Freedom is on the march as the rebellion against the Kurian Occupation of Earth takes the offensive. David Valentine has recruited an ad hoc company of former Quisling soldiers and puts them through a trial by fire with a successful raid against an enemy armory. Now, they’re ready to join forces with a guerilla army planning to establish a new freehold in the Appalachian Mountains.

Valentine knows that a permanent outpost near the East Coast would provide a strategic victory over the Kurians—and he believes that only his old ally Ahn-Kha could be leading the guerillas. But nothing could prepare Valentine’s fighters for what awaits them at the end of their journey.

Fall with Honor is available at Amazon.com.

Earlier this week we posted an initial Origins Report which featured a few teasers for interviews that guest blogger Michael Erb had lined up while he was at the convention. Also included in that first post is the list of Origins Award Winners for this year. Today Michael shows off a few of the photos he snapped while wandering the hall and highlights some of the publishers he made contact with throughout the weekend…

Daughter of Nexus is an adventure offering for White Wolf’s fantasy RPG, Exalted. This adventure is published in PDF form and is another prong in White Wolf’s fairly aggressive and welcome acceptance of the PDF medium as a way to do business. This is particularly desirable for Adventures, I think, as the production costs and the sale price can be kept low though, at nearly seven dollars – for which you can get PDFs two and a half times as big and with more content – I still don’t think they’re getting the price point right for their electronic offerings, after all, adventures are pretty much disposable products, with little in the way of replay value and few elements that can be effectively reused.

Review by James ‘Grim’ Desborough

“And what have you done lately?” So ends a fast-paced, winner-take-all honey of a comic book brought to life. Wanted builds from a nicely sardonic character study through a romp of an action film into a colossal final fight built around a twist that suddenly catapults the movie from a fun night out into an edge-of-the-seat thrill ride. It may start out slowly, but this movie ends with a bang so big, it will leave you grinning with malicious glee. All nice words aside, don’t go to this movie looking for high drama and a soaring intellectual quotient—although the movie does, at times, make witty, ironic jokes worthy of a wry smile. But if you enjoy a dark comic book writ large and riddled with as much wordplay as bullets, then this is the movie for you.

Review by Dana Hagengruber

“Godlike” is a role-playing game about super heroes during World War II. But “Godlike” isn’t your normal super-powered game. The heroes, called Talents, are normal people with extraordinary powers, but who ultimately are still very human.

The Talents in “Godlike” don’t dress in spandex and capes while soaring into war. That’s like wearing a giant target on your back. Instead Talents tend to work in small groups, just like a regular military unit, and conceal their extraordinary abilities when possible. The Talents have great power, but ultimately are tools in the war, and a player character’s ability to affect the course of the war is limited and dependant more upon the success of missions rather than just on personal actions.

Review by Michael Erb

Some of the Flames Rising crew was at Wizard World Chicago this weekend checking out new Horror Comics and Dark Fantasy Artists. Michael Erb helped us diversify our efforts and dropped by Origins Game Fair to get the scoop on upcoming games, cool events and the 34th Annual Origins Awards.

Editor James Lowder shaped Worlds of Their Own around a very simple premise: you might know the writers featured in the anthology for their franchise fiction (such as Forgotten Realms or Warhammer Fantasy), but just you wait until you read fiction set in their own worlds.

“The stories presented herein take place, as the book’s title suggests, in worlds created and controlled by the participating writers,” Lowder says in his introduction to Worlds of Their Own. “[The writers] applied their passion and their skill, and told the fantasy and SF adventure tales they wanted to tell. Sometimes their style or theme dovetails nicely with the author’s franchise work. Other times there are surprising departures. But the stories all depict worlds for which the original author has final say, a fact that places the burden for each work’s success or failure squarely on the shoulders of that author.”

War Is Hell

The service trains you to be strong. It teaches you teamwork, how to rely on others and how to rely on yourself. Which is a damn good thing. You need every edge you can get. You’ll see for yourself when you discover what else is out there in the night.

World of Darkness: Dogs of War is available to pre-order at Amazon.com and instant download at the Flames Rising RPGNow Shop.

Polymancer Studios announces it will publish material supporting Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition under the new FourthRight imprint. Under the terms of the Game System License, products will appear in print and PDF in October 2008.

FourthRight, a new imprint of the publisher of many quality game products, will support the newest edition of the most popular roleplaying game rules system on the market today. The terms of the Game System License (GSL) allow for the rapid development of adventure scenarios as well as monster, power, and NPC compendiums.

Can you make it to the safety of the helicopter before the zombie hoard makes a meal of you? Do you risk a run for ammo or try to slip past unnoticed? Why not slow them down with a few friends instead?

Players each take on the role of one of four survivors in a town overrun by the undead. The game uses a combination of miniatures, tile laying, dice and cards to simulate the twists and turns of a zombie horror flick. Each player has movement, represented by the rolling of a six-sided die; cards, representing different events or items; and tokens, representing a character’s health and how many bullets they have.

