Posted on February 11, 2016 by Flames
Be a Good Dog. Protect Your Home. Be Loyal To Those Who Are True.
These are the words of the Code of Man. Dogs have inherited the world, building the kingdom of Pugmire thousands of years after the Ages of Man. These dogs have been changed to use tools and language, and they (along with other races of uplifted animals) seek to rediscover the world they’ve inherited. Some dogs use the leftover technology of humanity, but they believe it all to be magic handed to them by their dead gods. Others seek to create an ideal civilization, using a Code of Man compiled from ancient, fragmentary lore. The world is dangerous and mysterious, but courageous and loyal dogs will persevere.
Pugmire is a light-hearted and family-friendly fantasy world. It’s one of the first of Onyx Path Publishing’s creator-owned games, produced in a partnership with Eddy Webb and Pugsteady.
The Kickstarter has already blown past the original funding goal and is well on its way to achieving a number of exciting stretch goals that not only enhance the game itself, but add new media options for fans of the setting. Eddy Webb sat down with Flames Rising to talk a bit about the Pugmire setting and what is going with the Kickstarter project.
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Posted on January 12, 2016 by Flames
Dungeons & Dragons is all about creativity. For more than 40 years, the folks who spent the bulk of their time creating amazing adventures, those noble Dungeon Masters, did not have a convenient outlet to share them with the gamers who weren’t sitting at their table. You either had to raise money to publish a physical book or zine on your own, or convince a publisher you had the chops.
Now, the Dungeon Master’s Guild puts the power to share that creativity firmly in the hands of the DM.
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Posted on December 23, 2015 by Flames
Lore of the Clans
My sire always told me, “There’s no instruction manual for being dead, strákur.” I believed her, because she was older and smarter than me, and we value knowledge if nothing else. Many sires spill a lot of poison into the ears of their childer, telling them the One True Way to be a vampire. Some vampires don’t even bother, kicking their errant progeny to the streets and letting them figure it out for themselves. A few smother their instruction in religious imperatives, philosophical tenets, or mystical confluences. But not one of them has a pamphlet with clear, easy instructions once you’ve become Damned.
Of course they lie. All vampires lie. But the best lies are those that are told between two truths, yes? Here are thirteen such truths, childe. They may line up with other things you know, or they might not. Sometimes the narrators present tantalizing rumors and conspiracies, while others digress into areas not often considered by many. Some of what they say have no facts to back them up, but not everything is a lie, either.
Let us find instruction from amidst the lies, together.
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Posted on December 22, 2015 by Flames
From the ashes, hope rises
The Final Empire was built on the backs of the skaa — the downtrodden descendants of those who opposed the Lord Ruler’s ascension a thousand years ago. They are the faceless masses of Scadrial, tasked with plowing the barren fields, sweeping the ash-covered streets, tending the opulent nobility, and serving at the whims of their “betters.” But a few skaa cast off the chains of their destiny to be something more. They are thieves, Allomancers, firebrands, and rebels. They fight the system of oppression and brutality to give their people something they lost long ago — hope.
Skaa: Tin & Ash is an essential supplement for the Mistborn Adventure Game, designed for players, Narrators, and fans of the Mistborn novels. Developed in cooperation with Brandon Sanderson, this guide expands the canon of the novels, providing new insights into skaa throughout the Final Empire. Inside you’ll find detailed information on the history and beliefs of the skaa; the lives of city, canal, and plantation skaa; the skaa criminal and political underground; and famous skaa such as the Citizen, Mare, and the Survivor of the Flames.
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Posted on December 12, 2015 by Flames
Keep walking.
Eyes straight ahead.
Don’t look back.
In the shadows and between the cracks of our everyday lives hide the Chronicles of Darkness. Here lurk creatures of ancient myth and urban legend. Here lie the graves of angels and the bunkers of secret government programs. Here every malformed horror you’ve ever seen out of the corner of your eye has a home. And they’ve seen you.
Don’t look back!
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Posted on December 10, 2015 by Flames
Judge us not by our seemings for we are never what we appear.
Come hither, changelings and join the dream-dance,
lest the winter come and the Dreaming pass into memory.
Recall your heritage! Let the games begin!
Twenty years ago, White Wolf published Changeling: the Dreaming, the fifth of their promised five game-lines that together comprised the World of Darkness. Seen by some as a lighter, more fantasy-based setting in the modern-day, and by others as the darkest game White Wolf had yet created, players had to face the question of what happens once creativity and magic fades from their world.
