It’s a banner year for DUNGEONS & DRAGONS! Coming off the acclaimed film Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves, and the smash hit video game Baldur’s Gate 3, D&D is celebrating 50 years of the WORLD’S GREATEST ROLEPLAYING GAME. More than 64 million D&D fans love rolling dice, slaying monsters, and envisioning themselves as the amazing heroes they all are inside. This year at Gen Con 2024 in Indianapolis, Indiana, DUNGEONS & DRAGONS will be debuting the 2024 Player’s Handbook making D&D more accessible than ever before. Wizards is bringing 3,000 copies of the 2024 Player’s Handbook hot off the presses to Gen Con 2024 – each of which features the 50th anniversary logo in gold foil, along with a commemorative “Gen Con 2024” bookplate making it even more exclusive and distinguishing it from other first-run copies.

With a multi-product line event coming in 2024, Paizo is preparing for the new rulebook release with a playtest of two new classes: the animist and the exemplar.

A war is brewing and all of existence will be drawn into the conflict! As gods die, new gods arise, and Golarion itself bucks and twists under the pressure of immortal powers vying for dominance, Pathfinder introduces two new classes with their own particular roles to play in these colossal battles.

An anthology of thirteen stand-alone adventures set in wondrous lands for the world’s greatest roleplaying game.

Journeys through the Radiant Citadel is a collection of thirteen short, stand-alone D&D adventures featuring challenges for character levels 1–14. Each adventure has ties to the Radiant Citadel, a magical city with connections to lands rich with excitement and danger, and each can be run by itself or as part of an ongoing campaign. Explore this rich and varied collection of adventures in magical lands.

Shotguns & Sorcery is a mix of high fantasy and hardboiled noir. It’s filled with wizards and freelancers who skulk through dungeons and creep through glowglobe-lit streets. They hang out in speakeasies after raiding zombie-infested tombs. They carry pistols as well as wands, and they’re ready to use them both.

Matt Forbeck stopped by to tell us about about the upcoming 5th Edition OGL version of the RPG, currently funding on Kickstarter!

Free League Publishing has just released two new expansions for the popular ALIEN RPG offering a new adventure as well as a way to jump into the game with a basic introduction rule set! ALIEN RPG Starter Set The job was routine, the money fair. Then the damn company diverted you to answer a distress […]

Undead & Unbound is a book of fiction celebrating those who have returned from the grave — in all their glory and in whatever form they take. You will find the famous blood-drinkers and flesh eaters here, but also ghosts, patched-together reanimates, fiends of myth and folklore, and some not-so-easily-identifiable creatures from beyond the grave.

Nineteen tales take the undead to their limits. From the distant past to the far-flung future, and to all corners of the Earth, the undead are eternal and everywhere: symbiotes, parasites, monster mash-ups and ghoulish grins, bleak tales of inescapable dread, an ancient evil from a far-away land with unspeakable dietary needs, a boy and his…well, it’s not a dog. History is brought to (un)life. Ghosts, specters, phantoms and haunts of every sort. Not-so-easily-classifiable stories that do new things with the basic premise of what’s alive, what’s dead, and what’s neither.

Join a completely digital tabletop gaming convention from Onyx Path Publishing, taking place June 12-14, 2020.

Onyx Path Publishing is holding its very first convention over the course of three days to provide fans and players of tabletop roleplaying games with a uniquely online convention experience. Onyx Path Gaming Con will be completely digital and accessible to anyone with a laptop, computer, or cellphone, allowing fans and players of Onyx Path games to connect with one another over their favorite game.

The convention will feature actual play streams of Onyx Path game lines, workshop sessions for gamemasters and game developers, panels with tabletop RPG industry professionals. Along with behind the scenes updates and developments of upcoming Onyx Path titles. This online content will be accessible across Twitch and YouTube channels owned by Onyx Path Publishing, Gehenna Gaming, and other partners.

Inspired by Justin Achilli’s Act Charitably, Win V20 I’ve decided to do my own. I have an extra copy of the Grand Masquerade limited edition V20 core book that was released in 2011. I’m seeing these sell for $400 or more on eBay and similar sites. Like Justin, I’d like to give it away to someone looking for something cool. Unfortunately, it is a little late to give this as a X-Mas gift, but maybe someone will kick off the new year with a rare book…

Last week, I was horrified to learn that Steven D. Russell of Rite Publishing was killed in an car accident on July 5th, 2016. Steven was one of the first DriveThruRPG publishers I was able to build a friendship with that I had not already known from my previous experiences in the RPG industry. Having run Flames Rising for several years (and a little freelance writing here and there), I had naturally built up a number of friendships and working relationships before I started working for DriveThruRPG. But, those friendships represented only a fraction of the industry, and jumping into the publisher services role offered me a ton of opportunities to get to know even more people from companies big and small. Steven was one of them, and that friendship was built over time as his company (and DriveThruRPG) grew.

Normally, it can be difficult for me to talk about my day job and/or part-time gig as a freelancer here on Flames Rising due to any number of reasons. However, after learning so much over the past few years I wanted to start talking about various aspects of what I do.

Today, I want to address what it means to work with everyone…

There are thousands of active titles on the sites I manage for DriveThruRPG.com, DriveThruComics.com, and DriveThruFiction.com. I’ve had the pleasure of working with publishers and creators that are beyond awesome. I’ve also worked with publishers and creators who say and do things I disagree with in any number of different ways.

I’m doing a little freelance RPG development for Onyx Path Publishing in the off hours from my “day job” as Marketing Director for DriveThruComics, DriveThruRPG and related sites. As a developer I get to pitch new ideas for books and focus on the overall concept and design, while bringing on talented freelancers to bring those concepts to the written page.

