Our next entry in the Vampire Retrospective Project comes from Andrew Peregrine, developer of the Victoriana RPG by Cubicle 7 Entertainment. Andrew tells us about hist first experiences with Vampire, joining the Camarilla and the friends he has made along the way.

Masquerade and Me

Have I really spent 20 years playing vampire? Not only is that half my life, but twice as long as I’ve been with my partner. Is it wrong that Masquerade is one of my longest relationships? It isn’t even the first role-playing game I played. Like so many other gamers, Dungeons and Dragons claims that dubious honor, and Call of Cthulhu was my first horror game. So why do I feel like I owe Vampire anything special? In my case, it’s because I owe so many friendships to this game.

Our first entry in the Vampire Retrospective Project comes from Michael Holland, who is one of the Moderators on the White Wolf forums. Michael tells us about his first discovery of Vampire: the Masquerade.

It is not every day that a game like Vampire the Masquerade comes along and changes everything. For the most part, the list of revolutionary role playing games is a very short one. In 1974, Dungeons & Dragons served as the veritable genesis of the table top role playing game phenomena. In 1977, Traveller successfully brought the subgenre of the science fiction role playing game into its own space so to speak. The work of H.P. Lovecraft had always been a major influence on role playing games, but in 1981 Call of Cthulhu took us deeper into the realm of horror than we had ever gone before.

Speak Out with your Geek Out began with a single drop of creativity. Today, from where I sit, I’m floating happily along in an ocean of laughter, smiles and friendship. For that? I thank you muchly. (See: the answer to why is a raven like a writing desk.) The majority of the responses have been […]

Among other things, I’m a gamer. One of my favorite aspects of gaming is painting miniatures. Whether it be an army of Dwarves or Goblins for Warhammer Fantasy Battles, or the Austrian 18th Regiment of infantry from the 1809 Campaign against Napoleon, painting miniatures is sub-culture of gaming I particularly enjoy.

Today’s post is to give you some ideas to blog about. If you want to help, please share your ideas for blog post ideas in the comments below or contact me to do a guest post. Before I do, I want to share with you one of the debut posts encouraging people to sign on. […]

We surpassed 500 committed bloggers for Speak Out with your Geek Out this weekend. If this keeps up? We’ll hit 1,000 by Thursday. For today’s post, the logo is revealed, a few questions are answered, and the Tumblr is unveiled. You are encouraged to share the logo and spread the word!

The other day, an article went viral around the internet. The writer decided to write about her dating experience in a very negative way to illustrate her point that people stereotype. The guy in question? A world champion Magic: the Gathering player. Unfortunately, the article was extremely mean and, as I later found out, the […]

The Flames Rising Design Essay Series started in 2008 when Preston DuBose and I were chatting about different projects we’ve worked on (including Buried Tales of Pinebox, Texas which we had recently released) and I asked him to write a little something about the next project on his agenda, you can find the essay below. Like other parts of the site, this series started out in RPGs, but soon expanded to include Fiction, Comics and we even have one essay about Film.

The series continues to evolve and has become an ongoing project where authors, game designers and others can tell Flames Rising readers about the creative process that went into a particular project. We have no plans on stopping this series, but I thought I’d take a moment to look back at some of the essays we’ve posted so far:

Another GenCon has come and gone – my eleventh straight as an industry professional – and I wanted to reflect a bit on why GenCon is important for the gaming industry – not to mention just a great time as an attendee/gamer. For one thing, nearly all the major tabletop game companies – and most of the minor ones – have a presence at GenCon. If your favorite local Game Store (FLGS) doesn’t carry something from one of these companies, odds are better than average it can be found in the dealers’ hall.

Gaming at GenCon? Yes, there’s lots. Most of it involves paying something extra to play, which is a bit of a downer, but still affordable. If you plan to go, registering for events early is a good idea; they fill up quickly and there’s no guarantee of a last-minute opening in the game you really wanted to try. Many manufacturers run demos at their booths in the dealer’s hall; these will be short, use pre-gen characters they provide, but are an excellent way to sample something new before buying.

After a post the other day on Google+, Monica poked me about letting Flames Rising readers know what I’ve been up to while I’m not writing for Flames Rising.

Most of my writing recently has been for Branford Patch, a local online news site, where I do a regular history column about the early days of Branford, Connecticut. It’s great fun, but not typically a cross-over into horror (although perhaps I’ll track down a ghost story one of these days!).

This past week, however, I had my very first Dragon magazine article published!

