I remember thinking when the Harry Potter series was drawing to a conclusion that Halloween was changed forever. After all, who in their right mind would just be a generic witch anymore? With the wizarding world so well known via J. K. Rowling, being a regular ol’ witch would be so passé — get out those graduation robes and a scarf, and you’re officially a wizard or witch associated with his or her house from the old alma mater, Hogwarts. While working in a bookstore cafe, I wore my Gryffindor colors proudly — not because I would test out as a Gryffindor (nearly every Sorting Hat application on the Internet puts me in Hufflepuff), mind you, but because the colors were easier to find in my own wardrobe. I went with a necktie instead of a scarf, which I wore with a v-neck jumper and black pants. Close enough to a school uniform to pass, I’d say!

But to be perfectly honest, I’ve been dressing up as characters from books and movies for a long time.

To help you get into the spirit of Halloween, FlamesRising.com project manager talks about making a costume — for her dice. In this article, find out how Monica made her dice coffin and where she got the inspiration to add black tulle, a mask, and red roses to the coffin lid.

Here’s a sneak peek at what she has to say: Victorian-inspired Halloween decor is one of the hot themes this year; you can find black lace and dead roses almost everywhere you look. Birds like ravens and owls are pretty popular, too. Now, I went a little crazy nutso with the scenery because I wanted it to look three dimensional. I used black tulle, which you can find in any wedding aisle. The flat, red roses were from the scrapbooking section of our local craft store and the owl, mask and bat were die cut stickers from a Halloween display.

Find out more in this fun post about Monica’s quest to make a dice coffin costume.

Last week, I talked about why 13 GHOSTS is a classic horror film. For this week’s article, I decided to talk about a different kind of monster — THE BLOB.

“Released in 1988, The Blob remake is the kind of horror movie that makes you groan, laugh and scream. Creepy violins and cheerful images of a small town set the mood. The first people you meet? Teenagers!”

While every day is Halloween for me, this time of year brings out the best in a lot of free television and movie websites like Crackle.com.

During the month of October, I’m writing about horror movies for Crackle.com from a fan’s perspective. This week, I take a look at the classic horror film 13 Ghosts, which was produced by William Castle.

After seeing some of the trailers that I’ve created, a lot of people ask me how easy it is to create a book trailer and whether or not it’s worthwhile. A lot of people are claiming that one easy way to promote your books is to offer a video book trailer through YouTube! or your website. While the jury is still out as to whether or not sales can be attributed to someone watching a video book trailer, they can help spread the word and, for horror, can allude to the theme of the work.

In this post, I’ll talk about how you can create a promotional trailer for your book or game on a tight budget.

ACD Games Day is an annual tradeshow put on by hobby games distributor ACD Distribution LLC that connects retailers with the top publishers. This year’s show was bigger than last year and offered exhibitors and attendees to explore a brand new location in Downtown Madison.

Industry veteran Boyan Radakovich, who is ACD’s new Marketing Manager, had this to say about his first ACD Games Day.

“I wanted to make sure that ACD Games Day had the feeling of a marquee tradeshow. We moved to the beautiful Monona Terrace Convention Center and Hilton Madison for our event programming. We also increased the number of seminars to sixteen total, including key manufacturer seminars like the Wizards of the Coast track, the Mayfair Demo-2-Demo program, and many others.”

Having attended a show the previous year, I could definitely tell the difference between this year’s and last year’s show. This venue was bigger and well laid out. There were demo tables set up with games throughout the hall and there was a lot of attention to detail — included projected exhibitor and sponsor logos above the exhibition hall.

Like comic conventions? This year for Wizard World, otherwise known as Chicago Comic-Con, I spent the weekend in Artist’s Alley with Leanne Buckley. First off, I should point out that I couldn’t help but compare this convention to C2E2, which was held at the McCormick Place just this past April in Chicago. The difference between the two is pretty distinct, because the venues had a different emphasis from one another. As many fans pointed out to me, there was a noticeable lack of comic book publishers at Wizard World. Most, if not all, of the publishers that were missing had booths at C2E2 this past Spring, so I wasn’t surprised that there was a lack of publishers at this show. I was happy to see that Avatar Press was at Wizard World, and I had a great chat with them. Admittedly, I was a little curious why some of the local Chicago comic book publishers didn’t have a booth at the show.

Whether you’re in this industry of alternative media, or whether you cover this industry of alternative media, there are certain milestones, certain times of the year, places, etc that just stick out and you have to plan on the fact that you’ll be there, you’re going to be there, you’ll have to be there or something close to that line of thought. Because, if you aren’t there or don’t go, then you’re going to miss out on some really great opportunities. Of course I’m talking about conventions. Yes, that (now) time honored tradition of packing up your favorite tee shirts and comfortable shoes, and getting yourself to an expo/convention center huffing your way through town, and breaking your way through the ebb and flow of fan boys, both costumed and under clothed. Some of them unwashed, many smelling like some third world open air market. But the world of comics/alternative media/books and everything else is changing.

