A lethal zombie virus will be infecting websites, blogs, forums and social media accounts across the globe from April 16th to celebrate the publication of the first novel in an action-packed new urban fantasy zombie series by Dana Fredsti!

To win a signed copy of Plague Town and the unprecedented chance to have a character named after you in the next novel in the series, Plague Nation, follow the spread of this virtual zombie pandemic by searching for a code hidden across nine articles, interviews and excerpts hosted by a selection of the top fantasy, horror and books sites in UK & US, including none other than Flames Rising!

Monarch Comics’ ongoing comic book series, Witch Hunter, is debuting the title’s letters column in Witch Hunter #9 (“The Scarlet Circle Network”), releasing in print format on April 30th (Monarchcomicslair.com and select stores) and shortly thereafter in digital format on DriveThruComics.com To get the magic word out about the column and generate letters for it, Monarch Comics has announced an ongoing letter-writing contest for Witch Hunter.

Star of The Walking Dead To Participate in Q & A with Fans; Followed by 3-Hour Signing!

Noted actor Steven Yeun, currently starring in the role of Glenn in AMC’s hit original series The Walking Dead, will appear at this year’s Chicago Comic & Entertainment Expo (C2E2). In addition to his starring role in The Walking Dead, Mr. Yeun has also recently starred in an episode of the television series Law & Order: Los Angeles and an episode of Warehouse 13. Steven Yeun, who lived in Chicago where he performed with the Second City Theatre, will appear at C2E2 on Saturday, April 14 where he will conduct a Q & A with fans followed by a free 3-hour signing.

The crew of the delivery ship Haldis is en route to drop off a high-ranking politician on a remote world, but something isn’t right. Someone is sowing mistrust among the crew. The ship has been sabotaged. When Xax, the ship’s young medical intern, disappears, it’s clear the situation is serious. Can Marrl, the security chief with serious anger management issues, and Cass Leary, the cool cyborg captain, get to the bottom of this before it’s too late? Is Xax even still alive? Who’s behind all this, and what do they stand to gain?

This is a novella about conspiracy and paranoia in the space-lanes by Flames Rising‘s own Monica Valentinelli set in the shared science-fiction universe of Bulldogs!

The eBook (including PDF and ePub editions) of Redwing’s Gambit is available now at DriveThruFiction.com!

Mind’s Eye Theatre gives you everything players and Storytellers need to play a live-action game set in the World of Darkness. From setting material and rules for playing mortal characters to Storytelling advice and an innovative challenge resolution system, this book is the cornerstone of a totally new live-action experience. Enter the theatre of the mind and learn the secrets of the night.

For a limited time White Wolf has marked down all of the Mind’s Eye Theatre eBooks, for both Classic and New World of Darkness at the Flames Rising RPGNow Shop!

Investigator Weapons for Call of Cthulhu in the Classic era is a comprehensive collection of weapons available to stalwart investigators of the Cthulhu Mythos and their crazed cultist opponents.

Investigator Weapons covers handguns, rifles, shotguns, submachine guns, machine guns, flamethrowers, melee weapons, explosives, and special ammunition; and gathers together all the spot rules for injury, environmental conditions, and firearms combat in one place, as well as introducing many optional rules for enhanced play.

Investigator Weapons – the essential weapons book for Keepers and players of all editions of Call of Cthulhu.

Investigator Weapons is available now at the Flames Rising RPGNow Shop.

Moonstone Books, the publishers of the Vampire: the Masquerade and Werewolf: the Apocalypse comic series, are having a fun sale on two of their horror fiction anthologies…

Welcome back to Golarion–the world of Krunzle the Quick, Isiem the wizard, and Alaeron the seeker of forbidden knowledge. Here you’ll find lands such as Cheliax, Numeria, Druma, and Nidel where greed, secrecy, and savagery await heroes and readers alike.

Below, the authors of three forthcoming Pathfinder Tales novels discuss how they came to the world of Golarion and what stories they found there.

Behold, Matthew Hughes (www.archonate.com) who writes science fiction, crime, and media-tie novels as Matthew Hughes, Matt Hughes, and Hugh Matthews. He is best known for his Archonate tales, including Template in the Planet Stories line, and his recent Hell and Black trilogy. His Pathfinder Tales novel Song of the Serpent is due out in 2012.

