Review by: Jason Thorson

Sometimes the most innovative ideas are so simple, it’s amazing they haven’t already been done. Such is the case with Cloverfield – a giant monster movie shot entirely from the perspective of a character’s camcorder. Produced by J.J. Abrams, written by Drew Goddard, and directed by Matt Reeves, all of whom are television vets having been responsible for episodes of Lost, Buffy, Angel, Alias, and others, Cloverfield is more than merely Godzilla meets The Blair Witch Project. It’s unique in that it attempts to give us fully developed characters to inhabit it’s high concept scenario and entirely besieged Manhattan setting.

The plot is exactly like the movie. The movie is good, so the book is good by default. It’s definitely a page turner. De Candido’s style is largely free of literary flourishes. It’s as if he literally transcribed Joss Whedon’s screenplay verbatim while tossing in only a few extras. Story-wise, I thought that the book could have gone into a little more depth than it does. However, it does elaborate a bit on the battle of Serenity.

Borrowing snippets from the back cover of the book, Blood Games II is an occult-horror role-playing game about courage, self-sacrifice and desperate heroism with no hope of reward. I think of it along the lines of “John Constantine meets Buffy the Vampire Slayer”. There are a lot of great ideas in the book and there is an underlying sinister tone that helps separate this game of occult horror from lighter traditional urban fantasy.

A Modern Fantasy game written by Stewart Wilson.

The simple version of the game’s premise is this: there is a magical world existing alongside our own. The Unaware cannot fully comprehend everything and so the magical realities of life are concealed from them.

You can now search by publisher at the Flames Rising eBook Shop. This includes lots of fiction and comics (in addition to all of the RPGs). Basically all of the publishers from the various OneBookShelf sites are now listed in one handy spot. For example, all of David Moody’s Autumn tales from Infected Books and […]

While its another dicepool system the roll-and-keep and the exploding dice seem to focus people’s attention on the game pretty well and make rolling the dice unpredictable enough to be exciting. Combine this with ‘raises’ (extra risk for extra effect) and the mechanics fairly naturally lend themselves to skilled characters using a bit of flair and expertise rather than simply hacking away.

Review by: Jason Thorson

David Slade has provided us genre geeks something to get excited about. 30 Days of Night is quite simply a very solid horror flick. All the ingredients for success are here: good acting, beautiful photography, and great source material. It’s scary, fun, and dramatic, while also giving us a nice example of the potential this genre has to deliver engaging stories. And if a month in the dark shows us anything about modern horror, it’s that David Slade’s future is looking very bright.

Twilight of the Dead now a free online read! Five years after the dead rose a small band of survivors has taken refuge in the fortified town of Eastpointe. When a newcomer arrives claiming to know the location of the antidote to the zombie plague, it sends the town into an uproar. To retrieve this […]

The Devil’s Rejects is Rob Zombie’s follow up to his House of 1,000 Corpses though most of it is so different to House of 1,000 Corpses, despite being a sequel, that you wonder if it really is a sequel in spirit. The Devil’s Rejects feels more like a remake than a sequel per se, a sequel made by someone who has come off the fun psychedelics and sobered up.

Scar Night is the debut novel from Alan Campbell who, previously, has worked as a designer and coder on the Grand Theft Auto games. It forms, apparently, the first novel in a series to come called The Deepgate Codex. A good, even great first effort Scar Night would seem to (hopefully) establish Campbell as another of the active British fantasists and SF authors that seem to be keeping the innovative side of those genres bubbling along a bit

Basically, what the game world is, is part of a lower, demonic plane of existence, beneath the other spiritual and other worlds, a place of demons and death and devilry and Tim Burtonesque twisted landscapes where the various demonic races and beasts vie with each other for power and control. A theme which has been explored more than just a little in many other products for many other game lines.

