We have a new design essay today from Michael Jasper, author of the In Maps & Legends comic series. In Maps & Legends was the winner of the November 2009 Zuda Comics competition hosted by DC Comics. Today Michael talks about the craft of writing the series and the things he learned along the way.

Want to know what one of the best things that happened to me while I was scripting out the nine issues of In Maps & Legends, the digital comic I wrote with artist Niki Smith?

A lot of great things happened, but the best side-effect of the whole experience is that it made me a much better—and hopefully more effective—writer.

Our first entry in the Vampire Retrospective Project comes from Michael Holland, who is one of the Moderators on the White Wolf forums. Michael tells us about his first discovery of Vampire: the Masquerade.

It is not every day that a game like Vampire the Masquerade comes along and changes everything. For the most part, the list of revolutionary role playing games is a very short one. In 1974, Dungeons & Dragons served as the veritable genesis of the table top role playing game phenomena. In 1977, Traveller successfully brought the subgenre of the science fiction role playing game into its own space so to speak. The work of H.P. Lovecraft had always been a major influence on role playing games, but in 1981 Call of Cthulhu took us deeper into the realm of horror than we had ever gone before.

Flames Rising is celebrating the 20th anniversary of the Vampire: the Masquerade. We have reached out to the community of fans and asked them to tell us what Vampire means to them. We know that this game has brought friends and family together, changed lives, and created lasting memories in the minds of players and fans around the world. The Vampire Retrospective Project is not only a chance to hear some of those stories, it’s an opportunity to record them for future generations.

Since our original post about the project, we have received essays from several people ranging from people who’ve worked on Vampire: the Masquerade, played a character in the Camarilla, or who remember how this game has influenced popular culture.

Dungeons & Dragons: Heroes of Neverwinter enters open beta phase

The first name in roleplaying games is taking another step in its storied pop culture history as Atari brings Dungeons & Dragons to the Facebook platform. Atari, one of the world’s most recognized publishers and producers of interactive entertainment, will release Dungeons & Dragons: Heroes of Neverwinter into its “open beta” period on September 15, bringing the ultimate RPG brand to the ultimate social platform.

FR Press, the publishing arm of popular horror site FlamesRising.com, announced today that its debut anthology is entitled Haunted: 11 Tales of Ghostly Horror. The anthology will feature stories from Alana Joi Abbott, Georgia Beaverson, Jason L Blair, Alex Bledsoe, Bill Bodden, Richard Dansky, Preston P DuBose, Nancy O Greene, Jess Hartley, Jason Sizemore and Chuck Wendig. The collection of spooky stories also includes an introduction penned by Jaeson K. Jrakman, a ghost hunter who hails from Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

Edited by Monica Valentinelli, Haunted: 11 Tales of Ghostly Horror will debut just in time for Halloween. The anthology will be available in both e-book format and print. Readers will be able to pick up a copy from DriveThruHorror.com and other online retailers.

Vampire: The Masquerade exploded into hobby games in 1991 and inspired a generation of fans of which the game industry had never seen before or since. The cultural significance Vampire left on not just the gaming world but on modern vampire-related pop culture can be seen and felt at virtually every turn and in every medium today. Vampire: The Masquerade – 20th Anniversary Edition brings the entire World of Darkness experience full circle and will serve as the perfect anniversary milestone to celebrate two decades of gaming after dark. This is the original Masquerade in all its glory, and our way of saying thank you and welcome home.

The Vampire: 20th Anniversary Edition eBook is available now at the Flames Rising RPGNow Shop!

Talk Like A Pirate Day just passed by and it got us thinking a bit about Pirates and RPGs, which naturally lead to zombies…ok, I don’t know where I was going with that, but it made a lot more sense in my head (guess I don’t have to worry about zombies wanting my brains do I?) Anyway, our Design Essay series continues with Daniel Davis telling us about ARRGH! Thar Be Zombies, a supplement for the All Flesh Must Be Eaten RPG from Eden Studios!

Ahoy, me hearties, Arrgh!

Pull up a keg ‘n’ ‘ave a grog while I tell ye scalawags a tale o’ stormy seas an’ th’ walkin’ dead! Thar Be Zombies, ‘ere…

Ahem…yeah, anyway, I’m Daniel Davis, writer of the All Flesh Must Be Eaten supplement, Arrgh! Thar Be Zombies! from Eden Studios. Matt’s asked if I wanted to write up this little essay and talk about the process that brought ATBZ to the gaming table. ‘Twas a sea of shoals an’ flotsam, sun an’ fair wind, but I’ll recount th’ tale, arrgh.

Someone screwed the timeline up It’s 2150, and the Earth’s starting to get over the Great Apocalypse of 1906. From the steampunk sky-cities of Isla Aether and High Tortuga, airship pirates ply the clouds, in search of excitement and booty, kept in check only by the might of the Imperial Air Navy. Down below, North […]

The year is 12,090 A.D., and what little is left of humanity has finally crawled out from the ashes of war and destruction. From the darkness of fallout, mutants and a race of vampires known as the Nobility have spawned. They rule the weak with no remorse. Once bitten by a Nobility, one is cursed to become a member of the undead. Villagers cower in fear, hoping and praying for a savior to rid them of their undying nightmare. All they have to battle this danger is a different kind danger – a Vampire Hunter.

Enter D – a lone, mysterious vampire hunter, sought out by the desperate Doris Lang. Bitten by the vampire lord Count Lee, Doris is destined to her unholy fate… Can D deliver her from her curse and bring her to salvation, or will she forever be part of the unholy dead?

Vampire Hunter D Vol. 1 is now available in eBook format at DriveThruComics.com!

