Book three of the internationally bestselling urban fantasy series by the author of EYES TO SEE and BY THE BLOOD OF HEROES.

When Knight Commander Cade Williams discovers that his wife, Gabrielle, is not truly dead, but held in some kind of arcane stasis between the lands of the living and the lands of the dead, he vows that nothing will stop him from freeing her soul from the prison surrounding her.

But his vow is tested right from the start when an old friend calls on him to help protect the city of Boston from the ancient scourge that threatens to destroy it, leaving Cade with a heart-breaking choice: Do his duty and save the innocent lives he has sworn to protect or forsake them all in order to rescue the one for whom he would brave the walls of hell itself?

A Tear in the Sky is available now in eBook formats at DriveThruFiction.com!

For years, fans have enjoyed games powered by Margaret Weis Productions’ award-winning Cortex Plus system. From the embroiled teenaged drama powered by Smallville to the high-tech heist hijinks of Leverage, and the comic book action of Marvel Heroic Roleplaying, the community has embraced these games and made them their own. Many have taken the rules from each licensed game and adapted them to a wide variety of settings, genres, and play styles.

In the spring of 2010, MWP sent out a call to its growing community for the best “hacks” of the Cortex Plus system. They asked creators, amateurs, and professionals alike to share new mechanics, settings, and entirely new games from the bones of existing games. Over 20 different authors contributed their own ideas to the project, which was dubbed the Cortex Plus Hacker’s Guide.

The character of Stompadon was invented by performance artist Kelsey Wailes as part of a competition called Super Art Fight. Wearing a massive mask, gloves and a tail, Wailes became the bug-eyed dinosaur that drew, creating mad-cap murals in a 25-minute time limit.

Stompadon is now taking on a life of its own, with a plush toy. Plus… truly fancy pieces of art and a weapons-grade adorable children’s book, written by Stompadon’s dad and illustrated by Stompadon.

Find out more info about Stompadon and back this project on Kickstarter.com!

New Orleans, 1935. Whoever called this “the Big Easy” sure got that one wrong. Things are tough all over. Honest work is hard to find, and even dishonest jobs are getting scarce. The one thing that’s not in short supply is trouble. From shady thugs to crooked cops to Mafia soldiers, there’s plenty of characters out there looking to give an honest Joe a hard time.

And that’s not the worst of it.

There are stories going round about things that go bump in the night. Things you wouldn’t want to meet in a dark alley on a darker night. And those stories aren’t just coming from rummies or saps who read that Epitaph rag.

Deadlands Noir is now available in PDF format at the Flames Rising RPGNow Shop!

About a decade ago, White Wolf released a game called Mummy: The Resurrection as the core offering for its Year of the Scarab. When the Time of Judgment rolled around, that game and its continuity were put to rest, along with the other classic World of Darkness lines; but endings breed new beginnings, and in the course of developing the end of that game, a vision for a new mummy-focused roleplaying experience began to take shape. It would be a decade before that vision could come to life, but here we are at last.

Welcome to Mummy: The Curse, a new World of Darkness roleplaying game.

Edison T. Crux is an author whose first novel, “Tale of the Wisconsin Werewolf” debuts on December 15. The author will be attending an event at Pegasus Games

While many are pointing at 12/21/12, some people interpret the Mayan calendar to predict this Wednesday, 12/12/12, to spell the end of the world as we know it. But, David Lapham feels fine.

The Eisner Award-winning author has three of his own personal series hitting comic shops this Wednesday, all published by Avatar Press. In addition to the debut of Caligula: Heart of Rome – the sequel to his supernatural horror tale set in ancient Rome – Wednesday will also premiere the trade collection of his original Ferals werewolf crime/horror comic series, and the most recent issue of his gonzo detective series, Dan The Unharmable #8.

In the labyrinthian maze of endless corridors, annexes, and wings of the enormous medical complex known as the Castle prowls a grief-stricken man determined to redeem himself and bring justice for those victims incapable of doing it for themselves.

During the four months that his son lay dying, ex-con Kasteel lost his job, his wife, and nearly his mind. He became a fixture at the Castle, a phantom prowling the halls in the deep night, a shadow of his former self until he faded from sight and was forgotten altogether.

