped talking about starships and aliens and began talking about love. While Hero is primarily an adventure story, love too is an adventure.

I populated my book with a crew of characters, always careful to make sure that the secondary characters stayed secondary but interesting. Telisan, the ace-pilot from a species with three genders, the kindly Duna, scientist and scholar of the few remaining Enshari, Kyle Mmok the acerbic robot controller and many others. I wrote with a strong visual sensibility as that’s what I like to read, I need to see the movie play in my head.

So in the end I produced what I feel is a strong adventure where sometimes the air is filled with the flash of energy weapons as deadly enemies close in and sometimes two people cling to each other to banish the universe’s terrors with the strength of their emotions. I hope you will join me for the voyages of Robert Fenaday, Shasti Rainhell and the Sidhe, available through Hellfire Publishing with an introduction by Janet Morris of “Heroes in Hell” fame.

See you around the galaxy,

Edward McKeown – 2012

No related posts.

Children of the Revolution is a rogue’s gallery of those Embraced “in interesting times,” to use a euphemism. In times of upheaval and turmoil those who join the ranks of the Damned can’t help but be shaped by the chaotic events around them. The transformational disruption that occurs in the world remains indelibly with the Kindred Embraced in that moment, marking him as an agent of change among Kindred society in some capacity.

One example might be the Anarch Tyler from Chicago by Night, Embraced in the throes of active rebellion and forever characterized by her opposition to tyranny. The Lasombra Gratiano, Embraced by his clan’s progenitor, committed diablerie on that sire, forming the Sabbat in the crucible of that betrayal’s aftermath. The inscrutable Inconnu Dracula, playing one sect against the other while defending his homeland against the Turk incursions. All of these are excellent examples of the sorts of Kindred who could be considered “children of the revolution.”

Now it’s your turn. Examine an old chronicle of yours or describe a favored character’s backstory. Show us, in practice, the vampires who emerge from the interesting times of your chronicles or in your consideration of the World of Darkness. Delve into the secret history of Vampire, into the War of Ages and among the bloody annals of the Jyhad. What events in Kindred or mortal history shaped the vampire you propose?

Read more about the project and how to submit your character at WhiteWolfBlogs.com.

No related posts.

All zombies are created equal. All zombie stories are not.

From its humble beginnings as an indie comic book, The Walking Dead has become a pop culture juggernaut boasting New York Times–bestselling trade paperbacks, a hit television series, and enough fans to successfully take on any zombie uprising.

Triumph of The Walking Dead explores the intriguing characters, stunning plot twists, and spectacular violence that make Robert Kirkman’s epic the most famous work of the Zombie Renaissance.

Flames Rising is proud to present an exclusive excerpt from this book. The Walking Dead novels’ co-author Jay Bonansinga provides the inside story on translating the comics into prose.

A Novelist and a Zombie Walk into a Bar

A dear friend, who also happens to be a Hollywood talent manager, rings me up one day last summer and babbles into the phone: “Some people I know are shopping for a novelist to help write a book based on a comic that’s being developed into a TV series. You with me so far?”

I mumble something like, “Um . . . I think so.”

“Anyway,” he goes on, “you would be working with the guy who created the comic, who is somewhat of a big shot, and you know, this deal could very possibly open many doors across the southern region of California. And when I heard they were looking for some author with horror chops who can play nice with others and has a really sick, disgusting imagination and is somewhat morally challenged . . . I naturally thought of you.”

“Uh huh,” I say. “And may I be so impertinent as to ask the name of the comic?”

“Ever hear of The Walking Dead?”

“The Norman Mailer book?”

“That’s The Naked and the Dead . . . and I said comic.”

“There aren’t any naked people in this?”

“Are you on something right now?”

“I’m kidding.” I take a deep breath. “Of course I’ve heard of The Walking Dead . . . cripes! Who do you think I am, your dad? It won the Eisner Award and it’s like a marathon of great, lost Romero movies all strung together . . . but better . . . it’s like the picture George Romero would make in heaven on acid with God as his cinematographer.”

After a long, exasperated pause, my buddy says, “Shall I take that as a Yes, you’re interested?”

Robert Kirkman’s epic survival saga The Walking Dead lives in its own graphic stratosphere—a rarefied yet austere visual canvas that screams out for translation into other media. Among the iconic roster of superstars who have rushed in to decode Kirkman’s muscular visual universe are Hollywood luminaries Frank Darabont and Gale Anne Hurd, whose basic-cable phenomenon of the same name pulls off a major coup: it captures the human drama beneath all the rotting flesh and ultimately channels the power of Kirkman’s two-dimensional frames into the bland, parochial world of the small screen.

Producers of the mega-smash AMC TV series have made two important discoveries: 1) the spiritual center of the comic series—a human story playing out amid all the gore—translates well to the intimate confines of television; and 2) the ingenious way Kirkman builds big cliffhanger moments into splash pages that end each issue works like gangbusters on the tube. After a fleeting first season of only six episodes—an introduction to the Kirkman universe so ephemeral it almost seems like a freak accident—viewers were hungrier than reanimated corpses for more red meat.

Now we come to the second re-imagining of The Walking Dead, a trilogy of all-original novels based on Kirkman’s mythos, which take readers deeper into the narrative waters and all the rich tributaries branching out of the central story. Commissioned to coincide with the highly anticipated second season of the AMC series—premiering on Halloween 2011—the books are the latest milestone in the media crossover sensation.

In some ways I feel as though I was born to collaborate with Mr. Kirkman. A film school brat, I was weaned on EC comics—Vault of Horror, Tales from the Crypt, et al.—and after graduating, I spent years writing short horror stories for magazines such as Grue, Cemetery Dance, and Weird Tales.

After publishing my first novel, The Black Mariah, in 1994, I had the absolute sublime pleasure of working with George Romero on the film adaptation of said book. I will never forget landing at the Fort Myers airport for a story meeting at George’s house in Florida and seeing this big, burly grizzly bear of a man loping toward me with a huge smile. “Let me carry that,” he said, eyeing my suitcase. I was aghast and euphoric in equal parts. The thought of my childhood hero schlepping my luggage was my first lesson in a strange dichotomy: those who create the darkest, nastiest, harshest fictions are in true life the biggest pussycats.

Robert Kirkman is no exception. After working with him on the first installment in this triptych, I am stunned by how gracious, humble, and down-to-earth the man is. But the more I think about it, the more I conclude that this kind of unexpected sweetness—as is the case with George Romero—is Kirkman’s secret weapon.

This decency and plainspoken nature is actually what has enabled Robert Kirkman to reinvent an entire genre in comic book form.

After encountering the Walking Dead comics, no reader will ever be able to watch a zombie film, or read a zombie story, or just generally think of zombies in quite the same way. Without spoiling the main narrative for anyone living under the proverbial rock, suffice it to say that the comic paints a familiar picture with unfamiliar colors and tones. In the early issues, a small ragtag band of everypeople find themselves struggling to survive an inexplicable plague of cannibalistic, reanimated corpses. But the thing that instantly sinks a hook into readers—and is probably responsible for turning the comic into a milestone of the genre—is an unexpected humanity.

The characters of The Walking Dead are not mere characters; they are people. They are terrified, and they are morally sickened, and they long for deliverance, and they love their children, and they will do anything to protect their families. In other words, unlike the marionettes of most zombie books and movies, these people act like . . . well . . . real people.

“So . . . you got a name?” the lonely main character, Rick Grimes, whimsically asked a horse on which he rode through a desolate landscape in an early issue. The former police officer had just awakened from a coma after being shot in the line of duty, and now he was frantically searching the apocalyptic byways for his family. “I held her hand the whole time,” Grimes later recounted for the uncomprehending animal, describing his wife’s labor and the subsequent birth of his son. “There were some complications . . . and she had to get a cesarean. I was really worried . . .” Grimes eventually chokes on the words and can’t go on . . . but in a way he discovers right then why he must go on . . . and why we the readers must turn the page!

This is the keystone of The Walking Dead’s power: an unexpected tenderness in the characters. Because of this, the stakes of this story are raised incrementally with each page. You care a little bit more. You empathize. And, perhaps most importantly, you realize that this empathy is what makes the next eruption of trademark zombie-splatter all the more horrific.

Kirkman and his team of artists keep the visual strategy of the comic simple and linear. The style brings to mind the kitchensink realism of Bernie Wrightson of Swamp Thing and Warren horror comics fame. Both literary and filmic devices are put to good use. As is silence: characters brood and ruminate wordlessly in many of the panels, often captioned by a simple and inscrutable ellipsis. At other points, the comic’s mise-en-scène of epic filmmaking conjures memories of Sergio Leone and David Lean. Intimate close-ups widen out to panoramic landscapes of vast prison yards and urban outskirts. Huge empty skies are stitched with Hitchcockian crows.

The Walking Dead begs comparison to both EC horror and end-of-the-world epics such as Earth Abides, The Stand, and I Am Legend, but, more than anything else, it is the character-driven pathos that truly elevates the series into transcendent territory. It is also the thing that fuels the adaptation Robert and I tackled in the early months of 2011.

I wish I could say we labored with Sisyphean effort to translate the panel-bound world of the Walking Dead comic into the ethereal, cerebral, non-linear world of prose. I wish I could say we ingeniously contorted the visual details of the comic book into exotic allegories and literary equivalents. But the truth is, the mythos of The Walking Dead made the leap to fiction with the ease of a bullet passing through the rotten gray matter of an animated corpse. Maybe this was due to the relentless forward motion of Kirkman’s narrative. Perhaps it was because of the meticulous simplicity of the plot—every twist, every turn, every shift in point of view, every “money shot” completely, utterly motivated.

Technically a comic book’s closest cousin is the feature film. In a movie, a story is told with pictures and dialogue. Things happen, and people react to those things . . . and everything occurs in the here and now, with minimal, if any, use of devices such as flashback (a staple of prose). Of course, there are movies that employ voice-over narration—think of Philip Marlowe recalling how dark and stormy the night was when that crazy dame walked through his door—but, again, such devices are actually quite rare. Even in the case of movies with a narrator, the main body of the story unfolds in the present tense.

Such is also the case with the comic book medium. Granted, there are occasional thought bubbles, as well as boxes and sidebars containing Godlike, omniscient narration, but for the most part, comics—especially modern comics—show rather than tell. Instead of revealing a character’s thoughts (or providing clunky, whimsical narration in the style of the Crypt-Keeper), the modern comic shows you internal life through external action.

The Walking Dead abides by this axiom with almost religious fervor. Nobody pauses to think . . . they just do. They love, they hate, they struggle, they dream, they plot, they screw up, they live, they die, they kick zombie ass, they get devoured . . . all of it in real time.

Here’s the kicker: Despite the inherent differences between comics and prose, Kirkman and I found the act of rendering The Walking Dead into a novel fascinatingly expedient. The way the visual flow of the comic is organized cries out for analogous organization in a book. The cliffhanger splash pages suggest twist endings to chapters. The density of panoramic landscapes leads to cinematic scene-setting. The gruesome detail of cadaverous faces and all the vivid carnage demands visceral description. And Kirkman’s lean, straightforward way with dialogue looks and sounds terrific on the printed page—a mixture of Cormac McCarthy and Martin Scorsese.

Conventional wisdom says that novels—unlike movies, television, comics, or theater—are internal. You get inside the thoughts and motives of the characters. In novels you are free to present your story in non-linear fashion, jumping back and forth in time and point of view. Novels are digital rather than analog. They are everywhere all at once. They are impressionistic rather than structural. To put it another way, a novel is inside-out instead of outside-in. You tell your story from inside the characters, and the power comes from an accumulation of detail.

Even the action-oriented adventure books of yesteryear—beginning with the turn-of-the-century penny dreadfuls and continuing through the pulps of the 1950s—told their stories through the steely nervous systems of their lantern-jawed heroes. Granted, the internal stream-of-consciousness of a Doc Savage or a Conan the Barbarian were not exactly grist for Freudian analysis. But the form itself necessitated that the reader feel the sting of a poison-tipped spear from inside the synapses of the hero.

On a deeper level, the novel can also be about something else altogether. In this chaotic age of the internet, gaming, and social networking, the novel—more than ever—is the most interactive of all media. It is about getting inside the thoughts and motives of the reader. Subtly, insidiously, sensually, sneakily, the novel is all about touching off the flames of the imagination.

