I’m looking at dead things, specifically games about dead things. My next three reviews are going to cover the World of Darkness’ shadowy afterlife and the things that sometimes make the doorway between worlds a bit more revolving than usual. These reviews will cover Book of the Dead, Geist: The Sin-Eaters, and Through the Ebon Gate. Today, we will take a baby step into the realm of the dead through the guise of the World of Darkness system’s Book of the Dead. This book intends to deliver an encompassing look at the underworld, although admits that having Geist makes things all the better.

Let’s talk about this book’s artwork. Artwork tends to have a direct relationship to the importance of the text. With that said, Book of the Dead must be a critical addition to the White Wolf line. The cover art, which features a Mercy Thompson look-alike, is exactly the kind of cover that prepares me to dig into a book.

No Door, No Windows by Joe Schreiber is, at its heart, a haunted house story; although it might be more accurate to say it is a haunted character story.

The novel is filled with characters who cannot escape their pasts, or their present, which means that their futures may be in jeopardy. Schreiber’s characters are haunted by guilt, regret, and emotional inertia as much as they are by supernatural forces. Schreiber wields both realistic and otherworldly horrors with deft and subtlety in this suspenseful novel. The plot is centered on Scott Mast, a professional greeting-card writer living in Seattle who is forced to return to his native small-town in New Hampshire for his father’s funeral.

The Flash Fire Mini-Reviews series has crawled out of its grave and returned as a regular feature on the Flames Rising website.

To celebrate we’re going to be taking a look at several kinds of undead this week. We’ve got a mix of games, books and more. This particular edition of Flash Fire Mini-Reviews is going to feature a few different reviewers.

We’re going to take a look at Zombie Haiku, Vampire: the Eternal Struggle, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, Geist: The Sin-Eaters and The Estuary.

What do you get when you take one of the most popular comedy franchises ever, bring back the original writers and actors who made it so great, and have the original writers come up with a new script tying it all together?

You get Ghostbusters: the Video Game, of course.

Ghostbusters: TVG had been plagued from developmental issues from the start. Passing from publisher to publisher, the game faced cancellation several times despite promising trailers. Eventually managing to be released by Atari, this game features voice acting from the original cast. Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd, Harold Ramis, and Ernie Hudson reprise their roles as the classic supernatural investigators and eliminators.

Review by John D. Kennedy

Cat and Bones take their romance in a whole new direction (read: planning a wedding) in the third novel in Frost’s series. But nothing comes easily for the pair: Cat, a half-vampire, has some serious soul searching to do over the course of the novel, only partially because her vampire father has torture on the brain. Is she a vampire? Is she human? What does it mean to be either?

Not, of course, that there’s a lot of time to just stand and think. That Cat’s father has found her means that her identity is no longer secure, which endangers her whole unit. Add a very old, very powerful vampire calling on Bones to share power and ally together (which almost certainly means that a vampire turf war is on the horizon) and Bones turning Cat’s unit member Tate into a vampire by request, and things get very, very complicate. Tate’s love for Cat is only the tip of the iceberg.

“I see you. You go about your life like nothing ever happened. You think you’re safe now that it’s done, like a problem that you’ve solved once and for all. You’re wrong. I remember what you did. You might have killed me, but I’m not gone. I stayed behind… and I won’t go until you’ve paid.”

This week White Wolf is offering a special bundle at RPGNow that is focused on ghosts and mortal interactions in the World of Darkness. The bundle includes Ghost Stories and Chicago Workings, Regularly 32.98, now $17.99 (savings of 55%).

The Ghost Tales bundle is available at the Flames Rising RPGNow Shop.

Welcome to Darklore Manor, where spirits of the dead do not rest easy, nor do they find release from their eternal suffering… Enter a dark realm of living gargoyles, sinister shadows, diabolical dolls, haunted havens and undead nightmares risen from the grave.

This illustrated anthology contains thirteen tales of terror by Joseph Vargo, Joseph Iorillo and Timothy Bennett, including several stories from Dark Realms Magazine and an original novella based on Nox Arcana’s haunting concept album, Darklore Manor.

The ongoing urban fantasy novel series, Violet War, by Monica Valentinelli has new chapters to explore!

Monica gives her readers a little teaser on the new material:

One of the key concepts in this chapter, is that we read about the concept of “The Condemned.” In the magic world, there is a series of Oaths that bind and tie each and every entity within the magical community together. These Oaths are a complex network of promises and “social contracts,” replacing the need for written laws. Oaths are binding and brutal, for many concepts like “free will” go right out the window once an Oathbringer brands the oath into their mind–literally. The strength of the Oath depends upon a lot of factors including the magical prowess of the Oathbringer, the resiliency of the person’s mind, how many people are branded, etc.

Visit www.violetwar.com for the latest updates.

In this interview artist extraordinaire Echo Chernik tells us about her work on various RPGs including Mage: the Ascension, Conspiracy X and Deleria.

She also gives us some insight into her inspirations and other bits about her art.