“This is the final volume of “Family Bones”, a true crime graphic novel about the elderly serial murderers from Missouri. In their 70?s, Ray and Faye Copeland were sentenced to death for the murder of many farm workers that lived with them. The tale told through the eyes of their unwitting nephew comes to a gruesome conclusion. And through it all somehow this city boy finds young romance with a neighbor’s daughter. Written by the actual great nephew of Ray and Faye Copeland, “Family Bones” is a gritty, fish-out-of-water American gothic that will send shivers down your spine.”

I enjoyed the artwork in this volume a bit more than I did in Vol. 1. Not saying that there is better talent on board here, just that I liked the more realistic look that this group of artists brought to the project. Even as the story progresses here, and we see more of the true nature of the cast, it seems to get grittier and darker.

Ullsaard has conquered the known world. All have fallen before his armies.

Now it is time to take the long journey home, back to the revered heart of the great Empire he had helped create for his distant masters. But when he returns to the capital, life there is so very different from what he had believed. Could it be that everything he has fought for, has conquered and killed for, has been a lie?

I’ve long been a reader of Gav’s work and consider the novels he has written for Black Library Publishing to be among the best works they have put out to date. I was excited to see that Gav had stepped out of the Games Workshop intellectual property to create something all his own. The folks at Angry Robot were nice enough to send me a copy of The Crown of the Blood several weeks ago and I happily stuck in.

White Wolf Publishing seems to have covered everything possible for Vampire the Requiem; it helps they had a previous edition of the RPG – Vampire the Masquerade – to hash out what players though was useful and what they didn’t want. Along comes a small tidbit like Invite Only, and I for one am left wondering “Why didn’t anyone think of this sooner?”

Written by David A. Hill Jr. and Chuck Wendig, Invite Only is a guide to parties — more specifically, parties hosted or attended by the Kindred. Besides giving the less combat-oriented Kindred something interesting to do, parties are also the focus of a lot of deals and surprises in the V:tR world. A Kindred who pays attention could learn a lot at a party – if she survives long enough to make use of this knowledge.

“No one knows where these two warriors came from. The only thing that’s clear is that they’re two of most ornery, trouble-making $%@# that have ever lived. SKULLKICKERS is a fantasy action-comedy: Two mercenaries are entangled in a high-class assassination plot and nothing—werewolves, skeletons or black magic—will stop them from getting paid. If you love tabletop fantasy RPGs or movies like Army of Darkness, SKULLKICKERS is waiting for you!“

Have you ever read a comic book and then tried to replay it all in your head, but all you seem to recall is a cartoon? Except you didn’t just watch a cartoon. No, instead you read a comic book. This book does that to me. The artwork is playful and laid out so well that I really recall it as a cartoon. Sure you’re not going to get super detailed action here, but who cares?

The alchemist has been knocking around the fringes of fantasy games for ages, generally – if codified at all – as an NPC that your characters can go to for a range of useful items to take on their adventures, with alchemy itself as a sideline skill practiced in your ‘Craft’ spot. Now Paizo’s Advanced Player’s Guide has brought him out of the workshop to become a playable character in his own right, with skills useful down the dungeon or out on the road, and this product seeks to expand on this and make him an even more attractive option.

The alchemist PC has several notable skills, which are mentioned in the Introduction – he can throw bombs, make and use extracts, brew potions and use poison. However, to hone such a character, he needs appropriate feats and here a grand total of 30 are presented for the budding alchemist to choose from.

Benjamin Baugh’s Savaged edition of The Kerberos Club is one of the more imaginative settings I’ve seen for the engine in awhile. The setting couples super heroes with Victorian England. It’s really a game for fans of Alan Moore’s The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (the comic of course, not the movie). Beginning in 1860, superhumans begin cropping up (or flying about in this case). The public is understandably weary of such, so factions quickly form. The superhumans come in all flavors. There are mystically created heroes, Mystery Men of Science, and more. The 300-page corebook, while meaty, still requires both the Savage Worlds corebook and Savage Worlds Superpowers Companion to play.

Having read some of Bentley Little’s work before (MY FATHER’S SON), I was really interested in picking up THE DISAPPEARANCE to see what twists and turns were in store for me.

The story takes place in our modern-day world, and infuses our worst fears into what should be a very fun weekend. A group of college students from UCLA travel to the world-renowned Burning Man festival, and experience a bizarre turn of events: they wake up from a drug-induced state to find that Gary’s girlfriend Joan has disappeared. Worse, when they contact the police, they don’t believe that she has ever existed because her digital identity has been wiped cleaned.

So, by a show of hands- who would have thought that there would ever come a time, in the history of television, when the total evisceration and down right general defilement of a shambling corpse would make for great, if not EPIC, television?

