Fans of the meme-monster Cthulhu and other creations of cult horror novelist H.P. Lovecraft can get a little extra help in counting down to Christmas, thanks to a new mobile advent calendar app. Titled ‘Cthulhu Christmas Calendar‘, it features 25 original pieces of artwork – one for each day in December until Christmas Day. Each image presents a fun mashup of festive icons like Santa into the Cyclopean world of the great Cthulhu, the malevolent Mi-Go and the dark god Nyarlathotep. Normally priced at $0.99, the app will be free for iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch on the 1st December only, to celebrate our collective descent into Yuletide madness.

Dungeons & Dragons: The Book of Vile Darkness was originally released directly to DVD in the UK in Aug 2012 and premiered in the U.S. on the Syfy channel this weekend. Writer Brian Rudnick (Dungeons & Dragons: Wrath of the Dragon God) was joined once again by director Gerry Lively (Darkness Falls, Dungeons & Dragons: Wrath of the Dragon God) to bring the third Dungeons & Dragons movie to life.

Heroes of Reality

The proud men and women who serve the New World Order are the paragons and saviors of humanity. These Enlightened minds have the thankless job of being our shepherd, leading us to ultimate Empowerment and protecting us from utter chaos: the misguided Traditionalists, corrupted Technocrats, vile creates, and ourselves.

The Order oversees the Technocratic Union through its unrivaled academic might, omnipresent surveillance, and unparalleled advances in psychology. But even as the Technocracy is winning so many hearts and minds, NWO must keep the Union from turning on itself.

A Truly New World

Convention Book: New World Order is available in PDF and Print formats at DriveThruRPG.com!

November’s issue of The Lovecraft eZine features a sordid tale of madness and persistence penned by yours truly. Titled “The Dig,” this is a gender-neutral story about a person and something (or someone) known only as “It.” Also included in this issue’s Table of Contents are stories from many illustrious writers — including a tale by Silvia Moreno-Garcia, who hails from the Innsmouth Free Press.

What’s more? You can read and listen to The Dig for free online.

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.

Nothing is more horrifying to us than fighting hordes of shoppers to get that last book or spooky comic sitting on the shelf. While we specialize in bringing you atmospheric scares, today we’re going to save you from the madness, by bringing you a round-up of deals from sites like DriveThruRPG, DriveThruComics, Noble Knight Games, and more!

Want to get on Santa’s naughty nice list? If you find a good deal, add the link to the comments section for your fellow FlamesRising.com readers to get in on the savings…

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!

Tabletop RPGs were born from historical minis gaming. Going in the reverse direction seems to be difficult in RPGs. Unless, of course, you add a supernatural element. Western gaming lay dead until Deadlands came along with a potent mix of zombies and steam guns. It’s no surprise that the company made famous by that game, Pinnacle, might try a similar formula with other times in history. They made a successful foray into the d20 OGL with Weird War II, smashing together the horrors of war with the horrors of legend. Weird Wars are poised to become a brand within Savage Worlds, with rumored entries including Rome and the Crusades. Launching the line felt like a good time to revisit Weird War II, which is available in Print and PDF for Savage Worlds.

New Tales of the Yellow Sign by Robin D. Laws is a collection of eight short stories that invokes and draws inspiration from The King in Yellow, the 1895 psychological horror collection of Robert W. Chambers. In writing New Tales, Laws undertakes what is, in my opinion, one of the most difficult projects for an author—writing a short story collection built around a core concept or a small number of central themes. The challenge in doing this is that whether readers are trying to or not, they tend to judge each short story on its own, instead of how it fits into the collection’s overarching concept and themes. In composition, I see a collection like New Tales to be akin to concept albums. Each has “core tracks” that advance the concept. Each may include “voice breaks” where the audience is addressed directly as a way to make the message more explicit to the audience. Each often contains a “cover song” or a selection that pays homage to a past artist that the overall work is drawing inspiration from.

The Introduction lays out the basic premise. This is not just any spy game. It has a very specific slant, taking the view that in the aftermath of the Cold War a lot of people who’d been earning their keep on the back of the efforts of East and West to monitor (and interfere with) each other now found themselves at a loose end, and had to put their somewhat dubious skills to profitable use in a freelance market – mercenary spies for hire, if you will. Frequent reference is made to movies and TV shows that present the appropriate feel, and if you enjoy them, it’s likely that this game will work for you, at least at the ‘spy’ level. As has been done with other GUMSHOE games, there are various ‘modes’ in which you can run your game and each is denoted by a small symbol – these are used to denote optional rules appropriate to your chosen mode, and other snippets of information useful to that style of game. This allows you to fine-tune the mood of your game so that it becomes precisely what you are after.

