It is no secret that I’ve been a fan of many of the products White Wolf has released over the years. This site started out as a resource for a Live Action Vampire: the Masquerade game I was running in the Milwaukee area. Eventually it expanded to include other Horror games like Cthulhu Live, Obsidian: the Age of Judgement and All Flesh Must Be Eaten.

Over time it evolved into the current set-up featuring just about anything Horror & Dark Fantasy you can imagine. Still, we continue to play, review and generally enjoy many of the current and classic White Wolf games and fiction. We’ve even added new Previews of upcoming products recently.

Back when I interviewed Eddy Webb there technically was not an “Alternative Product Developer” at the company. He had been working on developing and writing Mind’s Eye Theatre: The Awakening which became the first product to be released in both eBook and Print on Demand formats.

If you go to your bookshelf and pick up your favorite gaming book, whether it’s from Apophis Consortium or Evil Hat Productions, reread the fiction or flavor text that’s used as chapter breaks or to enhance the setting. Now, check out your other books and see how many World of Warcraft-inspired novels or Forgotten Realms stories you have.

Do you remember what you liked about them? Disliked?

For the past, five years Flames Rising has been fortunate to publish content from some interesting folk. From musicians to up-and-coming authors or horror fans, our reviewers have come from all walks of life. Flames Rising review Lynne Thomas is no exception. Here Lynne opens up and describes her fascinating job as the Head of Rare Books and Special Collections at Northern Illinois University in DeKalb, IL, where she focuses on Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror literature.

Come take a look at this awesome day job, and learn how you can help preserve the science fiction, fantasy and horror books you love to read.

When Wizards first announced it’s new Open Game License (OGL) for publishers, a flurry of forum activity like this thread on RPGnet covered concerns from fans, contributors and publishers. Wizard of the Coast’s new OGL license for 4th Edition Rules hardly resembles the previous, free-flowing version, and while you may (or may not) agree with the way that Wizards has handled this aspect of their business, I still feel that it’s important to point out that this change could affect freelancers workflow and payment schedules.

Horror-genre lovers (like you and me) can’t resist sharing our love of the macabre. If we tell our friends about a dog of a film, they probably won’t go to see it. How then do we write a film review that finds the happy medium between gushing over the latest hit and bashing that worthless dud?

While the day may seem just like any other day, several people are hoping you’ll remember June 6, 2006, the so-called “number of the beast,” by doing something a little hellish, and maybe picking up an item or two along the way.

These days almost everyone with a home computer at some point or another wants to be a writer. As a consequence the fiction market has been flooded with new authors: some good, some bad. But what makes a piece of fiction “bad”? How does the average reader know what’s worthwhile to read and what isn’t?

The purpose of a review is to provide readers with enough information to decide whether they would like to spend their time or money on reading the book, watching the film or, in our case, playing the game. Whether or not the reviewer enjoys or is enthused by the game is of less importance. The reader must come first.

Plenty of articles deal with setting the mood for a horror RPG. As a result, I’m not going to tackle that topic. Instead, I’d like to talk about plot devices that, when in operation at a level of generality above specific mood elements, set the stage for creating a truly horrific RPG.

Have you ever noticed how some types of characters seem to lend themselves naturally to stereotype? In Vampire you can easily find multiple-personality Malkavians, limp-wristed über-goth Toreador, street-punk Brujah, and so on; in Changeling (which I play the most often) there’s big, dumb trolls and horny satyrs, and so on. Every clan or kith or tradition or group has a stereotype.