DriveThruComics.com has partnered with over 30 comic book publishers to offer a $20 bundle of digital comics for charity. Proceeds of the charity bundle, which has a retail value of $95, will be donated to the Hero Initiative. Participating publishers include: Top Cow Productions, Archaia Entertainment, Moonstone Books, Dork Storm Press, and a number of creator-owned and small press publishers.

Filip Sablik, Top Cow’s publisher says, “Top Cow has been a proud supported of the Hero Initiative from the beginning, with Jim McLauchlin, the current director of the charity being a former editor-in-chief at the Cow. We’re always thrilled to support Hero in any way we can and it’s very cool to see DriveThruComics stepping up to participate in this way!”

John Carter hit theaters this weekend and we’ve got plenty of Mars products for you explore at DriveThruRPG!

Adamant Entertainment’s entire line of MARS: The Roleplaying Game of Planetary Romance ebooks are 50% off for the rest of the month!

Be sure to check out Heliograph’s Space: 1889 line for even more Mars adventures!

Also available is Skirmisher’s Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Mars: Shadows of a Dying World for OGL and Pinnacle’s Space 1889: Red Sands for Savage Worlds!

Before he secured his place in the annals of international pop culture with the Tarzan stories, Edgar Rice Burroughs offered up the initial adventure in the far more interesting and inventive Barsoom series. “Under the Moons of Mars,” later to be retitled A Princess of Mars for book publication, first saw print in the Munsey pulp The All-Story, from February through July of 1912. The six-part serial chronicles the adventures of Confederate veteran Captain John Carter, who stumbles across a cave in Arizona through which he is transported via psychic projection to Mars, or as the locals call it, Barsoom.

Once deposited on Barsoom, Carter treks across the dying planet and encounters an imaginative assortment of races and creatures, from the four-armed warrior Tharks to the super-speedy dog-lizard things called calots (one of which, naturally, becomes the hero’s faithful companion), to the humanlike red Martians.

Over the years, FlamesRising.com has played a number of Munchkin games including Munchkin Cthulhu, Munchkin Bites and Munchkin Bites 2: Pants Macabre, and Munchkin Zombies.

Today, we get to offer you a sneak peek at the latest expansion to classic Munchkin.

Dubbed Munchkin 8 – Half Horse, Will Travel, this is the first expansion in two years and it offers new types of cards for players to use in the game. You’ll find Centaurs and Lizard Guys, two classic fantasy races that finally get a full color Munchkin treatment. You’ll also receive brand new Race and Class Enhancers like the one pictured here!

In Plague of Shadows by Howard Andrew Jones, the half-elf Elyana and her companions must race across the ravaged land of Galt, scale the Five Kings Mountains, and scour the Vale of Shadows for the cure that will save the cursed Lord Stelan.

Prepare yourself, for Plague of Shadows, dear reader, is fast-paced, sword-and-sorcery at its best.

“Friendship and loyalty lie at the heart of Plague of Shadows,” said Jones. “In whom can you really place your trust, and what does friendship really mean? Not that I’m ever on a soapbox about it. But loyalties, choices, and friendship drive the plot.”

In the short form or long, Jones has been praised frequently for his lightning quick pacing and irresistible plotting—pacing that does not sacrifice character development but depends upon it. Indeed, as Jones says below, “plot is character.”

The Vampire Retrospective Project continues today with an essay from Craig Oxbrow. Craig tells us about his experiences with Vampire: the Masquerade 1st Edition.

I had been playing and GMing roleplaying games since I was eleven or twelve, and I’d always wanted more focus on the players’ characters than most RPGs and adventures encouraged. Too many missions where it didn’t really matter what you were like as long as you could pick locks or use a sniper rifle. I was approaching seventeen and already jaded.

The Pathfinder Tales novel Winter Witch by Elaine Cunningham and Dave Gross tells the story of Declan, a magical mapmaker, and Ellasif, a diminutive barbarian from the Lands of the Linnorm Kinds.

“Some people are born knowing what they’re meant to be,” said Cunningham. “Ellasif is one of them, and from a very early age she was determined to become a fighter despite her apparent physical limitations.”

