If you are a looking for a deep and philosophical game to explore the intricacies of your mind, then this is not the game for you. However, if you are looking for a light-hearted and whimsical romp in between long running campaigns then this game can easily fill that need. Early on the game touts itself as a ‘Beer and Crisps’ game (or a Beer and Pretzels game in the States), and it adheres to this easygoing philosophy.

One takes on the role of a Jerkian Warrior, a clone of the great leader whose purpose in life is to entertain the Exalted Emperor and feed the Exalted Emperor. It’s not an easy life being among the lowest ranks, and a gruesome (though entertaining) death is almost a certainty. One of the few ways to ensure your own survival is through treachery and betrayal of your fellow Jerkian Warriors; rank hath many privileges — one of the most obvious being fewer missions in which death is likely.

CELEBRATE GMs! ANNUAL RPGNOW SALE!

Buy your favorite games or try new ones from Postmortem Studios, Cubicle 7, Galileo Games, Pelgrane Press, Pinnacle Entertainment, Adamant Entertainment, White Wolf Publishing, Evil Hat Productions, Green Ronin, Malhavoc Press and even Flames Rising Press, including the best-selling title The Queen of Crows.

The year is nineteen-sixty-something, and after endless millennia of watery sleep, the stars are finally right. Old R’lyeh rises out of the Pacific, ready to cast its damned shadow over the primitive human world. The first to see its peaks: an alcoholic, paranoid, and frightened Jack Kerouac, who had been drinking off a nervous breakdown up in Big Sur. Now Jack must get back on the road to find Neal Cassady, the holy fool whose rambling letters hint of a world brought to its knees in worship of the Elder God Cthulhu. Together with pistol-packin’ junkie William S. Burroughs, Jack and Neal make their way across the continent to face down the murderous Lovecraftian cult that has spread its darkness to the heart of the American Dream. But is Neal along for the ride to help save the world, or does he want to destroy it just so that he’ll have an ending for his book?

Flames Rising is pleased to present you with the first chapter from Move Under Ground, a Lovecraft-inspired novel by author Nick Mamatas. Set in the 1960s, Move Under Ground is Mamatas’s debut novel about a character named Jack Kerouac who receives strange, rambling letters from Neal Cassaday. Will Jack successfully rescue Neal? Will they escape the Cult of Utter Normalcy? Or will they face Cthulhu himself? Dubbed an “ambitious” novel, read Chapter One and enjoy a fresh voice inspired by H.P. Lovecraft.

Move Under Ground is available now at Amazon.com.

Dance ‘Til Sunrise

The definitive companion to Vampire: The Requiem.

Flames Rising is pleased to present an exclusive excerpt from this new Vampire: the Requiem sourcebook from White Wolf. Danse Macabre is available at Amazon.com and RPGNow.com.

It is the 41st millennium, a future in which the vast Imperium of Man stretches light-years across the galaxy. The wildly popular Warhammer 40,000 universe is one of constant strife; for untold billions, merely to be born is to be condemned to a lifetime of cruel suffering under an unforgiving and draconian regime. Only a select few in positions of power possess limited freedom: the Inquisitors who hunt heretics, the Rogue Traders who gather wealth, and the Deathwatch Space Marines who combat the alien threat. Science and technology offer little promise of relief; too much has been lost since the Dark Age of Technology, and all that is left goes to fuel the Imperium’s mighty war machine. It is a universe of grim darkness.

Former Stoker Award-nominated editor Jason Sizemore compiles seventeen tasty, brainy morsels of zombie short fiction in The Zombie Feed: Volume 1.

Fast paced, yet thoughtful, The Zombie Feed: Volume I will sate your appetite… at least temporarily.

Titan Books presents Angel of Vengeance, the original never-before-released novel that inspired the vampire TV series “Moonlight.”

Written by Trevor Munson, the co-creator, writer and producer of “Moonlight” (the CBS series which attracted 7 million viewers and still retains a loyal, devoted fan base and cult following), Angel of Vengeance offers a new twist on the classic Dracula vampire tale and blends it with Raymond Chandler’s hardboiled P.I. detective fiction.