As William Burroughs said, “Language is a virus from outer space.” And what a good novel does is infect the inner space of a reader with images, sounds, smells, tastes, and textures.

Happily, the universe of The Walking Dead is not only born out of a very direct, linear approach to narrative, but is also evocative of myriad sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and textures—most of which are latent, hiding within the panels, alluded to in the dialogue, suggested by the narrative.

The fictional version teases these sensory details into the foreground. A reader is spared nothing. The senses are assaulted by the side effects of the plague. Explanations are eschewed in favor of a constant triangulation of sensory input. A floor is sticky with gore, giving off an oily black aroma as the characters investigate a deserted room buzzing with the vibrations of bluebottle flies and the echo of something moaning in the basement.

This profusion of sensory detail ultimately dictated the stylistic approach that Kirkman and I adopted for the novels.

Not only do the Walking Dead novels move with the inertia of a fever dream—all told in the present tense, jumping from one point of view to another with the quick-cut velocity of a movie montage—but the sensory details suggested in the panels of the comic are amplified, intensified, enriched. Like particles charged with radioactive half-lives, the flies on a corpse lead to internal trauma among eyewitnesses, which leads to madness, which leads to the slaughter of more corpses and the geometric population growth of flies. The world now has flies on it, the core of civilization rotting from the inside, personified by the internal atrophy of the characters. And always at the center of the action is the single most important symbol, the engine powering the conflict from the inside as well as the outside, the moldering, festering raison d’e^tre around which everything revolves, the key to the whole damn thing . . .

The zombie.

As a novelist, I cut my teeth during the horror boom of the 1980s—that heady time when anything with a lurid foil cover and the words “evil” or “phantom” in the title ruled the bestseller list with the consistency of death and taxes. I learned to write by gobbling up Stephen King, Peter Straub, Clive Barker, Joe Lansdale, David Schow, and Skipp & Spector. And I started getting published at the cusp of the splatter-punk bubble, when guys like Edward Lee and Rex Miller were pushing the envelope of anatomically incorrect gore. But I think the greatest influences on my writing were the archetypes of supernatural horror: ghosts, vampires, werewolves, demons, and manmade monsters of all makes and models.

Popularized first in the classic Universal Studios films of the 1930s and 1940s, these mythological beings have been cash cows for nearly a century. But historically, their origins go back all the way to the nineteenth century, springing from the quill pens and genteel sensibilities of Mary Shelley and Bram Stoker.

On the page, the archetypes have aged well because they have deeper meanings than mere bogeymen. The vampire—a potent symbol of repressed human sexuality—finds new and romantic iterations in teenybopper romances such as Twilight. The devil and his minions—those pesky personifications of our baser instincts—are alive and well in works such as William Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist. Ghosts—our stubborn, guilty past consuming the present—continue to haunt literature, both highbrow and low. But what about the lowly, hapless zombie? How does this archetype fit in? What does a zombie represent culturally? Why hasn’t it enjoyed more days in the literary sun? One is hard pressed to name a zombie classic in book form. Stephen King’s Cell? Max Brooks’ World War Z? These are fine books, but I’m not sure we have yet seen a literary zombie masterpiece . . . and the reason may be as simple as the problem of comparing oranges to rotten apples.

The zombie is the coin of the visual realm—a conceit of movies and comic books. By design, the archetype has no “there” there—zombies are eating machines, dead inside and out, with no purpose other than devouring the living and multiplying. Even their appearance has a sort of uniform, machine-stamped quality—albeit a gruesome one—that brings to mind the way death makes us all the same. Namely . . . gross and inert.

Keep in mind that I’m not referring here to the gothic voodoo wraith as depicted in subtle cinema such as Val Lewton’s I Walked with a Zombie. I’m talking about George Romero’s lurid concoction first unleashed on the war-weary, turbulent, paranoid society of the late 1960s. The rainbow coalition of shambling, slow-moving, cannibal roamers in Night of the Living Dead resonated deeply in the American imagination over the next four decades . . . and they resonated for a reason.

Romero’s zombies represent the wolves at our doors. They represent your mortgage, your car payments, your pending divorce, the suspicious lump under your skin—the things that just keep coming at you and will not stop until you are toast. Xenophobia, the collapse of society, your toilet backing up— these are the dream symbols personified by the undead.

Robert Kirkman knows this well. In his comics he constructs a human underground fighting to retain its humanity in the face of the wolf pack—and the moldering beasts just keep on coming and coming, as inexhaustible as cancer cells. The depiction of the zombies in The Walking Dead are lavish, Grand Guignol works of art. The sunken faces are lovingly rendered, the hollow cheeks and blank eyes carefully delineated to distinguish one monster from another. It’s like a nightmarish catalogue of exotic fighting fish.

And this is the key to our translation.

Until Robert Kirkman decides to include scratch-and-sniff panels on his comics, the non-visual senses will be the stars of their prose counterpart. Through meticulously calibrated description, we layer the smells and sounds and textures. This is how we translate something that is purely visual, by writing it in “odorama”—getting inside the senses of the readers. In other words, in the purely visual world of the comic, we must see Rick Grimes reacting to an odor—“Phew!”—in order for us to smell that odor. In the novels, we go straight for the nose.

Have you ever wondered what a warehouse filled with hundreds of upright cadavers would really smell like? Or have you thought about what a chorus of thousands of zombies all moaning at the same time would sound like? Maybe you’ve ruminated about what the exact texture of brain matter is like after getting sprayed across the inside of a windshield.

Doesn’t everybody wonder about these things?

The best part of this sensory feast, however, is for those who hunger to go deeper into The Walking Dead backstories. The trilogy—the first installment of which is available from St. Martin’s Press—is no mere tie-in. These are not standard novelizations that follow a screenplay or comic note for note. Our books—courtesy of the endless well of Kirkman’s fecund imagination—explore the origins of mysterious characters and the tantalizing secrets and relationships only alluded to or fleetingly glimpsed in the comics.

As a novelist, I could not ask for a more exciting thrill ride. Six months after that original call from my Hollywood friend in which he floated the idea of going on this amazing journey with Robert Kirkman, my pal calls me back. “Hey, Boopie,” he says. “How’s the zombie business?”

“We’re killing ’em in Poughkeepsie,” I tell him.

“What stage are you at?”

“I’m close to writing ‘The End,’” I say. “Right now I’m in a warehouse full of dead people.”

“What’s it smell like in there?” he asks.

“You don’t want to know.”

“C’mon, I can take it.”

“Okay. It smells like a combination of human feces and bacon cooked in pus.”

After a long pause—during which I can hear a faint gagging noise—he says, “God, I hate you . . . I have a lunch meeting today at Greenblatt’s Deli, and had planned on the chicken liver.”

“You asked.”

“I’ll have that smell in my schnoz for weeks.”

He cannot see me smiling. “That’s the idea, my friend . . . that’s the idea.”

Jay Bonansinga – 2011

Jay Bonansinga is a national bestselling author, screenwriter, and filmmaker, whose directorial debut, Stash, premiered in 2010. His 2005 novel, Frozen, is in development as a major motion picture, and his latest book, Perfect Victim, is an alternate title for Book-of-the-Month Club. He has worked with George Romero and has won major film festival awards, including a Gold Remi at the Houston International WorldFest and a “Best Comedy Feature” at the Iowa City Landlocked Film Festival. Jay’s 2004 nonfiction debut, The Sinking of the Eastland, won the Certificate of Merit from the Illinois State Historical Society, and his forthcoming nonfiction Civil War thriller, Pinkerton’s War, is due out from Lyons Press in late 2011. Online at jaybonansinga.com.

Related posts:

1. Triumph of The Walking Dead at ComicCon
2. The Walking Dead Season Finale Review
3. Zombie Week: Walking Dead Episode 5 Review

Terrors lurk in the darkness, subvert the souls, and corrupt the mind. Secret detachments of psychics remotely view our every move. Powerful occultists perform secret rituals in hidden locations, manipulating our world to their ends. Mysterious forces invade our very souls, twisting and distorting the weak into strong and violent predators. Creatures flee from humanity’s encroachment on their territories, then strike out when prying eyes get too close. Spirits haunt the edges of our silent fears.

This is the paranormal side of the world of Conspiracy X. Operatives struggle to uncover secret occult cabals, exorcise dangerous spirits, investigate the creatures of myth, and project their minds into future. The threat of alien invasion may loom, but the corruption of humanity by paranormal forces lurks behind every mission. Can you truly say you are prepared for the direst of humankind’s imaginings? The ageless battle against the paranormal continues.

The Paranormal Sourcebook is a supplement for the Conspiracy X Second Edition roleplaying game. In it, you will find:

• Details on the history of psychic, occult, and cryptozoological phenomena.
• Rules for a complete range of psychic abilities, including remote viewing, precognition, and even teleportation.
• A comprehensive list of rituals from simple curses and blessings to weather control and immortality.
• An in-depth discussion of the Seepage phenomena, the paranormal encountered at Loci and Pools, and their effects.
• Details of the horrific effects of corruption, and sample archetypes such as vampires, werewolves, stalkers, prophets, and adepts.
• Cryptozoological creatures from myth and legend, such as the Loch Ness Monster, Bigfoot, Chubacabra, and the mysterious Pilosi.
• New organizations that can be used in any campaign as antagonists, aides, or infiltrators.
• Compatible with All Flesh Must Be Eaten, Armageddon, Terra Primate, CJ Carella’s Witchcraft and other Unisystem games.

Visit the The Paranormal Sourcebook Kickstarter page for more information about the project.

No related posts.

We have a new design essay from Cynthia Celeste Miller. Cynthia stops by to tell us about the development of the brand new Macabre Tales RPG. Macabre Tales is the dominoes-based RPG of Lovecraftian horror from Spectrum Games.

Designing the aspects of Macabre Tales

Designing Macabre Tales was a labor of love. In fact, when I first conceived the game, I had no intention of releasing it commercially. Rather, the plan was to use it solely for my own gaming groups. Once I began putting the pieces together, however, it became clear that others might enjoy this drastically different take on Lovecraftian horror gaming too. That’s when I headed over to the RPG.net forums, stated my core system ideas and asked what people wanted in a Lovecraftian RPG. The responses were telling (and varied), which was precisely what I was hoping for. I used this information to carry forth with the design process.

I spent well over a year developing and playtesting Macabre Tales, starting almost completely from scratch more times that I’d care to count. It was an arduous but ultimately rewarding experience. The end result was, I feel, worth the time and effort put into it.

One of the things that I’m a stickler for is devising game rules that faithfully emulate the source material the game is based on. Actually, I’m obsessed with it. I like to tear it all apart, analyze the various aspects of the genre or subject matter and represent them accurately within context of the game. So, when I started developing Macabre Tales, I made a checklist of things that I felt were crucial to designing an RPG that truly captures all the nuances of Lovecraft’s fiction. Let’s look at a few of the items on that checklist and I’ll explain how I represented them.

One Primary Protagonist

You didn’t see many groups of protagonists in Lovecraft’s stories. There were exceptions to this (At the Mountains of Madness, The Dunwich Horror, etc.), but in most cases, the stories featured one primary protagonist. For this reason, I based the entire game around the concept of one narrator and one player. This may sound strange to some, but the level of involvement in one-on-one role-playing is an intense experience… and Macabre Tales was designed to elevate that even further.

We even included advice for making the adventure represent an experience that is being told by the protagonist “after the fact”, which is something Lovecraft was fond of doing (“The events I’m about to describe to you will be difficult for you to believe, but I swear to you that they are accurate.”).

Deliberate Build-Up

Anyone who has ever read Lovecraft can attest to the fact that his stories had a slow build. That slow build usually involved research and investigation, with the protagonist gathering information that would inevitably lead him toward the tale’s climax. This was replicated in the game with the use of dominoes rather than dice. With dominoes, the player keeps a hand of three dominoes at all times and can play one of them for his character’s checks. This creates a sense of deliberateness that dice would have been hard-pressed to create. The player essentially chooses his own “die rolls”, which adds another wrinkle to the game: prioritization. The player will be asking himself how important each check is. If he plays that 6/6 domino on a task, only to face a more relevant task a few minutes later, he may be in deep trouble. But if he doesn’t use the 6/6 and flubs the check, he might also be up the creek without a paddle.

