When the ashes cool, all that remains is dust…

Dust to Dust is a story supplement using the Storytelling Adventure System designed for use with Vampire: The Masquerade 20th Anniversary Edition, and it acts as a spiritual successor to the classic story Ashes to Ashes. It includes all the characters and information you need to tell a complete story, as well as notes from the Wrecking Crew, the demo team that ran the story at The Grand Masquerade 2011 in New Orleans.

Dust to Dust is available now in eBook format at the Flames Rising RPGNow Shop.

We have a new design essay from Cynthia Celeste Miller. Cynthia stops by to tell us about the development of the brand new Macabre Tales RPG. Macabre Tales is the dominoes-based RPG of Lovecraftian horror from Spectrum Games.

Designing the aspects of Macabre Tales

Designing Macabre Tales was a labor of love. In fact, when I first conceived the game, I had no intention of releasing it commercially. Rather, the plan was to use it solely for my own gaming groups. Once I began putting the pieces together, however, it became clear that others might enjoy this drastically different take on Lovecraftian horror gaming too.

Flames Rising is happy to announce the launch of a new column! Michelle Webb is here to talk about Live Action Role Playing and she wants to hear from you! Life Imitates LARP will explore the hobby, offer up some advice to Storytellers and Players and generally discuss this hobby. Michelle brings years of experience in running large-scale and local games. So, take it away Michelle…

Life Imitates LARP

When people hear the acronym LARP (Live Action Role Play) a number of images come to mind. Possibly it involves dressing up in medieval clothes and beating up each other with foam swords. It could also involve something that looks like this. When I got into LARP, it all started when a fellow Rocky Horror cast member said, “Hey, there is this Vampire game flyer. Why don’t we go check it out?” What I experienced that first night was the best combination of Table Top and acting in which I had the pleasure of indulging.

We have a new design essay from Jim Zubkavich about the Skullkickers comic series which is published by Image Comics. In this essay Jim tells us about his love of Dungeons & Dragons, bonding with his brother and how the game inspired the series.

Skullkickers, the action-comedy comic published by Image that I created, is the sarcastically loveable bastard child of many different sword & sorcery sources. From Robert E. Howard and Fritz Leiber to Tracy Hickman and Terry Pratchett, there are a slew of fantasy books by amazing authors that boil and bubble together in the cauldron I’m stirring, but above and beyond those literary sources is good ol’ Dungeons & Dragons.

To celebrate our favorite day of the year we have marked down the entire line of FR Press products by 50%!

The sale lasts for one day only so don’t miss out!

This includes the brand new Haunted: 11 Tales of Ghostly Horror anthology that features spooky stories from Chuck Wendig, Jess Hartley, Rich Dansky, Jason Blair, Bill Bodden, Nancy Greene and more!

Also included in this sale is The Queen of Crows, Instant Antagonist: Creepy Cottontail and more!

Check out the complete line of FR Press eBooks and get half off for Halloween!

You’re never too old to have fun at Halloween, so start searching DriveThruComics.com and DriveThruRPG.com for these pumpkins…

Will it be a great Treat – an awesome free product – or will it be a fun Trick, with who-knows-what on the other end?

Participating publishers include White Wolf, Eden Studios, Top Cow Productions, Pelgrane Press, Moonstone Books, 2000 AD, Apex Books and more!

We have a new design essay from Tomas Rawlings today. Tomas tells us about the work that went into developing the new Call of Cthulhu: The Wasted Land mobile game from Red Wasp Design.

Designing The Wasted Land

Hi there! My name is Tomas Rawlings and I’m the designer of the new game Call of Cthulhu: The Wasted Land. I’m one part of a small indie development team who’ve been working hard for almost a year now on a role-playing/strategy game set in the midst of the First World War. We’ve been working with Chaosium, the publisher of the multi-award winning paper RPG of the same name which, coincidently, this year celebrates its 30th anniversary and we’re aiming to bring the best of paper RPGs and mobile gaming together (and to sacrifice a few goats to Shub-Niggurath in the process).