Well, it’s been a little while since I’ve dropped in to talk about what I’ve been up to, so I thought I’d write about some of the exciting things that are happening behind-the-scenes. In this update, I talk about Geek’s Dream Girl, John Kovalic, The Creepy Cottontail and my helping out at the DriveThruRPG/ White Wolf booth at GenCon: Indy.

In July, my first article geared toward freelancers debuted on a site called Geek’s Dream Girl. My new column is written to help new writers move from commoner to freelancer and offers some “mechanics” to help you do that. Dubbed Calling all Freelancers: Adventure to Dice Castle, it’ll provide a different take on the topic and will appear once-a-month.

What do FlamesRising.com readers and me have in common? A love for all things geek, of course!

Yesterday, I launched a theme week on my blog at www.mlvwrites.com about all things girly and geeky. This week-long celebration is due, in part, to my new column debuting in July on the Geeks Dream Girl website about freelancing for the hobby games industry. What better way to say “I like being a geek” than to enjoy a fun contest!?!

Wow. This year’s free RPG day freebies were outstanding. We decided to shop at NobleKnight.com because we were looking for a copy of the Hellboy: Sourcebook and Roleplaying Game — and found it! At Noble Knight, we snatched a first edition, first printing from this fully-illustrated edition published by Steve Jackson Games. Also included in the “paid” portion of our haul, was the Pathfinder campaign setting Undead Revisited. I can’t help but think the name implies a double dose of necromancy — as if one wasn’t bad enough!

I’ve recently discovered two very cool looking Lovecraft inspired projects on Kickstarter. The first is the Unisystem RPG called –Eldritch Skies– from Battlefield Press. The future is here. Machine-made telepathy, augmentations, and unprecedented levels of automation have changed the face of Earth. But the science of sorcery, and our primitive understandings of what lies outside, […]

This weekend, I’ll be attending OddCon in Madison, Wisconsin as a panelist and moderator. Guests include J.V. Jones, Robin Laws and Sarah Monette. You may recall we conducted an interview with Robin Laws here at FlamesRising.com just recently. Well, Robin is the gaming industry guest of honor at OddCon, which takes place from Friday, April 8th through Sunday, April 10th in Madison, Wisconsin.

In this post I talk about other guests, my panels and offer more information.

One of the things I did at C2E2 was sit down and play a demo of Magic: the Gathering. I had the chance to talk to a very knowledge and experienced judge. We have some decks here at home and even though I’ve played a few rounds, with a game like Magic: the Gathering I feel there’s always something new to learn.

For my demo, I chose the Chandra Nalaar or red deck from the Planeswalker set. Immediately, the game designer in me wondered how gameplay might vary between the different colors. The red deck was totally appropriate to my personality and had lots of fiery cards and mountains in it.

It may come as no surprise that I’ve been thinking about horror lately. It occurred to me recently that there has, at no point in modern US history, been such a vast array of horror material – across all media – available for consumption. Not only do we have a regular horror television series currently airing (Walking Dead) plus many more series no longer in production available in DVD collections, but also a ton of fiction, both in novel and in comic/graphic novel formats. It’s a great time to be a horror fan!

I was glued to AMC’s series The Walking Dead ever since I stumbled across a preview trailer online last summer. My wife complained about the amount of space it took up on our already full DVR, so I conceded and deleted the recordings. The DVD of the first season is available now; I’m waiting for the time to be right to buy a copy. As the highest-rated series to date on AMC, and one of the top five shows from 2010 in terms of ratings on basic cable, the Walking Dead has broken new ground as a continuing horror series.

Thought you might want to see a collection of the photos I took at C2E2. There’s more C2E2 goodness coming when I talk about Skullkickers, what’s new with Tim Seeley, my Magic the Gathering demo and a smattering of new comic titles. Hope you enjoy these!

We recently made the trek down to Chicago for the second year of C2E2. The attendance was up by ten-to-fifteen thousand people year-over-year to reach in upwards of 40 to 45 thousand; you can see by the picture at the top that the show was hopping. I was really impressed by the attention to detail to make this show fun. Last year, the show’s organizers walked the floor on Sunday, which had died down considerably, and asked the vendors and booth managers what could be done. Huge, huge, difference between this year and last year. Huge.

Since releasing one of the first enhanced e-books entitled The Queen of Crows, I’ve been pursuing publication of short stories and other works over the past year. I’d like to share some exciting news with you here. In honor of Read an e-book Week, links will primarily point to the digital version.

Hope you take the time to read the post and check out my new short stories and games.