Another way the game system creates a deliberate build up is through the use of “acts”. Lovecraft’s stories were very structured, which opened up some intriguing possibilities for me as a game designer. I opted to make the classic “three-act structure” an integral part of the game system. During the first act, the primary character cannot die or go insane. During the second act, things become more dangerous for the character. But during the third act, the stakes are very, very high and the character can perish or fall into the depths of insanity at any time.

Madness and Things Man Wasn’t Meant To Know

One of the tenets of Lovecraft’s stories was the fact that the human mind simply can’t fathom the truths of the universe and that the more it learns, the more its sanity dwindles. Obviously, you can’t ignore this in a game based on his stories. I had to devise a means for reflecting this in the game, but I felt that enough games used the “Sanity Points” concept without me needing to add yet another one to the mix.

My answer to this particular dilemma was the “sanity check”. When the character is exposed to the horrifying knowledge of the cosmos, a sanity check must be made. If successful, the character is fine, but gains a .5 bonus to his “Knowledge [Forbidden Truths]” rating. If the sanity check is unsuccessful, a random domino must be flipped over to determine if the result is game-ending (he goes mad) or non game-ending (perhaps the character faints dead away, but is otherwise okay). The exact number or higher that must be obtained in order to avoid a game-ending result depends on which act the tale is currently in.

Tension Without Constant Combat

The stories penned by Lovecraft didn’t contain the type of combat generally portrayed in role-playing games. In fact, they seldom had any combat at all… yet they never failed to involve tension. It is for this reason that I devised something called “tension scenes”. A tension scene begins when the story reaches a point that your pulse starts pounding like a jackhammer (when being attacked, during a chase sequence, etc.). At this point, a random domino is flipped over to determine how many “momentum points” the character starts the tension scene with. Each check the character successfully makes will give him additional momentum points… but each one he fails will cause him to lose momentum points. If he reaches a certain number, the tension scene ends favorably for the character. If he drops to zero, however, it ends negatively. And that often means death or madness. The tug-of-war aspect of the tension scene rules creates a real sense of edge-of-your-seat drama and excitement that really increases the suspense of any game.

———————————————————-

The aspects listed above are but a few of the most important ones that had to be represented in the game system. There are plenty more, I assure you. Hopefully, this essay has at least given you a glimpse into my thought processes regarding the design of the game.

In short, Macabre Tales is the Lovecraftian horror role-playing game that I’ve always wanted to design, run and play. Throughout the entire process, I kept asking myself if it would be a game that H.P. Lovecraft would approve of had he ever been given the chance to read or play it. Ultimately, I’ll never know the answer to that, but I feel confident that he would at the very least appreciate the amount of effort that went into attempting to emulate his tales of terror. And that’s good enough for me.

Before I sign off, I would like to say that this product was not a solo project. Without the help of others, I would still be pounding away at the design. Eric Hudson worked tirelessly to help me out however he could and acted as my right hand man from start to finish. My playtesters were top-notch as well and I owe them all a big “thanks”. When the original editor went M.I.A., Norbert Franz stepped in and did a wonderful job on hardly any notice. And I would be remiss if I left out the artists, especially Nicholas Shepherd and Scott Harshbarger, without whom the book would look a lot less atmospheric and creepy. Despite having my name on the cover, Macabre Tales was created by many people, not just one.

Cynthia Celeste Miller – 2011

Related posts:

1. Macabre Tales RPG Available Now!
2. Designing Call of Cthulhu: The Wasted Land
3. Cthulhu Week: Cthulhu Tales Comic Review

We have a new design essay from Jim Zubkavich about the Skullkickers comic series which is published by Image Comics. In this essay Jim tells us about his love of Dungeons & Dragons, bonding with his brother and how the game inspired the series.

Sword & Sassery: The Source of Skullkickers

Skullkickers, the action-comedy comic published by Image that I created, is the sarcastically loveable bastard child of many different sword & sorcery sources. From Robert E. Howard and Fritz Leiber to Tracy Hickman and Terry Pratchett, there are a slew of fantasy books by amazing authors that boil and bubble together in the cauldron I’m stirring, but above and beyond those literary sources is good ol’ Dungeons & Dragons.

Yup, Dave Arneson and Gary Gygax’s dice chucking combat miniatures game is the heart and soul of Skullkickers’ many hijinks and insanity.

Having said that, I want to make it clear that D&D play isn’t required to enjoy Skullkickers. It may help supply the blood that pumps through its veins, but it’s not insular or focused on impressing the reader with obscure stats and references to D&D canon. What Dungeons & Dragons did was to forge a paradigm in my brain about how fantasy was supposed to feel and what made it fun. Let me explain…

I started playing D&D when I was 8 years old. The now-famous red box set of rules came out in 1983 and my brother and I were introduced to the game by our older cousins. When you’re 8 years old anything older kids do is amazing, so the fact that my cousin Kevin could drink an entire can of Coke and then belch the alphabet made him pretty much the coolest person I‘d ever met at that point in my life. Mark and Kevin showed us the joys of Commodore 64 video games and Dungeons & Dragons and we were both horribly hooked. Hooked on games and hooked on fantasy as a whole. From then on we sought out fantasy novels like Conan and Fafhrd & the Grey Mouser, fantasy comics like Conan and Dr. Strange, fantasy movies like Conan the Barbarian and Beastmaster and fantasy video games like Gauntlet and… er, Conan. That Conan guy got around.

Before this my brother Joe generally didn’t want to hang out with his younger snot-nosed bro, but D&D was something we could do together that we both liked. Joe was the Dungeon Master and I was his eager pupil, waiting to be told which dice I had to roll and what viscerally violent reaction came from their results. The rules didn’t always make sense to us but we muddled through and figured it out as we went along. I was just happy Joe was listening to me for a change and that we could create a story about killing monsters.

And boy oh boy, did we kill those monsters – skeletons, goblins, kobolds, bugbears and fish people. All of them fell before the axes of Rolf, my little violent dwarf, Silverwood, the ranger or Victory Lion, the noble paladin. The body count and piles of treasure were enormous. Good times indeed.

Here’s the thing though, beyond just kicking butt, I realized that one of the things I enjoyed the most about playing D&D was my ability to make Joe laugh really hard. My brother has a façade of respectability and maturity, like we all do, but when he’s laughing and tears are rolling down his face while he can barely breathe, well that’s pretty much the best thing ever. I would surprise the crap out of him with strange asides and observations, throwing his plans for epic fantasy to the wolves time and time again. Every attempt for him to create a cohesive fantasy tale got sideswiped by the sass and stupidity I injected into the game. He’d act defiant about it at first, but eventually he’d start laughing and then it wouldn’t stop.

As we grew up and both became teenagers trying to figure out who we wanted to be, it wasn’t easy. There were new friends, different expectations and crazed hormones changing our behavior and interactions with everyone around us (girls!). D&D was the bond that kept our friendship intact.

In high school I moved on to a different group of gaming friends and that sass-laden attitude defined our games as well. I thought it was just Joe and I, but quickly realized it wasn’t. When you get a great group of friends together to roll some dice and tell a story, no matter how serious you try to be, the inherent silliness and sarcasm comes out unbidden. Storytelling is fun, the unexpected is fun and character interactions should turn clichés on their head and make people smile.

That joyful paradigm is at the heart of Skullkickers. Fantasy isn’t stodgy prophecies and magical items of unpronouncability, they’re a fun-filled romp that defies expectations; ‘Low’ fantasy instead of ‘high’ fantasy.

When you read Skullkickers, I hope that manic almost-out-of-control energy and adventurous spirit comes through loud and clear. It’s a thrill to bring that to our readers. If you finish an issue of Skullkickers and aren’t smiling, we haven’t done our jobs.

Jim Zubkavich – 2011

Visit Skullkickers.com for the latest updates on this series.

Skullkickers Volume 1: 1000 Opas and a Dead Body is available now at Amazon.com. You can also pre-order Skullkickers Volume 2: Five Funerals and Bucket of Blood at Amazon.com as well. Be sure to check out Jim’s work on UDON’s Exalted comics, which are available at DriveThruComics.com.

Related posts:

1. Skullkickers Vol. 2 Review
2. Skullkickers Comic Caption Contest
3. Skullkickers 3 – 4 Comic Review

We have a new design essay from Tomas Rawlings today. Tomas tells us about the work that went into developing the new Call of Cthulhu: The Wasted Land mobile game from Red Wasp Design.

Designing The Wasted Land

Hi there! My name is Tomas Rawlings and I’m the designer of the new game Call of Cthulhu: The Wasted Land. I’m one part of a small indie development team who’ve been working hard for almost a year now on a role-playing/strategy game set in the midst of the First World War. We’ve been working with Chaosium, the publisher of the multi-award winning paper RPG of the same name which, coincidently, this year celebrates its 30th anniversary and we’re aiming to bring the best of paper RPGs and mobile gaming together (and to sacrifice a few goats to Shub-Niggurath in the process).

Its probably worth a quick detour for anyone who has not heard of Call of Cthulhu. The deliberately unpronounceable ‘Cthulhu’ is the titular being of a series of shorty stories and novellas written by an American horror writer of the 1920s called Howard Philip Lovecraft, the most famous of which is ‘The Call of Cthulhu‘. What lifted Lovecraft’s work above much of that written by his contemporaries was that he managed to tap into the very human desire we have to explore our own mortality. Indeed he took this idea from something we explore at an individual level to flirt with the apocalypse of our species itself. Lovecraft’s stories were the Ragnarok for the 20th century and that status has ensured his work is read, reprinted, re-imagined and replayed over and over. Popular amongst the extensions to his work, was a table-top role-playing game, which became the ‘dark’ alternative. It was something played by those who wanted a little more ‘meat’ with their game than you got from playing the original Dungeons & Dragons (though not to disrespect D&D, it will always have a place in my heart!)

I’d written a paper supplement for Chaosium, the publishers of Call of Cthulhu a couple of years ago called the Dark Mirror. While working on this I had talked to Chaosium about doing something in video games on a number of occasions but it never seemed to happen for one reason or another. Then, the stars aligned last year, and I found myself in a position to do a mobile adaptation of Call of Cthulhu. Now mobile is not traditionally the first choice as a platform for an RPG especially not a paper one. A core part of what makes Call of Cthulhu such a great game is the people you play with and the role-playing they bring to the table but when faced with a screen that is about the same size as the palm of your hand, re-creating that communal experience is hard. So in deciding how to approach the game I looked back through the many games I’d played, searching for inspiration so we could retain that role-playing vibe yet allow a strong experience that lives as much in your head as in the games machine.

What struck me is that some of the most intense and enjoyable games I’ve played have been turn-based games; Laser Squad, Xcom and Fire Emblem for example. Their Chess-life strategies and fractured time structure build a tension within the player I was keen to use. We looked to do a turn based strategy game with strong RPG elements. So the core idea developed around taking the compelling universe of Call of Cthulhu, pulling out the core gameplay stats and the like, then overlaying that with my own experience as a games designer. For example this meant keeping the combat system in its broadest form but altering the Sanity system a little to account for the lack of people in the same room as you over-acting their Phasmophobia. On the subject of Sanity, in the paper game of Call of Cthulhu your characters slowly lose their minds over many adventures alongside brief bouts of madness between here and their final asylum of rest. For The Wasted Land, we’ve adapted the Sanity system so that your characters suffer from bouts of either mania, where briefly they become strong with rage before collapsing, or become paralysed with fear yet can recover their Sanity again. This adaptation means you need to ensure that you steal your character’s minds as well as their bodies for the inevitable tentacled-evil they will meet, yet the gameplay never spins away from you and stops being fun.

As another example of how we’ve adapted a system, lets look at magic;

“There is unknown magic on Hatheg-Kla, for the screams of the frightened gods have turned to laughter, and the slopes of ice shoot up endlessly into the black heavens whither I am plunging… Hei! Hei! At last! In the dim light I behold the gods of earth!” H.P.Lovecraft, The Other Gods (1921)

Magic is one of the defining aspects of most paper RPGs, and Call of Cthulhu is no different – it has magic, but a Mythos-like take on it. Magic in Call of Cthulhu is a much more expansive affair than in many other fantasy genre RPGs. In Call of Cthulhu, spells often take lots of time to cast and require considerable preparation. As a result I’ve always felt that magic in the Call of Cthulhu games has an authenticity that means it was almost believable and in-line with occult magic as described by famous historical figures like Dr John Dee. (Indeed Dee is reputed to have translated the Necronomicon into English!) Another important facet of magic in Call of Cthulhu is that is costs Sanity to use; this stops magic simply being an ‘easy’ weapon because this additional cost to your character incurs by their subversion of the laws of nature.