Earlier, White Wolf publishing announced an upcoming paranormal romance sourcebook for Vampire: the Requiem entitled “Strange, Dead Love.”

Developers Russell Bailey and Eddy Webb guided a trio of writers on the project. Jess Hartley, Filamena Hill and Monica Valentinelli lent their expertise and their voices to dive into the steamier side of Requiem where vampires and mortals fall hopelessly in love and lust.

In honor of this sexy new book, FlamesRising.com wants Russell Bailey and Eddy Webb to spill all the supplement’s dirty secrets. We think you do, too. That’s why we need your help.

Find out more by clicking through to the rest of the post.

To celebrate the 20th anniversary of the Vampire: the Masquerade, Flamesrising.com is hosting an open call for new essays detailing memories and experiences of the property first published by White Wolf in 1991. The title of this series is the Vampire: the Masquerade Retrospective.

For more details on where to submit and what FlamesRising.com is looking for, please review the Vampire: the Masquerade Retrospective Submission Guidelines.

Shelter in Place is about survival, teamwork and fun. Designed for ten to twenty five players, the game captures the frenetic pace of a zombie movie in an action packed game. Players can take on the roles of Humans or Zombies in a desperate conflict to survive. Humans must use their wits to survive, making sacrifices in order to live through the night. The Zombies must use their brute, unrelenting strength and teamwork to overpower the humans and eat some delicious brains.

Shelter in Place blends all the fun of a good old-fashioned game of tag, with the camp and action of a zombie horror film. The system was created to be easy to read and understand for new gamers, but still a fun challenge to more experienced players. Shelter in Place comes with the option to add special “twist” characters who can change the game – from adding a cyborg to a vampire, these twist characters can make every game a surprise!

In Ashes of the Earth Eliot Pattison pieces together a new society after global annihilation. While most novels set in the future offer heavy doses of imagined science and technology, in his new novel Pattison constructs a more realistic society out of the ashes of apocalypse—with characters who sometimes became a little too realistic for the author.

I have been a Sherlock Holmes fan for as long as I have been able to read. I have over a dozen books devoted to the Great Detective, and I have spent more than a year working on a series of essays examining the original stories written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. So it’s no surprise that Flames Rising asked me if I wanted to review a (nearly) all-new anthology of “uncanny tales” featuring Sherlock Holmes. It’s even less of a surprise that I accepted.

In my collection of books, I own a couple of anthologies that take different directions for Sherlock Holmes – one of science-fiction stories, and one combining Sherlock Holmes and the Cthulhu Mythos – so in reading this, I tried to put aside my “slavish fanboy” hat and read them with an eye towards different takes on the Great Detective. In such anthologies, I personally look for two elements: fidelity to the core of the characters and elements of the Holmes canon, and novelty to present a new take or slant on familiar faces. How does this new anthology hold up?

Stew Wilson from Zero Point Information is here to tell us about his new game Black Seven. A modern espionage RPG, Black Seven isinspired by stealth-action games like Deus Ex, Alpha Protocol, and Splinter Cell.

Infiltrating BLACK SEVEN

BLACK SEVEN started life in my throw-away ideas file, a couple of notes for a system that, at the time, I wasn’t able to make work. That time was 2004, and I was re-playing Deus Ex for the fourth time. Under the effects of too much strong coffee, I hacked White Wolf’s Trinity so that I could run Deus Ex-like games. I never had a chance to try it, and I was left with niggling little ideas that wouldn’t go away that wouldn’t work in my proposed hack.

“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 […]

The Repairer of Reputations is a Trail of Cthulhu scenario by Robin D Laws, based on the story of the same name by Robert W. Chambers. It is one of four short horror stories incorporating Chambers’ mythology of The King In Yellow, a decadent play whose publication brings madness and supernatural presences into the world. His mythology was later subsumed into the Cthulhu canon when H. P. Lovecraft, and his circle and later followers, made reference to it in their tales of the mythos.

Trail of Cthulhu: The Repairer of Reputations is available now at the Flames Rising RPGNow Shop.

CHICAGO COMIC & ENTERTAINMENT EXPO ANNOUNCES DATES FOR 2012 Organizers of Chicago Comic & Entertainment Expo (C2E2) have announced that the 2012 edition of the annual pop culture convention will take place April 13 – 15 in the North Hall of McCormick Place Convention Center. While this represents a small move from the West Building […]

The Flames Rising Design Essay series continues with a little something from David Chandler (Wellington) telling us about his new dark fantasy novel Den of Thieves. Most Flames Rising readers will know David from his excellent zombie and vampire novels, several of which we’ve reviewed here at the site. In this essay David also shares a little insight into his publishing history and what genres authors are told about they can and can’t write.

How I Ended up Writing a Fantasy Novel and Changed my Name

Hi. My name is Dave. I used to think I was a science fiction writer.

That was back in the ‘80s, a wild and wooly time for genre fiction. I was not exclusively a science fiction reader back then—nobody was, or at least, I knew very few people who identified themselves as just “science fiction fans”. When I went to Waldenbooks with whatever money I could scrap together I looked at the wall of books and could spend hours trying to figure out what to buy. There was fantasy, science fiction, and horror, typically all on the same shelf—and I wanted it all.

Author and comic scribe Michael Jasper is here with a new design essay about his novel A Sudden Outbreak of Magic. Michael tells about the genesis of the idea back in his teaching days and how that initial concept developed into the book that is available now. He even links us to a sneak peek at the follow up book, A Wild Epidemic of Magic, which is currently in development.

Magic is everywhere. You just have to look hard enough to see it.

Magic is dangerous. You start using it, and all sorts of powerful people will take notice. And they will hunt you down.