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Posted on November 18, 2015 by Flames
Visionary Comics, a production studio and digital publisher, is marking 10 years in the creative industry by announcing the hiring of two well-known industry execs and a retooled website as the first phase of a major expansion that will extend into 2016. Company leaders are calling the initiative “Visionary 2.0.”
“We’ve been working hard the last few months to move Visionary to the forefront of the industry and wanted to announce our first exciting changes at Tucson Comic Con,” says C. Edward Sellner, the company’s Chief Creative Officer. The eighth annual event kicked off at the Tucson Convention Center in Tucson, AZ, on November 6, and wraps its three day run Sunday. Visionary execs made the exclusive announcements today at a panel during the popular show.
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Posted on November 11, 2015 by Flames
Presenting an epic improvised campaign for Night’s Black Agents Roleplaying Game. Do your Agents have what it takes to face the Lord of the Undead himself?
The Dracula Dossier follows in the fully improvisational path of the award-winning The Armitage Files campaign. Players follow up leads in the margins of Dracula Unredacted, a rare edition of Bram Stoker’s masterpiece that reveals the terrifying truth behind the fiction. They’ll chase down the real characters from Stoker’s novel, their descendants in the present, and the British agents caught in the backblast.
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Posted on November 3, 2015 by Flames
WELCOME TO THE SWORD COAST—a region of Faerûn that comprises shining paragons of civilization and culture, perilous locales fraught with dread and evil, and encompassing them all, a wilderness that offers every explorer vast opportunity and simultaneously promises great danger.
While the Sword Coast Adventurer’s Guide is a valuable resource for Dungeon Masters, it was crafted with players and their characters foremost in mind. There is a plethora of new character options to intrigue and inspire every member of the adventuring party.
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Posted on October 10, 2015 by Flames
Popcorn Press is a small press publisher that has been producing Halloween-themed books of haikus, poems, and short fiction for the past few years. Each year the publisher picks a theme, like vampires, zombies, or Cthulhu, and collects a tightly-focused collection filled with poems written by dozens of writers ranging from Elaine Cunningham to Matt […]
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Posted on September 23, 2015 by Flames
We’re all mages, we Awakened Ones. Tradition wizards and Technocrats, Mad Ones and Fallen Ones and all the “ones” in between who refuse to choose a side in our demented little War. We’re ALL mages. Many refuse that title, or deny it to others, but that’s what we are: priest-kings holding the keys to reality.
Mage: the Ascension 20th Anniversary Edition is available now in PDF and Hardcover editions at the Flames Rising RPGNow Shop!
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Posted on September 15, 2015 by Flames
The pall that had descended over the North is gone, and a new day has dawned on a victorious Mithral Hall, but no matter how bright things seem on the surface, Drizzt and his companions know that what lurks just under their feet remains steeped in evil and charged with unimaginable power.
The dark elves of Menzoberranzan, including the powerful Archmage Gromph, aren’t done with Drizzt yet. And consumed by their own power struggles, feeling backed into a corner, the drow may just be desperate enough to call on demonic forces from the deepest reaches of the Abyss, and unleash a disaster even the Underdark could never have prepared for.
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Posted on August 18, 2015 by Flames
Go beyond the boundaries of the fantastic, award-winning Numenera setting.
Monte Cook Games is currently running an exciting Kickstarter campaign that will expand the Numenera RPG into new vistas, giving characters a chance to explore further than they ever dreamed. The campaign reached the origianl funding goal almost immediately after launching and now new stretch goals are offering backers expanded content, fiction, maps, and more.
Flames Rising is pleased to have award winning author and game designer Monte Cook drop by to tell us a little about some of the design goals of these new supplements and content being offered in this Kickstarter project.
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Posted on August 11, 2015 by Flames
The magic of bestiaries, or dictionaries of mythological creatures, has been captivating the human imagination since ancient times.
Now, Stone Skin Press brings a fresh take on these compendiums of the fantastic with its latest anthology—Gods, Memes and Monsters. Featuring over sixty authors, this stunning international volume offers entries and short stories that range from the horrific to the humorous. The bestiary shed lights on familiar beasts that are coping in our modern era, including gorgons, minotaurs, and mantichores. It also introduces newly discovered creatures such as meme mosquitoes, trashsquatches, and urbantelopes that are thriving in the cyber age.