However to add magic to a mobile strategy game comes with its own challenges to make it fun as a gameplay device; in an environment such as this it can’t take days of preparation before casting a spell nor can we make the process overly complicated with such a small interface. But what we can do is keep the action cost of spells high and keep the cost in Sanity in-place, so that it makes a magic powerful tool during the adventure, but not one used without thinking first.

Once we’d designed the broad outline of the game genre and its gamic system, next we needed to work on the setting and story. With Call of Cthulhu you’re a bit spoiled for interesting choices; Inviticus, Dark Ages, 1890s, 1920s, contemporary or the far future. I wanted to keep closer to the 1920s but felt it was not quite where I wanted this game to be set, plus I wanted access to bigger guns! When working at Hothouse Creations, I’d pitched them a survival horror set during the First World War. I’d used this setting as it is a war on the cusp of living memory. It had lots of drama; filled with horror for those involved as the commanding generals, more accustomed to dreaming of cavalry charges than the reality of machine guns and barbed wire, leading their men into a storm of bullets year after year. As such, much of the art that came out of that war also had a nightmarish and surreal horror quality to it and again it reinforced the idea that it was a good setting for Call of Cthulhu, so the Great War for Civilisation began to be drawn into our narrative.

What of the game’s story? Years ago, after I’d seen the now classic 80s gore-fest of Re-animator, I sought Lovecraft’s original text and was fascinated to discover that it was not set only in one hospital but was set over several locations, including in the midst of World War 1. In Lovecraft’s story Dr. Herbert West volunteers his services in the British cause and happily finds himself a ready supply of bodies amidst the carnage. I’d always felt this was a story that could be expanded upon and so looked to this for inspiration. I started thinking; what if West was, far from an isolated operator, part of something much bigger and more dangerous? In The Wasted Land this is the case with a rogue German military cult using the war as cover for a much bigger plan. Sent over to stop them is the maverick academic and occultist Professor Brightmeer. He and his team have to descend into the middle of a human war to face a battle involving much older and darker powers than the German or British empires…

I hope this journey into the design process for Call of Cthulhu: The Wasted Land has been interesting. If you want to know more, you can follow us on Facebook or Twitter and also on our blog. Thanks for reading!

Tomas Rawlings – 2011

Related posts:

1. The Stars are Right as Call of Cthulhu: The Wasted Land Launches!
2. Adamant Entertainment Receives Call of Cthulhu License
3. The Doom from Below for Call of Cthulhu

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.

Exploring In Maps & Legends

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.

The comic version of Maps actually began life as a prose novel, one in which I’d written, oh, about 100 pages. Then I hit that dreaded middle section, where, you know, stuff really needs to start happening? And I’d gotten stalled out. Stuck in the mud. Blocked.

So I took the initial image of the book—a young woman standing in her apartment, razor in hand, carving a map into the drywall—and I described it to artist Niki Smith. Thanks to Twitter, I’d seen a call-for-writers tweet from her, in which she expressed her interest to draw a story if someone had a story idea to share. She really liked the concept of the map and the way the map opened into another world, and we were off.

I won’t go into all the details of how the comic got to its current state as a nine-issue digital comic miniseries—you can read about that at the Maps website—but here’s a quick checklist of how writing a comic sharpened my writing skills for other projects, whether it’s a novel or a story or even another comic script.

1. Fit your story into a prescribed format. For Maps, each issue was 20 pages, not counting the cover or the last page with the teaser for the next issue on it. So I had to make the story fit into those 20 pages, building to a strong finish to each issue to make readers salivate for the next issue. Once we got past six panels a page, things got crowded. This taught me how to be an efficient writer, squeezing in as much story as I could to fit my page guidelines, but it also forced me to consider pacing and things like chapter length and even the length of a paragraph or sentence. How much white space is there on the page? How will that big block of a paragraph look to the reader? Can I break it up? These are all things I’ve thought about before working in comics, but I now have a stronger sense of how things look on the page, and how to use that to manipulate – um, I mean satisfy – the reader.

2. End your chapters and scenes with a kick. Each page of a comic is like a little story, with a final panel so intriguing that you have no choice but to turn the page. So I always tried to end each page of the comic with a nice little jolt or surprise, something to keep the reader clicking through the pages. Now, as I’m working on a prose novel (ah, how I miss the pretty pictures!), I always need to know how each scene is going to end as well as each chapter, so I can build to that ending. I didn’t do that so much before I did my work in comics. Now, I’ve gotta know the how the scene or chapter ends before I can begin, and it should be some sort of cliffhanger.

3. Show through action instead of description or internal monologue. Remember the little clouds comic artists and used to use (and cartoonists still use on the funny pages) to represent a character’s thoughts? Well, those have pretty much gone out of style in comics today. While the thought balloons have been replaced by the caption box, I think it’s telling that we don’t really need those thoughts if the art is doing its work and the writer and artist has set up each panel properly. Readers rely on the actions of the characters to flesh out the characters’ personality, their needs, and their desires. It’s just that in comics you can see this happening, while in a prose work, you have to have enough words to envision those actions in your mind. And your characters need to act, not just sit there on the page. Your protagonist needs to protag.

4. Describe your setting. In my prose writing, I’d often forget the “establishing shot.” Comics need one, movies need one. This is one panel, usually the first in a new scene, to give readers or viewers a sense of where this scene is taking place. Sometimes I’d gloss over that, diving right into the dialog or the action. Or both. While working on the Maps script, artist Niki Smith would often remind me of that until it stuck. Now, in my current projects, I make sure I get the setting in there early, along with the dialog and action. And also, whenever I read novels or comics, or watch movies, I want to know more about the setting – and I get annoyed when nobody tells me anything about it!

5. Focus on your characters above all else. Why do we still love Batman, Spiderman, and John Constantine? They’ve been around for years, but they still have stories to tell. It’s because they’re fascinating, nuanced characters, and as a result writers keep pulling story after story out of those characters. Sure, there’s also a soap-opera aspect to these characters, in that you know they’ll always be there, serialized year after year, but you keep learning something new about them in the hands of strong writers and artists. So take a look at some of those comic characters and see what the storytellers are doing behind the scenes to make those characters so compelling. And take that with you into your own writing projects.

This list is just the biggest five things I’ve learned from scripting a comic. I could list all the other things I’ve picked up, but that’s a whole ‘nother blog entry.

And so our nine-issue comic In Maps & Legends comes to a conclusion this week, but my learning is far from over. Also, there are some plot threads we’ve left open that I’d like to one day tie together. At some point, I’d love to get back to Kait and her friends. There are always more maps and places to explore, and more writing tricks and techniques to teach myself.

# # #

You can find PDF versions of all 9 issues of In Maps & Legends at DriveThruComics.com.

About Michael Jasper
Michael Jasper has published six novels, a story collection, and over five dozen short stories in Asimov’s, Strange Horizons, Polyphony, Writers of the Future, and the Raleigh News & Observer, and other fine venues. His most recent novel is A Sudden Outbreak of Magic (UnWrecked Press, 2011).

Related posts:

1. Mouse Guard: Legends of the Guard Preview
2. Archaia Announces ‘Mouse Guard: Legends of the Guard’

Talk Like A Pirate Day just passed by and it got us thinking a bit about Pirates and RPGs, which naturally lead to zombies…ok, I don’t know where I was going with that, but it made a lot more sense in my head (guess I don’t have to worry about zombies wanting my brains do I?) Anyway, our Design Essay series continues with Daniel Davis telling us about ARRGH! Thar Be Zombies, a supplement for the All Flesh Must Be Eaten RPG from Eden Studios!

Ahoy, me hearties, Arrgh!

Pull up a keg ‘n’ ‘ave a grog while I tell ye scalawags a tale o’ stormy seas an’ th’ walkin’ dead! Thar Be Zombies, ‘ere…

Ahem…yeah, anyway, I’m Daniel Davis, writer of the All Flesh Must Be Eaten supplement, Arrgh! Thar Be Zombies! from Eden Studios. Matt’s asked if I wanted to write up this little essay and talk about the process that brought ATBZ to the gaming table. ‘Twas a sea of shoals an’ flotsam, sun an’ fair wind, but I’ll recount th’ tale, arrgh.

I’ve been a fan of the zombie genre for some time and a fan of the Age of Sail and pirates for only slightly less. I did some minor works for AFMBE, but I wanted to do something larger and heard that George was interested in a pirate themed AFMBE book. I threw together a pitch for the book, thinking that it’d be no problem. After all, I like zombies, and I like pirates. It was a no-brainer. Little did I know how little I knew about the Age of Sail. They liked the pitch
outline, sent me a contract, and so I heaved to, hoisted sail, and all that rot.

The biggest thing I wanted to remain true to was AFMBE’s roots, survival horror. ATBZ could easily have become Pirates of Penzance hokey, but the thing I like about AFMBE is its dark, survival horror aspect and I wanted to keep that as much as possible. I did have a discussion about that with the editor they assigned me. Much of the suggestions were for more of the over the top, voodoo dancing girls with snakes and Hollywood hoodoo, but I felt it’d be truer to the fans to keep with the horror aspect of the game instead of going for the lighthearted action of Basil Rathbone, Errol Flynn, or Douglas Fairbanks. There’s still some Hollywood in there, however, and you can still play Pirates of Penzance if you want. Actually, one of the playtesters ran a spoof of Star Wars to see how far you could push the system, so it’s all in the perception.

I delved into research, trying to find any sources for piracy and the Age of Sail. Some of it was simple. Other things, not so much. This was just before the first Pirates of the Caribbean film, so I looked for sources like The Princess Bride and the old Basil Rathbone films for movie inspiration. I also watched The Serpent and the Rainbow again for some Vodou inspiration. For books, there were a few research materials I purchased, others found from the library.

And then there was Treasure Island, of course, and the excellent On Stranger Tides by Tim Powers as far as fiction. While I was writing the book, the first Pirates movie hit the screen and I used it for a little inspiration in one of the Deadworlds, for some of the zombie Aspects, and Notoriety. Then, of course, there was the internet.

Anyone who’s done research on the net knows well the dangerous waters ye tread. There was a lot of information out there, but not a ton of reliable info. Still, I managed to find some aficionado sites that seemed pretty good sources and mined those for useful bits as well. In fact, I continually struck out on two things, reliable ship details and reliable Vodou information.

The first thing I knew I wanted to put in the book was a Vodou that would do justice to not only the religion, but to the setting and game mechanics. To that point, AFMBE had a few Miracles in the main book, but nothing else as far as metaphysics, and I wanted it to fit within that structure and expand some on the Miracles, something that hadn’t really been done up to that point. I mean, it is a religion, after all. However, I had Serpent and the Rainbow to go on and a couple random metaphysical books around my apartment.

I figured it’d be easy to find reliable Vodou information, but it was not to be. I photocopied some things from a book at the library, followed some of the internet links there, and eventually found a couple sites from true practitioners of Dahomean Vodou. I owe my research to the houngan and mambo who run those sites. The information they gave was about the most concise and helpful info I could find on true Vodou, as opposed to Louisiana voodoo or Hollywood hoodoo. I learned much that I never knew about the religion. Still, a bit of the Hollywood made its way into the book. It sort of had to. I mean, who wouldn’t want the fear factor of a character suddenly vomiting a mass of insects or becoming transformed into a frog for their transgressions against a local bokor?

My next difficulty lay in finding prices for gear and goods back during the Age of Sail, along with trying to figure out reliable sources for currency rates back in the 1700s. It was a fluctuating time monetarily, so things changed a lot as war with this country or that drove prices higher or modified exchange rates. I managed to find some sources and even some ship manifests that showed the prices of the goods aboard the vessels, which was a huge help. I contacted a fellow AFMBE player in England for a good source for the English currency of the day and even some exchange rates.

If Vodou was the most difficult thing to put together, ships and ship combat was the close second. As I said earlier, there’s a lot of unreliable or conflicting information out there. Also, the more research I did, the more I found to add to the chapter. Sail types, cannon shot types, the effects of cannon shot on ships, fires aboard ships, crew ability, torture, disease, mutiny, everything you could think of. Sadly, there are some things that never made it into the book, but I hope to one day see it in a web enhancement. The second thing that made ship combat so daunting was that the creator of Unisystem, CJ Carella, already had his own ideas on wooden ship combat, which I didn’t know until I’d written the chapter. I ended up having to wait for the file and then retrofit it all into what I’d written. A daunting task, but eventually, it came together.

