Flashpoints in the Fog

In a society made up of liars and murderers afflicted by a slowly eroding grasp of their own existences to date, who can trust the concept of history? Understand, then, that there is a scale upon which all Kindred are precariously balanced. As personal power weighs more heavily, the ability to rely on that monster’s memory of the past is lightened. How do the Kindred navigate this Mystery of Ages?

Ancient Mysteries is available at the Flames Rising RPGNow Shop.

White Wolf takes us back to the Eighties in New Wave Requiem (WW25320). The decision to turn back the clock nearly twenty five years seems to be a brilliant one (Yes, I did say TWENTY FIVE years). Sob. Vampire: the Masquerade hit bookshelves in 1991, so readers never really got a feel for the Reagan Era of gaming. This appears to be their attempt at remedying that issue. This slim supplement weighs in at eighty-one pages; however, it wastes no space with ads (an oddity considering the waste the 1980s created). There are a few pages devoted solely to pieces of art, but these terrific characterizations demand forgiveness as they summon images of The Warriors and an evil Susanna Hoffs.

Review by Todd Cash

Author M. Joseph Young has joined our ongoing Horror Design Project here at Flames Rising and tells us a bit about writing horror elements for his Multiverser RPG.

Multiverser Horror

Some people think that horror is easy: dial up the kill rate, and soon every character is terrified.

What, though, if the characters are immortal?

This was the fundamental question we had to face in writing horror scenarios for Multiverser. Player characters are “versers”. Death is the doorway to take you to the next world, and the next world is where the next adventure awaits. Dial up the death rate, and for the verser it becomes a game of choosing how to die, how to end the horror and get somewhere nicer. Thus if we were going to create horror scenarios, we were going to have to figure out how to frighten someone who is completely unafraid of death. That meant understanding fear, and its more fundamental causes. Here are a few of the things we learned. Each has value.

Looking for ideas for your Hunter game? The Collection of Horrors is an anthology of Storyteller tools inspired by the Horror Recognition Guide that you can either use in conjunction with the Guide or as part of your existing Hunter: The Vigil chronicle.

Each story kit in the Collection of Horrors (which you can buy individually, as a bundle or as a subscription) contains variety of appropriate tools; usually an SAS scene, a character with a character sheet, and props ranging from maps and reports to print out and hand to your players, to short imbedded audio files that you can play at your gaming table. These kits represent a collection of evocative story tools that you can write a story around, drop into an existing SAS or even string together. They aren’t stories in their own right, but rather pieces that you can snap together into whatever shape you want. Using the Guide can add even more props and ideas to this anthology, but it’s not required to use the various story kits in the Collection of Horrors.

A modern take on the classic “apocalyptic” novel, Hater is similar in tone to the seminal works of H.G. Wells, and also the recent films 28 Days Later and I Am Legend. Hater tells the story of Danny McCoyne, an everyman forced to contend with a world gone mad, as vast numbers of the human population suddenly become irrationally violent, killing all who cross their path.

Flames Rising is pleased to bring you the first chapter of David Moody’s Hater, which is currently available at Amazon.com.

Renowned RPG Publisher Offering Free and Discounted Downloads to Reward Fan Loyalty

In light of recent announcements, some fans have expressed concern over the future of electronic (PDF) format book sales in the RPG industry. White Wolf Publishing today has announced that it currently has no plans to discontinue its existing PDF products.

“Quite the opposite,” says Eddy Webb, the Alternative Publishing Developer for White Wolf. “I believe this is a growing market with potential we haven’t yet had a chance to fully explore, both as publishers and as fans of role-playing games.” Eddy remarked that he has dozens of upcoming PDF-exclusive products on his schedule in addition to continuing to provide PDF versions of upcoming products, and that White Wolf is still actively looking into returning to the print-on-demand arena.

