Requiem for Rome is a historical supplement and setting for Vampire: the Requiem from White Wolf Publishing, much like Dark Ages: Vampire was a historical setting for Vampire: the Masquerade. Requiem for Rome is a beautiful, but dark, book full of cunning aristocrats, noble savages and mysterious monsters. It is a 260 page hardcover (or eBook) filled with history, rumor and legend.

Ken Hite’s Foreward, The Deathless City, sets the mood immediately with a look at the history, secrets and terrors of Rome. Any Storyteller should be able to gather more than a few ideas from this section of the book alone. It is definitely worth the read if you get the chance.

As a fan of Big Red, I was eagerly anticipating seeing this sequel to Hellboy after watching the Hellboy and the Golden Army trailer and hearing about Guillermo del Toro’s involvement with the film. Impressed with del Toro’s work on Pan’s Labyrinth and Christopher Golden‘s novelization of Hellboy with artist Mike Mignola, I went into the movie with certain expectations.

Like other films and content within the Hellboy franchise–you do not need to be familiar with the characters or the setting to watch this film.

With sold out shows and talks of an Oscar, if you haven’t seen The Dark Knight you’re probably wondering if it lives up to all of the hype. Even within the body of countless movie reviews for the film there are a few who, believe it or not, don’t like The Dark Knight. Why? You see, the one thing this comic book movie has at its core (that other movies of a similar type don’t) is an atypical visibility to a broader audience. While it’s impossible to find a true statistic, could it be safe to assume that people unfamiliar with the darker Batman franchise went to see the movie just because it was Heath Ledger’s last role?

Exquisite Replicas is the latest game from Abstract Nova, who specialise in surreal off-the-beaten-track games such as Heaven and Earth 3rd edition, Aletheia, and Noumenon. ER shares this surreal quality, but couples it with horror. This is not the gore-laden horror of zombie films (though there are creatures in the game which you wouldn’t want to come across on a dark night), but the horror of losing your mind, or a distinctly unsettling feeling that you know something’s wrong, but can’t explain (even to yourself) why, and you feel powerless to do something about it.

Only the brave men and women of The Century Club stand between villainy and humanity, and they’re not going down without a fight.

‘‘Spirit of the Century: A Pulp Pickup Roleplaying Game’’ by Evil Hat Productions is a fast-paced, character-driven RPG that seeks to capture the feel of the old, over-the-top dime-store novels where the pulp genre first flourished.

Characters can range from machine-gun wielding dilettantes to two-fisted mystery men to brilliant (or mad) scientists or spiritual seekers of truth.

Review by Michael Erb

I would assume, given all the fuss about the Sookie Stackhouse books by Charlaine Harris, that I’m missing a great deal of what makes them good by reading From Dead to Worse before reading the beginning of the series. I hope this is true, because otherwise, I don’t really understand what all the hubbub is about. Sookie is a fun main character, the writing is charming, and the setting is both intriguing and well used (how many urban fantasy series take place in the South, much less post-Katrina Louisiana?). But From Dead to Worse is missing something extremely core: a plot.

Review by Alana Abbott

“InSpectres” is a role-playing game of horror and comedy written by Jared Sorenson and published by Memento-Mori Theatrics. Players take on the roles of supernatural investigators who are part of a franchise, ala “Ghostbusters.” The players control not only their characters, but also the business itself, allow it to grow financially, physically and in terms of contacts and clientele. A game master sets up the story and calls for different die rolls at different times, controlling all of the non-player characters in the game.

Review by Michael Erb

I’ve been reading a lot of Mythos fiction lately. It started with my review of Cthulhu Live 3rd Edition, which was a lot of fun and renewed my interest in the genre once more. Since then I’ve picked up several books and was blown away by the Trail of Cthulhu RPG from Pelgrane Press. So I started digging into the fiction collections even more…

Frontier Cthulhu is a bit different, having characters explore the “frontier” throughout the ages and encountering dark, twisted horrors along the way.

“Donar’s Hammer” is the first of the smaller supplements for “Godlike” RPG, and provides an introductory scenarios as well as optional rules for your “Godlike” game.

Set in Sicily in 1943, players take on the role of a group of Allied Talents that come face to face with a group of Axis Overmen protecting a talent called Mjollnir, the name of the norse god Thor’s mythic hammer. What begins as a simple seek-and-destroy mission instead becomes a fight for survival and the soul of a small town.

Review by Michale Erb

This is the second part of the Scion Companion to be released as a PDF, the first having been the Tuatha de Daanan segment and with a couple more to come. It furthers White Wolf’s relatively progressive e-book policy while simultaneously acting almost as a preview for the eventual, finished product and also, probably, cunningly getting people to buy much of the same material twice – can’t really fault them for doing that! This section is all about the powers, the elevated statistics and their consequences, the fields of expertise and the powers within those, additional companions, followers, artifacts, magic and so on.

Review by James ‘Grim’ Desborough

“The Zantabulous Zorceror of Zo,” by Chad Underkoffler and Atomic Sock Monkey Press, is a game of adventure and wonder set in a world of fairy tales. But the land of Zo is more than just pixies and knights. The game includes classic story elements from almost every childhood fantasy, from “The Wizard of Oz” and “Alice in Wonderland” to “Peter Pan” and “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.”