The Deadworlds were probably the simplest to put together of all of it. This was another of those editorial arguments I had. I wanted to keep that survival horror aspect, regardless of the setting. I did end up cutting one Deadworld and added Islands in a Dark Sea, which was probably the biggest sticking point and is actually the Deadworld I’ve seen the most positive reaction to. I was incredibly happy with how that one turned out and it was nice to hear that others liked it as well.

Even after the book was finished, after one editor had to leave and another took his place, there was playtesting and many tweaks.

Unfortunately, with the first editor gone, ATBZ sort of sat for a while on the playtester list and some other, also excellent products, passed it in the queue. Pirates II passed it as well, as did Pirates III, which would have been good times to get it out, but between a personal life issue of my own, Eden’s monetary hit with Buffy and other things, and the recession, it sat around, lurking like a local fisherman out for a pleasure cruise at night through eel infested waters.

Still, it did sail out into the light o’ day an’ I’m ‘appy as Jolly Jack ‘imself t’ see it. It was fun, it was maddening, it was exhilarating, it was daunting, it was frightening, just like sailing across the seven seas and battling the undead, and I’m happy to have had the chance to do it.

Daniel Davis – 2011

Related posts:

1. Zombie Week: Zombie Tramp Comic Review
2. Zombie Week: Interview with Daniel Davis
3. Zombie Week: Nox Arcana’s Zombie Influx Review

Shelter in Place is about survival, teamwork and fun. Designed for ten to twenty five players, the game captures the frenetic pace of a zombie movie in an action packed game. Players can take on the roles of Humans or Zombies in a desperate conflict to survive. Humans must use their wits to survive, making sacrifices in order to live through the night. The Zombies must use their brute, unrelenting strength and teamwork to overpower the humans and eat some delicious brains.

Shelter in Place blends all the fun of a good old-fashioned game of tag, with the camp and action of a zombie horror film. The system was created to be easy to read and understand for new gamers, but still a fun challenge to more experienced players. Shelter in Place comes with the option to add special “twist” characters who can change the game – from adding a cyborg to a vampire, these twist characters can make every game a surprise!

Shelter in Place can be played at a park, home, convention, as a team building exercise for a hip workplace, as a kids’ summer camp game, or at a lighthearted wedding reception.

Shelter in Place is finished and ready to go to print. Your support will help us release Shelter in Place in our first print run, and ensure that we can bring the game to conventions and backyards everywhere.

Find out more and pledge your support for this game at Kickstarter:

Related posts:

1. Gimme Shelter Zombie Anthology Available Now!
2. Zombie Cinema Game Review
3. Cthulhu Live 3rd Edition eBook!

In Ashes of the Earth Eliot Pattison pieces together a new society after global annihilation. While most novels set in the future offer heavy doses of imagined science and technology, in his new novel Pattison constructs a more realistic society out of the ashes of apocalypse—with characters who sometimes became a little too realistic for the author. As Pattison explains:

The Apocalypse at the End of the Hall

Many of my readers have been asking why I would make such a big leap from my two series set in Tibet and the 18th century to the post-apocalyptic future of Ashes of the Earth. From my perspective the leap was not so great. I have been writing for years about characters, and groups of characters, who are cast out of society. I think tales of people who must construct their own justice because law and government have failed them provide a fertile ground for storytelling, and also allows me to explore the interplay of government, culture and religion in defining justice. For many years I pursued those themes in the context of Tibetans who have had their culture systematically dismantled by outsiders, then moved to the 18th century Scots and Native Americans whose cultures were also directly attacked and nearly annihilated. I kept wondering what it would be like to throw together people who not only have lost their culture but also their government, their social and economic context, their very identity. This is the fundamental premise of Ashes. It’s a rich context for a novelist, but seldom explored in any detail.

If you’re asked to name a book or film about the end of the world you’re likely to think of a high tech spectacle like 2012 or Day After Tomorrow or a gloomy survivor tale like The Road. They’re either adrenalin rushes or morose tragedies. Tales of the day after are always the same: how to stay alive and make it to another day. I am more interested in the day after the day after. My characters have had a generation to think about what happened, to adapt, to step forward, however imperfectly. Faced with a blank slate, they have been forced to consider, very deliberately, what their new world should be. They are driven by new tools, new tensions, new cultural priorities, but have to face some very old forces of corruption and crime.

I always develop a bond with the lead characters in my books, and as that bond grows, writing the book becomes a journey in which they are my close companions. In Ashes, as I grew more deeply engaged in that journey I began to feel the weight that constantly pressed down on these companions. These are people filled not just with self-doubt but also a collective doubt about the viability of their very world. Driven to reconcile the pieces of their lives, their prior lives have become more like a puzzle that is impossible to solve.

At the same time, of course, they are haunted by grief. Those lost to my protagonist Hadrian Boone in the apocalypse are still so vivid to him twenty-five years later that they are sometimes more real to him than those around him. For some of these survivors no meaningful comfort is available, no real possibility of healing the pain of their losses. They have realized the pain will never really go away, they simply have to find ways to endure it, letting scars build over it. An unexpected scent, sound or image can suddenly trigger a memory of a lost place, lost moment, or a lost loved one, threatening to drown such survivors in a flood of emotion. There are times when these ghosts become so real they are like characters in the book, phantoms lurking offstage that very much affect events and personalities, a dark presence that can pounce on my companions like a paralyzing seizure.

As my journey in the ruined lands progressed I began to sense another ghost that hung over all my characters, the ghost of the old world in a collective sense. The self-annihilation of that world has caused the survivors to distrust it, to suspect it, to often consider the prior civilization—our civilization—as an experiment that had to be set aside. Despite its wealth and dazzling technology their prior world failed them, and after a generation that world has begun to feel like something of a fraud in the broad history of mankind. Some readers have questioned my new society’s practice of not speaking of the history of the past century but in the long quiet hours every novelist spends with his characters I grew to understand that they really did not want to speak of their former world. Discussion of it wasn’t simply painful to them, they also genuinely feared that the new generation would try to emulate it. As I say in the novel, it was very like, a communicable disease that spread by speaking of it.

My close bond with my characters—for months they were shadows lurking just behind me—made the apocalypse seem all too real sometimes. When I was walking down the hall to my office for another session with the book it was very much like stepping into that world. The apocalypse was always waiting for me at the end of the hall. During the last few months of writing Ashes I was dreaming about apocalypse almost every night.

Another surprise in writing Ashes was my discovery of the frightening normalcy of apocalypse. In my many dialogues about the novel I have discovered a remarkable, though sometimes reluctant, resonance among others about post-apocalyptic scenarios. I expected that initial reactions from readers would be along the lines of “why select such a dismal context?” or “why would you want to spend so much time in such a dark, unlikely place?” –but that has not been the case. Instead, a surprising number of readers seem almost eager to offer their personal view of the post-apocalyptic world. They don’t reject the notion that such scenarios are a real possibility, they want to explain their own version of what that world would be like. Apparently we have lived so many years with the Doomsday Clock set at five minutes to midnight that the apocalypse has taken on a familiar aspect. We may often treat discussion of the apocalypse as taboo but it is uncanny –even alarming—that so many of us are thinking about it.

I have been truly amazed at how many people harbor ready, well-considered views on what post-apocalyptic geographies would be safe, what technologies would endure, what types of people would be most likely to survive, or even what food survivors would be eating. This may not be a topic for dinner table discussion but it is one that many of us have harbored secret thoughts about, often in great detail. Realizing that I have obviously spent a lot of time immersed in such scenarios tends to make others ready to divulge these dark secrets. I have become their post-apocalyptic confessor.

Eliot Pattison – August 2011

Related posts:

1. Plague of the Dead 2: Thunder & Ashes Fiction Review

Stew Wilson from Zero Point Information is here to tell us about his new game Black Seven. A modern espionage RPG, Black Seven isinspired by stealth-action games like Deus Ex, Alpha Protocol, and Splinter Cell.

Infiltrating BLACK SEVEN

BLACK SEVEN started life in my throw-away ideas file, a couple of notes for a system that, at the time, I wasn’t able to make work. That time was 2004, and I was re-playing Deus Ex for the fourth time. Under the effects of too much strong coffee, I hacked White Wolf’s Trinity so that I could run Deus Ex-like games. I never had a chance to try it, and I was left with niggling little ideas that wouldn’t go away that wouldn’t work in my proposed hack.

Seven years later, I was re-playing Deus Ex for the seventh time, when all of a sudden I got one of those ideas that refuses to let go. Two nights later, I had a file of scribbled notes and ideas.

Over the course of another week, I stuck that file into Scrivener and rewrote the living hell out of it. At that point, I had a playtest draft. Testing showed me some wonky areas, and I was able to smooth them over. All of a sudden, I had a game. But where had all of this come from?

Deep Background

BLACK SEVEN isn’t the only game in its genre. I describe it as a stealth-action game because calling it an espionage game would invite comparisons to Spycraft, Top Secret/S.I., and Wilderness of Mirrors. Espionage is about the long game, while stealth-action focuses only on particular aspects. To use a cinematic example, “espionage” can do all of Doctor No, while “stealth action” only really comes into play once Bond and Honey are captured.

As you can possibly tell, I’m a massive video game fan. Deus Ex may have started the ideas rolling, but bits from No One Lives Forever, Alpha Protocol, and the Splinter Cell series all fed in to the design. When you look at the game in the abstract, a stealth-action game is a puzzle with a limited range of solutions that appeal to different levels of player skill. In effect, each solution’s made up of a combination of actions involving stealth, takedowns, and FPS-style gunplay. Chop each of those up in to four general “tasks” under each heading, and you’ve got the range of what players can do. Yes, you can sneak past guards. Or your can pick the locks on the vent shafts and not see a guard, or hack the cameras, or put on a fake pass and a confident smile and act like you’re meant to be there. If you’re taking a guard out, do you snipe from half a building away, get up close and personal, or fake a distress call from another area? Each level in a game presents a situation, and it’s up to the player to work out which set of specific actions from the limited selection available will work best with his or her own skill and preferences.

Likewise, video games operate on a primarily reactive level: the level and scenario is designed from the start, and it only changes in response to the player’s actions. In terms of pen & paper roleplaying games, that school of design calls back to pre-populated dungeons drawn out on graph paper, without even the thrills of wilderness encounters to add some randomness. I wanted something in place that would limit the GM to setting the scene and then following the rules same as every other player.

Gather Intel

I don’t normally like prescriptive games. My ideal system looks a lot like PDQ, Over the Edge, or Unknown Armies—games with a lot of fuzz around the edges and flexibility built in. I don’t game with people I don’t trust, and a lot of prescriptive game design boils down to using the rules to replace the trust between players, because it’s not assumed to be present. Sorry, that’s a horrible sentence, but it’s true. However, BLACK SEVEN’s plenty prescriptive. How come?

At least in part, it has to be. I personally hate using maps and markers to work out who can see who, and what can hit what, but I wanted to preserve those tense moments when you sneak into an office and oh shit a guard! Stealth action as a genre is very adversarial—in effect, the players are trying to solve the puzzle that is the facility. Setting up a strict, all-encompassing structure of rules protects everyone at the table from accusations of pulling things out of thin air. To be fair, I tried to make it as fun as possible for everyone involved, so while the GM’s building facilities and working out missions, he gets to roll dice and move poker chips around. I suppose you could use stones, or unused dice, or some other marker. I just have a whole lot of poker chips.

Despite that design philosophy, I still wanted to leave as much detail as possible up to the players. Hence, while the rules describe what happened on one level, it’s up to the folks around the table to work out what that means in the context of the story being told. Being Noticed is a rules-thing, but all it means is that you’ve got a very short window of time before people start shooting. How that plays out in the actual story of the operation is up to the players and GM, as it should be. I deliberately left the whole thorny issue of “narrative authority” loose and fuzzy, because I see BLACK SEVEN as a fairly casual game, and thus it should accommodate folks like Tamsyn, who wants to narrate how cool her character is on a success alongside those like Danny, who wants to sit back and let the GM (or the other players) tell him what cool things happened.