I normally tackle one product at a time; however, Sean Boyle’s line of HDL games is so entwined with one another that it’s simply easier to treat them as one massive project. The exact products I’m including are the HDL Basic Rules, Perfect Horizon, Demongate High, the HDL cards, and Lucid: Dreamscape Reality. I’ll try to separate these books for clarity’s sake, but I suspect I’ll have to trip back and forth between them on occasion.

The first book in the HDL line is strictly the nuts and bolts of Boyle’s system. It’s a modest read at eighty-seven pages. Like most, my first impression of the book came through a skimming. The artwork, derived from a stable of six illustrators, seems to enjoy the fact that it rests inside a generic system’s corebook.

Review by Todd Cash

After killing her former mentor-turned-vampire, U.S. Marshal Jameson Arkeley, Caxton was nearly left for dead. Taken to prison for assaulting a convict, she now faces her most harrowing hours yet. Locked up in a Pennsylvania correctional facility that holds the state’s death-row inmates, not to mention countless murderers and drug dealers whom Caxton herself has put away, she is an easy target.

But it gets worse. The oldest living vampire, Justinia Malvern is still on the loose and manages to infiltrate the prison. There she uses the inmates as livestock—taking daily donations of blood at will and slaughtering any who don’t cooperate. But it’s Caxton’s blood she’s most hungry for, and when Caxton’s girlfriend, Clara, comes to visit but ends up trapped there, Justinia will use her as a pawn to get to her most sought-after prey. . . .

Pre-Order 23 Hours: A Vengeful Vampire Tale at Amazon.com.

Pulp meets mutants. Can you picture it? Robin D Laws can, and did well.

The opening fiction caught my attention immediately. In two illustrated pages, it manages to cover most pulp detective crime scene tropes, and set the stage for a slightly tongue-in-cheek mutant x-factor (sorry, I had to.) Then the stage is set with a description of the game’s setting. Arbitrarily ten years in the future, the world has undergone the biggest ten years worth of change possible; due to an odd illness, people began exhibiting superpowers. Simple enough statement, but the quality comes from the explanation of how these mutants have changed sports, entertainment, law enforcement, et cetera. It’s serious, while still being able to put a gratifying smile on the reader’s face.

Review By David A Hill Jr

“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.

Contagion. Plague. Survival.

Out in the Scavenger Lands life is difficult, and compassion can seem like a dangerously unaffordable luxury. But despite the propaganda you might hear in the Realm about the savagery of those beyond the Threshold, most of the folk who call the Confederation of Rivers their home consider themselves good people. But what happens when the imperative to survive challenges one’s moral commitment to one’s fellows? Sacrifices have to be made, but when do the needs of the many justify the losses of a few?

A story in the Storytelling Adventure System for Exalted.

Disease of an Evil Conscience is available at the Flames Rising RPGNow Shop.

What It Is
Apocalypse Prevention, Inc (or API,) is an action-horror RPG set in a future plagued by monsters, magic, destruction, all the average faire of a post-apocalyptic fantasy setting. The namesake is the corporation who holds back all the above-mentioned things. Characters are agents, working to fight back the destruction of the planet. Pretty simple?

The game advertises itself as “action horror, with a twist of humor.”

Review by David A Hill Jr

Argentum is the first book for an urban fantasy series called the “Violet War.” Told in an online serial format by writer Monica Valentinelli, installments are readable online through www.violetwar.com.

Imagine being free. Free from everything that defines you, that makes you easily recognizable as who you are. Welcome to a place where bleak noir cityscapes share a Technicolor sky with combat fighters, where you can find gunslingers from the Old West and a lost chapter from a literary classic, all with something in common: Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos. This is a place where the Crawling Chaos has to solve his own murder and the Old Ones come up against the Gods of Las Vegas, a place where the new player in London’s underground isn’t human and masked heroes go toe-to-tentacle with eldritch horrors. This is a Mythos collection unlike any other. This is Lovecraft in many colors, many guises. This is Cthulhu–Unbound!

Pre-Order your copy of Cthulhu Unbound today at Amazon.com.