Angel of Vengeance: L.A.-based P.I. and vampire Mick Angel has been hired by a beautiful red-headed burlesque dancer to find her missing sister. The apparently simple case of a teenage runaway is soon complicated by drug dealers, persistent cops, murder, and Mick’s own past. Mick must learn the hard way what every vampire should know – nothing stays buried forever, especially not the past.

Flames Rising is pleased to present an exclusive design essay from author Trveor Munson. Trevor tells us about the creative process as well as the challenges of in redefining vampire lore for this book.

Fugitive Rachel Nolander is a newcomer to the city of Dogsland, where the rich throw parties and the poor just do whatever they can to scrape by. Supported by her brother Djoss, she hides out in their squalid apartment, living in fear that someday, someone will find out that she is the child of a demon. Corporal Jona Lord Joni is a demon’s child too, but instead of living in fear, he keeps his secret and goes about his life as a cocky, self-assured man of the law. The first book in the Dogsland Trilogy, Never Knew Another is the story of how these two outcasts meet.

Flames Rising is pleased to present this excerpt from Never Knew Another by J. M. McDermott. Never Knew Another is available now at Amazon.com.

It’s a wonderful time to be alive, at least until the Mayan calendar runs out next year and the sun goes dark. The year is 2011, the internet rules, I have a magic box in my pocket that can access the
sum total of human knowledge, and a balletsploitation were-swan horror flick is a serious contender for five Academy Awards.

Part of the buzz about Black Swan is purely technical: in this film, Natalie Portman realizes the promise she showed way back in Leon (or The Professional, depending on your country of origin). As of Black Swan, she is one of the greatest actresses of our generation.

The stories of rocketships and rayguns you read under cover of dark are coming to life before your eyes. Will you become a victim of Parsons’ ‘Big Hoodoo’?

The Big Hoodoo is Lovecraftian noir in 1950s California with a ripped-from-history plot centered on the explosive death of real-world rocket scientist, science fiction fan, and occultist Jack Parsons in a garage laboratory in 1952. The investigators are iconic figures active in the science fiction scene at the time of Parsons’ death, and their inquiries lead them from the mean streets of Pasadena to the edge of the Mojave Desert and the mountains of southern California as well as the beaches of Los Angeles.

Flames Rising is pleased to present Black Angels, a story by Michael Jasper, which is part of the Gunning for the Buddha anthology. Gunning for the Buddha is available now at DriveThruHorror.com.

Author Michael Jasper has this to say about Black Angels:

“Black Angels” started with a picture and a memory, of a statue in an Iowa City graveyard. The rest came to me as I was daydreaming on my commute home from work one day. The statue from the story really does exist, in an Iowa City cemetery. Every freshman learns about it while attending the University of Iowa. The Black Angel is spooky. Especially at night…

In the divine struggle between good and evil, humans are hardly noticeable to the mal’akhim, but when an ancient seal is broken on the grounds of a California college campus, beings from dimensions beyond the balance of holy and unholy erupt from the earth. A retired priest and an ailing magickian must trust the mysterious Walker Between the Worlds and his skin-eating demon familiar as they step through Heisenbergian passages of probability and battle forces that are so far beyond demon they cannot be fully seen in earthly dimensions. Amidst the earthquakes and interdimensional intruders, the students and staff of California Hills University step across the boundaries of their knowledge and faith, revealing their true natures as the night erupts in earth and blood.

Flames Rising is pleased to present this excerpt from An Agreement with Hell by Dru Pagliassotti. An Agreement with Hell is available now at DriveThruHorror.com.

First published in March 2010 on DriveThruHorror.com, we’ve expanded our digital offering to include a text-based version for your Amazon Kindle or your Nook from Barnes and Noble. Since this file format is primarily text-based, we went ahead and dropped the price to $2.99 on both the Kindle and the ePub edition. The ePub format, which is available at Barnes and Noble, is also compatible with several other devices including your Sony eReader and your iPhone. Both the Kindle and ePub format are also available through DriveThruHorror.com for your convenience.

