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.

Electronic Coupon for 20% off the following PDF products at RPGNow.com

For one day only – this Friday, the 13th of June, White Wolf is offering a discount on the following, appropriately thematic supplements from the World of Darkness. Naturally, this is a special day in our offices and we thought, why not share with our fans?

Second Sight – Not every entity with supernatural powers is one of a species of creatures that prowl the night. Solitary psychics, crazed sorcerers and doomsaying cultists all share the World of Darkness. This book explores their unique abilities. A character and setting book for all World of Darkness Games

This second edition of Blood! updates an original game from 1990, although quite why the author wishes to do this rather than create a completely new game which just rips off (adapts) some of the original concepts is not clear. As author Desborough points out, this makes the game a little unusual in the current environment in that games now tend to be rules-light and high-concept, while Blood! is a comparatively rules-heavy game. There are, for example, something like 400 weapons which can be used, including a fishing rod and a knitting needle. There are also extensive critical hit tables describing what might happen to the human body when it is variously bitten, stabbed, crashed into by a moving vehicle, shot, electrocuted and so forth. These are generally quite graphic in nature and this underlines the principal approach to the game, which is that of the gorefest.

Review by John Walsh

In normal Dread play, this is where henchmen and cultists would begin to interfere: the mook-battering is designed to wear down the PC’s Fury so that the final conflict is tough (and usually deadly, to one or more PCs). But being a one-shot con game, Raphael paced the scenario faster and got us on the trail of the first, possessor demon fairly quickly. A few chats with a scatter-brained crackhead, a store clerk, and other contacts, and we realize we’re on the tail of the mayor, possessed by a demon that loves to destroy the lives of its victim before finally destroying the possessed itself and moving on to new hunting grounds.

Review by David Artman

Horror Roleplaying in the Worlds of H. P. Lovecraft

The Great Old Ones ruled the earth aeons before the rise of humankind. Originally they came from the gulfs of space and were cast down by even greater beings. Remains of their cyclopean cities and forbidden knowledge can still be found on remote islands in the Pacific, buried amid the shifting sands of vast deserts, and in the frigid recesses of the polar extremes. Now they sleep — some deep within the enveloping earth and others beneath the eternal sea, in the drowned city of R’lyeh, preserved in the waters by the spells of mighty Cthulhu. When the stars are right they will rise, and once again walk this Earth.

It is not a bad idea to yoke together two distinct genres in order to create a media product which occupies a distinctive niche. Of course, the approach does not guarantee that the result will be coherent in terms of meaning or internal logic but, given enough attempts, it should be possible to find a combination that more or less works. Justin Bow, for Green Fairy Games, has joined together the concepts of, as the name suggests, ‘Fae’ and ‘noir.’

Together, then, these two concepts could work. Fae creatures enter an otherwise predominantly human society in which bad things tend to happen to everyone. It is possible to argue that the Sergei Lukyanenko novels, for example, fit this pattern, although RPG players are perhaps more likely to reference the film Sin City and the comics that gave rise to it.

Review by John Walsh