Right out of the box, Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition does a lot for combat on the personal scale, but when it comes to the broader field of battle—when things go macro—the tools to handle a clash of thousands just aren’t there.

Or are they? In Hard Boiled Armies, you’ll find an examination of how to take the existing tools in the game—with just a few additions and changes of perspective—to get right where you need to go for medium- and large-scale military conflicts. And by looking at these existing tools with new eyes, you’ll be able to add large scale battles to your game in a way that feels both fresh and yet completely familiar.

Hard Boiled Armies is available now at the Flames Rising RPGNow Shop.

White Wolf has a special place in my heart that goes both ways. It’s a classic tale of love and hate that dates back to the first edition of Vampire: the Masquerade I bought on a whim. As they dwindled down their successful runs only to reboot them, I found myself enjoying their releases less and less. I felt they were trying to reinvent their own wheel and, well, just couldn’t do it. I took on Hunter: the Vigil and hoped for the best.

This monstrous tome pushes four hundred pages and yet somehow manages to enrapture the reader. There are small bits off; however, this is an exceptional book. Let’s take a look at it. The layout of Hunter is typical to their new lines. A cropping of artwork throughout the book lines the upper border of the book while fading into a gray border that frames each page.

Review by Todd Cash

Post Mortem Comic Studios is based out of western North Carolina, joining authors from the Southern Horror Writers Association with talented artists spanning the world. Some of the titles available at DriveThruComics include:

Magic Eight Ball

A one-shot horror comic. Three teenagers test their fate in the words of a Magic Eight Ball when strange creatures threaten them.

Dorothy Rising

Hatfield, Arkansas becomes terrorized by a government experiment gone wrong. A swarm of mutant insects takes control of the wind and destroys everything in their path. A plague of funnel clouds begin to form and lay waste to the town or so the town thinks.

Blue Dragon Plus for the Nintendo DS is a sequel to Mistwalker’s console RPG Blue Dragon. This time around, the straight-up RPG action has been replaced with a real-time strategy mechanic but everything else, from the Dragon Ball-esque graphics to the big bad Shadows, has returned.

The original Blue Dragon was a hotly-anticipated title for the Xbox 360. Not only did it have an esteemed pedigree with the creator and composer of the Final Fantasy series onboard but the 360 was going through a bit of an RPG drought. Its release helped scratch an itch a lot of Xboxers had and was a decided “hand across the aisle” to the Japanese market who regarded the 360 as an American machine with American games.

Review by Jason Blair

Spectrum Games is pleased to announce the release of Slasher Flick, the role-playing game that brings the thrills and chills of the “psycho killer” horror movies from the screen to your tabletop.

According to Cynthia Celeste Miller, “As with any of our games that emulate a particular genre or medium, Slasher Flick was designed to reflect every aspect of the source material. This isn’t a universal system. It was created specifically to feel like a slasher film in play. And I’m extremely confident that the game does exactly that. One of the most important keys to capturing the feel of the slasher movies was the implementation of something we call ‘kill scenes’. A kill scene begins when the killer appears in any given scene and ends when the character(s) present drops to below zero survival points (death) or gains a total of eight survival points (escape). Survival points are gained and lost by making crucial stat checks throughout the kill scene.

One word describes the first novel from author Jack Kilborn: relentless. Much like the works of Jim Butcher and David Morrell, Kilborn’s premiere work, AFRAID, is non-stop tension. Each section break, while short, somehow manages to ratchet up the suspense to the point that you wonder how much more you can take. You won’t want to put the book down once you start it and a small part of you will wonder what possessed you to pick it up in the first place. The story is a non-stop horror ride…once on, you can’t get off.

The story centers on Safe Haven, Wisconsin, a small town that prefers its privacy over even economic depression. Snowbirds flee south for the winter, leaving the 900+ full-time residents to their quiet, peaceful place of fishing and relaxation. That is, until what appears to be a helicopter crash ignites a world of trouble for every one of the town’s 900 inhabitants.

Review by Joe Rixman