“No God commands me, yet I answer to a higher law than yours. My heart does not beat, yet it still feels. Only her word rules me, and only her smile warms my blood.” – J. Carlton, Nosferatu Harpy of Baltimore

Strange, Dead Love is a new supplement for White Wolf’s Vampire: the Requiem RPG. It is guide to the themes and props of paranormal romance, custom-fit for the World of Darkness, specifically Vampire: the Requiem. This book features a collection of world shards, ready-made chronicles with their own plot hooks and rules. As well as advice for storytelling romance, including guidance on games for two.

Strange, Dead Love is now available in Print and PDF formats at DriveThruRPG.com.

One of the best things about my role at DriveThruComics.com is working with an amazing group of authors and artists that are producing some awesome comics. One of our publishers has a universe shattering series going on now and I recently had the chance to talk to Artifacts series author/architect Ron Marz about it. This interview was originally crafted for the DriveThruComics Newsletter, so I wanted to do things a little differently. I did some “crowd-sourcing” for questions from folks reading the series. I added those suggestions to my questions and fired them off to Ron.

Artifacts was originally a limited series that involves the bearers of 13 mythological items such as the Witchblade and The Darkness. Recently it was announced that Artifacts will continue past issue 13 and the affects on the Top Cow Universe will be lasting. Here Ron tells us a bit more about the series…

The amount of source material produced for the World of Darkness role playing universe is truly impressive. Not all of it is useful to players – much of it being useful primarily to the game master for the purposes of fueling any individual group’s adventures – and some is of benefit to all players. Night Horrors: Immortal Sinners is a book that is fascinating to read for any aficionado of the setting, but is likely best left to the GMs (or “Storytellers” in White Wolf’s World of Darkness parlance) as it spends most of its 160 pages detailing powerful vampires that the players’ characters could bump into in-game.

FR Press is pleased to announce the release of Slices of Fate!

Slices of Fate is a unique collection featuring the works of Eddy Webb. Stories within range from the author’s nod to literary tales as in his piece “A Sheepish Trip to Yorkshire” to his more speculative work such as “The Battlefield.”

Essays include a series on two of Webb’s oldest loves: wrestling and Sherlock Holmes. Combined with several pieces of microfiction, this debut collection is an in-depth representation of Eddy’s work over the course of several years.

“Enthusiastic, creative, honest, intelligent.” – Jason L Blair, from the introduction.

Slices of Fate is available now in eBook format at DriveThruFiction.com!

Tad Williams’ new short story collection, A Stark And Wormy Knight, is available now, worldwide, as an ebook, $4.99 (or equivalent) for one month. The following story is published on FlamesRising.com with express permission of the author. Happy Holidays!

THE SUGARPLUM FAVOR (A Christmas Story)

Danny Mendoza counted his change three times in while the teacher talked about what they were all supposed to bring for the class winter holiday party tomorrow. It was really a Christmas party, at least in Danny’s class, because that’s what all the kids’ families’ celebrated.

The Vampire Retrospective Project continues today with an essay from Frederick Bell. Frederick tells us about how much he initially did not like Vampire and walked away from it for some time. He then re-discovered the game through online play. He goes on to tell us how playing the game online was one of the most rewarding gaming experiences of his life.

At first, I absolutely hated the Vampire the Masquerade game.

I hated everything about it. The haughty audacity of the game concept, the glorification of monsters, the hipster arrogance of the players, the model-perfect character art, and even the overly ornate layout of the game-books just grated against my sensibilities. My first attempts at playing in a chronicle were clumsy, confused and brutal affairs that always descended into sociopathy and sadism.

The Zombie Feed Press, an imprint of Apex Publications, is pleased to announce the release of THE FIELDS by Ty Schwamberger in Trade Paperback and eBook.

Billy Fletcher learned to farm the family’s tobacco fields – and beat slaves – by the hands of his father. Now, his father is dead, the slaves have long since been freed, and the once-lush fields are dying. Salvation by the name of Abraham knocks on the farmhouse door, bringing wild ideas. He can help Billy save the plantation and return the fields to their former glory…by raising his father’s slaves from the dead.

Can the resurrected slaves breathe life back into the Fletcher farm? Having brought the slaves back from graves that his father sent them, can Billy be the kind master his father wasn’t? Is keeping the farm worth denying the men the freedom they earned with death?

Billy’s conscience holds the key to those mysteries, but not the biggest one: what does Abraham really want from the former slave owner’s son?

