Across the Emerald Empire, the greatest servants of the Emperor make their homes in ancient castles, elaborate courts, impregnable fortresses, venerable dojo, and majestic palaces. Some exist in the wilds of the Empire, while others mark the center of great, sprawling cities. Some are centers of trade and artistry, while others exist far from any other sign of civilization. And yet, despite their many differences, it is in the heart of each of these bold strongholds that the heart of the samurai dwells.

Strongholds of the Empire explores a handful of the many unique cities throughout Rokugan, seeking out those with particular interests for the different Great Clans.

Strongholds of the Empire is available in PDF and Print exclusively at DriveThruRPG.com!

Perspective is the most powerful force at work in the universe. The angle, pitch and yaw of how things are viewed, how things are not seen, and how things are interpereted by the human heart and mind’s eye forges reality for an individual. Often times this reality, perceived by the individual, exists inimical to equidistant realities nurtured and sustained by other individuals-at-large.

Driving Through the Desert presents such a singular and stalwart perspective. A universally hale perspective. The reality of Driving Through the Desert as engineered and presented by the novella’s author, Donna Lynch, is shared – for the most part – by two individuals; Kam and Henry.

In Nightmare’s pages, you will find all kinds of horror fiction, from zombie stories and haunted house tales, to visceral psychological horror. No subject is off-limits, and we will be encouraging our writers to take chances with their fiction and push the envelope.

Edited by bestselling anthologist John Joseph Adams, every month Nightmare will bring you a mix of originals and reprints, and featuring a variety of authors—from the bestsellers and award-winners you already know to the best new voices you haven’t heard of yet. When you read Nightmare, it is our hope that you’ll see where horror comes from, where it is now, and where it’s going.

Nightmare will also include nonfiction, fiction podcasts, and Q&As with our authors that go behind-the-scenes of their stories. Our planned publication schedule each month will include two pieces of original fiction and two fiction reprints, along with a feature interview and an artist gallery showcasing our cover artist.

The design essay series here at Flames Rising continues with the first part of a series by game designer Mischa L Thomas. Mischa tells us about the forthcoming Cold & Dark RPG.

Living with Cold & Dark: Part 1

Hi, my name is Mischa L Thomas and I’m the lead designer at Wicked World Games 1.1, a small RPG design company based in Gothenburg Sweden. In a couple of months we’re going to release the gritty space horror science fiction pen and paper RPG Cold & Dark in partnership with Chronicle City. I thought I’d talk a little bit about the inspirational sources and conceptualization method behind the design process which led up to the finished game document. But first a little bit of background.

First Class on the Titanic is exciting in itself but when you are invited to a private viewing of one of the world’s great curiosities, you jump at the chance. The mummy of Hettunaway, Priestess of Amun-Ra, the Unlucky Mummy is being shipped to New York and donated to the Metropolitan Museum of Art by its owner, Jefferson Shaw. Legend has it that those who look upon her face are doomed. Jefferson Shaw’s intentions are not as philanthropic as they seem. Strange rituals, a device to contact spirits and the awakening of something he cannot control.

The Titanic is on a collision course with an iceberg but will it be the icy water that kills you or the ancient force, finally unleashed?

The Millionaire’s Special is a short adventure for Trail of Cthulhu by Adam Gauntlett (Not So Quiet, Hell Fire). This is to celebrate the centenary year of the Titanic’s tragic sinking.

All proceeds from the sale of this adventure will go to the Heroes in the Dark charity.

RMS Titanic: The Millionaire’s Special is available at the Flames Rising RPGNow Shop!

Zombie Dice, the brain-eating dice game produced by Steve Jackson Games, will appear in the third episode of Tabletop on Friday, May 4, 2012.

"I'm really hyped about the G&S channel, and especially Tabletop," said company founder Steve Jackson. "The Internet is the right way to deliver this, and it's fun food for geek brains. Braaaaaiiiinnnns."

Narrated by actor and author Wil Wheaton, Tabletop features guests playing dice, card, board, and pen-and-paper games. The show is available free online on the Geek and Sundry YouTube! channel. This episode shows viewers how to play this quick dice game.

It is the Age of Cthulhu, and the cold tentacles of primeval madness reach across the globe!

Age of Cthulhu 6: A Dream of Japan is now in stores and at RPGNow.com. A search for a missing socialite leads to the Aokigahara forest at the base of Mount Fuji. Eerily quiet, strangely lifeless, and infinitely desolate, this mysterious forest hosts more suicides than any other location in the world — and, as the investigators will discover, is home to an alien intelligence far beyond our comprehension!