Review by Michael Erb

The Blight Elves are a race of elves native to Simarra in the Blood Throne setting. These are basically dark elves dialed up to eleven with the themes becoming those of torture, despair and cruelty, equally dialed up to eleven. This is presented for True20 rules and it will be interesting to see how d20 variants like True20 and Mutants and Masterminds fair in the face of 4th Edition D&D.

Review by James ‘Grim’ Desborough

The Innovative Creators Will Hold A Toy Design Discussion From 4-5 P.M. On Friday, June 27th.

Have you had a killer toy idea in your head for years, but don’t have the know-how to make it a reality? Does the idea of it leave you awake at night with a gnawing, burning desire in your gut to turn your dream into a toy?

Well, after you’ve been to your doctor to rule out an ulcer, get on over to the Wizard World Chicago Convention Friday, June 27th from 4-5 p.m., because we’ve got the cure for what ails ya! Two of the demented minds behind the Teddy Scares toy line, co-creator, Joe DiDomenico and Chris Patchell, Teddy Scares artist extraordinaire, will discuss the “how-to” of designing your very own toy!

Dark Matter Studios, producer of the well-received fantasy rpg Epic Role Playing, has released its latest offering, the Atlas of Eslin. Weighing in at over 300 pages, the Atlas contains eight continents’ worth of diverse cultures, compelling story hooks and varied professions.

A companion to the Epic RPG Game Manual, the Atlas is designed to be used by GMs and players as a complete and ready-to-play campaign world or as a modular salad bar of ideas for homebrew settings.

Animation legend Bruce Timm and award-winning writers Josh Olson, Brian Azzarello, Greg Rucka and Alan Burnett will be the featured panelists when DC Comics, Warner Premiere, Warner Home Video and Warner Bros. Animation present the World Premiere of the DC Universe Animated Original PG-13 Movie, Batman Gotham Knight, at Wizard World Chicago on June 28, 2008, it was announced today.

Batman Gotham Knight will arrive July 8, 2008 on DVD and Blu-Ray disc, and will also be available On Demand via digital cable and for download through broadband sites.

Trailers Contest

In celebration of the upcoming August release of Hunter: The Vigil, White Wolf is bringing back the incredibly popular trailers contest that we ran last year! We know our fans are creative and artistic, so we are looking for people with vision to create the trailers that play on our website and on the internet.

I am a sucker for the undead. In the history of my D&D experience I have always gravitated toward playing necromancers. There was something awe-inspiring about those who used their magic to alter the rules of death. One thing all of my necromancers have in common is that none of them were evil. The idea of the black-cloaked cackling lunatic, raising shambling hordes was so cliche as to be completely uninteresting to me. A good or neutral wizard who used the walking dead to battle the true evils of the world: that was a concept I could get behind.

This book had me at Lawful Good Lich.

Review by Vincent Venturella

“Backup,” a twelve thousand word novelette set in Jim Butcher’s ultra-popular Dresden Files series. This time Harry’s in trouble he knows nothing about, and it’s up to his big brother Thomas to track him down and solve those little life-threatening difficulties without his little brother even noticing.

Backup is available for pre-order at Amazon.com.

Many of today’s best (and best-selling) fantasists got their start writing shared-world fiction supporting roleplaying games. This massive anthology collects more than a dozen thrilling tales from R.A. Salvatore, Michael A. Stackpole, Monte Cook, Ed Greenwood, Elaine Cunningham, and more, providing an exciting overview of the original worlds and characters of authors who achieved their greatest fame writing stories they do not own.

Edited by James Lowder (The Book of All Flesh, Prince of Lies), Worlds of Their Own presents an unprecedented sampler of fantasy and science-fiction adventure tales from some of the best-loved and best-known authors in the genre.

The Heart of Darkness opens once again – to free the Trail of the Brotherhood!

Designed by the man who brought you Arkham Horror and other fine games, Richard Launius, Trail of the Brotherhood is Lovecraft writ large as a boardgame. And the featured illustrator of the game is Samuel Araya – known for his dark and distinctive work on other games, such as Unhallowed Metropolis and Abuse: The Final Insult!

CCP Unfolds New Storyline and Gameplay in Free Expansion

CCP, one of the world’s leading independent game developers, today announced the launch of the eighth free expansion for EVE Online, its popular massively multi-player online game (MMOG). EVE Online: Empyrean Age destroys the peace of New Eden as long suppressed political tensions between the four major Empires of EVE boil over into direct conflict. Stalwart starship pilots join the newly mustered militias and make solitary strikes deep within enemy territory. By choosing sides in this epic war, players have the power to direct the course of the conflict. New players can quickly immerse themselves in the EVE universe by diving into large-scale factional battles.