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Posted on July 29, 2015 by Flames
It’s 1242. The Mongol army crushed Baghdad, then Russia under its heel, then moved on to devastate Poland and Hungary. The Holy Roman Empire stood to war with the Papacy. The second Lombard League wielded the word of the Pope and fought off Frederick II.
The War of Princes rages. Patricide looms. Young powers look up the ladder to the next rungs, and see stagnation and hypocrisy. They see targets. When they look down, they see humanity. They see a power that could change everything. They see mortals organizing into universities and empires.
In the mortal world of 1242, power shifted at the rate an army marched. For the undead, power shifts faster than a fire overtakes a haven. To the Damned, power flows as fast as blood from an ancient heart.
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Posted on July 22, 2015 by Flames
New class options, character backgrounds, and deity descriptions from the Forgotten Realms.
Get everything you need to adventure in the Forgotten Realms on the exciting Sword Coast, home to the cities of Baldur’s Gate, Waterdeep, and Neverwinter! A collaboration between Green Ronin Publishing and the Dungeons & Dragons team at Wizards of the Coast, the Sword Coast Adventurer’s Guide provides D&D fans with a wealth of detail on the places, cultures, and deities of northwestern Faerûn.
The Sword Coast Adventurer’s Guide is also a great way to catch up on recent events in the Forgotten Realms, to get background on locations featured in the Rage of Demons storyline coming in September, and to learn the lore behind video games like Neverwinter and Sword Coast Legends.
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Posted on July 3, 2015 by Flames
“The Americans were passing Intel to the Israelis, hoping that they’d act fast to grab the artefacts as a cultural priority, mainly to snub the Russians. They didn’t know about the Stasi mole funnelling everything back to Moscow, or that their Damascus network was wide open. We had some agents in place throughout, but I didn’t for a minute think we weren’t compromised in some way or another. And my code N sources were feeding back whispers from the cultists that they’d got a solid lead on the origins of the pieces and were getting ready to move. The whole thing was a murky mess, and I needed to clean it up. The only thing I knew for sure was that we needed to neutralise half a dozen people in the next 24 hours… but who?”
World War Cthulhu: Cold War throws you into one of the most paranoid and chaotic conflicts of the 20th century. The tangled webs of the spymasters tear and rejoin, double and triple agents make their moves and counter-moves, and it’s hard to be sure which side you’re really working for. Nuclear destruction hangs over everyone, and a few people at the heart of western intelligence continue their personal battle against the insidious influence of a much older enemy…
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Posted on June 25, 2015 by Flames
There are some threats that transcend a local Prince’s domain and become enemies of every Kindred in the Camarilla. These Anathema become targets of a global Blood Hunt for their crimes. Not just political enemies, the monsters on the Red List have been named enemies of the entire Camarilla by the Justicars.
Dread Names, Red List explores the Camarilla’s “Most Wanted” List, naming those deemed most dangerous by the Justicars and their chosen deputies, the Alastors. Included are details on the Anathema that occupy the Red List, as well as details on those who hunt them. Storytellers are also given a toolkit for running Alastor-focused chronicles.
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Posted on June 24, 2015 by Flames
Sixth Gun RPG Kickstarter Ends 10pm EDT Thursday, June 25, 2015
Fans of The Sixth Gun and Deadlands settings were excited to learn a crossover adventure was planned as a stretch goal for The Sixth Gun RPG Kickstarter.
“This needs to happen…….no really…it does.” commented backer Brandon Janosco of Garden Grove, California, on the Kickstarter page.
“Chocolate meet my peanut butter!” commented Facebook user Richard Mark Borges of Jamestown, Rhode Island.
“Oh, snap! Deadlands + The Sixth Gun crossover?!” posted the Savage Bloggers Network on Google+.
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Posted on June 12, 2015 by Flames
The Old Ones ruled the earth aeons before the rise of man. Traces of their cyclopean cities can still be found on remote islands, buried amid the shifting desert sands, and in the frozen wastes of the polar extremes. Originally they came to this world from the stars. They sleep now, some deep within the earth or beneath the sea. When the stars are right they shall again walk the earth.
Call of Cthulhu is a tabletop roleplaying game based upon the worlds of H. P. Lovecraft. It is a game of secrets, mysteries, and horror. Playing the role of steadfast investigators, you travel to strange and dangerous places, uncover foul plots, and stand against the terrors of the Cthulhu Mythos. You encounter sanity-blasting entities, monsters, and insane cultists. Within strange and forgotten tomes of lore you discover revelations that man was not meant to know. You and your companions may very well decide the fate of the world.
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