Look for AOC6: A Dream of Japan in your local game store or download at RPGNow.com!

Missed out on the Kickstarter? Don’t sweat it. Streets of Bedlam: A Savage World of Crime + Corruption is now available for pre-order!

Bedford and Lamrose. Two sides of the same river. Two sides of the same coin. One, an affluent metropolis teeming with industry and aspiration. The other, a cesspool of crime and vice. Both dirty, both begging for the match that will set this whole city on fire.

Of course, you know what they say about good intentions.

This setting requires the Savage Worlds Deluxe rulebook from Pinnacle Entertainment.

Save $5 off print, $5 off the pdf, or order both and save $15 of your order. Get it fast, get it cheap.

Visionary Comics and Pinnacle Entertainment Group are proud to present Deadlands, the critically acclaimed and fan favorite new comic series, now available at DriveThruComics.com. The work of masters such as Jeff Mariotte (Desperados), Brook Turner (Golly!), Ron Marz (Artifacts), Bart Sears (Conan), Jimmy Palmiotti and Justin Gray (Jonah Hex), Lee Moder (Shinku), David Gallaher, and Steve Ellis (High Moon) brings the Weird Western World of the Role Playing Game to the world of comics with style.

This collaboration of industry all-stars has created four brand new stories that delve deeply into the mystery and mayhem of Deadlands. Set against a backdrop of the Old West gone slightly weird, these stories range from the mad invention of The Devil’s Six Gun to the masterful horror of Death Was Silent. We are also excited to bring you, for the first time in one complete issue, The Kid: Origins; the backup story that ran through all four print editions of Deadlands from Visionary Creators C. Edward Sellner, Oscar Capristo, and Ale Aragon now collected together under an exclusive new cover. Telling the origin of the fearsome werewolf stalker Billy the Kid, this story sets the stage for the upcoming mini-series.

Down a lonely alleyway, under a starless sky, lies a city that never was, yet is: the Mad City, where nightmares walk the streets, and a good night’s sleep can get you killed.

Here, then, is a book from that place. Within these recovered pages are the tales of the Awake, insomniacs who’ve walked those perilous streets, bringing a bit of the power of dream with them to fight back the night—always at a terrible cost.

For many, it will not end well. For a few, they might just become heroes—or at least find their way back home.

For you, a choice. Turn away. Don’t read this book. And maybe you’ll continue to rest easy. Or open the cover and enter a world unlike any you’ve ever dared to imagine…

Pre-Order the softcover edition at EvilHat.com today.

“Born of the U.S. government’s 1928 raid on the degenerate coastal town of Innsmouth, Massachusetts, the covert agency known as Delta Green spent four decades opposing the forces of darkness with honor, but without glory. Stripped of sanction after a disastrous 1969 operation in Cambodia, Delta Green’s leaders made a secret pact: to continue their work without authority, without support, and without fear. Delta Green agents slip through the system, manipulating the federal bureaucracy while pushing the darkness back for another day—but often at a shattering personal cost.”

THIS IS THE END AND THE BEGINNING

Delta Green co-creator John Scott Tynes merges Lovecraftian cosmic horror with techno-thriller espionage in these four stories and a novel interconnected by a web of deceit.

Delta Green: Strange Authorities is now available in ePub format at DriveThruFiction.com!

A zombie virus of guest articles, Q&As and excerpts from new urban fantasy novel, Plague Town, will be infecting websites, blogs and social media accounts across the globe to offer readers the chance to win a signed copy of Plague Town and have a character named after them in the next novel in the series!

Flames Rising is the 8th stop on the ‘Plague Town Pandemic Tour’.

Collect the 8th word hidden in CAPS at the end of this article along with a sequence of eight others on blogs and websites outlined in the link below; tweet the sentence you’ve discovered to @TitanBooks and @zhadi1 with #PlagueTown before April 23rd.

Happy Hunting.

Whispers in the darkness today confirmed that the critically acclaimed ‘Call of Cthulhu: The Wasted Land’ today announced their hit game is coming to PC. The developers, Red Wasp Design, revealed the existence of a Cyclopean pact with the Intel AppUpSM program to spread the insanity onto laptops, Ultrabooks and desktops worldwide. The Intel AppUpSM center is a service that aggregates, curates and distributes validated digital content delivering a fuller, richer experience on the PC.

