This preview and the images were provided with permission from the publisher as part of FlamesRising.com’s continuing coverage of Steve Jackson Games Week. Today, you’ll find images of upcoming Munchkin Games including Munchkin: Axe Cop, Munchkin Zombies 2, Munchin: Conan and a few other Cthulhu-related treats.

From Steve Jackson Games to our dice bags, there will be an attractive plethora of custom and jumbo die this Fall for Cthulhu Dice, Fairy Dust and Munchkin Jolly. One color in particular stood out in our minds. We regard it as watered down red, but you’ll probably look at it and go… Pink? Pink Cthulhu Dice? With SPARKLES? It’s almost as if they know we’ll lose sanity just by picking one of them up. Well, if that doesn’t cause you to go a little insane, the giant foam Cthulhu Dice (pictured above) probably will. Instead of marbles? Think Silly Bandz in the shape of Cthulhu. Oh. My.

FlamesRising.com is pleased to present you with an excerpt from Night Veil, the second novel in the new Indigo Court series written by Yasmine Galenorn. This dark fantasy story debuts on Tuesday, July 5th. In this preview, you’ll read a brief introduction to the world and a part of the first chapter.

Night Veil: The Beginning

Myst led her people into the shadows and ice, and there they hid, sheltered in the depths of lore. The Vampiric Fae were pariah, kept a dirty secret, shamefully debasing the entire realm of Faerie. And so in furtive silence, the Host fed and drank deep and did rend the flesh of its victims and feast. But their thirst was unquenchable, and it was then that Myst discovered one of their newfound powers: Members of the Indigo Court could drink from the souls of the magic-born…

ANYA SOBCZEK (SUB-CHECK) is a snarling science major with an arm full of Darwin tattoos. Her brother OWEN is a sensitive young thing in a coven of teenage occultists. The Sobczek sibs have always been brutally competitive, but now that Owen’s blood has started BUBBLING with ancient tentacled abominations, their rivalry’s about to enter a vast new dimension of cosmic terror…

In 2010 Artists DREW RAUSCH and AARON ALEXOVICH hurled their infectious horror/comedy hybrid ELDRITCH! into blazing combat in DC Comics’ final Zuda webcomic competition. After several centuries it emerged, dazed and confused, with the word WINNER indelibly etched on its forehead.

FlamesRising.com is pleased to present you with a preview of The Crimson Pact Volume One. Twenty-six authors wrote stories in this demon-themed eBook anthology and samples of three of them are available for you to read below.

The Failed Crusade
Written by Patrick M. Tracy and Paul Genesse

News of our victory came not in the happy shouts of the freed multitudes, but in the groaning voices of the animate dead. Ours was a victory that none would confuse with triumph. The best half of us lay broken within the Rusted Vale, the rear guard left to puzzle out the events that had been no more than far-off echoes within the smoke and crashing iron. We knew only that we had finally won, that the Crimson Pact was redeemed, that we could all go home. Tired as we were, no man lifted a fist to celebrate. No Blessed Woman smiled. No church Catechist recounted the litany of our good fortunes. The cost had been too high, the wager of battle too awful. In that moment, winning didn’t seem to matter. It would not be long before we found that even the brief illusion of victory would tear away like fog before the wind.

FlamesRising.com is pleased to present you with a preview of The Zombie Feed Volume One. Several authors penned stories in this zombie anthology. Three of the stories you’ll find in this debut anthology from The Zombie Feed are available for you to read below.

Zombie fiction from many sub-genres are represented here: zombie apocalypse, zombie survival, zombies in human society, zombie hunters, and more. And the one thread interlocking these disparate groups-ZOMBIE MAYHEM! This action packed anthology takes a syringe full of contaminated adrenaline-laced undead and slams 1000 CCs directly into your chest cavity.

Born of the U.S. government’s 1928 raid on the degenerate coastal town of Innsmouth, Massachusetts, the covert agency known as Delta Green spent four decades opposing the forces of darkness with honor, but without glory. Stripped of sanction after a disastrous 1969 operation in Cambodia, Delta Green’s leaders made a secret pact: to continue their work without authority, without support, and without fear. Delta Green agents slip through the system, manipulating the federal bureaucracy while pushing the darkness back for another day-but often at a shattering personal cost.

Ten years ago, everything changed. It’s time you found out how.

It’s January 2001. The Delta Green agents code-named Cyrus and Charlie get the call: A young boy dead and buried for years has reappeared, healthy and happy, as if no time at all had passed and the disease that killed him had never been. The family thinks it’s a miracle, but Delta Green has seen too many miracles turn to madness. Cyrus and Charlie must discover what horrors lurk behind this one. The mission brings them to the brink of apocalypse-to the edge of the revelation and destruction of Delta Green-to secrets and terrors at the heart of reality itself.