The game uses Underkoffler’s Prose Descriptive Qualities (PDQ) system, which is also used in the super-hero RPG “Truth & Justice” and the manic “Monkey, Ninja, Pirate, Robot: the Roleplaying Game.” In PDQ, characters use Qualities to represent their abilities. Qualities can be anything from skills to beliefs to personality quirks.

Review by Michael Erb

After reading the first two issues of Marcus Almand’s comic book, Razor Kid, I’m left feeling surprisingly compelled to read more. Razor Kid is as indie as it gets, but this does not belie the effort that Almand and his revolving crew of artists have put forth in giving readers a superior product.

Issue one introduces us to 15-year-old Alexander Tanaka, AKA Razor Kid, as he fights Kevin Michaels in an exercise of initiation into the C.A.P.E. (Citizens Authorized for Protection and Enforcement) program. Alexander is a boy genius who’s developed an armored super suit equipped with an assortment of blades and devices including cybernetic arms that replace his own which have been amputated. Kevin, 18, provides quite a test as he appears to be a full-blown martial arts badass.

Review by Jason Thorson

Normally I don’t like to read books in a series out of order–the exception being when I’m reviewing them. I’ve got a couple of second novels that I picked up still lingering on my bookshelves, waiting for me to pick up book one. So it always impresses me when a second or third entry in a series can pick up the story without making you feel like you’re adrift (if you’ll excuse the pun). Heroes Adrift does it incredibly successfully, and though our heroes spend the whole book out of their element, the reader catches up to the action in the first few pages.

Review by Alana Abbott

The book is a massive one, totalling out to nearly four hundred pages interspersed with illustrations that are mostly small, so that’s an intimidating amount of text, though most of it is background and plots, and thus optional. It includes the general rules, combat rules, character creation, kung fu, secret techniques and powers and an enormous section of plot and background providing a great many hooks and ideas to players and Games Masters alike. The game is complete in one book but be aware that the PDF I am reviewing from lacked the front cover image, this does make a file smaller but I would have liked it to be there. I have also read the hardcopy version.

Review by James ‘Grim’ Desborough

Lunar rains cascade down upon the blasted landscape of Highpoint. Lunar demons raze the ruins of once-great civilizations and assault the under-realms harboring the last of dying races. Across the surface of this once-great world, only the giant City Mechs hold sway, lumbering across charred and corrupted lands, seeking truth, beauty and a new beginning.

The world of “DragonMech” by Goodman Games is a post-apocalyptic fantasy setting where humans, dwarves, elves and other races have turned to technology to protect them in their final days.

Review by Michael Erb

This is a review of the second edition of the game with the name altered from Crimson Empire, which the earlier edition was titled, due to a dispute with Lucasarts. Cursed Empire is a small, independent press game written by Chris Loizou and presented enthusiastically and comprehensively at many UK conventions. This is a weighty book and obviously a labour of love for the creator whose enthusiasm for the game is obvious and infectious. This makes me feel bad about criticizing the game given that it’s such an obvious and singular labour of love, but there are significant problems with it.

Review by James ‘Grim’ Desborough

In this strange land between waking and sleep, you can wield strange and wondrous powers, but your talents make you a target. Push too hard and you’ll fall asleep. That’s when the Nightmares come to feed. Stray too far from reality and you go insane, eventually becoming one of Nightmares that hunt you. Fight for what you believe and remember who you are, but whatever you do, don’t rest your head.

“Don’t Rest Your Head,” is a roleplaying game of insomnia, madness and super powers written by Fred Hicks and published by Evil Hat Productions.

Review by Michael Erb

In this hardcover edition of Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter: The First Death, fans will get both issues in the series, as well as the Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter: Guilty Pleasures Handbook. Published by Marvel with a retail price of $19.99, the book is a prequel to Laurell K Hamilton’s best-selling novel Guilty Pleasures, which is the first in the Anita Blake series.

Adapting a comic book from a novel series isn’t an easy thing to do, because of the novel’s rich format, rife with details and setting descriptions. Additionally, the Anita Blake series is told from the first person point-of-view, which can be challenging to display visually in a graphic novel. Stray too far from the point-of-view, and you may encounter oddities–things that the main character (Anita Blake) may be describing but hasn’t seen yet. A nod to the writing team of Laurell K Hamilton and Jonathon Green, each scene was pointed and specific to Anita’s character.

“The Shab-al-Hiri Roach” by Jason Morningstar and Bully Pulpit Games is a storytelling game about academic life, the pursuit of tenure and the lengths people will go to for success, even if that means swallowing an ancient Sumerian bug and burning down the campus. Billed as a Lovecraftian dark comedy of manners, players take on the roles of assistant- or full-proffesors at the ficticious Pemberton University in the fall of 1919.

Players choose an Expertise for their character, an area of learning such as History or Geology, and two Enthusiams, areas in which they excel and delight, such as Creativity, Manipulation or Debauchery.

Review by Michael Erb

Private investigator Vicki Nelson, like most everyone in Toronto, doesn’t believe in the paranormal, but when it appears that the latest serial killer could be a vampire, she’s out of her depth. Retinitis pigmentosa has already cost Vicki her former life as a homicide detective, and she needs specialised help with this case. Enter historical romance writer Elizabeth Fitzroy, or known about town as Henry Fitzroy, the bastard son of Henry VIII. He’s also a vampire, and as he and Vicki investigate, they realise that a vampire may not be to blame – but a demon and a screwed up college kid are.

Review by Tez Miller