Next up for Cthulhu Week we asked reviewer Jason Thorson to tell us about his favorite Lovecraft-inspired movies. Not an easy task to say the least, but we were certainly willing to risk his sanity for this investigation.

Read on to learn of the challenges he faced…

In the interest of full disclosure, I have to give you some background on what you’re currently reading – what’s now become a ranting blog on H.P. Lovecraft film adaptations. My initial intention was to write a feature about the nature of Lovecraftian flicks and then list the five best examples. However, I immediately anticipated some difficulty. My original thesis was that most of these films don’t work, but surely there have been so many attempts to adapt Lovecraft’s work that I’d certainly be able to find five movies worthy of recommendation. Right?

Wrong.

Kenneth Hite, author of Cthulhu 101 and other Mythos tomes of dark intent brings us a tale of the Call of Cthulhu roleplaying game from Chaosium.

Enjoy this contribution to Cthulhu Week, but don’t read too deep…we can’t be held responsible for what horrors are left behind…

In Call of Cthulhu, your character explicitly starts no better than any other. There is no leveling up, no percentile strength, no special class skills or feats separating your character from any other citizen of Arkham. Yes, your character may well gain magical powers and travel to exotic destinations, as in other roleplaying games. But such “improvements” come at a cost, at the cost of lowering your irreplaceable Sanity. In Call of Cthulhu, the player knows at the outset that his character, if played long enough, will go insane and die. That’s a very different proposition from hoping that your character will become the vampiric Prince of Pittsburgh or get a Helm of Command at 18th level. Of course if that was all it was, Call of Cthulhu would simply be nihilistic, an exercise in masochistic masturbation. At best, its characters would resemble the decadent aesthetes of Lovecraft’s short story “The Hound,” seeking ever more outré pleasures, or perhaps the shortsighted Tillinghast in “From Beyond,” accepting insanity as the necessary visa for interdimensional tourism. And in many of Lovecraft’s stories, this is the case — Lovecraft was, after all, a nihilist (albeit a gentlemanly nihilist) himself, who considered morality “mere Victorian fiction.” The object of terror, for Lovecraft, is terror.

Next up for Cthulhu Week is a little something from Flames Rising reviewer Eric Pollarine. Eric takes a look at some of his favorite fiction, music and movies and talks about how these folks have been influenced by H. P. Lovecraft and just what that means to him as a horror fan.

H. P. Lovecraft.

The name alone sets the stage in your mind, if you are a fan of horror, or even if you are not -to a place in time that is alive with the nightmares of the industrial revolution and arcane secrets hiding in dusty old texts. A place of extraordinary psychological terror, a time in which we were a young nation, exploring the limits of our capacity to both destroy and create -the modern, and the profane; the forbidden knowledge of the Garden of Eden, the limits and expectations of Fate and above all else the limited resources of man faced with the fact that he is in and of himself the primary cause for both guilt and civilization’s current state.

They call it “The Best Four Days in Gaming,” but for me Gencon turned out to be one single day of hyper-kinetic goodness dotted by plenty of booth babes to punctuate my day. Going to Gencon in order to enjoy the event is quite different than being a man on a mission, well, missions. There were some fantastic new products this year, such as new releases in the Cthluhutech and Eclipse Phase lines. I picked up Smallville (and the Leverage Quickstart Job adventure) to see what twists they would bring to the Cortex system. I mean how could Clark Kent sport a D12 Strength when Jayne from Serenity does the same thing (Cam Banks’ answer to that question proves pretty interesting). White Wolf took a bold move by, well, not bringing a single book to read this year (though the booth, which looked like a Vampiric salon, was hopping with excited patrons looking to hear about upcoming products and get their drink on). Companies like Out of the Box had a fleet of new party and educational games while Wits and Wagers had both an expansion and family edition available (would have liked to see Say Anything release an expansion too, but oh well).

First let me state, that I am not the worlds largest Vampire fan. I don’t mean the RPG nor simply movies, or fiction- but as a franchise or archetype or whatever on a whole, the Vampire just doesn’t do it for me. So when the request came down through the digital bullpen that the powers at be who run this most fantastic site said they were looking for someone to write a blog post on Vampires, for our Vampire week, I shrugged my shoulders and put my digital hand up. Why not give it a shot?

Those of you familiar with what I have been doing on Flames Rising, know that I am pretty much a die hard and committed Zombie fan. I won’t go into anything related to Zombies here in too much detail, because this is supposed to be about vampires and I have already written about 150 words not concerning them, but I will say that I look forward to possibly doing my own little blog pieces solely on the walking dead, again though-this is about the living dead, or the undead, and we should begin. Ready?