I would say “the plot thickens” but to be honest the fourth installment in the Paranormal Activity franchise doesn’t really add much to the mix. I will say that up front. At this point the writers (Christopher Landon, Chad Feehan) have pretty much phoned in the possibility of developing a growing plot and they’re playing with the dangling threads of the previous movies. We see this kind of treatment all too often in other franchises and it is usually a sign that the ride is coming to an end. If the box office is any kind of indicator the general audience is feeling the same as PA4 earned less than half of any of the previous PA films.

The Legions of Emperor Augustus have returned victorious from putting down a massive revolt among the Germanic tribes of the Danube frontier. While Rome basks in its success, a new foe is gathering in the darkness of the Carpathian Mountains. When a young boy shows up at the distant fortress of Troesmis, it falls to Optio Gaius Justus Vitalis and his centurion to investigate the horrors described by the young refugee.

It is just the beginning of a struggle between the Eagles of Rome and the undead forces of an enemy that could halt the Empire’s northern advance.

It’s Romans vs. Zombies in this first novella of the Carpathian Interlude series. Get ready for action, mystery and blood in this clash between Light and Dark.

Immortui is available now in multiple eBook formats at DriveThruFiction.com for only $0.99!

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.

I cannot tell you the naked fear I feel, putting down these words for once and for all. Perhaps I will regret them. Perhaps they will never see print. Yet, it is my nature to report this. It is, as they say, in the blood.

Thus wrote Aristotle de Laurent, Noddist scholar and vampire, in the preface of the Book of Nod. This book was special because it was published by White Wolf Publishing, Inc. in 1995 to be used as setting material for the Masquerade Mind’s Eye Theatre game as well as Vampire the Masquerade chronicles. Bound in black leather the book was the perfect prop for storytellers to hand over to their intrepid players. The stories began to write themselves.

The Price of Disobedience

All societies have rules–even societies of mages. But rules were made to be broken. For the Awakened, shattered laws raise sinister forces. The Left-Hand Path tempts sorcerers with forbidden power, fulfilling their desires at the risk of ostracism, madness or damnation. In exile, more of them thrive than the Pentacle admits, challenging the peril to their souls … and uniting in common cause. Look Beneath the Surface.

A Character Book for Mage the Awakening

Left-Hand Path is now available in PDF and Print formats at DriveThruRPG.com!

Ghouls of the Miskatonic by Graham McNeil was published a little over a year ago and marked the first foray into fiction publishing for powerhouse board game publisher Fantasy Flight Games. Ghouls takes place in Fantasy Flight’s Lovecraftian setting, Arkham Horror, and is the first book in The Dark Waters Trilogy (the second book in the trilogy Bones of the Yopasi has also been published). The plot of the novel follows a menagerie of characters trying to solve the mystery behind the disappearance and murder of a number of girls from Miskatonic University, as well as the character’s attempt to keep a grip on their sanity when faced with giant flying mantis creatures who think dress formal means wearing their brains on the outside.

Protagonists cut off from the real world. Men and women forced into violence to survive. Agents of powers that skulk in shadow. Are they spies or vampires? Both types of characters share a startling amount of similarities. The two genres seem tailor made for each other. Ken Hite brings them together in his newest RPG, Night’s Black Agents. But be aware, it’s not vampire spies. It’s spies vs. vampires.While playing vampires in RPGs has been extremely popular over the past 20 years or so, this one is about putting stakes in hearts and walking away while the bloodsucker burns in the sun.

The PDF is full color and laid out in a very modern style. The game includes several sidebar callouts explaining why certain rules work certain ways as well as giving examples of what happened during playtesting.

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!

Night’s Black Agents brings the GUMSHOE engine to the spy thriller genre, combining the propulsive paranoia of movies like Ronin and The Bourne Identity with supernatural horror straight out of Bram Stoker. Investigation is crucial, but it never slows down the action, which explodes with expanded options for bone-crunching combat, high-tech tradecraft, and adrenaline-fueled chases.

Updating classic Gothic terrors for the postmodern age, Night’s Black Agents presents thoroughly modular monstrosity: GMs can build their own vampires, mashup their own minions, kitbash their own conspiracies to suit their personal sense of style and story. Rules options let you set the level of betrayal, grit, and action in your game. Riff from the worked examples or mix and match vampiric abilities, agendas, and assets for a completely custom sanguinary spy saga.