Delta Green: Through a Glass, Darkly is a new novel written by Delta Green co-creator Dennis Detwiller. The book is finished. It’s been reviewed, revised and edited. Now Arc Dream Publishing is holding a Kickstarter project to raise the funds to publish it.

Flames Rising posted an earlier excerpt from Delta Green: Through a Glass, Darkly on April 30, 2011.

Here’s another glimpse.

Delta Green: Intelligences is a new short story by Dennis Detwiller in the award-winning Delta Green setting.

Dennis’ company Arc Dream Publishing is holding a fundraiser for a new Delta Green novel, Through a Glass, Darkly. As the fundraiser hits milestones towards its goal, Arc Dream will release all-new Delta Green short stories to go along with it — starting with "Intelligences."

Here’s an excerpt.

The first part of the highly anticipated Cthulhu Apocalypse series.

The Investigators are rendered unconscious by a train crash. When they wake they discover the world has died. White flowers cover the ground and they see, beneath the delicate petals, the faces of the dead. No other human is in sight, everyone is gone.

The struggle to survive the apocalypse takes the Investigators through Britain, across the sea to America and beyond the veils of reality.

The Dead White World contains the first three scenarios for Cthulhu Apocalypse by Graham Walmsley, author of The Purist Adventures.

Flames Rising is pleased to present an exclusive preview of this new Trail of Cthulhu product from Pelgrane Press.

FlamesRising.com is pleased to present you with the introduction from Whedonistas: A Celebration of the Worlds of Joss Whedon by the Women Who Love Them. This collection of essays was edited by Lynne M. Thomas and Deborah Stanish, and was recently published through Mad Norwegian Press.

Introduction

Lynne’s Story:

You may know me as a Chick Who Digs Time Lords, but I’m also an avowed Whedonista. Although Whedon fandom is not my primary active fandom (that belongs to the Doctor), the Whedonverse has been a part of my life for just about as long.

I mentioned in Chicks Dig Time Lords that watching Doctor Who got me through much of my pregnancy; Buffy the Vampire Slayer got me through oh, I dunno, my whole adult life.

The year is nineteen-sixty-something, and after endless millennia of watery sleep, the stars are finally right. Old R’lyeh rises out of the Pacific, ready to cast its damned shadow over the primitive human world. The first to see its peaks: an alcoholic, paranoid, and frightened Jack Kerouac, who had been drinking off a nervous breakdown up in Big Sur. Now Jack must get back on the road to find Neal Cassady, the holy fool whose rambling letters hint of a world brought to its knees in worship of the Elder God Cthulhu. Together with pistol-packin’ junkie William S. Burroughs, Jack and Neal make their way across the continent to face down the murderous Lovecraftian cult that has spread its darkness to the heart of the American Dream. But is Neal along for the ride to help save the world, or does he want to destroy it just so that he’ll have an ending for his book?

Flames Rising is pleased to present you with the first chapter from Move Under Ground, a Lovecraft-inspired novel by author Nick Mamatas. Set in the 1960s, Move Under Ground is Mamatas’s debut novel about a character named Jack Kerouac who receives strange, rambling letters from Neal Cassaday. Will Jack successfully rescue Neal? Will they escape the Cult of Utter Normalcy? Or will they face Cthulhu himself? Dubbed an “ambitious” novel, read Chapter One and enjoy a fresh voice inspired by H.P. Lovecraft.

Move Under Ground is available now at Amazon.com.

Dance ‘Til Sunrise

The definitive companion to Vampire: The Requiem.

Flames Rising is pleased to present an exclusive excerpt from this new Vampire: the Requiem sourcebook from White Wolf. Danse Macabre is available at Amazon.com and RPGNow.com.

Fugitive Rachel Nolander is a newcomer to the city of Dogsland, where the rich throw parties and the poor just do whatever they can to scrape by. Supported by her brother Djoss, she hides out in their squalid apartment, living in fear that someday, someone will find out that she is the child of a demon. Corporal Jona Lord Joni is a demon’s child too, but instead of living in fear, he keeps his secret and goes about his life as a cocky, self-assured man of the law. The first book in the Dogsland Trilogy, Never Knew Another is the story of how these two outcasts meet.

Flames Rising is pleased to present this excerpt from Never Knew Another by J. M. McDermott. Never Knew Another is available now at Amazon.com.

In the divine struggle between good and evil, humans are hardly noticeable to the mal’akhim, but when an ancient seal is broken on the grounds of a California college campus, beings from dimensions beyond the balance of holy and unholy erupt from the earth. A retired priest and an ailing magickian must trust the mysterious Walker Between the Worlds and his skin-eating demon familiar as they step through Heisenbergian passages of probability and battle forces that are so far beyond demon they cannot be fully seen in earthly dimensions. Amidst the earthquakes and interdimensional intruders, the students and staff of California Hills University step across the boundaries of their knowledge and faith, revealing their true natures as the night erupts in earth and blood.

