Achtung! Cthulhu brings you a two-fisted wartime CALL OF CTHULHU roleplaying game setting packed full of fiendish Nazis, terrifying ancient mysteries, legendary war machines, and enough writhing tentacles to fill ten Reichstags!

Three Kings is the first in a series of standalone adventure supplements in the globe-spanning Zero Point campaign for Achtung! Cthulhu written by Sarah Newton. Join a band of heroic soldiers, agents, and partisans behind enemy lines on the eve of World War Two, as they discover the unspeakable horrors of Castle Karlstein in occupied Czechoslovakia!

San Francisco after the zombie apocalypse. The vampire turned shepherd-with-a-shotgun Coburn is on the trail of his vampire sire. There’s bad blood between them and scores to be settled.

But just out in the Bay in the abandoned fortress prison of Alcatraz, a ketamine-snorting cult of New age weirdoes who eat the flesh of the zombie as some kind of grotesque communion bring a new threat to Coburn’s continuing existence – super zombies!

The direct inspiration for curse the darkness was a song. My brother sent me a link to A Perfect Circle’s cover of John Lennon’s “Imagine” some years back. I like the original well enough, but the cover really got my brain moving. I tend to see scenes and characters and stories when I hear music anyway, and when I heard that song (which you can find easily enough on Youtube, if you want to give it a listen before buying it), I saw a man standing on a balcony looking out over the ruined world. The ground was blasted and blackened, and he — whoever he was — stood there thinking, “Yes, this was the right decision. I did the right thing.”

Who was he? What had happened? I didn’t know. I did know that the message of the song felt different with the cover. Instead of “let’s all get along,” it was “get along, and that’s not a request.” I let that sit in my brain for a while, not really knowing what to do with it.

If someone had handed me a copy of Chicks Dig Comics when I was younger I would not have known what to do with it. Growing up as a comic book nut during the 80s and 90s I never saw girls reading comics so the title alone would have thrown me for a loop. While my brother and I devoured stories about the X-Men, Captain America and Superman my sister wanted nothing to do with them. I spent a lot of time in my local comic book shop and I cannot recall ever seeing a woman in that little hole in the wall.

From Hugo Award–winner Tim Pratt comes a new fantastical adventure set in the award-winning world of the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game.

In City of the Fallen Sky, a young alchemist named Alaeron flees an apprenticeship with the dark scholars of Numeria’s Technic League, only to find himself in trouble once more as a chance encounter sends him and several reluctant companions into the jungles of the Mwangi Expanse. Tracked by a high-tech assassin, and armed only with his inquisitive nature—and a few mysterious artifacts stolen from the Technic League—Alaeron must find the ruins of a legendary flying city, or face the wrath of a cruel crime lord…

Flames Rising is pleased to present an excerpt from this new novel.

Enemy planes are not the only things hunting in the sky…

Early winter, 1918. You are members of the Royal Flying Corps stationed near the Front and rumour has it, the next big push is about to begin. The squadron’s being worked to death, and its champion ace is on the verge of cracking up. Meanwhile the new Hun Circus is racking up kill after kill – but is it the enemy or something else that’s to blame?

A sortie into Hunland to tackle an observation balloon ends in a fierce scrap with Jasta 32. Great winged beasts, agents of Death itself, are glimpsed flying in and out of the clouds. On the ground, flying ace MacMurdo knows more than he’s letting on but he is on the edge. Reporting it to Command won’t do any good, but talking to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, military journalist, might. Combat takes its toll, and the date of the Push draws near. It’s up to you to make the skies safe and not just from the German planes.

Trail of Cthulhu: Flying Coffins is available now at the Flames Rising RPGNow Shop!

Twenty years ago, a barmaid in a harbor town fell for a young sailor who turned pirate to make his fortune. But what truly became of Black Edward Tew remains a mystery—one that has just fallen into the lap of freelance sword jockey Eddie LaCrosse.

To find the truth, and earn his twenty-five gold pieces a day, Eddie must take to sea in the company of a former pirate queen in search of the infamous Black Edward Tew…and his even more legendary treasure.

Flames Rising is pleased to present the first chapter of Wake of the Bloody Angel, a new Eddie Lacrosse new novel by Alex Bledsoe.

Alright, my first real RPG book review. Bear with me folks.