Together, Declan and Ellasif search for a missing child and in the process discover a lot about what it means to be a hero.

A veteran of shared world settings, Cunningham has written extensively in the Forgotten Realms. Her Realms work includes the Songs and Swords pentalogy, Starlight and Shadows trilogy, and the Counselors and Kings trilogy, as well as Evermeet: Island of Elves and City of Splendors: a Novel of Waterdeep (with Ed Greenwood). Her Realms stories were collected in The Best of the Realms, Book III: The Stories of Elaine Cunningham. She contributed Dark Journey to the New Jedi Order series set in the Star Wars Expanded Universe.

I like to think of “The Wicker Man” as the greatest Hammer film never actually produced by the venerable studio. Despite the fact that it was in decline, Hammer was still the foremost name in English horror cinema at the time of the film’s release. While it was originally distributed by British Lion Film Corporation, “The Wicker Man” shares Hammer’s penchant for beautiful landscapes, lush production values, and its franchise star, Christopher Lee, who portrayed Dracula, Frankenstein’s monster, and the Mummy in numerous films for the studio.

White Wolf is having a one day super sale on the Storytelling Adventure System line of products at the Flames Rising RPGNow Shop!

White Wolf’s Storytelling Adventure System (SAS for short) is a series of stories in PDF format for the various Storytelling game lines (World of Darkness, Scion, Exalted, etc). The basic parts that make up most SAS stories are simple: Storyteller characters, scenes and some advice on how you can put them together. Each of them can be used in different ways to keep the story building towards its climactic end.

This sale includes all of the SAS eBooks currently available on RPGNow.com and has them all priced at $2.29 for one day only!

PARTY PEOPLE! Your NIGHTMARES have been fulfilled…

Some of the darkest horrors are those that we choose to inflict on ourselves. In the hands of the MASTERS OF HORROR, the evils of drug use, alcoholism, scarification, obesity and obsession have been amplified into bloodcurdling cautionary tales…

Some of the darkest horrors are those that we choose to inflict on ourselves. In the hands of the MASTERS OF HORROR, the evils of drug use, alcoholism, scarification, obesity and obsession have been amplified into blood-curdling cautionary tales…

19 Terrifying tales and a nonfiction detoxification guide await you within. Sacrifice your vice with the MASTERS OF HORROR. You’re literally DAMNED IF YOU DON’T.

Masters of Horror: Damned if you Don’t is available now at DriveThruFiction.com.

Welcome to part two of our talk with Dave Gross. If you missed part one, you may want to go check out Part One first.

Dave Gross continues the adventures of half-elven Pathfinder Varian Jeggare and his hellspawn bodyguard Radovan in Master of Devils. This time the oddly paired duo travel to the exotic land of Tian Xia, and Gross layers the storyline with a third narrative.

“Master of Devils is more about being trapped in a situation anathema to your desires,” said Gross. “What will it take to make you give up your pride or even your life?”

Tachyon is proud to announce our new release of Charles de Lint’s classic fantasy novel EYES LIKE LEAVES. We are joining Charles and his partner MaryAnn Harris for a special giveaway on Facebook. By joining the novel’s Facebook group, members are entered into a March 7th drawing to win copies of the novel and signed CDs of Charles and MaryAnn’s music.

Kickstarter Launched For New Card Game Velociraptor! Cannibalism!

Raptors in monocles and silly hats graft strange body parts to themselves and eat their own kind. That might seem like an odd premise for a game, but the team behind Velociraptor! Cannibalism! thinks gamers will love playing these vicious and rather stylish dinosaurs. Based on a crude and inaccurate understanding of natural selection, this game pits players against each other as they devour adorable animals, steal eggs, and eat their own bodies to survive. This card game with a twisted sense of humor was created by six game designers who met for the first time at IGDA Philly’s Global Game Jam site in January. In 48 sleepless hours, Velociraptor! Cannibalism! was born. After a wildly enthusiastic reception, the team wants to bring a polished finished product to the unsuspecting public.

Win a Piece of Horror History

Original 1936 Astounding Stories, H.P. Lovecraft Magazine is Up for Grabs!