Flames Rising is pleased to present this excerpt from An Agreement with Hell by Dru Pagliassotti. An Agreement with Hell is available now at DriveThruHorror.com.

FlamesRising.com is pleased to present you with an inside look at the design process for Scenes of the Embrace, a brand new toolkit released from White Wolf Publishing to be used with its Vampire: the Requiem role-playing game.

This exclusive article is broken up into two parts. First, we give you an overview of the design process for this product, which was inspired by Will Hindmarch’s design from Scenes of Frenzy. After you read Eddy Webb and Monica Valentinelli’s exchange, stick around for an exclusive preview from this new e-book.

Scenes of the Embrace is available now at the Flames Rising RPGNow Shop.

The lightning-paced conclusion to the Stone of Tymora trilogy by best-selling author R.A. Salvatore and his son…

Featuring the sage words and signature swordwork of R.A. Salvatore’s best-selling character Drizzt Do’Urden, this final book of the Stone of Tymora trilogy is packed with action, magic, intrigue, and a heart-stopping twist that Salvatore fans won’t want to miss.

Flames Rising is pleased to offer our readers an excerpt from this book by Bob and Geno Salvatore. Be sure to check out our interview with the Salvatores about the Stone of Tymora series here at Flames Rising. The Sentinels is available now at Amazon.com.

Hard to believe I released Little Fears Nightmare Edition over a year ago. The initial reception blew me away and you are still picking it up, playing it, and sharing your stories with me. I enjoyed working on the new edition of the classic game but, by the time I finished the book, I was pretty burned out on it. I ended up taking a break from it, working on other projects and recharging my batteries. All in all, the time away did a lot of good as I’m more excited about Little Fears now than I have been in a long time.

This past September, after a hectic summer, I decided to celebrate the one-year anniversary of the game’s release by committing to a monthly series of standalone, ready-to-play episodes called Campfire Tales. I put up the first in October. Beggars Night tells the story of some monsters who are looking for the perfect costume for their waking master. The second, called The Fall Harvest, is set in one of my favorite types of places (an apple orchard) during my favorite time of the year. The Fall Harvest is about a little girl whose love for her grampy’s farm brings all kinds of monstrous trouble to the unsuspecting attendees of the local fall festival.

On sale December 15, 2010 in comic shops is MOUSE GUARD: THE BLACK AXE #1, launching a brand-new volume of the popular MOUSE GUARD series by David Petersen.

The Eisner Award-winning MOUSE GUARD returns with THE BLACK AXE, a third volume of the critically acclaimed series. Set in 1115, this prequel to MOUSE GUARD VOL. 1: FALL 1152 fulfills the promise the wise oldfur Celanawe made to Lieam the day his paw first touched the Black Axe: to tell the young warrior about the mouse who first wielded the deadly weapon. The arrival of distant kin takes Celanawe on an adventure that will carry him across the sea to uncharted waters and lands, all while unraveling the legend of Farrer, the blacksmith who forged the mythic Black Axe.

Flames Rising is pleased to present a Preview of MOUSE GUARD: THE BLACK AXE #1:

The fairy tale lives again in these forty new stories by some of the biggest names in contemporary fiction.

Spinning houses and talking birds. Whispered secrets and borrowed hope. Here are new stories sewn from old skins, gathered from around the world by visionary editor Kate Bernheimer and inspired by everything from Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Snow Queen” and “The Little Match Girl” to Charles Perrault’s “Bluebeard” and “Cinderella” to the Brothers Grimm’s “Hansel and Gretel” and “Rumpelstiltskin” to fairy tales by Goethe and Calvino. Fairy tales are our oldest literary tradition, and yet they chart the imaginative frontiers of the twenty-first century as powerfully as they evoke our earliest encounters with literature. This exhilarating collection restores their place in the literary canon.

Flames Rising is pleased to present the introduction to this new collection by Kate Bernheimer.

Today you die. Today you are reborn. Today you hunt the man who killed you.

It’s Lee Child vs. Altered Carbon in a high-tech blast of tough-as-nails future thrills. Matt Forbeck arrives as the new king of high-concept – with a blockbuster action movie in a book. In the near future, scientists solve the problem of mortality by learning how to backup and restore a persons memories into a vat-bred clone. When Secret Service agent Ronan “Methusaleh” Dooley is brutally murdered, he’s brought back from the dead yet again to hunt his killer, and in doing so uncover a terrible conspiracy.

Flames Rising is pleased to present a excerpt from this new novel by Matt Forbeck.

FlamesRising.com is pleased to present you with a preview of modern horror zombie novel PARIAH, by author and artist Bob Fingerman. Bob wrote an essay for us entitled “Confessions of a Boy Fraidy Cat where he talked about his personal experiences with the horror genre as a kid. Today, Bob offers us original artwork and a preview of his zombie novel PARIAH, which was released from Tor Books.