Author and game designer Matt Forbeck recently announced the 12 for ’12 project, in which he will attempt to write a short novel every month in 2012. We think Matt might have gone just a little crazy, but we’re also pretty sure Matt can actually pull this off…so Jeremy LC Jones had a little chat with Matt about the project.

Um, Matt, what are you thinking?

I’m thinking I want to write and I want to self-publish. I’m thrilled with my current publisher, Angry Robot, but there are some projects I’d like to do that wouldn’t work with them. That’s what 12 for ’12 is all about.

I’m a fast writer, so technically I should be able to handle writing 12 novels in a year, especially if they’re shorter ones like these. I’m shooting for 50,000 words each, which is what anyone participating in NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) this month is shooting for. That’s still 600,000 words of fiction in a year, but I’m pretty sure I can manage it.

Escape from Zombie City (A One Way Out Novel) by Ray Wallace has been released in Trade Paperback (the eBook is coming soon!) by The Zombie Feed Press, an imprint of Apex Publications. Below in an interview with Ray by The Zombie Feed.

The Zombie Feed: Who is your biggest literary influence, and why?

Ray Wallace: That’s a tough one. There are so many. But if I was forced to choose just one then I guess I’d have to go with Clive Barker. The Books of Blood are still some of the best horror collections ever written. I’ve always loved the way he merges the beautiful with the grotesque. And his ability to describe utterly fantastic worlds and creatures is truly awesome at times. Whenever I read one of his stories it makes me want to sit down at the computer immediately and start writing.

The Vampire Retrospective Project continues with a new essay from Dave Martin. Dave is the leader of the Wrecking Crew demo team. The Wrecking Crew ran a number of Vampire tabletop games at this year’s Grand Masquerade in New Orleans.

I am a better therapist because of Vampire.

I know this sounds crazy but it’s true. I run specialty groups for men in prison and on probation – between two jobs I run twelve of these groups every week with each group consisting of six to twelve men. It is my job to confront or challenge them in order to help them grow and meet their own goals.

When the ashes cool, all that remains is dust…

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. It includes all the characters and information you need to tell a complete story, as well as notes from the Wrecking Crew, the demo team that ran the story at The Grand Masquerade 2011 in New Orleans.

Dust to Dust is available now in eBook format at the Flames Rising RPGNow Shop.

The Vampire Retrospective Project continues with a new essay from Tiphanie Gammon. Tiphanie got her start with Vampire as part of an online forum game. Here she tells us about that experience and her recent return to the night.

My story with the World of Darkness started back in 2005, when a friend asked me to join a forum role-play with him. I was in eighth grade at the time, with seemingly endless free time, so of course I joined. And that moment, that choice to join, changed my life.

I was never into traditional table top role-plays — a horrific experience the one time I ever tried to purchase dice in my teens left me scarred and unwilling to leave the comfort of Japanese RPGs and manga until college — but I gave London by Night a chance since Jon thought it was cool. Why not, right?

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.

The Vampire Retrospective Project continues today with an essay from Brian Petkash. Brian tells us about his short time working at White Wolf, which in part led to him working with the National Association to Protect Children and becoming a teacher.

Fate is a curious thing

One doesn’t know what is planned out ahead of time, of course—God or the three old ladies or the oracle or the Flying Spaghetti Monster isn’t that open—but with hindsight it’s easy to see the willful hand, or paw, as it is in this case, of the cause-and-effect chain of fate.

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.

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.

The Vampire Retrospective Project continues today with an essay from Eddy Webb, Lead Developer for Vampire 20th Anniversary Edition and many other World of Darkness titles. Eddy tells us about the special dedication from the 20th Anniversary Edition book.

To Michelle. Without you, I would not have Vampire. Without Vampire, I would not have you.

Those sixteen words in Vampire: The Masquerade – 20th Anniversary Edition were mentioned to me more than any others as I walked around The Grand Masquerade in 2011. People seemed pleased, confused, and even close to tears as they read them back to me over and over again. Those words really explain the most important thing about Vampire to me – it brought me the woman I love.

To celebrate our favorite day of the year we have marked down the entire line of FR Press products by 50%!

The sale lasts for one day only so don’t miss out!

This includes the brand new Haunted: 11 Tales of Ghostly Horror anthology that features spooky stories from Chuck Wendig, Jess Hartley, Rich Dansky, Jason Blair, Bill Bodden, Nancy Greene and more!

Also included in this sale is The Queen of Crows, Instant Antagonist: Creepy Cottontail and more!

Check out the complete line of FR Press eBooks and get half off for Halloween!

Spectrum Games is pleased to announce the release of Macabre Tales, a dominoes-based role-playing game that seeks to faithfully emulate the type of “weird stories” penned by H.P. Lovecraft during the 1920s and ’30s. The game is intended for use by one narrator and one player, but there are detailed optional rules for multiple players as well.

According to designer, Cynthia Celeste Miller, “While designing this game, my goal was simple: to accurately recreate the feel of Lovecraft’s fiction right at your gaming table. This required me to examine how an RPG functions, disassemble it all, modify it and then put it back together again. It was a time consuming and arduous task, but I think the final result was well worth it.”

Macabre Tales is available now at the Flames Rising RPGNow Shop.