Now, without any life to return to, he takes it upon himself to become the Castle’s guardian. He lives off the grid hiding among the hundreds of miles of twisting passages, rooms, offices, and underground parking structures. Despair, confusion, and terror are the natural state and trade of any hospital: Not only must the patients endure disease and infirmity, but others are victims of physical and sexual abuse from the outside world or from cruel security guards.

OneBookShelf, Inc., the parent company of DriveThruRPG.com and DriveThruComics.com, announced today that their advocacy event “Teach Your Kids To Game Week” (rpg.drivethrustuff.com/rpg_teachkids.php) will begin on Monday, December 3rd and end on Friday, December 7th.

While DriveThruRPG is the largest digital RPG distributor on the web, the retailer also advocates the positive benefits of gaming with kids.
Teach Your Kids To Game Week is a program designed to reach out to the community and will feature articles, tips, and advice to do just that.

Author Craig Saunders tells us about his novel A Stranger’s Grave, published by Grand Mal Press, in this new design essay.

All right, Genesis may be a little high-falutin for what I do. I’m a straight forward, bash it out writer. I’m not a ‘literary’ writer, and anyone who calls my work literary is apt to get an earful. David Gemmell once whispered in my shell-like that he’d wasn’t the type of writer to go to the ends of the Earth for a paragraph; write 1K a day, and you’ll get there.

What is the God-Machine?

You hold in your hands the book that might answer that question…or might simply complicate it. The God-Machine Chronicle Anthology contains new fiction by Justin Achilli, Eddy Webb, Stew Wilson, David A Hill Jr, and many others, as well as previously published stories by Chuck Wendig, Ray Fawkes, Rick Chillot and Matthew McFarland. All of these tales feature encounters with the God-Machine, and serve to pave the way for the God-Machine Chronicle itself.

What rises may fall. What has fallen may rise again.

The God-Machine Chronicle Anthology is available in eBook and Print formats at DriveThruFiction.com!

The Littlest Shoggoth is a children’s story written and illustrated by longtime game industry veteran, Stan! It was originally released for free on the website StoryTimeWithStan.com and was subsequently published in a very limited print run by Super Genius Games. Since that edition went out of print, the book has been unavailable (though the story can still be read online).

For a long time we’ve wanted to bring the book back into print in a premium edition, and now with your help, we hope to do just that.

If we can raise just $5,000 in pledges, we can bring The Littlest Shoggoth back into print with a high-quality print run that will allow it to reach a broader audience and become the quirky holiday tradition that it deserves to be.

Find out more information and support this project at Kickstarter.com!

From a world magically transformed entirely into glass to a distant future where the Catholic Church of Osirus uses two singularities to manipulate time, the science fiction and fantasy stories of Small Matters take the readers to places unlike any they have visited before.

Brought to you from the mind of master world-builder and storyteller Monte Cook, these seven short stories tell tales of vengeance and honor. Love and murder. Loyalty and greed. As the title suggests, these are personal tales, not of world-saving quests but of people who face tough decisions that affect their own lives. Not all of them choose wisely…

Flames Rising is pleased to present an exclusive pair of excerpts from this collection.

This month, aspiring (and existing) novelists everywhere begin their 50,000 word jaunt for National Novel Writing Month, otherwise known as NaNoWriMo. 50,000 words, or the equivalent of half a standard novel, translates to writing roughly 1,666 words every day. For writers with a full-time or even a part-time job, furiously scribbling five to seven pages of text can seem rather daunting — especially if you’re not sure how (or what) to write. Not sure if the snowflake method is best? Or if your dialogue techniques are up to par?

Flames Rising and DriveThruFiction can help!

In honor of novelists everywhere, we’re offering a contest to receive $10 gift certificates to DriveThruFiction.com!

In the deep forests of Kyonin, elves live among their own kind, far from the prying eyes of other races. Few of impure blood are allowed beyond the nation’s borders, and thus it’s a great honor for the half-elven Count Varian Jeggare and his hellspawn bodyguard Radovan to be allowed inside. Yet all is not well in the elven kingdom: demons stir in its depths, and an intricate web of politics seems destined to catch the two travelers in its snares. In the course of tracking down a missing druid, Varian and a team of eccentric elven adventurers will be forced to delve into dark secrets lost for generations—including the mystery of Varian’s own past.