Welcome to The Fields.

Coming January 2012: A Collection of the Award-Winning Cthulhu Mythos Horror Fiction of John Scott Tynes

“This is pure evil, pure destruction. This is the apocalypse.” And it’s just getting started. In January 2012, Arc Dream Publishing will release “Delta Green: Strange Authorities,” a collection of the award-winning Cthulhu Mythos horror fiction of John Scott Tynes. It will be available in trade paperback from Amazon.com and Ingram Book Company, and in ebook for Kindle, Nook, iBooks and other devices.

“Delta Green: Strange Authorities” features the complete fiction of John Scott Tynes in the “Delta Green” setting, which explores the cosmic horrors of H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos in a modern world of deadly conspiracies and personal apocalypse.

Following on from the popular full version of Cthulhu Christmas Calendar, Red Wasp Design have now released a Lite version of the app to allow fans and cultists to dip their tentacled toes into a Mythos countdown. The app allows users to see the art and enjoy the quiz entries from the 1st till the 9th of December for free. To see the art from the 10th December onwards, users can purchase the full version to continue the countdown till when the stars are right for Cthulhumas.

Both the Lite and full versions of ‘Cthulhu Christmas Calendar’, feature original pieces of artwork for every day in December leading up to Christmas. Each image presents a fun mashup of festive icons like Santa into the Cyclopean world of the great Cthulhu, the malevolent Mi-Go and the dark god Nyarlathotep.

This is a monumental work, a comprehensive and scholarly history of the role-playing industry from its inception in the early 1970s to the present day. The focus is interesting, concentrating on the individuals and companies that have made role-playing what it is today rather than looking at the games themselves.

Whilst detailed, the writing flows well, making it eminently readable and often entertaining, a fascinating survey of the companies and people who have shaped role-playing and are responsible for most of the books on my shelves (or, these days, lurking on the RPG hard drive) – and who have provided me with years of entertainment and passion. If your interest in role-playing goes anywhere beyond the next dungeon delve, if you like to know the background and history of the games you enjoy, you should find something here catches your attention… and once caught, be warned, it may be a while before you can tear yourself away!

A Road Paved in Iron: A Voodoo Western Dime novel

Zombie fiction is rife with decomposing corpses, mad scientists and biohazard symbols. Unless its tongue-in-cheek, zombie and man have little place in the social landscape save one brutally molesting the other. Caribbean spirituality, namely Vodou, has a different view of zombies. Whether or not Haitian zombies are undead is unclear but those tales rely on the fact that the zombies are friends and kin among the communities they threaten. They’ve been known to shamble about in broad daylight and mingle among their old neighbors.

Being a fledgling author, I had often pondered what it would be like to participate in a public reading of one’s own work. I recently had the chance to find out. I agreed to assist in the promotion of Haunted: 11 Tales Of Ghostly Horror (Flames Rising Press, 2011), particularly since, as a contributor to the anthology, I have a personal stake in how well the book sells. Knowing that readings could help us immensely by generating interest and word-of-mouth advertising, I cast about town looking for likely venues.

It turns out that bookstores are good choices for readings, as one might expect. Also good, and perhaps not as obvious a choice in our Internet-driven culture, are public library branches.

Carl Kolchak, hard-bitten reporter of the supernatural from the TV series of the 1970s returns to action courtesy of an ongoing series of comic books and graphic novels from Moonstone Books. This time, Carl’s been fired by the owner of the newspaper that used to employ him, and he must find another way to make ends meet. He’s approached by a young couple, Otto and Mo Brerhahrer, who are ghost hunters in their spare time, and Kolchak can hardly say no, particularly when they offer to buy him lunch.

Through three related vignettes, the reader learns more about Kolchak, and why he has such a close connection to the supernatural. The first, titled “Fifteen Minutes,” find Kolchak at his wits end regarding where his next meal is coming from.

FlamesRising.com is pleased to present an interview with the developers of Atari’s Heroes of Neverwinter Facebook game and a giveaway!

We would like to thank Peter Banks, the Director of Product Marketing for Atari, for sponsoring several Explorer Packs for fans of this game set in the Forgotten Realms and for providing us with this great interview!

The Vampire Retrospective Project continues today with an essay from Adrian Stagg, a reviewer over at DriveThruRPG. Adrian tells us about discovering Vampire at age 15 and how the World of Darkness has influenced his games and more.