Coburn’s been dead now for close to a century, but seeing as how he’s a vampire and all, it doesn’t much bother him. Or at least it didn’t, not until he awoke from a forced five-year slumber to discover that most of human civilization was now dead—but not dead like him, oh no.

See, Coburn likes blood. The rest of the walking dead, they like brains. He’s smart. Them, not so much. But they outnumber him by about a million to one. And the clotted blood of the walking dead cannot sustain him. Now he’s starving. And nocturnal. And more pissed-off than a bee-stung rattlesnake. The vampire not only has to find human survivors (with their sweet, sweet blood), but now he has to transition from predator to protector—after all, a man has to look after his food supply.

Flames Rising is pleased to present the first chapter of this upcoming horror novel by Chuck Wendig.

Flames Rising is pleased to present you with a special interview, just in time for Sweetest Day! Earlier, we asked you to help us come up with interview questions for White Wolf Publishing developers Russell Bailey and Eddy Webb. We’re happy to share their responses as they dive into your burning questions about Strange, Dead Love, the new paranormal romance sourcebook for Vampire: the Requiem that debuts in early December. Thanks to everyone who commented and shared their thoughts on this sourcebook. The questions below were pulled from your feedback!

We have a new design essay today from Michael Jasper, author of the In Maps & Legends comic series. In Maps & Legends was the winner of the November 2009 Zuda Comics competition hosted by DC Comics. Today Michael talks about the craft of writing the series and the things he learned along the way.

Want to know what one of the best things that happened to me while I was scripting out the nine issues of In Maps & Legends, the digital comic I wrote with artist Niki Smith?

A lot of great things happened, but the best side-effect of the whole experience is that it made me a much better—and hopefully more effective—writer.

Flames Rising is celebrating the 20th anniversary of the Vampire: the Masquerade. We have reached out to the community of fans and asked them to tell us what Vampire means to them. We know that this game has brought friends and family together, changed lives, and created lasting memories in the minds of players and fans around the world. The Vampire Retrospective Project is not only a chance to hear some of those stories, it’s an opportunity to record them for future generations.

Since our original post about the project, we have received essays from several people ranging from people who’ve worked on Vampire: the Masquerade, played a character in the Camarilla, or who remember how this game has influenced popular culture.

Talk Like A Pirate Day just passed by and it got us thinking a bit about Pirates and RPGs, which naturally lead to zombies…ok, I don’t know where I was going with that, but it made a lot more sense in my head (guess I don’t have to worry about zombies wanting my brains do I?) Anyway, our Design Essay series continues with Daniel Davis telling us about ARRGH! Thar Be Zombies, a supplement for the All Flesh Must Be Eaten RPG from Eden Studios!

Ahoy, me hearties, Arrgh!

Pull up a keg ‘n’ ‘ave a grog while I tell ye scalawags a tale o’ stormy seas an’ th’ walkin’ dead! Thar Be Zombies, ‘ere…

Ahem…yeah, anyway, I’m Daniel Davis, writer of the All Flesh Must Be Eaten supplement, Arrgh! Thar Be Zombies! from Eden Studios. Matt’s asked if I wanted to write up this little essay and talk about the process that brought ATBZ to the gaming table. ‘Twas a sea of shoals an’ flotsam, sun an’ fair wind, but I’ll recount th’ tale, arrgh.

To celebrate the 20th anniversary of the Vampire: the Masquerade, Flamesrising.com is hosting an open call for new essays detailing memories and experiences of the property first published by White Wolf in 1991. The title of this series is the Vampire: the Masquerade Retrospective.

For more details on where to submit and what FlamesRising.com is looking for, please review the Vampire: the Masquerade Retrospective Submission Guidelines.

Shelter in Place is about survival, teamwork and fun. Designed for ten to twenty five players, the game captures the frenetic pace of a zombie movie in an action packed game. Players can take on the roles of Humans or Zombies in a desperate conflict to survive. Humans must use their wits to survive, making sacrifices in order to live through the night. The Zombies must use their brute, unrelenting strength and teamwork to overpower the humans and eat some delicious brains.

