“ONE THOUSAND OPAS AND A DEAD BODY,” Part Three—A pilfered poison pabulum has pickled pieces of our protagonist’s paunch while portentous poetic prophecies proudly parade apace, parlaying a perilous paradigm. Paraphrasing: SKULLKICKERS is a particularly perfect packaged pamphlet of plucky pulp worth every precious penny in perpetuity. Purchase!”

First of all the “tripping sequence” are you serious? How can you relate that both verbally and visually any better in a comic book? Ridiculous! onto this issue, it rocks. I find myself flying through the pages, not because there is nothing on them of course, but because I get lost in this universe so well.

A beautiful young girl, alone in desolate Central Europe. Nightmares. Revenge. Mesmerism. Rationality eroding under the stress of supernatural evil, murder, and disease. Blood. Mere swords against the preternatural strength of the undead. And the world’s first lesbian vampire.

Got your attention? J. Sheridan LeFanu brought these elements together in 1872 — 25 years before Bram Stoker’s Dracula — in his novella “Carmilla”, a story that subtly tilts between the nightmarish Gothic terror-tale and today’s “realistic” horrors set firmly in the waking world. Generations later, Chicago’s Wildclaw Theatre company has adapted “Carmilla” for the modern stage. [Full disclosure: I wrote a short essay, pro bono, on LeFanu for the program book for this production.] Wildclaw’s Carmilla is the latest in a series of adaptations including Machen’s “The Great God Pan,” Lovecraft’s “Dreams in the Witch House,” and William Peter Blatty’s Legion that makes Wildclaw Chicago’s — and perhaps America’s — leading missionary of classic horror to contemporary theater audiences.

This is the second in a series of three reviews looking at the core books for Hellfrost, a setting by Triple Ace Games for the Savage Worlds system. In this review, I will examine the Bestiary, the second of these three books.

The book, not surprisingly, contains a plethora of monsters, archetypes and animals that not only help you populate your Hellfrost campaign with relevant beasties, but also offer some good fodder for any other campaign run using the Savage Worlds rules. For anyone using Hellfrost with a different set of rules, this book won’t be as useful as the other two core HF books, but it will give you some idea of the types of critters out there in Rassilon for you to convert to whatever game system you’re using. In general, the book is great for Hellfrost using SW rules, and ok for anyone using either a different system for HF, or a different setting with SW.