One of the books I pitched last year was an expanded look at Ghouls and Revenants for Vampire: the Masquerade.

Geek.Kon is Madison Wisconsin’s very own anime convention, sci-fi convention, and gaming convention all rolled into one! As the name implies, Geek.Kon is a place to celebrate all that is geeky from strong foundations in anime, science fiction, video gaming, tabletop gaming, and costuming to up and coming fandoms like steampunk and gothic lolita. From Lord of the Rings to Doctor Who, Mario to Solid Snake, Geek.Kon covers it all.

Several of the Flames Rising crew will be at the convention and on panels throughout the weekend.

I just got back from New York Comic Con and I had a great time at the show. I was mostly there in my role as Marketing Director for DriveThruComics.com, but I somehow found the time to have a little fun for Flames Rising too.

There were certainly plenty of awesome Horror & Dark Fantasy items on display to catch any fans interest. One of my first stops was the Black Watch Comics booth to check out The North End of the World by David Hunsaker and Christopher Shy. Conveniently for me, the Monarch Comics booth with new and collected issues of the Witch Hunter series was right next door. This is also where I ran into Brian and Matt from the Secret Identity Podcast (of which Brian got me to do a short interview, yikes!) so this area kind of became my “home base” for the show. Great books, good friends and a cool place to hang out between other meetings and wandering the show floor.

PAX Prime 2012 has wrapped up and I had a great time at the show. That unfortunately meant I had to miss out on other great times like Dragon*Con in Atlanta and WorldCon in Chicago. I could go off about the scheduling demons that need to be exorcised to make that not happen again. I’ve heard all kinds of cool stories from those other shows that I missed out on…but anyway, PAX was pretty awesome so let’s talk about that…

Congratulations to the 2012 ENnie Awards nominees!

See the full list at Ennie-awards.com.

Some excellent Horror & Dark Fantasy entries in the list this year from Pelgrane Press (Trail of Cthulhu), Cubicle 7 (Cthulhu Britanica), Steve Jackson Games (GURPS Horror), Chaosium (Call of Cthulhu), Green Ronin (Dragon Age), White Wolf (Vampire: the Masquerade) and a few others. Of course there are some dark fantasy elements in the various Dungeons & Dragons and Pathfinder nominations as well. Traditionally Wizards of the Coast and Paizo do rather well at the ENnies, which is not surprising consider ENWorld is a D&D site first and everything else second. I’m usually more interested in who wins the Silver awards for each category.

So, this is something a number of us have suspected for a few months, but now there is “official” confirmation. Chris McDonough has sent Open Letter From CCP to the membership of the Mind’s Eye Society (aka the Camarilla fan club).

In the letter there is some information about the transition of the club formerly known as The Camarilla out of White Wolf/CCP hands and back to the fans themselves. This has been an ongoing process and I’m on the outside looking in (i.e. a friend, but not an active member of the club), however, I think it is a good thing. Fan clubs should be run by fans and while it might be nice to have a company handle all of the funding and management tasks, it really should fall to the fans to manage those details.

When I first launched the Vampire Retrospective Project I had intended it to be a short run to the end of the year and that was it. The response has been very positive from fans, developers and freelancers that have worked on various editions of Vampire: the Masquerade and other RPGs over the years. I’ve also had a few people contact me that wished they could have taken part, but missed the deadline due to work or other conflicts.

So…I’m making the project an open-ended event here on Flames Rising. Especially now that Vampire: the Masquerade 20th Anniversary Edition is out and people are starting up games all over the world. If you missed out on sending in an essay, here is your chance, I’d love to hear about your experiences with Vampire (any and all editions or variants).

Who willingly walks into a haunted house?

Our readers do!

Since we launched Haunted: 11 Tales of Ghostly Horror in October we’ve received some excellent reviews and recently we won an award for the anthology. We also just found out that Haunted: 11 Tales of Ghostly Horror won the Best Anthology category in the Preditors & Editors Readers’ Poll. The P&E Readers’ Poll is an annual event hosted by the Critters Writers Workshop where readers and fans can vote on their favorite books, authors and publishers. Thanks to our readers we took the top spot in this year’s event and we’re honored that so many would vote for our little collection of horror.

Haunted: 11 Tales of Ghostly Horror is available in eBook (PDF, ePub and Mobi/Kindle) and Print formats at DriveThruFiction.com. It is also available at the B&N Nook Store.

One of the best things about my role at DriveThruComics.com is working with an amazing group of authors and artists that are producing some awesome comics. One of our publishers has a universe shattering series going on now and I recently had the chance to talk to Artifacts series author/architect Ron Marz about it. This interview was originally crafted for the DriveThruComics Newsletter, so I wanted to do things a little differently. I did some “crowd-sourcing” for questions from folks reading the series. I added those suggestions to my questions and fired them off to Ron.

Artifacts was originally a limited series that involves the bearers of 13 mythological items such as the Witchblade and The Darkness. Recently it was announced that Artifacts will continue past issue 13 and the affects on the Top Cow Universe will be lasting. Here Ron tells us a bit more about the series…

Streets of Bedlam is a pen-and-paper roleplaying game in which you play characters with histories, who’ve done bad things, who may do a few more, but who have a code they stick to, fuzzy though it may be, that guides them through life and allows them to make a difference. Everybody in this town wants something but your characters are aiming higher than most and maybe, just maybe, they’ll do some good. At the very least, maybe they’ll stop some bad from happening.

Written and designed by critically-acclaimed game writer Jason L Blair, the man behind Little Fears, Streets of Bedlam will be built around the award-winning Savage Worlds ruleset published by Pinnacle Entertainment Group.

In this interview I ask Jason for details about the inspirations he drew from and the characters that you play in Streets of Bedlam.