Broken Frontier proudly presents the winners of its sixth annual Broken Frontier Awards!

For its 2009 edition, BF opened up its voting process to fans, creators and industry professionals after our staff had compiled four nominees each over a series of ten categories.

As such, the creators and projects that came out on top are the winners as determined by our voting public.

Have your players been good boys and girls?

If not, the perchta is waiting for them! In need of some wintery foes to throw at your Pathfinder players?

Then look no further, Mythic Menagerie: Winter Ravagers is here!

Winter Ravagers is the first in Super Genius Games’ new Mythic Menagerie line of monster products. The plan is for every Mythic Menagerie to offer a set of monsters that match a theme, with full write-ups, simple index card style summaries for use at the game table, and printable standee figures for every monster. But while future versions will feature typical fantasy adventure themes-fiends and cultists, dark fey, creatures from the subterranean kingdoms – Winter Ravagers is focused on a less common trope.

As the official source for information regarding the development and eventual production of a feature film based on Eclipse Phase, MoreNachos Entertainment is pleased to announce that EclipsePhaseMovie.com is now online.

Fans of the role-playing game and those anticipating the film, may now find updates on the script and
production status – and soon read blog entries from the producers and writers as well as casting choices. A forum is dedicated to discussing everything about the film and game. Additional areas are dedicated to the roleplaying game, about the production staff and more features to come.

Who watched cartoons when they were growing up? Or still watches them, perhaps covertly, today? (You don’t need to answer that!) In the Foreword the point is made that not only are cartoons very entertaining for youngsters, they also provided a fertile inspiration for games on the playground… so why not for role-playing as well?

Channel 1: Introduction (to promote the TV show feeling, ‘chapters’ are called ‘channels’!) begins by attempting to define what sort of cartoons this game is intended to emulate – the 1980s action-adventure ones, which have been grouped together as ‘retro-toons.’ Now I’m a bit old to have been entranced by them (I graduated in 1980!), but certainly caught the odd episode and can see the appeal. Typified by boundless enthusiasm, violence that was brief and never seemed to draw blood (although robots came apart a lot) and no difficulty whatsoever in distinguishing between the Good Guys and the Bad ‘Uns, the sheer innocence and capacity for boundless fun is at the center of their appeal.

THE GAME’S AFOOT, WATSON. LET’S CRACK THESE ROTTERS IN THE SKULL! – SHERLOCK HOLMES!

“It’s the master detective like you’ve never seen him before, and anyone underestimating Watson will pay dearly for it. Don’t miss Warner Brother’s extraordinary new take on Sherlock Holmes on December 25th, and our Movie Mayhem sale all Christmas Weekend.

Sherlock Holmes Movie Mayhem Sale at the Flames Rising RPGNow Shop

Don’t forget the check out the Sherlock Holmes collection from Caliber Comics available now at DriveThruComics.com.

People often say that there are no such things as monsters. They are wrong. Vampires, werewolves, ghosts, and other un-namable horrors co-exist with us. Watching us. Using us. Preying upon us.

Welcome to Pinebox, a sleepy little East Texas town with a lot more than its share of trouble. Whether it’s the haunted diner luring weary travelers, the unexplained ‘alligator attacks”, or the crone who just might be hexing neighborhood kids, trouble always seems to be hidden just below the surface. Buried, but not forgotten.

In Buried Tales of Pinebox, Texas, a dozen horror authors and game designers have gotten together to write tales set in Pinebox, Texas. This sleepy little East Texas town definitely has a lot more going on than the occasional bar fight.

The e-book version of Buried Tales of Pinebox, Texas is available now at DriveThruHorror.com and the paperback version is available through Amazon.com.

FlamesRising.com is pleased to present a preview of a few stories in this horror anthology.

Sin-Eaters know that their strange existence is a complicated one. They stand at the crossroads between life and death and endure all the complications of both. But there are others, desperate for something to believe in, who believe that a Sin-Eater’s bond with her geist is a blessed state of unification and a triumph over the limitations of the human form.

These souls make up the brethren of the Glorious Church of the Unified Spirit. They have been told that their path lies not in life or death, but in a divine state somewhere in between. Those who have only experienced one life cannot achieve true enlightenment. The sacred symbiosis of spirit and flesh must be achieved to take the next step. Sin-Eaters are their saints, their bodhisattvas. The brethren are told that they must step through the black gate to reach their potential. They are told that this is humanity’s next step – humanity’s destiny.