The game will launch on the AppUpSM center on 5th May 2012 at the RPC Germany international RPG event. The games developers will also be at the event demoing the PC version of the game to fans and fellow gamers. The price point will be confirmed on the release date. AppUpSM is free to install and has lots of games and applications on it for Windows PCs. The PC version of the game runs in widescreen and has been optimised to run on laptops, Ultrabooks™ and desktops including support for Windows 7 touchscreen powered PCs.

April is National Child Abuse Prevention Month and RPGNow.com has partnered with several publishers to raise funds for the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children.

Check out the NCMEC Bundle with over $146 worth of RPG PDFs for only $25

A number of publishers including White Wolf, FunSizedGames, Skirmisher Publishing, Troll in the Corner, Tricky Owlbear Publishing, Melior Via and more have each donated some very cool products to this collection with all proceeds for the Bundle going to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children. This special fundraiser Bundle will only be available this month, so be sure to scoop up this great deal and support a cause while you get the chance.

At last the stars are almost right!

Soon Nyarlathotep’s plans will come to fruition. Then the world will be changed irrevocably — but not quite yet. Pesky human investigators have learned much. Now they must survive long enough to make sense of what they know, and take resolute action.

Masks of Nyarlathotep is a Lovecraftian exercise in horror and mystery. This Call of Cthulhu roleplaying classic is a series of linked adventures forming one long and unforgettable campaign. Horrifying deeds and dangerous sorcery dog those who dare attempt to unravel the fate of the Carlyle Expedition.

Writer Ron Marz has revitalized Witchblade and is the architect behind the acclaimed First Born and Broken Trinity crossover events. Now, joined by artist Lee Moder (First Born: Aftermath, Painkiller Jane), Marz debuts Dragon Prince, a five-part modern fantasy with equal doses of magic and martial arts mayhem.

Like a lot of teenagers, Aaron Chiang feels he’s never fit in, though he’s never known why. But all that changes when he learns the truth of his heritage: He is the Dragon Prince, last of his kind and heir to the bloodline of all dragons. Hunted to the brink of extinction by a secret society of wizards, dragonkind’s survival is now in Aaron’s hands.

The Dragon Prince series is now available at DriveThruComics.com!

Award-winning graphic novel publisher Archaia Entertainment announced its plans for the Chicago Comic & Entertainment Expo (C2E2) (www.c2e2.com), which includes a 20’ x 30’ display with a huge selection of product for sale on the show floor; hosting over two dozen creators for free autograph signings, including Chad Michael Murray (Everlast), David Petersen (Mouse Guard), Jim McCann and Janet Lee (Return of the Dapper Men), Nate Cosby (Cow Boy), Ramón K. Pérez (Jim Henson’s Tale of Sand), and Royden Lepp (Rust: Visitor in the Field); presenting two panels, one making several exclusive announcements and one to advise aspiring storytellers on proper world-building; and distributing thousands of free giveaways, including single issue comics, mini-posters, and bookmarks.

Fantastic Stories of the Imagination is Warren Lapine’s new anthology, taking an SF magazine sensibility into the anthology market. He brings 14 very diverse stories by a wide range of authors from great masters such as Mike Resnick and Harlan Elision to more recent discoveries (at least to me) Fans of the Liaden universe will be glad to see a Sharon Lee and Steve Miller story.

The tales go from pure science fiction through to urban fantasy. There is no theme to the anthology though many of the stories deal with the intersection between man and machine and the question of where one leaves off. Most of the stories deal with ethical and moral issues characters face, about when to intervene in someone else’s life or situation. Love is encountered, succeeds, disappoints, fails and rises from the ashes as we learn to cope, to hold and to release.

Spacetime Studios, working closely with Google, is introducing the world’s first MMO to launch simultaneously on mobile and desktop platforms. The mobile MMO Dark Legends is now available exclusively for a two week period on Google Play for Android devices and on the Chrome Web Store for PC, Mac and Linux.

The commercial launch of Dark Legends across both mobile and desktop simultaneously is another industry first by Spacetime Studios and furthers their goal to create a ubiquitous social gaming experience. The company’s Legends series are the only 3D MMOs in the world that allow people to play the same game together on desktop computers, smart phones and tablets.

For more details visit www.darklegends.com.

This steampunk fantasy combo contains the children’s novel Scourge: A Grim Doyle Adventure as well as the short story, Simian’s Lair: A Tale from the Land of Verne!

Also includes the first chapter of the eagerly awaited Choose Your Own Adventure Novel, Billy Bones: Beyond the Grave!

Land of Verne: A Steampunk Fantasy Combo is available now at DriveThruFiction.com!