You’re never too old to have fun at Halloween, so start searching DriveThruComics.com and DriveThruRPG.com for these pumpkins…

Will it be a great Treat – an awesome free product – or will it be a fun Trick, with who-knows-what on the other end?

Participating publishers include White Wolf, Eden Studios, Top Cow Productions, Pelgrane Press, Moonstone Books, 2000 AD, Apex Books and more!

The Vampire Retrospective Project continues today with an essay from Shane DeFreest, the former Community Developer for CCP/White Wolf Publishing. Shane tells us about his early introduction to Vampire and his experience being part of the fan community. Shane’s role may have changed, but his commitment to the fans has not.

If you were to go back in time 20 years and tell me that the funny weird looking green book I was putting on the shelf in the section with all the other non-D&D “weirdo role playing games” at the local comic and game shop I worked at would be the single most defining thing in my life, I would have laughed at you and pointed to the X-Men #1 hanging on the wall and said “that defines my life”. Because, for ten years prior to Vampires release, and for as long as I could remember, comics did that for me, not role playing games. Sure, I loved playing D&D for the acting escapism (did theater from a young age) but I was a comic guy and expected that my life journey would forever be tied to superheroes. How so very wrong I would be. That strange green book ironically came out the same year I graduated from high school and my first year of adulthood. I didn’t know it then but my journey into darkness had just begun.

In a modernized spin on the classic story “Pigeons from Hell” by Robert E. Howard, we are following two African-American sisters and their friends into the murky swamplands to check out their inheritance: the old Blassenville manor. They quickly start to sense that something isn’t quite right in that ramshackle of a house, and things soon takes a sinister turn when one of the male characters falls through the rotten stairs and breaks his leg. After a failed attempt of getting out of the swamplands, they are being forced to stay the night in the manor.

Halloween is finally here and everybody has one thing on their mind: CANDY CANDY CANDY. This love of sweets is completely natural but there’s something decidedly unnatural happening tonight. A normal night of trick-or-treating soon turns into something dark and gruesome when the gang discovers someone might be handing out some bad treats–confections that’ll turn more than your stomach.

Be sure to check your candies, kiddos.

Death by Chocolate is the fourth release in the CAMPFIRE TALES line of standalone episodes for use with Little Fears Nightmare Edition.

The Vampire Retrospective Project continues with a little something from Pauline Benney, former designer at White Wolf and now at DriveThruRPG. Pauline tells us how she started playing Vampire and how she started working at White Wolf.

I first encountered Vampire: The Masquerade in 1993…But to tell this correctly, I should give a little background. I had gotten my certificate in Graphic Design and had completed school just as digital design started taking root. Most of the practical knowledge I had acquired at school was not in practice anymore by the time I graduated. In January 1992 I moved to Florida for no good reasons. After a couple of months, I got a job and made friends. One of them, Jinx, asked a group of us to play a new tabletop RPG with him. I had not role played since I was quite young…I didn’t want to spend hours rolling dice and reading charts just to make a character before we could even get started…I had flashbacks of my dad and brother trying to explain to me why my wizard could not carry a sword. After some pestering and promises that it wouldn’t be like that because “this system is sooo different,” I agreed.

The Iron Empires: eight weary nations, spanning three million light years of the Milky Way Galaxy. They are the withering remains of a human civilization once immeasurably vast. Their dying has not been quiet.

The Vaylen Terror has ravaged humanity down the ages, seizing a thousand worlds in a bloody rush, then pausing for decades of consolidation. During these intervals of calm, the empires rebuild, rearm…and wage war on their neighbors. they almost believe the Vaylen will never return.

Both Iron Empires graphic novels are available for the first time in eBook format exclusively at DriveThruComics.com!

The next entry in the Vampire Retrospective Project comes from a freelancer know for his work on Dark Ages: Vampire and other classic World of Darkness titles. Jacob tells us how he got his start with Vampire.

Funnily enough, it actually started with Mage: the Ascension.

I’d made a new friend in High School, a guy named Thomas, and he had Mage. I was getting tired of my old group and our games and so I got together with this guy and some other friends and we used Mage as a generic game. The result was a number of fun one-shot games and a great horror campaign. We’d also found out that the company that did Mage had done another game, this one about vampires, and so Thomas and I went to visit my cousin in Copenhagen and pick up some books at the gaming stores in the “big city”.

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).

The Vampire Retrospective Project continues this week with a new essay from Yair Robinson, a Rabbi who tells about the search for a game that explores a character and the first time playing Vampire: the Masquerade.

It was 1992 or so when Vampire: The Masquerade entered my life. I was a sophomore in high school, knee-deep in the kind of existential crisis that only arises when you’re 15, when my friend Amber and her boyfriend Keith asked me if I wanted to try a new game out called Vampire.

Initially I was unconvinced. I had played role-playing games before, and hadn’t been impressed. Oh, some of them had been amusing: Marvel Superheroes in Middle School (with appropriate ‘pew-pew’ noises); AD&D and MERP, which always struck me as a math textbook pretending to be a game; TORG (not going there), all provided a good laugh but never really moved me, never were more than a vaguely amusing board game. Oh, there was something called ‘character development’ in each of those games, but the rules surrounding them always seemed arcane and overly complex, with most of the effort spent on stats and figures rather than the nuances of the character himself.