The Job

I’m particularly happy with two sections in BLACK SEVEN. The first is the aforementioned facility design system. Each mission is broken down into a number of milestones, then each milestone’s attached to a facility. Each facility has areas with guards to take out, computers to hack, and security to avoid. Normally, one chip buys one area. To mix things up, the GM can also spend a chip to add a Feature—maybe the area’s protected by state-of-the-art security drones, or the sentries are in a running firefight with a third party, or the cops will show up in a set time, or the whole place is wired to blow. Each one applies different rules to that area, and the players don’t know what an area holds until they arrive.

The other is the options in the back. Simple, easy rules for adding cybernetics and psionic powers to the game, that I hope others will use as a template for their own hacks. Each one adds options for the players—cybernetic enhancements let an Agent re-roll failed actions, as long as she’s got Power available. Psi powers let each Agent break the rules in a specific way, but at the cost of Hits. But it’s not just the Agents who get new toys to play with: the GM can include Features like Biomagnetic Feedback Loops, Ghosts in the Machine, Masterminds, and Psi Dampeners.

BLACK SEVEN also exists as an experiment in self-publishing. Working entirely off my own back, with only myself to blame—no co-collaborators, no developers, and no artists—I’ve been able to bring an RPG to market in under a month. Seven years ago, it would have languished on a blog. Now, it’s available to the world. In addition to a fully bookmarked and linked PDF, BLACK SEVEN’s download contains the sample adventure as a separate document, copies of all of the record sheets, and the rulebook and adventure in ePub format. I’ve also released the game under a Creative Commons licence, because a small-press game can only benefit from people sharing it.

Debrief

Looking at BLACK SEVEN now, it’s what I wanted to make when I first scribbled down some notes. That’s a given. But taking the long view, it’s the game I didn’t know how to write back in 2004. I don’t think I’d fully recognise it, were I to read it back then. But that’s what comes of learning.

The first book isn’t the end. I’ve got a couple more ready-to-play missions in mind, along with a more in-depth look at cyberpunk stealth-action gaming, because I’m a personal fan of the genre. After that, who knows? And given the Creative Commons licence, I’m more than happy to host or link to other people’s interpretations of the game on zeropointinformation.com. This is just the start.

The Black Seven RPG is available now at the Flames Rising RPGNow Shop.

Related posts:

1. Black Angels by Michael Jasper

The Flames Rising Design Essay series continues with a little something from David Chandler (Wellington) telling us about his new dark fantasy novel Den of Thieves. Most Flames Rising readers will know David from his excellent zombie and vampire novels, several of which we’ve reviewed here at the site. In this essay David also shares a little insight into his publishing history and what genres authors are told about they can and can’t write.

How I Ended up Writing a Fantasy Novel and Changed my Name

Hi. My name is Dave. I used to think I was a science fiction writer.

That was back in the ‘80s, a wild and wooly time for genre fiction. I was not exclusively a science fiction reader back then—nobody was, or at least, I knew very few people who identified themselves as just “science fiction fans”. When I went to Waldenbooks with whatever money I could scrap together I looked at the wall of books and could spend hours trying to figure out what to buy. There was fantasy, science fiction, and horror, typically all on the same shelf—and I wanted it all.

I devoured Stephen King novels when I wasn’t buried under a pile of Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein, and of course there was the beautiful edition of the Lord of the Rings that had once belonged to my father, just waiting to be read yet again, if I could make time while working my way through Thieves’ World anthologies and Conan reprints. I couldn’t get enough of these books, and I would read anything I could get my hands on that was even vaguely genre related. I did not turn up my nose at elves and unicorns. I could muddle my way through hard science fiction novels that had actual math equations in them. And I loved being scared by a good horror novel.

When I started writing for myself it was mostly science fiction I tackled, but not always, not by a long shot. The first novel I actually managed to finish writing was a fantasy book and I was very proud of it. I wrote horror short stories for friends and watched their eyes bug out, and it was good.

When did we decide, as a culture, that you could only like one genre at a time?

In 2005 I published my first novel. It was called Monster Island and it had zombies in it, so everybody decided it was horror. It didn’t feel that way to me. It was set in the (very near) future and there was a strong emphasis on technology and science in the book, so I thought it was science fiction. But apparently I missed the memo. Zombies = horror.

It didn’t bother me much at the time. I liked horror just fine and was thrilled to be ushered into the rarefied world of published horror novelists. I went to the World Horror Convention in San Fransisco and met, for maybe the first time in my life, people who just… got me. Who understood where I was coming from, and why the old pulp adventure stories I loved were good, and why I would want to write about the undead. It was glorious, and the fact I could make a living doing it was a dream come true.

I was David Wellington, published author, and life was very, very good.

Until I announced I wanted to write a story about zombies who build a makeshift rocket and go to the moon so they could live in peace. And was met with stunned silence.

But that… that would be science fiction, I was told. You can’t do that!

Well, that’s the way it is today. We are constantly told by the media, by industry professionals, by our fellow writers that readers today can’t handle more than one genre at a time. Science fiction fans turn up their noses in disgust at the thought of elves and wizards—that’s just not scientifically accurate enough. Horror fans especially—or so I have been told—will never, ever pick up a book with a spaceship on the cover (for the purposes of brevity, let’s put aside the obvious exceptions—each of which just seems to prove the rule anyway). You’re not allowed to cross genres or somehow the spacetime continuum will collapse. Or you’ll stop selling books, which is even worse.

So I resigned myself to writing nothing but horror. My brain was fizzing with other ideas. I saw a solar system at the end of the planetary formation process, a system with ten thousand planets and the rough and tumble prospectors dodging protoplanet impacts there. I saw a world circling a black hole, where a Lovecraftian monster god ruled over acolytes mutated by constant x-ray bombardment. Most clearly of all I saw a thief in a medieval city, pulling off the greatest heist in history with nothing more complicated than a crossbow and a really solid plan.

But I put all those ideas on hold because I was David Wellington: horror writer—and that was that.

I had plenty of great ideas for horror books, too, and those I wrote and published and actually made some money, and that was more than enough to be satisfied with. But then something horrible happened.

Not “horrible”. No monsters jumped out of my bedroom closet, no serial killers started stalking me. I just got divorced. It was a lot worse than those genre horrors, frankly. It was a lousy time in my life and just a really sad ending to a relationship I had treasured. I had to move to Brooklyn and pick up the pieces and start life anew.

That was when I started writing fantasy. I did it as therapy, honestly. I let my inner thirteen year old out to play, and remind me why I loved what I did, and how books would always be my salvation. I had this idea, you see, that fantasy heist idea, and it had been percolating in my head for five years, five years while the characters got stronger, while the plot firmed up, while I imagined the whole thing as the book I could never write. And now, darn it, I was going to write it after all.

I did it in secret. I didn’t tell anybody what I was up to, not my agent, not my best friends. I was so terrified that my credentials as a horror writer would be questioned. But I wrote it. I started on page one and I didn’t stop until I got to THE END.

And then I did a terrible, dumb thing. I showed it to one friend. It’s really hard not to show off something you’ve put so much work into. I let my friend read it.

And he liked it. Like, a lot. He insisted I show it to my agent. I actually thought my agent was going to be angry that I’d wasted all that writing time. But my agent liked it, too.

Pretty soon we had a publisher who liked it. Den of Thieves, book one of the Ancient Blades trilogy, was on its way. There was just one hiccup. My fans.

My fans, who I owe everything to. My fans, my horror fans, who mean everything to me, the people who read my stories and email me to say they liked them, the people who give me all the encouragement and support a writer needs. My fans who I would not trade for all the world.

“They’re not going to like it,” I was told. “They don’t read fantasy.”

That’s just how it is. The way the world works. I was going to alienate all of my readers and doom my career by bringing out this book I was so proud of.

So I became David Chandler, fantasy writer. It’s my middle name, if you’re wondering. David Chandler doesn’t write horror, oh no. He doesn’t go in for all that blood and guts stuff. He’s a hardcore fantasy guy. He writes about dwarves and elves and magic swords. Don’t worry—you’re in good hands.

So here we are.

The book is out. It’s doing really well. People really like it. I’ve been holding my breath, waiting to see what my—I mean, David Wellington’s—horror fans would think. Whether they would get angry. Whether they would riot in the streets. I sent them an email telling them about the new book and promising I wouldn’t bother them again if they didn’t want to hear about it.

The response has been overwhelming. Overwhelmingly positive. Every single email I got back was full of excitement and enthusiasm. They didn’t care what I wrote—they just wanted more! They liked my books, they always had, and if I wanted to try an experiment they would come along for the ride.

Once again, my fans, my readers, have come through for me. The same people who made my dream possible in the first place have proven the conventional wisdom wrong, and given me hope that I can write all the books I want to, the books that fizz away in the back of my brain and maybe, just maybe, it won’t be the end of the world.

I can’t thank them enough.

So to all of them, and everyone reading this:

Hi. My name is Dave, and I write genre books. If you like action, and suspense, and fun stories regardless of what somebody tells you you’re supposed to like, we’re going to get along just fine.

David Chandler (Wellington) – 2011

About the author
David Chandler is the author of Den of Thieves, available now everywhere books are sold. David Wellington is the author of the upcoming 32 Fangs, a vampire novel which will be released in 2012. Find out more at their websites: ancientblades.com and davidwellington.net.

Related posts:

1. Frostbite: A Werewolf Tale by David Wellington Now Available
2. David Moody’s Hater Chapter One
3. Pre-Order 23 Hours: A Vengeful Vampire Tale by David Wellington

Author and comic scribe Michael Jasper is here with a new design essay about his novel A Sudden Outbreak of Magic. Michael tells about the genesis of the idea back in his teaching days and how that initial concept developed into the book that is available now. He even links us to a sneak peek at the follow up book, A Wild Epidemic of Magic, which is currently in development.

A Brief History of Magic

Magic is everywhere. You just have to look hard enough to see it.

Magic is dangerous. You start using it, and all sorts of powerful people will take notice. And they will hunt you down.

In a nutshell, that’s the premise of my Contagious Magic series of novels.

In the first book in the series, A Sudden Outbreak of Magic, magic returns to the world after years of being contained and sometimes wiped out by a centuries-old Sorcerer named Azure. But now magic is back, and it’s spreading like a virus, faster than wildfire.

I wish the same could be said for the actual writing of this novel. Because it was anything but fast!

Way Back in the ’90s…

I originally began work on these ideas about magic back in 1993 or so, back when I was teaching junior high English and Reading. I wanted my seventh graders to focus on sensory details, so I figured I’d try it myself. So I wrote about this old fellow with wild salt-and-pepper hair and a long gray beard, with snot in his mustache from a recent, explosive sneeze (my students loved that detail), and his cardboard home on the snowy streets of Chicago.

Over the next few years, I slowly knocked out my first version of that old fellow’s story (he was called Joe in the draft version, but now he’s named Archie). I still kind of like that original story, even if it did have a lot of characters and action packed into about 100 pages.

And now it just so happens that you can read that version, called “The Last Sorcerer,” for free over at my website. Great timing, there, eh?

Can’t Get You Outta My Head…

I fiddled with the story over the years, revising and rewriting it, adding and removing characters, making minor characters into main characters, and vice versa. At one point I’d taken it from about a dozen point-of-view characters down to just one. That version almost worked.

Almost.

But I was missing something, so just this year, about 18 years after scribbling out that original description of Joe the homeless guy for my teenage students, I went back in. The finished version is the novel-length book A Sudden Outbreak of Magic, featuring the dual (and sometimes dueling) protagonists, Kelley and Jeroan Strickland.

Kelley and Jeroan are a pair of black teenagers who’ve just moved from Chicago to a mostly white city (Dubuque, Iowa), where they immediately feel like outsiders in their new lives. And then one day, a homeless old man (remember him?) “infects” them with magic.

They soon learn that the old guy in the alley has lost most of his memory because of all the magic he’s done over the years. And the guy has some powerful enemies that have been looking for him ever since the big Chicago Fire, led by a very determined, 800-year-old Sorcerer who travels to Dubuque to find these Kelley and Jeroan before they infect anyone else.

Only Kelley’s new way of using magic will save their new city and their magically infected friends, though she may lose her brother Jeroan in the process.

More Magic to Come in the Future…

So that’s my story about the origins of A Sudden Outbreak of Magic, and I’m sticking to it—it’s taken me long enough to figure out how to tell it!

I also wanted to add that I’m in the very early stages of planning an 8-issue comic adaptation of A Sudden Outbreak of Magic. I’ve always felt like this story would work perfectly as a comic, and now that I know a lot more about scripting comics, I’m ready to take that leap. So if you know of any artists looking for some work, just let me know!