Today I’ll be talking about Northlands, the Norse themed sourcebook for the northern realms of the Midgard world. From what I gather Midgard is a homebrew setting writ large. Created with help from a proto-Kickstarter system called Patronage through Kobold Quarterly, fans can chip in to the design process and get special supplements. This is one of the first books to explore outside the Free City of Zobeck that is the heart of the Midgard Campaign Setting.

Overall this was a very well put together book. The maps are good, the art is very nice black and white and the content is engaging and well designed.

Children of the Revolution tells the stories of noteworthy or notorious Kindred of the modern nights whose Embraces came intimes of unrest, rebellion, or open revolution. The circumstances of these revolutions might have been mortal or undead, martial or cultural. These Kindred joined the ranks of the Damned under tides of war or cultural upheaval, and their blood bears the mark of change from one paradigm into another. Sometimes they are the agents of change. For others, their revolution drags them in its wake.

The world of the Kindred is always fraught with blood and danger, and Embrace amid the fires of revolution only heightens that fact. Here are Kindred who have risen to guide the Black Hand, who have led the armies of Alexander, who have plumbed the mysteries of the Nictuku, and who have been reborn in the fires of the Arab Spring. Their histories have been forged, but their futures remain to be determined by your troupe.

Visit the Children of the Revolution Kickstarter today.

Po’Kesteros, the Lostling.
This is one of the Faces of the Tarnished Souk series NPC’s for use with the Rite Publishing campaign setting/ adventure arc Coliseum Morpheuon. This is a setting of adventures and intrigues in the Plane of Dreams, where people can burn their dreams (Dreamburning) to influence fate and events. Not only can someone choose to burn a dream to control their circumstances but dreams can be stolen. On the Plane of Dreams, a dream is power. From what I can gather this high level setting, 16-20th levels, has roots in Planescape, with intrigue between factions, gladiator games, crazy occurrences, otherworldly landscapes and things unusual and odd to throw at your players.

The night modern horror was born was notoriously dark and stormy, as were the lives of those who wrote the most fearsome–yet beloved–tales in literature, for those so gifted were also cursed.

Horrors, a graphic novel by Rocky Wood and Glenn Chadbourne, reveals in gruesome detail how Mary Wollstonecraft, Bram Stoker, Edgar Allan Poe and other masters of the genre were haunted by their monstrous creations.

Horrors: Great Stories of Fear and Their Creators is available now at DriveThruComics.com!

Edward R. Pressman, producer of such classic films as Wall Street, American Psycho, The Crow, Bad Lieutenant, and Das Boot, announced today that he has optioned the feature film rights for Archaia Entertainment’s acclaimed graphic novel Feeding Ground. Created by Swifty Lang, Michael Lapinski, and Chris Mangun, Feeding Ground was the first full-length graphic novel to be published in hardcover simultaneously in English and Spanish. Alfonso Gomez-Rejon is set to direct and screenwriter Carlos Coto will adapt for the screen.

Feeding Ground tells the story of a “coyote,” a trafficker of illegal immigrants, forced to smuggle his family into America by crossing the most forbidding part of the Arizona/Mexico border, a searing no-man’s-land known as “The Devil’s Highway.” Along the way, he and his family clash with U.S. Border Patrol agents, only to realize that the entire party is being hunted by the real monsters that roam the countryside—werewolves.

It is 2030. The Gilman-Hawking drive has given us access to the stars. But we are not alone.

The future is here. Machine-made telepathy, augmentations, and unprecedented levels of automation have changed the face of Earth. But the science of sorcery, and our primitive understandings of what lies outside, have changed more than our minuscule planet. They’ve begun to let humanity out.

We walk amongst giants. Tread carefully.

Eldritch Skies is a complete role-playing game of Lovecraftian science fiction that uses the Cinematic Unisystem (Buffy, Ghosts of Albion. It contains all rules needed to play, and requires no additional material beyond your imagination and a few dice.

Eldritch Skies is available now in PDF at the Flames Rising RPGNow Shop!

In the sands of Thuvia, the atheist Salim Ghadafar must find the stolen soul of a murdered merchant. His search for souls extends throughout the planes and tests his strength to the breaking point. Death’s Heretic by James L. Sutter is a grand tour of the Outer Planes… a tour that balances large-scale awe and wonder with intimate character development.

Indeed, Death’s Heretic is more than “a book about tracking down kidnapped souls and killing monsters.” It’s a novel shot through with mystery, mayhem, and romping good adventure, sure, but it also asks some weighty questions… while killing monsters.

