Age of Cthulhu fans, here is your chance to play Death in Luxor using Trail of Cthulhu! Death in Luxor is the exciting new Call of Cthulhu adventure from Goodman Games, officially licensed to use the BRP rules from Chaosium. This conversion document allows you to use the Trail of Cthulhu rules from Pelgrane Press […]

Chicago lies at the center of the web that is the American heartland. Tendrils of power, wealth, and reward stretch outward, ensnaring the selfish, greedy, and unwary. Yet, Chicago attracts its predators, too. Creatures that would have the city for their own, spinning their own webs of malice and intrigue. But among the city’s towering skyscrapers and wind-swept streets, who is the spider and who is the fly?

Normal price for these three products if purchased separately is: $62.97. The sale price for this week is $25.99, a savings of 59%.

The Sweet Home Chicago bundle is available at the Flames Rising RPGNow Shop.

Tales of the Seven Dogs Society is a collection of three short stories framed against the background of the Seven Dogs Society, the player group of Abstract Nova’s Aletheia RPG. If the game is unknown to you, I recommend taking a look at the reviews found at rpg.net, flamesrising.com and abstractnova.com, as they will reveal a great deal about the setting which I cannot go into here. The cover is one of Eric Lofgren’s typical pieces, showing an evil-looking man leering at the reader, with flames rising around him.

The short stories give some useful ideas for an Aletheia GM, and (if you don’t mind the spoilers), for some good ideas on how a PC can be integrated into the team – Matt McElroy’s narrator, a former private eye, for example, is recruited after getting a name for himself as a missing persons expert on ‘weird’ cases.

Review by Nick Lemming

The Mekhet Clan Book for Vampire: The Requiem Unnoticed and silent, they watch. Their eyes have seen a thousand secrets, and yours are no exception. They are the Shadows that dwell among the Kindred, and everyone knows that the darkness has eyes in the Danse Macabre. Seek their wisdom under cover of night, and discover […]

Blood and Madness

Vampires: blood-drinking creatures of the night. Horrors born of darkness, whose sole purpose in life – unlife, actually – is to slake their unholy thirst on the blood of the living. Without doubt, vampires are monsters.

Monsters, though, need not always be unthinking, unfeeling terrors empty of remorse, or even compassion or other human traits. Indeed, vampires can exceed their deathless curse, themselves becoming antiheroes or even heroes.

Explore the depths of the Danse Macabre

The Bloodthirsty Adventures bundle is available at the Flames Rising RPGNow Shop.

Murder Most Foul What at first seems a case of an insane but isolated killer expands to put the cell at the mercy of an enemy that lives off violence itself, and can only be defeated by an act that could make the hunters killers on a par with the mass murderers they oppose. The […]

Last house on the Left is director’s Wes Craven’s (Nightmare on Elm Street, Scream) first movie. It’s a low budget exploitation movie about two teenagers that head to the big city to attend a BloodLust concert. On the way they get kidnapped by a gang of escaped convicts that torture and rape them.Then the movie takes a turn into revenge tale territory where bad guys get their comeuppance. I thought the movie was OK, certainly not the masterpiece I expected to see, judging from the hype surrounding it. The plot is pretty standard fare, the characters rarely have any kind of motive or reasoning behind their actions and there are plot holes in most of the film.

Review by George Cotronis

The End Is Nigh! Fimbulwinter has come. The wolf Fenrir runs free, and the serpent Jörmungandr has loosed Midgard from his coils. The twilight of the Gods has begun, and only the Scions of the Aesir can salvage some good from the conflagration to come. Will your character survive the final battle of order versus […]

Let’s get one thing out of the way first: Scott Sigler’s book entitled Infected was my favorite read in 2008. Written as the first book in this series, Infected‘s sci-fi/horror mood was set by a few inventive elements. Infected explored the now infamous blue triangles (and their hatching) with the claustrophobic devolution of Perry Dawsey’s (the main character’s) mental state. The book was an absolutely thrilling work, and left me quite excited for Contagious, the next story in Sigler’s current trilogy. The third book entitled Pandemic is the last work in this trilogy.

Review by William Aicher.

It’s a genreDiversion book like no other. New innovations set this apart from previous genreDiversion games. This new universal manual is a toolkit for your own adventures, featuring easy to learn, fast-playing rules with a number of options like exploits, scaling, and integrated support for miniatures. More versatile, more dynamic, more heroic, and more exciting… The genreDiversion 3E Manual provides rules for magic, monsters, and vehicles; plus Unbidden & Forsaken, a ready-to-use modern-horror setting is included. This is the must-have book of the year!

The genreDiversion 3E Manual is available at the Flames Rising RPGNow Shop.

The old woman totters off to enjoy her breakfast, as tiny drops of bile patter on the street behind her.

People are turning up dead with their organs missing, but there’s no evidence of scars or surgery. The deaths are clearly unusual and perhaps even supernatural, and when one victim dies right in front of the hunters, their involvement becomes crucial. While the hunters may at first believe they are simply tracking down a monster, their investigations soon reveal a pattern to the killings, which implies some guiding intellect behind the travesties.

A story in the Storytelling Adventure System for Hunter: The Vigil.

Spearfinger is available now at the Flames Rising RPGNow Shop.