They are misled.

A story in the Storytelling Adventure System for Geist: The Sin-Eaters.

Through the Ebon Gate is available at the Flames Rising RPGNow Shop.

Combining Archaia’s longstanding commitment to producing high-quality hardcover graphic novels and Roddenberry’s goal to produce sophisticated, intelligent and entertaining science fiction in the tradition of Star Trek, the companies announced today they will publish a deluxe Days Missing hardcover that collects all five issues of the critically acclaimed mini-series plus a host of extra features, available in February 2010.

The Days Missing hardcover is available for pre-order now through comic retailers and online outlets like Amazon.com (ISBN 1-932386-84-X).

Writer/director/producer Christian Petersen’s Midnight Chronicles is an indie film based on the fantasy role playing game Midnight from Fantasy Flight Games. Evil rules in Midnight’s world of Aryth after Izrador, the dark god defeated the free races in a war 100 years prior. Men are now enslaved while Elves and Dwarves have disappeared into the forests and mountains. Hope resides in only the few brave enough to pursue it. As Mag Kiln travels to Blackweir to investigate the disappearance of a fellow priest, others also descend on the small town where a complex web of good versus evil develops that has implications on the future of the dark forces that rule the land.

It’s Halloween in an election year. New Yorkers prepare to celebrate with masked revels and parades, while the city’s powerful hold fund raisers and give speeches. Business as usual in the Modern Gomorrah, but when someone or something hunts New York’s streets, eviscerating stray animals, slaying the homeless where they huddle, and stealing women from shelters – it threatens a councilwoman’s reelection bid.

Snows of an Early Winter is a stand-alone Call of Cthulhu adventure set in modern day New York City. It contains everything a group needs for two or three evenings of investigation and horror, including the scenario, pre-generated characters, and hand outs. It is the latest in the innovative line of officially licensed Call of Cthulhu scenarios and supplements from Super Genius Games.

Get it today at the Flames Rising RPGNow Shop!

I’m going to assume you’ve never been here before. It’s all right, that’s to be expected. Not many people have, you know? I mean… not many people like yourself. People with heartbeats. Everybody else, though – they all come here. A lot of them are still around. You know how some people day the best way to deal with an enemy is to outlive him? That’s good advice most of the time. But right about now you should probably be hoping that all your worst enemies are still alive. – Rio Fletcher, Sin-Eater

World of Darkness: Book of the Dead is available at the Flames Rising RPGNow Shop.

The television show Supernatural may not be a holy experience for me; however, I hold it in high regards. While critics may pan its “model factor,” I hold that it’s one of television’s brightest shows about darkness. Being one of my favorite shows, I was ecstatic when the corebook was released. While it took awhile for that to happen, Supernatural Adventures followed in a timely fashion. A book of adventures proves to be a tall order for me. I like running my games, not the games somebody else created. Also, I love the series and find myself inspired by it regularly. These two factors play a huge role in my review for this book.

Let’s start with Digger Hayes graphic design. I think Hayes approach to the Supernatural line is the only approach to it. Just about all the hunters we see from the show seem to be a disorganized, messy lot.

No other story has touched as many hearts and endeared itself into the American fabric as The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum. Often toted as America’s First Fairy Tale, this heartwarming classic has been made and remade again and again across every medium known to man. The themes are timeless, the characters themselves beloved.

But like all fairy tales, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz has one foot planted in the fantastic, and the other foot planted in blood. Explore the darker side of Oz…the parts too terrifying or obscene to be told as bedtime stories.

Shadows of the Emerald City is now available at DriveThruHorror.com.

In his introduction to “Michael H. Hanson’s Sha’Daa: Tales of the Apocalypse” author Mike Resnick sates that is “not quite a round-robin novel by its many authors, but is somehow more than an anthology.”

That statement is an accurate one. This book has a total of ten separate stories, and ten additional short “interludes” between each story written by Michael H. Hanson. Hanson wrote one of the ten stories, as did editor Edward McKeown. The remaining eight stories are written by eight separate authors. Each story is connected, however, by one over-arching theme and one or more re-occurring characters.