“If we really understood immortality,” asks Sutter, “would we still want it?”

There’s more, of course. What are the power dynamics of faith? The true nature of honor? Of heroism? What lurks within the complexities of human ambivalence? The resulting novel blends intimate knowledge of the Pathfinder setting with compelling characters and a plot that packs the energy of a Byzantine naphtha bomb.

Across the Emerald Empire, the greatest servants of the Emperor make their homes in ancient castles, elaborate courts, impregnable fortresses, venerable dojo, and majestic palaces. Some exist in the wilds of the Empire, while others mark the center of great, sprawling cities. Some are centers of trade and artistry, while others exist far from any other sign of civilization. And yet, despite their many differences, it is in the heart of each of these bold strongholds that the heart of the samurai dwells.

Strongholds of the Empire explores a handful of the many unique cities throughout Rokugan, seeking out those with particular interests for the different Great Clans.

Strongholds of the Empire is available in PDF and Print exclusively at DriveThruRPG.com!

Perspective is the most powerful force at work in the universe. The angle, pitch and yaw of how things are viewed, how things are not seen, and how things are interpereted by the human heart and mind’s eye forges reality for an individual. Often times this reality, perceived by the individual, exists inimical to equidistant realities nurtured and sustained by other individuals-at-large.

Driving Through the Desert presents such a singular and stalwart perspective. A universally hale perspective. The reality of Driving Through the Desert as engineered and presented by the novella’s author, Donna Lynch, is shared – for the most part – by two individuals; Kam and Henry.

In Nightmare’s pages, you will find all kinds of horror fiction, from zombie stories and haunted house tales, to visceral psychological horror. No subject is off-limits, and we will be encouraging our writers to take chances with their fiction and push the envelope.

Edited by bestselling anthologist John Joseph Adams, every month Nightmare will bring you a mix of originals and reprints, and featuring a variety of authors—from the bestsellers and award-winners you already know to the best new voices you haven’t heard of yet. When you read Nightmare, it is our hope that you’ll see where horror comes from, where it is now, and where it’s going.

Nightmare will also include nonfiction, fiction podcasts, and Q&As with our authors that go behind-the-scenes of their stories. Our planned publication schedule each month will include two pieces of original fiction and two fiction reprints, along with a feature interview and an artist gallery showcasing our cover artist.

The design essay series here at Flames Rising continues with the first part of a series by game designer Mischa L Thomas. Mischa tells us about the forthcoming Cold & Dark RPG.

Living with Cold & Dark: Part 1

Hi, my name is Mischa L Thomas and I’m the lead designer at Wicked World Games 1.1, a small RPG design company based in Gothenburg Sweden. In a couple of months we’re going to release the gritty space horror science fiction pen and paper RPG Cold & Dark in partnership with Chronicle City. I thought I’d talk a little bit about the inspirational sources and conceptualization method behind the design process which led up to the finished game document. But first a little bit of background.

First Class on the Titanic is exciting in itself but when you are invited to a private viewing of one of the world’s great curiosities, you jump at the chance. The mummy of Hettunaway, Priestess of Amun-Ra, the Unlucky Mummy is being shipped to New York and donated to the Metropolitan Museum of Art by its owner, Jefferson Shaw. Legend has it that those who look upon her face are doomed. Jefferson Shaw’s intentions are not as philanthropic as they seem. Strange rituals, a device to contact spirits and the awakening of something he cannot control.

The Titanic is on a collision course with an iceberg but will it be the icy water that kills you or the ancient force, finally unleashed?

The Millionaire’s Special is a short adventure for Trail of Cthulhu by Adam Gauntlett (Not So Quiet, Hell Fire). This is to celebrate the centenary year of the Titanic’s tragic sinking.

All proceeds from the sale of this adventure will go to the Heroes in the Dark charity.

RMS Titanic: The Millionaire’s Special is available at the Flames Rising RPGNow Shop!

Zombie Dice, the brain-eating dice game produced by Steve Jackson Games, will appear in the third episode of Tabletop on Friday, May 4, 2012.

"I'm really hyped about the G&S channel, and especially Tabletop," said company founder Steve Jackson. "The Internet is the right way to deliver this, and it's fun food for geek brains. Braaaaaiiiinnnns."

Narrated by actor and author Wil Wheaton, Tabletop features guests playing dice, card, board, and pen-and-paper games. The show is available free online on the Geek and Sundry YouTube! channel. This episode shows viewers how to play this quick dice game.