And I’m now eyebrows-deep into the second novel in the series, A Wild Epidemic of Magic, and I’ve got quite a few ideas for the third. Check out my website for a preview of the opening chapters of book two. Let’s just hope it doesn’t take me another two decades to finish these sequels!

You can find a PDF version of A Sudden Outbreak of Magic at DriveThruFantasy.com.

About Michael Jasper
Michael Jasper has published seven novels, a story collection, and over five dozen short stories in Asimov’s, Strange Horizons, Polyphony, Writers of the Future, and the Raleigh News & Observer, and other fine venues. He is also the writer for the digital comic In Maps & Legends with artist Niki Smith. His most recent novel is Family, Pack (UnWrecked Press, 2011).

His website is MichaelJasper.net.

Related posts:

1. Street Magic Fiction Review
2. Magic: The Gathering – Duels of the Planeswalkers
3. Magic Burns Fiction Review

Dave Gross, author of Pathfinder and Forgotten Realms fiction, who Alana recently interviewed here at Flames Rising stopped by to tell us a little about how his favorite kung fu movies inspired his writing.

For inspiration in writing Master of Devils, the latest Pathfinder Tales novel, I steeped myself in dozens of kung fu movies. Some were straight-on martial arts stories from the heyday of the Shaw Brothers, while others were more recent blends of wuxia action with art-house photography. Among my favorites are the fantasy films of the 80s and 90s, many of which include a strong element of supernatural horror.

The first thing you need to know about kung fu movies is that any one of them can seem like five or six different movies crammed into one. Chinese screenwriters seldom stick to a single genre, so you’ll find elements of horror, romance, satire, political commentary, and even slapstick humor in what appears by the DVD cover to be a straight-up action film. Thus, when you’re looking for a “horror kung fu movie,” you shouldn’t expect a simple fright fest–although some of them have some great scary moments. More often you’ll find moments of terrific suspense or ghastly horror in between scenes of action or comedy.

Here’s a brief survey of some of my favorite kung fu movies with an element of the dark supernatural. Whether you’re a gamer, a horror fan, or a lover of action movies, there’s something for you in each of these films.

Spooky Encounters (1980)

Long before Mr. Vampire perfected the depiction of hopping vampires, Sammo Hung introduced them as an icon of horror and comedy with Spooky Encounters. He plays Bold Cheung, the unwitting cuckold of a scheming wife who carries on with his boss, Master Tam, while Cheung is manipulated into staying the night at a series of isolated locations. The first involves a dare to peel an apple–without breaking its skin–while staring into a magic mirror in a purportedly haunted house. Despite the pranksters’ belief that it’s all just a gag, sure enough, a real ghost appears to admonish them.

A series of wacky accidents keeps Cheung safe while his tormentors fall prey to the undead in various locations. When Cheung finally begins to suspect the affair, Tam hires a witch, Chin, to dispose of his rival. The witch’s partner, Tsui, disapproves of the scheme and ends up assisting Cheung. In a nice joke that clearly inspired a subplot in Mr. Vampire, a dishonest merchant substitutes duck eggs for the chicken eggs that can save Cheung from one of the restless corpses.

After a series of comic encounters with the undead, the film climaxes with a duel in which the rival magicians use the bodies of Master Tam and Cheung as their proxies, the former imbued with the spirit of the Sword God, the latter with the essence of the Monkey King.

The final scene of Cheung’s revenge on his unfaithful wife will (and should) shock most North American audiences, but in a film of such broad comedy it is meant to play more like the ignoble defeat of the Coyote after his many attempts to capture the Road Runner. Still, as moments of horror go, that’s the one that stays with me.

Zu Warriors from the Magic Mountain (1983)

This Tsui Hark film is another mashup of genres, but its Blood Demon antagonist and the haunted chambers of the titular Mountain add a strong element of horror to a heroic quest with slighter elements of comedy, romance, and political satire.

The film opens with a war between East and West Zu, their soldiers dressed in bright red and blue uniforms. When the nimble scout Ti (Yuen Biao) falls afoul of his bickering commanders, he flees only to bump into a Red Army soldier (Sammo Hung). The two soon make a truce, only to be swept up in the advance of four other armies.

Ti escapes by falling down a cliff, where he finds himself beneath the Magic Mountain. In its chambers he finds a cult of demon-worshippers and restless dead. Fortunately, he also finds a master swordsman and begs to become his disciple. Soon a monk with his own follower arrives, and the four join forces to fight the dreadful Blood Demon. While a while-garbed mystic with prehensile eyebrows holds the monster at bay with his Moon Mirror, our heroes search for a pair of magic swords that can slay the demon. The dated special effects usually keep the monsters from seeming too horrific, but they include such evocative monsters as jar-ghosts, black-flag cultists, shape-changing avatars, and vicious blood crows. When the beautiful women arrive, the romance never slows the action for long, and the climactic scenes look far more Power Rangers than Crouching Tiger. Still, for those who can hold on for the wild ride, this film contains more inspiration per-minute than any other film I can think of.

Mr. Vampire (1985)

Even though it is set in the early 20th Century, Mr. Vampire’s story of necromancy could easily fit into an earlier age. Our heroes are Chau-sang (Chin Siu-ho) and Mon Choi (Ricky Hui), a sort of Chinese Martin and Lewis team. Both young men are apprentices to Master Kau (Lam Ching-ying), who tends the restless corpses of the recently departed. After a false scare of youthful mischief disturbs Master Kau’s undead charges and delivers a brisk action scene that teaches us the rules (the restless corpses hop rather than walk, and they can be pacified by a drop of blood or a sutra stuck to their brows), the story begins.

Obeying his will, the wealthy Yam (Huang Ha) wishes to re-bury his long-dead father. Canny Master Kau understands that the elder Yam was a dishonest businessman, and the fortune-teller who advised his burial cursed him to an undead existence but left this escape clause to spare his descendents from continued punishment. Naturally, the reburial plans go awry, and the elder Yam–a much more powerful form of hopping vampire–escapes to terrorize the town.

In a substantial subplot, the handsome Chau-sang attracts the amorous interest of a beautiful ghost (Wong Siu-fung), and goofy Mon Choi seeks to protect Yam’s daughter Ting Ting (Moon Lee) from the murderous corpse of her grandfather. Master Kau must protect them all, despite the interference of Ting Ting’s absurd and jealous cousin (Billy Lau).

The movie is rich with inspiration for gamers or writers seeking to include the accoutrements of Taoist sorcery in their campaigns or stories. Octagonal mirrors, cat’s cradles made of enchanted string, coin daggers, and the mystic power of sticky rice are all prominent devices.

Mr. Vampire is foremost a comedy, but the wire-assisted fight scenes rival the action in the best martial arts movies. And there are moments of great suspense and even horror, as when a hopelessly out-matched Mon Choi tries to hide Ting Ting from the blind vampire who tracks their breath. In fact, most of the action plays out like a survival horror scenario played at high speed.

A Chinese Ghost Story (1987)

A Chinese Ghost Story pairs handsome young tax collector Ning Choi-san (Leslie Cheung) with the restless spirit of the beauteous Nip Siu-sin (Joey Wang). The story begins when unfriendly villagers suggest that the penniless Choi-san spend the night in a nearby temple without warning him the place is haunted. There he interrupts a duel between a Taoist sorcerer (Wu Ma) and a deadly swordsman, the latter of whom soon succumbs to the wiles of another seductive ghost.

Choi-san soon encounters Siu-sin and avoids becoming another victim by virtue of his accidentally backing into fresh-painted sutras that ward against spirits. But his gallantry impresses Siu-sin, and they soon fall in love, much to the displeasure of her demon master (Lau Siu-ming in a scenery-chewing, cross-dressing role).

After a cute sequence in which Siu-sin must hide Choi-san in her bath, the demon discovers her treachery and transforms into its true aspect as a wicked tree with a hideous prehensile tongue (which also provides some especially raunchy humor). Despite the valiant efforts of Choi-san and the sorcerer, the demon drags Siu-sin into the underworld, setting the stage for a daring rescue.

While it shares a color palette with The Bride with White Hair, A Chinese Ghost Story depends much more on clever plot twists and a healthy dose of physical comedy. Despite those reliefs, both the walking dead who haunt the temple and the hideous tree demon are nightmare material.

The Bride with White Hair (1993)

More North American fans recognize the iconic image of Brigitte Lin from The Bride with White Hair than practically any other Chinese fantasy heroine. One of the great things about Lin’s Wolf Girl who eventually becomes the eponymous Bride is that she’s a complicated antihero and the perfect complement to the romantic lead.

Leslie Cheung plays Zhuo Yihang, the reluctant heir to the leadership of the Wutang Clan, one of several martial arts societies vying for supremacy. One of the rival factions is an evil foreign sect whose foremost assassin, Lian Nichang (Lin), falls in love with Yihang. Her feelings evoke a deadly jealousy from her sect’s leader, a monstrous pair of conjoined twins, the male half of whom lusts for Nichang. When tragic circumstances divide Yihang and Nichang, the later spontaneously ages, her long white hair becoming more deadly than her blade and whip. As the unstoppable witch, she destroys the Wutang. The rest of the film is full of bloody revenge with a beautiful, tragic image bookending the violence.

Almost entirely shot in studio, the film’s dark and misty palette establishes an ominous gothic atmosphere. Some of its most evocative scenes include the moonlight introduction of a young Nichang and Yihang and later the adult lovers in a brief erotic refuge from the struggles of their opposing factions. Such brief periods of tranquility provide a welcome balance against the savage fight scenes.

Dave Gross – 2011

Related posts:

1. An Interview with Pathfinder Author Dave Gross
2. Fantasy World Building for Indie Film
3. DragonArt Fantasy Review

Flames Rising is pleased to present the web version of the new release list that White Wolf is handing out at Gen Con Indy 2011. Several members of the White Wolf crew are on-site at Gen Con talking to fans about new and classic World of Darkness games. This is a look ahead at what new products are on the way and some news about the ongoing Now in Print program at DriveThruRPG.com.

Sep. 2011: (VtM) Vampire: The Masquerade – 20th Anniversary Edition

Vampire: The Masquerade exploded into hobby games in 1991 and inspired a generation of fans which the game industry had never seen before or since. This book is for all of the White Wolf fans who have lived, loved, and taken the long road with us for the past two decades.

This is Masquerade in all its glory.

An updating of the classic rules from Vampire: The Masquerade – Revised Edition. This book contains all thirteen original clans, clan variants and bloodlines, with their signature Disciplines. It also has rules for character creation and advancement from neonate to Methuselah, as well as all the Discipline powers from level one through nine. The book also features new full color art by Tim Bradstreet and other classic Masquerade artists.

Oct. 2011: (VtM) Dust to Dust

Gary, IN. It has been years since the War for Chicago, and nearby Gary, Indiana has been impacted by the changes. Things are heating up just as a new coterie comes onto the scene. How will the balance of power shift in the coming nights?

This is a brand-new Storytelling Adventure System story written by White Wolf specifically for the Wrecking Crew’s use at the Grand Masquerade, using Vampire 20th Anniversary rules. It will later be released as a PDF for sale through DriveThruRPG.com.

Nov. 2011: (VtR) Strange, Dead Love

Away from the eyes of mortals, vampires gather, nursing eternal grudges and burning for eternal love. A select few humans become part of this night world, bridges between the living and the damned. Can they resist the passion they have for each other, or must they defy the customs of living and dead alike?

Strange, Dead Love is our first collection of “world shards” for Vampire: The Requiem, different mixes of setting and rules to present a variety of Vampire worlds conducive to paranormal romance.

Dec. 2011: (MtAw) Imperial Mysteries

Archmasters pass a threshold in knowledge and power – the great secrets are just this far from their grasp. But mages exposed to greater secrets know that the quest and its goal are one.

Think of observation changing the object in pop culture quantum physics. The way you investigate secrets changes those secrets, and at the apex of power, changing those secrets changes the universe – and might break it.

Imperial Mysteries is a Mage: The Awakening book that digs into what happens to mages who transcend to the highest level of mystical power, including mechanics for Arcana at 6 dots or more.

Jan./Apr./Jul./Oct. 2012: (nWoD) House Divided Series

House Divided is a four-part series of interlinked Storytelling Adventure System stories released every quarter. Each story is suitable for all of the World of Darkness gamelines. Each story will be designed to be complete in and of itself, but the larger story is revealed if you play them all.