Since I was fifteen, there has been a vampire lurking in background. Green marble and red rose, the book was to change very much how I approached role-playing and really, certain aspects of my life. I had been playing D&D, WEG’s Star Wars, Shadowrun and a dash of Cthuhlu before I discovered Vampire: the Masquerade. Compared to the other games, it held a slightly different allure.

Mankind’s rise and fall in space begins here! Two thousand years from now, the Earth is nearly dead. A bold group of explorers led by philanthropist Thomm Coney pushes forward to take the first tentative steps out of Earth’s solar system. Their quest: new worlds to colonize, so that humanity may yet have a chance at survival. Facing impossible odds, political agendas, and a fanatical terrorist regime bent on their destruction, Coney and his crew brave the dangers of a potentially volatile star drive in order to preserve a civilization intent not only on killing itself, but also on taking down every other living thing around it. Will mankind set aside its greed long enough to see a future amongst the stars? Collects Critical Millennium: The Dark Frontier #1-4 and contains extra material, including data sheets, sketchbook pages, starship information sheets and more.

Here’s the idea… What if the characters of Renfield and Igor were a pair of down-on-their-luck buddies in a world filled with monsters from classic horror lore BEFORE they worked for their respective legendary employers?

RENFIELD AND IGOR MEET DR. JEKYLL & MR. HYDE is a “buddy story” similar to the likes of Laurel & Hardy and Abbott & Costello, told in the tradition of the great “road pictures” of Bing & Hope.

Reinfield and Igor are two down-on-their-luck, not so bright, unemployed common workers in Victoria London who both have a crush on “working girl” Ivy Pearson. They are in danger of losing their flat when Reinfield is approached by Dr. Jekyll to run an errand to acquire ingredients for a new formula. Elsewhere, Igor is approached by Mr. Hyde to run the same errand. Reinfield and Igor realize that they have both been hired for the same job, but they are not bright enough to figure out that both Jekyll and Hyde are the same person. They plot to go ahead and do the job for both men in order to be paid twice—and their adventures begin…

In an exciting team-up certain to rock the cosmos, Toy Vault, Inc. and legendary game designer Richard Borg (Memoir’44, Battle Cry) have joined forces to take you on a new action-packed adventure through the cold depths of space in ABADDON!

It’s the distant future and mankind has taken a galactic leap forward through space, time, and technology. Life as we know it struggles to endure on the ABADDON. Once the home of a mysterious, non-human civilization, the planet is now a desolate wasteland bearing one immensely precious resource: Feronium power crystals. The unimaginable energy contained within the crystals is coveted by two groups of humans: the Satellite City-States and the Commonwealth Alliance. Using giant bio-mech suits called Links, made from modified military vehicles and alien technology; the warring factions fight a weary battle for territorial control of the ABADDON.

“The second SKULLKICKERS adventure is a wondrous tornado of action-adventure: a den of thieves, a city of danger, nobility, stupidity, plant monsters, dinner parties and bloodthirsty faerie folk.”

CRASH! ROLL! LAUGH! STAND UP! FALL AGAIN! LAUGH! APPLAUD! That about sums up what I think of this amazing second volume of Skullkickers from Image Comics (if you have read any issue you will get the opening line.) Vol. 2 takes the heroes and places them into even more fantastical trouble. As the story unfolded I was treated to so many laughs and even a scene that made me really uncomfortable to look at. Like past issues of the book, these pages are GORE-Geous. My jaw drops to the floor on practically every page from the line work to the colors there is not a single thing that does not shine. Trust me on this too, there are plenty of horror elements to be found. A huge highlight is the big bad boss reveal towards the end of the story. The layout of that page alone is worth 1,000 Opas. The story is what really gets me though.

“No God commands me, yet I answer to a higher law than yours. My heart does not beat, yet it still feels. Only her word rules me, and only her smile warms my blood.” – J. Carlton, Nosferatu Harpy of Baltimore

Strange, Dead Love is a new supplement for White Wolf’s Vampire: the Requiem RPG. It is guide to the themes and props of paranormal romance, custom-fit for the World of Darkness, specifically Vampire: the Requiem. This book features a collection of world shards, ready-made chronicles with their own plot hooks and rules. As well as advice for storytelling romance, including guidance on games for two.

Strange, Dead Love was written by Jess Hartley, Monica Valentinelli and Filamena Young. You can read the Flames Rising interview with the developers Russell Bailey and Eddy Webb from October where we took fan questions about the book.

Flames Rising has an exclusive sneak preview of this new book with an excerpt called A Plague for a Dowry.