I have been posting short updates and industry news that I’ve come across over on my LiveJournal for the past few months. Someone suggested that Flames Rising readers might like to hear some of the rattling that goes on in my head so…we’re going to give it shot. These posts will indeed be a bit of a random mix of links and commentary and most likely won’t follow any kind of set pattern. Feedback and comments are welcome.

Last week I was in Atlanta on business for the “day job” (aka DriveThruRPG.com). I’m still trying to catch up on my e-mail, so if I owe you something give me a few extra days. That or it got lost in the shuffle so feel free to ping me with a reminder…

We are back from C2E2, held in Chicago’s gorgeous McCormick Center, and we have quite a bit we’d like to share with you. In this post, we’ll highlight a few dark fantasy, science fiction and horror comics and relay news about publishers.

Several publishers, including Zenoscope Entertainment, were offering a title or two set in their version of Wonderland. Zenoscope, who will also be producing the CHARMED comic, specializes in dark fantasy comics as seen through their GRIMM’S FAIRY TALES line. So if you like Alice, you may want to check out their series of different WONDERLAND comics.

As the evening’s action opens, Blake and Lavender have a discussion about moving the recovered treasures out of Stickney. While we trust Regent Czarnecki – our mentor – implicitly, he is not the only Nosferatu there, and certainly not the only one with access to the stuff. The Regent has suggested that while he’s fine with keeping it safe for us, he would ultimately like the stuff moved, and the sooner the better.

We debate the fate of the Canopic jars; they are a powerful, ancient artifact, but also dangerous. We know several Mekhet – a clan with ties to ancient Egypt – who could possibly help us find someone who knows what to do with this stuff. We agree that someone we know – Jed Holyoak, master of Blood Magic and high-ranking member of the Circle of the Crone – seems a likely candidate. We drive out to Stickney to look over the loot, possibly discuss things with our mentor and decide how to proceed and what – if anything – we should take away with us tonight. On the way, a Black SUV tries to run us off the road; we are suspicious, but draw no specific conclusions.

So Lavender and Blake were forced to skip a week thanks to the GM’s business-related trip. THIS week, we needed to spend time talking minutiae; we all feel we’re getting too bogged down in little details and not concentrating on specific character goals and more important plot threads. We spent some time going over the recovered files kept by Raphael LaDue, self-proclaimed Regent of Cicero. These files were primarily for blackmail purposes, but also contained significant information on Kindred in and around the Cicero area. LaDue, currently sentenced to a year in torpor for defying the Prince, kept files on everyone of interest to him; mortals he could blackmail for services and influence; Kindred who live in Cicero; and Kindred of general interest in the Cicago area.

In this episode, Lavender and Blake deal with the contents of the boxes and catch up on some old business with Kyle.

Lavender and Blake head over to Bootlegger’s, a kind of a blue collar-ish sports bar, to catch a quick bite to eat. Trying out her new “toy,” she tries to put the one-word whammy on a college kid and fails miserably, so she goes for the gold and entrances him. Leading him out to her car, she has a quick bite and wonders how to make better use of “Dominate.” After having a quick bite, she takes the mortal over to Coyote Ugly and dumps him in a sea of waitresses. On the way back to Bootlegger’s, Lavender notices Blake heading out with another woman, so she heads back to her apartment and finds a bunch of new books on the shelf.

This week in our ongoing Vampire:the Requiem game, Blake and Lavender are on their way to the Chicago suburb of Stickney to consult with their mentor, Regent Mike Czarnecki, Nosferatu and Invictus elder. The batch of assorted crates and containers we recovered from under the Chicago River were waiting to be opened. Upon our arrival in Stickney, we were led by the Regent through a series of hallways and tunnels to what appeared to be an empty parking lot – until the Regent canceled his Obfuscate, and we saw a smallish, corrugated metal building the size of a two-car garage. because we had enlisted the aid of the rival Carthians, it had been suggested to the Regent by McLean that the boxes recovered from under the Chicago River should be moved to a safer place. How much safer a hiding place could one get than a building that normally couldn’t be found? The Regent mentions that few outside of his own clan knew of this building; Blake felt honored to be brought into the Regent’s confidence in this way.

Picking up from where we left our coterie last week, we find Lavender, Blake and the rest about to look for sunken treasure. Having learned that the body of “The Old Man” (an Invictus elder) was in torpor at the bottom of the Chicago River, Blake immediately assumes we need to retrieve it and put it in safe storage. If the diablerists were to get their hands on it, the results would be bad no matter what happened. The diving expedition consists of Blake, Filthfoot (Nosferatu bound to our coterie under first-stage viniculum as punishment for misbehavior) and Garret McLean, Gangrel Seneschal to the Prince and all-around bad dude. Lavender will remain in the boat as look-out and back-up, along with Carpenter (Blake’s ghoul), Butch (Filthfoot’s buddy) and the boat captain, who thinks we’re diving to recover lost treasures of Al Capone.