Pagan Publishing is a small but award-winning publisher of role-playing games, specializing in books and supplements for the Call of Cthulhu role-playing game.

We have completed work on a new collection of five game scenarios entitled “Bumps in the Night.” This collection was written by John H. Crowe III and is set in the classic Call of Cthulhu era in the early part of the 20th Century. All five scenarios use the Call of Cthulhu Basic Role Playing mechanics, but none of them are based on the Cthulhu Mythos. Instead the players will have to face obscure horrors from the world of myth and folklore. At 120 pages, “Bumps in the Night” is beautifully illustrated by Rick Sardinha, Heather Hudson, Samuel Araya and Rhonda Libby. It will be produced as a 8.5″ x 11″ softcover, with glossy color exteriors and grisly grayscale interior artwork.

Zpocalypse is a survival board game set in a post-apocalyptic wasteland. Two to four players start in a basement/fallout shelter which can lead out to several base locations or even through the tunnels to sewer grates throughout the transformable board. Their survivors are trying to make it day to day in a world torn apart from the walking dead.

As in any survival game one needs food, guns, ammo, and more. Players go out into the wasteland and scavenge for supplies, or perhaps to find a new gun or melee weapon to fend off the next zombie attack.

In addition to gathering supplies, each player forms and controls their own squad. Each squad works to fortify the base(s). However your walls and barbed wire won’t hold the dead for long, and they’re getting hungry.

From the depths of R’lyeh come twenty-one brand-new, utterly terrifying, and thoroughly entertaining short stories of horror and the macabre!

Taking their inspiration from works by Lovecraft himself, prominent writers such as Caitlin R. Kiernan, Brian Stableford, Ramsey Campbell, Michael Shea, Darrell Schweitzer, Donald R. Burleson, and David J. Schow delve deep into the psyche, expanding on concepts H.P. Lovecraft created and taking them in new directions.

The result is stories that are wholly original, some even featuring Lovecraft himself as a character. Black Wings editor S.T. Joshi is the recognized authority on all things Lovecraftian, and is famous for his restorations of Lovecraft’s original works. He has assembled a star-studded line-up in a book that is essential for every horror library.

Flames Rising is pleased to present and exclusive excerpt from this new collection of Mythos tales which is published by Titan Books. Below is Usurped by William Browning Spencer.

The Vampire Retrospective Project continues today with an essay from Crystal Mazur. Crystal is an active member of One World by Night and tells us how Vampire was her introduction to RPGs.

Vampire the Masquerade has been a part of my life for about 13 years now. It was my introduction to roleplaying games, and no game has yet to bring what VtM has to offer. VtM has a lot of aspects that games tend to shy away from and themes even the most grotesque horror novelists would find deplorable.

So why has this game become such a sub-cultural icon? To me, it has to do with several factors. The first being the Theme of the game. VtM is all about personal horror. Yes there are monsters under the bed, but over time you become that monster.

Anne Rice, the legendary author who has defined vampires for a generation of readers and writers, is the latest addition to the star-studded line up of authors and other guests and talent at Chicago Comic & Entertainment Expo (C2E2). Ms. Rice became an international phenomenon in 1976 with the publication of Interview with the Vampire which has become one of the best-selling novels of all time. She has written 31 books including The Vampire Chronicles, Lives of the Mayfair Witches, and The Songs of the Seraphim, among many others. Ms. Rice will be appearing at C2E2 to discuss and sign copies of her new book, The Wolf Gift, on Sunday, April 15. A daring new departure, The Wolf Gift offers a whole new world – modern, sleek, high tech – and at its center, a story as old and compelling as history: the making of a werewolf, reimagined and reinvented as only Anne Rice could create.

The Worldwound weeps. The living tower looms overhead. The demon Yath and his minions spread throughout the southern kingdoms. Trying times call for unlikely heroes. In The Worldwound Gambit by Robin D. Laws, the charismatic con-man Gad pulls together a band of roguish adventurers— caustic Jerisa, gentle Tiberio, haunted Calliard, pragmatic Vitta, and the mad fire magician Hendregan–to head north to face Yath and make the world safe for thieves and miscreants once again.

Heroic fantasy, mystery, horror, comedy, and dashes of swashbuckling romance… Laws wraps it all around a heist. Yes, dear reader, The Worldwound Gambit is a heist novel and it is glorious!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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