Flesh Feast as an anthology of zombie-oriented horror fiction, currently available from Permuted Press, the third in a series apparently. The volume is presented much in keeping with the current, and ongoing, resurgent zombie fad but isn’t truly and entirely a zombie-oriented collection. While the stories do all follow the undead theme, zombie purists (those who foam at the mouth about 28 Days Later) are going to be a little disappointed and, to be honest, they have a point. The stories that stray the most from the more classic zombie fare are the weakest.

I should probably note before I commence that I am not much of a fan of the original Ravenloft, or of the world as a whole. Of the alternative game settings offered in the last gasps of TSR Ravenloft is much weaker – in my opinion – than Dark Sun or Planescape. To me it just all seemed a little too cheesy, a little too Bela Lugosi and we all know how unscary the old 40s and 50s horror films seem these days. Some of that ‘cheese’ always seemed to taint my encounters with Ravenloft from fortune telling gypsies to vampire lords and, so, I’ve never been that enamoured of it. I know people love it though, so I’ll try to rate this d20 remake gazetteer based on its individual content rather than the world it describes.

In this interview we talk to Eddy about Mind’s Eye Theatre: the Awakening, membership in the Camarilla and other LARP topics.

Aletheia is an extremely difficult book to write a review for because, while it is an RPG, it is one with an extremely defined, extremely tight, extremely focussed setting which amounts to a campaign idea with its own rules, rather than as an RPG as such. Given that so much of the book is devoted to the reality behind the secrets of the setting it is nigh impossible to give a full review and assessment of the game since that would give away too much and spoil it for those that do buy it.

Review by James Desborough

Orbit is an older game, 2003, but we picked up a copy on the bring-and-buy table at Gencon UK so I thought I might as well review it. Some shops seem to still have copies for sale and you can, apparently, still get copies from the creator.

What the game is, or at least what it tries to be, is a sort of ‘Heavy Metal’ (the film) in game form, intermingled with some psychobilly retro-fifties styling. The book is soft back, reasonably well printed and weighs in at 258 pages all told. I had high expectations for this game as I sensed a kindred spirit to ’45: Psychobilly Retropocalypse but these expectations weren’t particularly fulfilled.

Colonial Gothic is a game of occult mystery and darkness set during the American Revolution, I shall try to contain myself from dispelling too many myths about that time or the nature of the revolt, or what the British actually did/were doing and why but even without that making my forehead vein throb this seems, to me, to be a peculiar time period to place such a game in, when there are more pressing matters for both the British forces and the rebels.

Cadwallon sells itself as a ‘tactical role playing game’ and it sits, uncomfortably and mystifyingly, somewhere between D&D and one of Games Workshop’s skirmish games like Mordheim or Necromunda. It never quite explains what tactical roleplaying is exactly and it comes across in the reading as either a dumbed down D&D where the board becomes necessary or a brightened up skirmish game where you actually roleplay. It is stuck between dimensions, neither one thing nor the other but given the D&D miniatures and the popularity of Clix this new middle ground seems to have become a fighting area for many of the companies so there must be something in it.

Qin is to China’s mythological history what Legend of the Five Rings is to Japan’s. While there are superficial and stylistic similarities between the two games and they share the same broad appeal the similarities in no way mean they’re the same any more than the broad similarities between Japan and China themselves mean they’re in any way the same country.

Qin takes a more historical approach – though don’t worry, there are monsters and magic – and has a much more egalitarian and open society structure (considering the source material) than Legend of the Five Rings. Being a peasant or bandit is a much more viable option in Qin and while the social order is divinely mandated and enforced – particularly for women – the period of the setting is chaotic enough and in enough upheaval that this is no longer an issue.

From first edition Vampire through to about a year or so before the end of the Old World of Darkness line I was a bit of a White Wolf fanboy. Not a drooling fanboy, they still did things that annoyed me, but by and large I agreed with their design philosophy and found that their games appealed to my style of play and the sort of games I wanted to run. With their cackhanded interference in their LARP society (not that it could have made things much worse than they already were) and their wrap up of the oWOD I fell out of love with them for the most part and aside from the occasional bit of curiosity I haven’t really followed their games.

Except for Exalted.