12 to Midnight’s Skinwalker (TWL-0021) is a modern horror campaign using the fictitious town of Pinebox, Texas as its setting. I reviewed the “Savaged” version of the rules, but a D20 version of the same campaign exists. The PDF, which is sixty-plus pages, comes in a regular and printer-friendly format (I suppose that makes it 120-plus pages). As with most of 12 to Midnight’s products, the attention to detail is the first aspect that pulls in the reader. They love their haunted town so much that fans can visit their website (www.12tomidnight.com) and print out their own map of the city. This attention to detail is why the scenario never puts in the “you can adjust this campaign to fit your own setting” speech. They went ahead a built the town you would need to create for the campaign.

Review by Todd Cash

The syrallax rivals the dark elf and aboleth for domination of the subterranean realm. While syrallaces lack the sheer numbers of other races, they make up for it with the impressive stable of minions and thralls they keep and their ability to maximize those forces through superior strategy. Through intimidation and their poisonous gaze, they force others to serve them out of fear.

In this first set of poison pages from One Bad Egg’s Poisoncraft Fourth Edition line, you’ll find a set of monsters bound to make your upper paragon-tier players quake as they reach for the anti-venom.

Poisoncraft 4E: The Syrallax is available at the Flames Rising RPGNow Shop.

It is a story of Richard Cypher, a woodsman in a village of the Westland. To him magic was a myth or a legend and he never thought of it more than an afterthought. Then he stumbled across a woman dressed in white named Kahlan and everything in his world changed instantly. He finds out he is the Seeker of legend and he must cross the boundry to fight the evil Darken Rahl.

The good and bad thing about fantasy is that there is a very true formula for how the story is written. It is good because when someone that can truly write gets a hold of it, it can be a magical thing indeed. It is bad because of how predictiable the story can be sometimes. This book had both the good and bad of that equation.

Review by Stacey Chancellor

Wizards of the Coast has released the Beta version of Duels of the Planeswalkers, an arcade-style video game for Xbox LIVE Arcade developed in conjunction with UK company Stainless Games. The game is rated T for Teen and is scheduled for spring release for the Xbox 360.

Duels of the Planeswalkers takes players on a journey through a Multiverse in which they take on the roles of Planeswalkers, powerful wizards who battle others for glory, knowledge and conquest. Throughout their journey, Planeswalkers battle with, or against each other in lush interactive 3D environments. Similar to the Magic: The Gathering trading card game, Planeswalkers are equipped with an arsenal of spells and creatures that if used wisely will help advance the Planeswalker through the game.

As we continue to break into new shadowy depths for 2009, Flames Rising needs your help. For over five years we’ve poured through books, games and a few films to talk about horror. This year, we want to continue that effort, but also want to reach out to all the fans that have made Flames Rising possible. Our goal is to build a supportive community of minions and hellions that share in our passion for the things that lurk in the dark. We’ll share with you articles, posts and trailers beyond what we have here on Flames Rising. From contests to breaking horror trailers, join us on Twitter and Facebook and stay on top of your favorite genre.

Join @flamesrising on Twitter. Get breaking news, interesting links and a chance to win free stuff!

Gen Con LLC announced today that the US Bankruptcy Court of Western Washington has confirmed the company’s plan of reorganization and approved the company’s rejection of a hostile takeover bid.

“This is bright day for us”, said Adrian Swartout, CEO of Gen Con. “The entire team is looking forward to 2009 and continuing our growth as a stronger, more focused company. Our emergence from Chapter 11 is a testament to the skill and perseverance of our employees and the strength of the phenomenal Gen Con brand. Everyone here is excited to begin working outside of Chapter 11.”

Since filing for bankruptcy protection in February of 2008, Gen Con has significantly reduced its expenses and increased its cash position.

Races in Dungeons & Dragons 4E are good for laying down the broad strokes of a character, but they often don’t feel as “lived in” as the ethnicities we encounter in everyday life. One potent reason for this is a general lack of cultural complexity and diversity. D&D races tend to be presented as monocultural societies—all elves are the same the world over, and so on.

Hard Boiled Cultures aims to make it easy to change that, outlining versatile, easy methods for diversifying the ideas of culture and race in your D&D 4E game. Better yet, the methods break down how to give this diversity real weight in the system, rather than simply relying on “color” text to do the job.

Hard Boiled Cultures is available at the Flames Rising RPGNow Shop.

DriveThruComics.com and Moonstone are offering Twilight Crusade: Gabriel as a free download!

Twilight Crusade is a battle of Heaven vs Hell right here on our Earth, where the READERS will decide who wins!

In the War between Heaven & Hell, one soldier has been on the front lines of the battleground since the very Beginning.

Twilight Crusade: Gabriel is free for a limited time at DriveThruComics.com.

EVE Online: Apocrypha Uncovers a New Version of the Universe Itself

CCP’s massive free expansion slated for March Release

CCP, one of the world’s leading independent game developers, today announced the launch of the tenth free expansion for EVE Online, its popular science fiction massively multi-player online game (MMOG). EVE Online: Apocrypha is the most ambitious EVE expansion in the game’s over five year history and it coincides with the March 10th, 2009 release of EVE Online as a boxed product through a partnership with Atari.