From fan favorite Dave Gross, author of Prince of Wolves and Master of Devils, comes a fantastical new adventure set in the award-winning world of the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game. Flames Rising is pleased to offer an excerpt from this Pathfinder Tales novel.

Our gaze into the shadows of Halloween past continues today with the one-year celebration of our first anthology! Not only has Haunted: 11 Tales of Ghostly Horror been well-received by the community, earning a special mention in Ellen Datlow’s Year of Best Horror, but our debut collection also won a Reader’s Choice award. Your can read a round-up of reviews and our award announcement here on the site, by the way.

In honor of our one-year anniversary, we would like to provide you with an excerpt from two of these tales. First, we’d like to share with you the nascent beginnings from Jess Hartley’s story titled “Immaterial Witness.” Then, we’ll share Alex Bledsoe’s unusual take on ghost hunters from his spooky tale titled “What’s the Frequency, Francis?“

Halloween 2012 is breathing down our necks. In honor of our favorite holiday, we’ve turned to three spirits: the Ghost of Halloween Past, Present, and Future. Today, we’ve asked the Ghost of Halloween Past to recommend its favorite FlamesRising.com-related events. This spirit has revealed to us, that it wants to honor the writers who’ve helped us out over the years.

Today, for the first day of our Halloween celebration, the Ghost of Halloween Past would like to point out not one, but thirty-one stories written with you in mind. These very fine authors have given us sordid tales to scare and thrill you as a Halloween treat.

Hi Flames Rising readers- my name is Rich Thomas (richt on the forums) and since 1986, when I began illustrating and art directing for White Wolf Magazine, I’ve been responsible for the look and feel of every White Wolf product ever created — ranging from RPG books, fiction, board/card games and everything in between. I became Creative Director in 2006, which meant I was overseeing White Wolf’s writing and development as well. During this time WW launched multiple Ennie-award winning product lines which I’m very proud of: Scion and Changeling: The Lost.

For a few years I worked with an amazing group of computer game creators as Lead Designer and Content Director for the WoDMMO, but then someone was needed to head-up the team on Vampire: The Masquerade 20th Anniversary Edition, and I had so much fun and had so many great experiences with our tabletop and LARPing fans that I returned to the world of traditional RPGs with a renewed focus on tabletop gaming. In January 2012 I left CCP and founded Onyx Path Publishing and we are the official licensed publishers of the nWoD, cWoD, and Exalted game lines.

Children of the Revolution tells the stories of noteworthy or notorious Kindred of the modern nights whose Embraces came in times of unrest, rebellion, or open revolution. The circumstances of these revolutions might have been mortal or undead, martial or cultural. These Kindred joined the ranks of the Damned under tides of war or cultural upheaval, and their blood bears the mark of change from one paradigm into another. Sometimes they are the agents of change. For others, their revolution drags them in its wake.

The world of the Kindred is always fraught with blood and danger, and Embrace amid the fires of revolution only heightens that fact. Here are Kindred who have risen to guide the Black Hand, who have led the armies of Alexander, who have earned the Lextalionis, and who have been reborn in the fires of the Arab Spring. Their histories have been forged, but their futures remain to be determined by your troupe.

Children of the Revolution is available now in PDF and Hardcover editions at the Flames Rising Shop!

The KickStarter Campaign for Ars Magica: Years of Conquest is now available! The Campaign will run until November 18th, 2012.

Years of Conquest is based on Atlas Games’ award-winning Ars Magica role-playing game, and features a full century of simulation gameplay in a fantastic and magical Medieval setting. A faithful rendition of the original game, Years of Conquest incorporates the full Fifth Edition rules, including the legendarily powerful and flexible magic system.

The player must build their own Covenant in a time of invasion and strife and protect it from influences both within and without, if they are to attain the dizzying heights of magical power. For the first time in the 25 year history of Ars Magica, players are invited to discover the secrets of House Diedne, a powerful and enigmatic House facing total destruction.