Shelter in Place blends all the fun of a good old-fashioned game of tag, with the camp and action of a zombie horror film. The system was created to be easy to read and understand for new gamers, but still a fun challenge to more experienced players. Shelter in Place comes with the option to add special “twist” characters who can change the game – from adding a cyborg to a vampire, these twist characters can make every game a surprise!

In Ashes of the Earth Eliot Pattison pieces together a new society after global annihilation. While most novels set in the future offer heavy doses of imagined science and technology, in his new novel Pattison constructs a more realistic society out of the ashes of apocalypse—with characters who sometimes became a little too realistic for the author.

Stew Wilson from Zero Point Information is here to tell us about his new game Black Seven. A modern espionage RPG, Black Seven isinspired by stealth-action games like Deus Ex, Alpha Protocol, and Splinter Cell.

Infiltrating BLACK SEVEN

BLACK SEVEN started life in my throw-away ideas file, a couple of notes for a system that, at the time, I wasn’t able to make work. That time was 2004, and I was re-playing Deus Ex for the fourth time. Under the effects of too much strong coffee, I hacked White Wolf’s Trinity so that I could run Deus Ex-like games. I never had a chance to try it, and I was left with niggling little ideas that wouldn’t go away that wouldn’t work in my proposed hack.

The Flames Rising Design Essay series continues with a little something from David Chandler (Wellington) telling us about his new dark fantasy novel Den of Thieves. Most Flames Rising readers will know David from his excellent zombie and vampire novels, several of which we’ve reviewed here at the site. In this essay David also shares a little insight into his publishing history and what genres authors are told about they can and can’t write.

How I Ended up Writing a Fantasy Novel and Changed my Name

Hi. My name is Dave. I used to think I was a science fiction writer.

That was back in the ‘80s, a wild and wooly time for genre fiction. I was not exclusively a science fiction reader back then—nobody was, or at least, I knew very few people who identified themselves as just “science fiction fans”. When I went to Waldenbooks with whatever money I could scrap together I looked at the wall of books and could spend hours trying to figure out what to buy. There was fantasy, science fiction, and horror, typically all on the same shelf—and I wanted it all.

Author and comic scribe Michael Jasper is here with a new design essay about his novel A Sudden Outbreak of Magic. Michael tells about the genesis of the idea back in his teaching days and how that initial concept developed into the book that is available now. He even links us to a sneak peek at the follow up book, A Wild Epidemic of Magic, which is currently in development.

Magic is everywhere. You just have to look hard enough to see it.

Magic is dangerous. You start using it, and all sorts of powerful people will take notice. And they will hunt you down.

Dave Gross, author of Pathfinder and Forgotten Realms fiction, who Alana recently interviewed here at Flames Rising stopped by to tell us a little about how his favorite kung fu movies inspired his writing.

For inspiration in writing Master of Devils, the latest Pathfinder Tales novel, I steeped myself in dozens of kung fu movies. Some were straight-on martial arts stories from the heyday of the Shaw Brothers, while others were more recent blends of wuxia action with art-house photography. Among my favorites are the fantasy films of the 80s and 90s, many of which include a strong element of supernatural horror.

The first thing you need to know about kung fu movies is that any one of them can seem like five or six different movies crammed into one. Chinese screenwriters seldom stick to a single genre, so you’ll find elements of horror, romance, satire, political commentary, and even slapstick humor in what appears by the DVD cover to be a straight-up action film. Thus, when you’re looking for a “horror kung fu movie,” you shouldn’t expect a simple fright fest–although some of them have some great scary moments.

Flames Rising is pleased to present the web version of the new release list that White Wolf is handing out at Gen Con Indy 2011. Several members of the White Wolf crew are on-site at Gen Con talking to fans about new and classic World of Darkness games. This is a look ahead at what new products are on the way and some news about the ongoing Now in Print program at DriveThruRPG.com.