I know what you’re thinking and no, obviously not me, because if it were me then the first sentence of this little diatribe would be a little misleading. Was it you? I couldn’t see your hands if it was, so I’ll take that as a no as well. But that’s exactly the way it was last Sunday when I watched the second episode of AMC’s The Walking Dead. It was a painful and intimate event, one that even I, one of the biggest fans of the so called “Survival Horror,” genre couldn’t watch without thinking, “Holy crap on a crap cracker, that was intense.”

The Dresden Files RPG (DFRPG) by Evil Hat Productions is their adaptation of the FATE 3.0 system to the world created by Jim Butcher in his novels. While not required reading to play the game, a brief overview of the novels will be helpful, as no such summary is included in the game, with that in mind, there are mild spoilers throughout. The novels are chiefly concerned with the cases taken by a private investigator who is also a wizard. He solves various crimes in the city of Chicago that have an occult connection. The writers of the RPG have done an excellent job of using an established intellectual property as a baseline setting and not allowing the characters from the novel to overwhelm the game, a situation that has hurt other settings in the past.

The book itself is a large volume at just over 400 pages. The cover is a full wrap around image depicting Harry Dresden, Karrin Murphy and Michael Carpenter doing battle against a host of supernatural foes. The interior of the book consists of full color pages that are printed to appear as if a coil bound notebook. This appearance is due to the fact that the game is framed in such a way that it appears to be a manuscript of the game written by one of the characters from the series of novels. This stylistic choice is furthered by the inclusion of marginalia written by the “author,” a werewolf named Will, Harry Dresden and Bob, a spirit assistant to Dresden.

Jim Hines has a way of twisting fairy tales to let him get at bigger issues that lurk behind those stories. One of the biggest ideas he decided to take on is the traditional tale of Sleeping Beauty. One of the early versions of the tale says the the princess was not woken with a kiss, but either with intercourse or the pain of childbirth. If you follow Jim’s online writing at all, you know he’s worked very closely with rape survivors, and that talking about rape is important to him. It’s no surprise that he handles the issue with sophistication and a delicacy, which becomes even more relevant in Red Hood’s Revenge , a story that takes Talia back to her homeland to face her demons. The Lady of the Red Hood, also known as Roudette, is the most deadly assassin in the world, and she’s come after Talia. Her motives are unclear, especially when circumstances lead her to team up with the princess trio, but her hatred for fairies is obvious. When Talia wants to take out Zestan, a fairy the heroes suspect of being a deev — a very powerful evil fairy — Roudette gives every appearance of going along willingly, and only a shift in narrative technique allows readers to see that she’s up to something. (In the previous books, Jim stuck to a more limited third-person narrator; in Red Hood’s Revenge, the narration is broader, allowing peeks into several of the character’s perspectives.)

So I have waited to get this off the ground for a few good reasons, the first being that I am and will probably always be a very, very lazy individual. The second being that I wanted to give my initial awestruck impressions of AMC’s The Walking Dead a rest and see if I could realistically look at the show with a critical and more journalistic eye. Or at least if not a journalistic and critical eye, one that wasn’t covered in fan boy man happiness. Yes I said it fan-boy man happiness. don’t judge, it isn’t a very charming quality in a person.

Sunday October 31st 2010 will most likely go down as one of the most important dates in the history of zombie anything, outside of the original release of Night of The Living Dead. If you don’t believe me then you’re probably not as big a fan of the genre or you really have no idea of what I am talking about when I say “zombie” because you would have had to have been born circa 1949 to not understand the significance that the show represents for the horror community and the world of speculative fiction and/or maybe even the entire Media industry in and of itself. Looking back on it -the entire day, was at least for me, predicated around the premiere of AMC’s The Walking Dead. I know that , if you are reading this article, then it was probably the same way for you.

The introduction to this adventure provides an apposite reminder: in a game in which dynasties and bloodlines and the good of your House feature large, weddings are going to be very important events indeed. For players of the game of thrones, dynastic alliances are often sealed by a marriage, whilst the young may still harbor hopes of marrying for love rather than political advantage. Even if you are not getting wed yourself, there is plenty of scope during such an event to further your own ends as well as enjoy a good party!

So is the case with the wedding central to this adventure. Two minor houses are sealing recent agreement through marriage, having for many years been at odds with each other. One party is happy, affection having conveniently coincided with policy, but the other party has other ideas…

With the new season of Trueblood beginning soon, I thought it was a good time to take a look at the books that inspired the popular HBO series, starting with a collection of short stories – an excellent way to evaluate the world of Sookie Stackhouse for one’s self.

For those who may not know, True Blood is based on a series of novels by Charlaine Harris. The main character of these books, Sookie Stackhouse, is a barmaid in a fictional Northern Louisiana small town called Bon Temps. Sookie has a rare talent; she’s a telepath. As much curse as blessing, her telepathic ability meant she always knew what everyone around her was thinking – both god and bad. Sookie had resigned herself to a lonely existence when “V-Day” happened. Japanese scientists perfected a synthetic blood, and vampires – no longer needing to attack humans to survive – one day formally announced themselves to the world, along with their intention to live side-by-side with humans.