Unprecedented flooding in the Australian state brings the worldwide writing and publishing community together in the charity anthology “100 Stories for Queensland.”

Queensland (Australia) is currently experiencing the worst flood event in its history with seventy-five percent of the state declared a disaster zone. Queensland is not a small state, measuring more than 1.72 million square kilometres (twenty-five percent of Australia’s land mass). It is four times the size of Japan, nearly six times the size of the UK and more than twice the size of Texas in the USA. This is not a small flood or localised event. Its effects are being felt by more than 70 communities (including the capital city of Brisbane) and tens of thousands of people, many of them in rural areas. Other areas of the state have been flooded since before Christmas, with a number of communities West of Brisbane evacuated for the second time in two weeks.

The Legends of Anglerre RPG (LoA) by Sarah Newton and Chris Birch takes the Starblazer Adventures iteration of the FATE 3.0 system and adapts it for the fantasy genre. This game strives to cover multiple subgenres in the fantasy milieu, with the focus on the Moorcockian swords and sorcery setting of Anglerre, and the high fantasy Hither Kingdoms. The source material for this game is drawn from a series of British comics that appeared in the Starblazer Adventures comic books. References are made to various characters and events from the comics and can at times leave the reader a bit in the dark.

The physical book itself is an impressive tome at just over 380 pages. The cover is full color and depicts three adventurers posing dramatically in a ruined building. The interior of the book is predominantly black and white with the sidebars offset in parchment colored boxed. The artwork is predominantly drawn from the LoA comics.

They are safe in a night club, doors closed and barred. The undead can’t get them. They are safe, right? Who will protect them from themselves? There may be chaos outside, but inside the “asylum” isn’t all that much better.

Mark Allan Gunnells recent novella, Asylum (The Zombie Feed/Apex Publications), takes Romero-style zombies and situations and populates them with complex (and deeply compelling) characters who, as Gunnells says below, happen to be gay.

“My focus isn’t on the zombies themselves—though there is flesh-eating goodness to be had, don’t get me wrong—but instead on the characters trying to survive,” said Gunnells. “In many ways, Asylum is a character study of this group of survivors.”

The resulting novella is simultaneously rich in tradition and fresh with contemporary relevance. Most importantly, of course, Asylum is a damn good story well told.

Apex Book Company, a small press publisher specializing in the science fiction, horror and fantasy genres, announced today that it has made a significant change to their monthly edition of Apex Magazine. Subscribers and single-issue purchasers will now get an exclusive first look at the stories and poems before anyone else.

Prior to January 2011, Apex Magazine was offered to both subscribers and non-subscribers alike. As of January 1st, the magazine, which is edited by Cat Valente, will no longer be offered for free on the publisher’s website until the next issue debuts.

I’ve come to realize, somewhat unwittingly in more recent years, that Maberry scares me for reasons that go beyond the mere horrific. When I made my first serious foray into researching the occult, I didn’t realize until after the fact that my first fact finder’s guide just happened to have been written by the one who wrote this pithy little gem. But then, there’s always something about a writer whose writing not only gives you something you already know, but can serve to inspire other avenues of horror you were certain should have occurred to others by now – only didn’t.

Patient Zero is the first in a series of Joe Ledger novels (not to be confused with the Marvel character), revolving around a former Baltimore detective who is pulled into the shady world of the equally shady Church.

Try a New Game in the New Year!

It’s 2011, and DriveThruRPG has 20 games on sale for only $11! The New Year is a great time to start a new campaign with friends, and DriveThruRPG is offering great deals in our “New Year, New Game” event.

New Year, New Game Sale at DriveThruRPG.com!

Moonstone Entertainment, Inc. announces that the wildly eclectic, genre busting comic ‘ROTTEN’ from writers Mark Rahner and Robert Horton and Artist Dan Dough?erty continues to receive accolades and notice, this time from writers at the Comic Book Bin. Writers for the comic book centered site instituted their own awards this year. Calling them ‘The Binnies’, writers established several comic book oriented categories and then chose the winners for each category. ROTTEN was named as one of the six winners of Best New or Mini Series for 2010.