A New Age of Fantasy Roleplaying

It has been hundreds of years since the last Blight ravaged the world of Thedas. Many believe that it can never happen again, that the Dragon Age will pass without the rise of such evil. They are wrong. Beneath the earth the darkspawn stir. A new archdemon has risen and with it a Blight that will scourge the lands and darken the skies. The nations of Thedas need a new generation of heroes, but who will answer the call?

Fantasy roleplaying goes back to its dark and gritty roots with the Dragon Age RPG, the latest game from the company that brought you A Song of Ice and Fire Roleplaying and Mutants & Masterminds.

The Dragon Age RPG is available now at DriveThruFantasy.com.

Honed by years of experience with the D20 ruleset, Fantasy Craft opens with the clear premise: this is YOUR game, and the rules are but the toolset to enable you to run it how you like. That said, the Introduction continues with the usual information about what role-playing is, definitions of players, characters, the game master and the like… but throughout the point is continually stressed that you will be choosing the precise nature of the world in which your game will run, from a range of time periods to the relative levels of technology and magic.

VEINS is a supernatural thriller that combines the fast-paced prose of veteran short story author Lawrence C. Connolly with the soulful character portraits of Star E. Olson.

Fleeing from what should have been a perfect crime, four crooks in a black Mustang race into the Pennsylvania highlands. On the backseat, a briefcase full of cash. On their tail, a tattooed madman who wants them dead.

The driver calls himself Axle. A local boy, he knows the landscape, the coal-hauling roads and steep trails that lead to the perfect hideout: the crater of an abandoned mine. But Axle fears the crater. Terrible things happened there. Things that he has spent years trying to forget.

Enter Kwetis, the nightflyer, a specter from Axle’s ancestral past. Part memory, part nightmare, Kwetis has planned a heist of his own. And soon Axle, his partners in crime, and their pursuer will learn that their arrival at the mine was foretold long ago . . . and that each of them is a piece of a plan devised by the spirits of the Earth.

For a long time, Joe Pitt has been on the receiving end of the whip-as stick, and you might be wondering if he gets to turn it around in this, the final book of the Joe Pitt Casebooks series. I can tell you definitively and without a doubt that everyone gets what’s coming to them. And I do mean everyone.

Let’s be honest. Joe Pitt isn’t exactly what you’d call a hero; hasn’t been for the last several books. The darkness has been closing around him for a long time. The thing about darkness, though, is that it’s not always bad. Oppressors can be fled. Justice can be served.

After years of creating great gaming titles under the name ‘Talisman Studios’, we’ve decided that it’s time our real name… Savage Mojo… became known in its own right. After all, we focus on the Savage Worlds and Mojo Rules! roleplay systems, so it makes sense to use the name we gave the company.

The Talisman Studios name was originally created in 2003 when the company was an art and design studio to the adventure games industry, the brainchild of master artists Jason Engle and Aaron Acevedo. Since then it has expanded, is an Origins Award Winner (for Deadlands Reloaded), and two times Semi-Finalist (for Suzerain and Shaintar). These days Savage Mojo creates more than just roleplaying games, adding the Gamescapes line of gaming accessories, graphical fiction and art prints to our portfolio.

Weird “Haunted Science-Fiction” ongoing comic book series celebrates the end of its beginning by entering the doomed domain of retail pamphlet comics.

Dead Man Holiday, a well-received “Haunted Science-Fiction” ongoing comic book series self published by Colin Panetta, will release its third issue on December 30th, 2009. The series’ plot centers around Thad Planck, a low-rent security guard in a flooded and abandoned neighborhood known as Little Atlantis, where there have been some strange things growing and walking around as of late. The first two issues of Dead Man Holiday can be downloaded for free at the comic book’s website, DeadManHoliday.com. The fittingly aloof blurb for the new issue reads: “Little Atlantis is getting weird. So when a straw (in the form of a falcon carrying a dismembered hand) breaks the camel’s (our man Thad Planck’s, that is) back, the camel decides to strike back and show the weirdness who’s in charge. But not before making a sandwich. Can Thad keep Little Atlantis in check? Not without a little help from his friends. Or maybe just not at all.”