Red Wasp Design, the developers of the new Cthulhu-mythos horror/strategy RPG Call of Cthulhu: The Wasted Land have announced a competition where you could win an original 1936 copy of a pulp fiction magazine featuring the writing of H.P. Lovecraft.

Recently White Wolf launched a Kickstarter project for the V20 Companion, which is a supplement to Vampire: The Masquerade 20th Anniversary Edition. This is the first Kickstarter project for White Wolf and it looks like the V20 Companion is going to be a very cool book. We wanted to know a little more about it and posted an open call to fans to submit their questions.

We’ve compiled the submitted questions and added a few of our own. Rich Thomas and Justin Achilli have taken the time to answer them for us here.

Ken Meyer Jr.’s work has appeared in dozens of White Wolf game books, on over a hundred cards for Vampire the Eternal Struggle, on Magic the Gathering cards (along with a host of other games), in comics published by Marvel, Dark Horse, Image, Caliber, NBM, Avatar and others. His rebooted version of “Atmospherics,” the series he created with writer Warren Ellis just came out. He has also done illustrations for musician Tori Amos, the American Cancer Society, Bell Helmets, and a plethora of mainstream clients.

Most importantly, he has just started a Kickstarter campaign to finance the printing of his book, Into the Crimson Light, which collects 80 pages of the best horror and fantasy art of his long career. In addition to many paintings of the macabre and fantastic, Ken includes behind the scenes progressions and sketches. Check out his Kickstarter page and get a gander at the many collectible rewards he offers for donations, such as original paintings, copies of the book with sketches included, fine art prints and opportunities to be in the book yourself as a creature of your choosing!

A “half-breed” protagonist past his prime and his hellspawn bodyguard must find a missing Pathfinder before it is too late. Sczarni, werewolves, and a very weird witch woman… With Prince of Wolves the first novel in the Pathfinder Tales Line, Dave Gross captures the pulpy grandeur of Golarion without burying the characters under mountains of world-building.

“In Prince of Wolves,” said Gross, “one big question is, How can you find something you never lost? It’s about searching for the wrong thing, or realizing that you had it all along. It’s also about finding the unexpected.”

The “How to run Horror RPGs” series continues today at Flames Rising with an essay from About C. Harris Lynn from TheWeirding.net.

Horror roleplaying games are among the most difficult tabletop RPG to run for several reasons. The most important of these are the GM’s relationship to the players and characters, and the general hopelessness of the characters’ situation in many scenarios. Horror PCs are outclassed from the start and often remain so to the end, and this can make horror RPG difficult to play as well as run.

But there are a lot of tips for the budding horror GM, as well as the player (though this article does not offer tips for players). You do not have to incorporate all of these into every session or campaign – just being aware of them can help you in your process.

Solaris is delighted to announce that sales of the critically-acclaimed, New York Times bestselling Pantheon series by James Lovegrove have now topped 100,000.

In a remarkable coup for a military-SF series, the killer blend of high-octane action and worlds dominated by ancient religions, including New York Times bestseller Age of Odin, has been a massive hit. The series is now set to continue with three new titles.

The series focuses on the central question of ‘what if the Gods of Mythology were not only real but played a direct role in mankind’s lives?’ Created as alternative histories that can be read as stand-alone novels or enjoyed as a collective, Lovegrove revitalises deities of old with hard-nosed military science fiction and fascinating re-imaginings of our world.

Flames Rising recently put an open call for essays and articles on the topic of “How to run Horror RPGs” and we received several great submissions (hint you can still send yours in too). We’re starting off with this post from Stygian Jim…

Horror is the genre of fear. Fear of the unknown, fear of the monster lurking just out of sight, fear of the dead rising again with a hunger for human flesh. Fear is very personal, and horror can be as much an internal struggle as a reaction to an external source. Fear is a huge motivator, in gaming it can be a great motivator for heroes and villains alike, but how does one cultivate it at the table? Horror games can be much harder to craft than your standard sword & sorcery delve. Also, it can be difficult to inculcate your players to the kind of thinking that the genre entails, when they’re used to kicking down doors and busting heads. There are some advanced techniques as well that you can use to build a sense of tension in your players, and make the story an even more eerie experience. Lastly of course you can use props, sound effects and lighting to set the mood for your own tales of horror.