So, just when you thought there wasn’t any room left in hell for yet another “definitive” book on the greatest zombie movie of all time, Citadel Press puts out their 200 plus page achievement called Night of the Living Dead: Behind the Scenes of the Most Terrifying Zombie Movie Ever.

Yes, that’s the whole title.

Anyway – written by Joe Kane billed on the cover as “the Phantom of the Movies,” which I believe hearkens back to his (Kane’s) movie reviewing days with the New York Daily News, the book stands now as possibly the definitive book on the original movie. I found it at a big box book retailer about two days ago and after quickly leafing through it was compelled to purchase it.

When a rogue neuropathologist makes a startling breakthrough—literally isolating the root of all evil in the recesses of the human brain—he’ll stop at nothing to advance his theory. With the help of a naïve Hollywood actress, a tormented motion picture production designer and a condemned serial killer, Dr. Wolfe Chitel launches a bold experiment in the Nevada desert, the outcome of which could transform humanity forever. “The Truman Show” meets “Se7en” in SYNDROME, an inventive, original graphic novel hardcover that serves as one of the first titles to be featured under Archaia’s new Black Label line. Published in association with Fantasy Prone.

You might think that it was bad enough to be locked up on an automated spaceship and sent off on a one-way journey to an unknown destination in the company of people even nastier than yourself… but that’s only the start of it. Science-fiction meets horror meets prison drama in this game – and digging a tunnel to freedom is not an option.

Chapter 1: History sets the scene, explaining the political, historical and societal changes on Earth that have led to the development of this rather drastic solution to the age-old question of what do you do with those people too mad, bad or inconvenient to fit in to normal society. Based on rather dodgy psychological theory, people were assessed for their potential to commit violent crime and those deemed most likely to become violent got locked away before they even had a chance to do something wrong.

FlamesRising.com contributor Eric Pollarine blogs about horror music and horror artists in this colorful post about his top ten Halloween songs, albums and soundtracks.

It’s time for Halloween again, that most special of holidays for nerds, RPG folks, fan boys, Goth kids, and freak shows such as us, where we are able to come out come out from wherever we normally hide and celebrate openly, without fear of persecution, our collective weirdness. From the food court in the mall to the back room of the comic shop, from our mother’s basement to the diner down the street, no-not that one, the other one down the street.

What do you give the Savage Worlds’ character who has everything? In an earlier review, I suggested Suzerain, which permits players to take their characters to the demigod level and opens up, well, all the other game books on the bookshelf at home. This is becoming quite the trend as massive gaming collections fail to the get love they deserve. Eden’s under-appreciated Odyssey Prime tried this (with D20 and Unisystem no less). John Wick has an interesting take on it with his Flux game while Suzerain tries to work from one system (Savage Worlds) to make all the setting fit into place. The designers at Savage Mojo could have stopped with the core book, leaving readers to fend for themselves; however, they instead have created a series of settings intended for demigod powerhouses. To paraphrase the game, fighting a few vampires is good work for a hero. Fighting an army of vampires is what you get when you attain Suzerain status.

A visceral ride through a bio-punk future where life is cheap and death is the only way out. Welcome to 2085, the year of the rabbit. Fluorescent Black takes the reader into the hard-hitting dark future of South East Asia where gene-tech has divided humankind into two races: the rich, healthy Superiors and the sick, crazy Inferiors. These two races live in neighboring cities separated by a heavily fortified border. A superior named Nina is the test model for cutting edge genetic designs. She is a paragon of physical and mental health: her brain and body represent billions of dollars worth of corporate research and development. During a bio-terrorist attack, Nina is kidnapped by a street gang and taken across the border into a ghetto full of man-made splice animals, psychopathic hookers, drug addled freaks, deadly insects, poisonous ecosystems, and abandoned tenements. When the corporations tighten their dragnet, the gang quickly discovers that this is no ordinary captive… but she may be the key to solving all of their problems.

Former high school history teacher Layne Prescot and his girlfriend Tara are returning home from teaching English in China for Laynes’ father’s funeral. While they wait to board the next flight back to his sleepy and economically depressed hometown of Lilly’s End, Florida they meet a mysterious “professional courier” named Mr. Scott, and from there the adventure, terror and conspiracies are just beginning. Because on arrival back home they find that the mysterious man has left Layne his briefcase, and at exactly 11:23 the townspeople start going mad and committing unspeakable acts of violence towards both the people they love and themselves. While the two and their friends try to find a way out they quickly realize that the town has come under strict quarantine, been cut off from the outside world and that death isn’t picky.