Feb. 2012: (Ex) Masters of Jade

Many hate and revile them, yet none turn away from their visits. They are members of the Guild, a mercantile organization whose caravans and trading ships cross the face of Creation. They care not for the will of princes or Exalts, but only for profit. Some despise it, while others idolize it, but in truth, the Guild cares not if it is loved or hated, so long as those who do business with it pay their bills in full.

Masters of Jade details the Guild, the greatest of the world of Exalted’s merchant organizations. It will update the classic Manacle & Coin supplement to Second Edition, including new details of the Guild’s structure and methods – and of its abominable trade in addictive drugs and slaves.

Feb. 2012: (WtA/WtF) Werewolf Translation Guide

Similar to the Vampire Translation Guide (a Platinum seller on DriveThruRPG.com), the Werewolf Translation Guide will be a guide to help translate the feel and core elements of Werewolf: The Apocalypse and Werewolf: The Forsaken into the opposite game system and background.

Mar. 2012: (CtL) Victorian Lost

The foggy streets muffle the rattle of cab wheels and the measured clip-clop of horse hooves. Well-dressed gentlemen in top hats raise their lanterns high as they quickly make their way through the fog, practically dragging along women in elaborate dresses. This is London at the end of the nineteenth century, and even in this age of science and industry, people still believe in faeries.

They believe in you.

Victorian Lost offers advice and material for running Changeling: The Lost chronicles set in Victorian England. Akin to the previous books like New Wave Requiem and Mage Noir, Victorian Lost will focus less on the historical details of the late 19th century and more on evoking the Victorian Age through the eyes of the Lost.

May 2012: (VtR) Secrets of the Covenants

Secrets of the Covenants is a Vampire: The Requiem sourcebook presenting some of the intertwined politics between the vampiric covenants. Presented in a similar style to our critically-acclaimed Requiem Clanbook series, this book will showcase the shadowy conflicts between factions through interconnected narratives, as well
as providing new rules to enhance covenant play.

Jun. 2012: (Ex) Shards of the Exalted Dream

Ever wanted to play a space opera game with an Exalted flair? Or a modern game with massive swords and crazy martial art stunts? Shards of the Exalted Dream offer a variety of settings and genres for use with the Exalted system, much like the “shards” first presented in World of Darkness: Mirrors.

Aug. 2012: (Mt?) Mummy: the

Our latest game line for the World of Darkness, Mummy will be developed using an open process in which the community can see the progress of the game and contribute, and released as a virtual box set.

Sep. 2012: (WtA) Werewolf: The Apocalypse SAS

Continuing the tradition from The Grand Masquerade 2011, the Werewolf 20th Anniversary SAS will be a new Storytelling Adventure System story written by White Wolf specifically for the Wrecking Crew’s use at the Grand Masquerade, and later released as a PDF for sale through DriveThruRPG.com.

Sep. 2012: (Mt?) Mummy Supplement #1

The first supplement for the new Mummy game set in the World of Darkness.

Nov. 2012: (Ex) Scroll of the Monk, Vol. II: Scattered Lotus Petals

An update and expansion of the Scroll of the Monk, providing new martial arts for Exalted characters.

Dec. 2012: (MtA/MtAw) Mage Translation Guide

Completing the trilogy started with the Vampire Translation Guide and the Werewolf Translation Guide, the Mage Translation Guide will offer advice on how to translate the feel and core elements of Mage: The Ascension and Mage: The Awakening into the opposite game system and background.

Dec. 2012: (Mt?) Mummy Supplement #2

The second supplement for the new Mummy game set in the World of Darkness.

Now in Print

White Wolf, working in partnership with DriveThruRPG, is now offering Print versions of both our newest PDF products and our vast library of previously published books. The following listings are just the tip of the iceberg and we’re working feverishly around the clock to make every single WW book available in this format.

Coming Soon in Print

Questions? Comments?

Please feel free to contact either Rich Thomas at RichT@white-wolf.com or Eddy Webb at Eddy@white-wolf.com.
For news and discussion of our products visit www.white-wolf.com
Follow us on Twitter: @wwpublishing

During GenCon we will be tweeting where we are and what we’re up to, so follow us and drop in wherever we are. We might be at the DTRPG booth, we might be at one of our panels, but let’s face it: the odds are we’ll be at one of Indy’s delightful drinking establishments. Drop by and tell us about your characters.

WW PDFs and Now in Print books are available at DriveThruRPG.com.

Related posts:

1. More White Wolf Books Back in Print at DriveThruRPG!
2. White Wolf Celebrates Vampire: The Masquerade 20th Anniversary
3. Author Interview for White Wolf’s Paths of Storytelling

Thanks to Monica for letting me stop by Flames Rising. It’s always great to meet new people through different sites as I’m spreading the word about my debut novel. The Winds of Khalakovo came out this past April, and I thought it would be interesting to talk a little bit about the arc of emotions I’ve had along the way.

Any writer with a debut novel will tell you how exciting it is. (If they aren’t excited, they’re either lying or they’ve done something they’re not proud of.) It was wonderful to have The Winds of Khalakovo come out, and it was terribly gratifying seeing the kind of welcome it received. One of the most interesting things for me was how fun it was working with reviewers, not on the reviews themselves, of course, but on guest posts and interviews. It’s so nice to share beyond the bounds of the book. There are so many stories to tell. The book was three years in the making, and I learned a lot over that time, so it was fun to share my thoughts on writing. But it was also fun to share my thoughts on writing that particular book. In many ways I want the book to speak for itself, but there are other stories to tell—how the world was created, the cultures involved, the things I wanted to emphasize and deemphasize, the things I was most proud of, and so on.

There was also an interesting transition I went through over the months leading up to the debut and the months following. It didn’t really have anything to do with the release of the book, but rather the nature of publishing—publishing a trilogy, anyway. I’d signed up for three books, you see, and while I was throwing my hands up in the air with excitement over Winds coming out, the deadline for second book was looming. So this was a funny thing. Elation and dread mixed together in a not-altogether-pleasant mix. When you’re trying to break in, all you’re thinking about is getting the book out. The notoriety. The reviews. The fans and the movie deals (yeah, right). What you’re not thinking about—at least, not as much—is the life of a professional writer. But that life, the thing you’ve been shooting for forever?, is right there, breathing down your neck once you’re under contract.

I liken it to graduating high school or college. You can’t wait to get out there in the real world, but when you finally do, you suddenly have a lot of responsibilities on your place. Don’t get me wrong. I knew this was coming, but you never know what it’s really like until you live it. You really have to structure your time. And lest you think it’s simply a matter of putting your nose to the grindstone and writing, let me ring a bell for you. There’s this thing called promotion. And apparently it need to happen once the book comes out. In the nine months or so leading up to the release of Winds, I really didn’t have any promotion to do. I was gearing up for promotion, but the book wasn’t out and there wasn’t much to actually do other than emails to line up some reviews. I did some other things like preparing my website, working on a group blog, getting my book trailer done. But once the book hit the shelves, I got busy trying to get the word out. Now, this is fun work. It’s really fun work, but it takes time away from everything else. These are the harsh realities of the modern publishing world. You can’t expect the publisher to do it all.

As I write this, I’m putting the final touches on Book 2, The Straits of Galahesh, and I’m just starting to dive into Book 3. The marketing effort is starting to wane, and I’m going to go into full writing mode on the third book soon. It’s quite a rollercoaster ride already—fun and terrifying, in equal measure—but it’s one I wouldn’t trade for the world. I love the life of a writer. I only wish life would stop getting in the way so I could concentrate on it.

About Bradley Beaulieu

Bradley P. Beaulieu is the author of The Winds of Khalakovo, the first of three planned books in The Lays of Anuskaya series. In addition to being an L. Ron Hubbard Writers of the Future Award winner, Brad’s stories have appeared in various other publications, including Realms of Fantasy Magazine, Orson Scott Card’s Intergalactic Medicine Show, Writers of the Future 20, and several anthologies from DAW Books. His story, “In the Eyes of the Empress’s Cat,” was voted a Notable Story of 2006 in the Million Writers Award.

Related posts:

1. Debut author brings a devilish edge to the English Civil War

FlamesRising.com is pleased to present you with a peek inside GURPS Horror 4th Edition from its author, Kenneth Hite. For those of you familiar with his work, you might suspect Kenneth Hite is no stranger to writing about all things dark and terrifying. In this essay, Ken talks about the additions and influences he infused into the new edition.

A New Millennium Of Horror, And Of GURPS Horror

I started writing the Third Edition of GURPS Horror in very late 2000, right about the time that Final Destination, Scream 3, and Urban Legend: The Final Cut were finishing off (with one or another degree of skill and chill) the horror boom of the 1990s. No, wait, I lie. I actually started writing the Third Edition of GURPS Horror in 1998, only I called it Nightmares of Mine at the time, and I was writing it for Iron Crown Enterprises. So I began writing it during the Indian summer of clever, self-referential horror: The Faculty, Fallen, and Gods and Monsters were all part of that horror year. By the time I finished it, Iron Crown had gone bankrupt, and I had folded pretty much the entirety of the horror-gaming advice from Nightmares of Mine into GURPS Horror, Third Edition. Speaking of going bankrupt, Gus Van Sant’s Psycho and Jan de Bont’s The Haunting remakes both came out in 1998. But drawing on the arch, referential tone of the era, I wrote a book of arch, referential horror advice, full of symbolism and structuralism. It was no I Know What You Did Last Summer, but I thought it was pretty good.

What I didn’t know then was that I was going to get another bite at that poisoned apple; a chance to write, revise, and expand GURPS Horror for GURPS Fourth Edition. What I also didn’t know then was that I’d been writing GURPS Horror Third Edition during the beginning of the next great boom in horror: J-horror. I think I saw Uzumaki (2000) the same year GURPS Horror Third Edition (2002) came off the presses, and the same year that Gore Verbinski remade Ringu as The Ring — successfully! That year, Resident Evil and 28 Days Later revived the zombie flick. The new millennium in horror was off and running, mostly away from zombies. So by the time I started work on GURPS Horror Fourth Edition, I had a lot of new ground to cover.

Sean “Dr. Kromm” Punch, my long-suffering editor (Saw (2004); Hostel (2005)), cleared the decks for me to expand the book’s word count by about 40%, over and above the new rules for the new edition of GURPS. In went guidelines for J-horror and survival horror. In went new rules for Panic Disorders, more phobias, more corruption and degeneracy, and new rules for going mad and collapsing, tunable for gritty realism or Gothic symbolism as you wish. In went a very nice set of rules for fighting zombie hordes, which came out of the playtest almost intact. Likewise, Dr. Kromm pushed for a solution to the worst thing about horror in the new millennium (no, not Paris Hilton in House of Wax) — cell phones, so I added about six or seven. I added a lot more monsters, especially from Japan and India, where a lot more of our horrors were coming from this millennium — but I also added the first monster ever, the child-killing lilitu of Akkadian myth. Finally, I added something for Team Stephenie: guidelines for romance and horror, and a template for the Handsome Stranger. I think that template (Twilight (2005); Dexter (2006-)) may have been the last major thing I added.

In short, I wrote a book of horror advice full of long shots, darkness, lobotomies, and lots and lots of monsters. It’s no Let The Right One In, but I think it’s pretty good. I don’t know yet what I didn’t know last summer. Ask me in ten years.

About Kenneth Hite

Kenneth Hite is an author of the best introductory primer (Cthulhu 101), the second-best roleplaying game (Trail of Cthulhu), the fourth-best book of criticism (Tour de Lovecraft: the Tales), the best alternate comics history (Adventures Into Darkness), the fourth-best Tarot treatment (Tarot of Cthulhu: Major Arcana), the seventh-best RPG supplement (Delta Green: Targets of Opportunity), and the two best children’s books (Where the Deep Ones Are and The Antarctic Express) about the Cthulhu Mythos. He has also written 70 or so books and games that barely touch on Cthulhu at all. He blogs, if you can call it that, at PrinceofCairo.livejournal.com.

He lives in Chicago with two Lovecraftian cats and one non-Lovecraftian wife.

Related posts:

1. SJGames Week: GURPS Monster Hunters Review
2. SJGames Week: Interview with Munchkin Illustrator John Kovalic
3. SJ Games Week: GURPS Worlds of Horror Preview