This is a great looking issue. While it’s not rich in detail, the character designs have a great look and feel to them. They are nice and consistent from panel to panel, and there are even some great details in the backgrounds. The colors work well to showcase the mood and even help get the fear flowing with the gruesome images. Overall a great looking issue.

The story is by far the selling point on this issue. I can’t go too deep into it, but how freaking scary is that ending! So the start of the story had me a little confused, but as it went on I start to get a good feel for it. Nice character building throughout, you get a good sense of most of the cast. But all of that is just on hold when you reach that final page.

What do you and Cthulhu have in common? A love of the mythos, of course! In this post, we take a look at your favorite reviews of Cthulhu and other Mythos-related music, games, comics, books and films that you’ve enjoyed over the years. While we have an extensive selection of Lovecraft-related reviews and articles on the site, we chose these twenty not only because you really enjoyed reading these, but also because we felt that they were definitely worth a second look during Cthulhu Week. After all, who better to recommend something Cthulhu-related than your fellow cultists readers here on FlamesRising.com?

I believe that many folks judge a product based on their experiences with it filtered through the looking glass of expectation. If we expect X and get Y, we are often upset and our reviews of it tend to reflect that. I think the expectations of the Smallville need to be straight up front else the experience will suffer. This year there are other “Supers” RPGs being released. Smallville is considerably different in favor from the others in focus and vibe.

To get an idea of what the Smallville RPG is about consider the tele-drama it is based upon: young adults and all the weird social issues young people have. Add to these a variety of secrets and plots surrounding exceptional people and you almost have it. Make those exceptional people super-human…and it hits the mark.

While super heroes and super powers are a factor, I think it’s safe to say that they are flavor and useful as tools to deal with social issues and complications rather than the fix-all. This isn’t Mutants and Masterminds, Champions or DC Adventures.

Yazata is a new Pantheon for Scion done in the style of the Companion Pantheon sections for the Tuatha De Dannan, Celestial Bureaucracy, and Devas in the Scion Companion. It offers a look at a new Pantheon, their history, virtues, and PSP, some Birthrights, sample characters, and an examination of their Overworld, Underworld, and a Titan to menace them. Yazatas also offers a new All Purpose Purview, Stars, and an Adventure, The God, The Bad and the Ugly.

My familiarity with Persian mythology is mediocre. I am more familiar with it than the typical fellow on the street, but I would not say I have a professional’s grasp of it. Take my comments therefore with the appropriate grain of salt. On the other hand, I have run Scion heavily for over three years and have a good idea of how it works. As this is going up on a horror site, I’ll note like the other Scion books Yazata is not a horror game; if you’re looking for something to give a good scare at the table, you will want to give this a pass.

The BERSERKER comic series is a violent thrill-ride. It sets up a world where power is found only in destruction, and the conclusion is not likely to be a “pretty” one. Heroes get slaughtered and there are numerous super-villains and secret societies vying for control of the future. Through it all, ordinary people with extraordinary abilities are trapped in the middle and used as pawns. (Sound familiar? The BERSERKER comic does things a bit differently. One major super-human ability [so far], more blood, more guts, and more chaos – all with a base in Norse history and mythology.)

The cover art for each issue is, once again, amazing. Dale Keown, Jeremy Haun and Dave McCaig really bring their A-games to the various covers with just a few choice images and colors. Violent, of course, but with careful details that seem to convey more than just a gorefest.

Childhood revisited yet thoroughly contemporary: back in 1963 a very small Megan watched from behind the sofa (the Daleks terrified me!), and now I revel in the relaunch over the past five years… here in my hands is a box which like the Tardis itself contains far more than you’d think from the outside!

Just as the subject matter takes me back to childhood, presentation harks back to early role-playing games: a boxed set, ‘all you need to play’ even some dice. Purchasers of the PDF version get everything except box and dice, although you’ll have to print out cards & counters. The game itself – in both presentation and mechanics – is designed to be accessible to newcomers to role-playing as well as to those who have been playing a long time.

Ulrika Magdova, reluctant vampire, is struggling to control her thirst for blood. For the protection of herself and others, a coven of vampires has given Ulrika sanctuary, so she can safely adapt to a life of darkness. But before she learns to control her strange new powers, that sanctuary is endangered.

In the city of Nuln something is preying upon this ancient race, and threatening to expose their existence to the nation. A witchhunt has begun and people are calling for the destruction of the vampires. With nowhere to hide, Ulrika and her mentor, the Countess Gabriella, must hunt down this mysterious killer before they become its next victims.

Let me start by saying that vampires have never really been my thing. Other than loving Gary Oldman as Dracula and staring at Kate Beckinsale I haven’t been attracted to them the way many people are. I have always thought of vampires as being great villains when done right, but more often than not, they are done all wrong in the worst kind of way. Yeah that’s right Twilight; I am looking at you….

Here is is, folks, Artifacts #1, the first issue of the big cross-over event of the Top Cow universe, just now out at your local comic shop. And is it ever off to a bang. In several of the Top Cow series, we’ve been hearing about the 13 artifacts and how dangerous it would be to bring them all together. (Potentially, you know, the end of the world.) Some of the artifact holders are actively working toward that. Others are, of course, working against it, not wanting to be a party to Armageddon. But when Tom Judge is released from Hell bearing the Rapture, one of the 13, it begins to look like fate (or some power like it) is at work, bringing them together.

We open in New York with Sara Pezzini, the bearer of the Witchblade, fighting a minion of hell who is killing priests, looking for one in specific, the aforementioned Tom Judge.

While the full moon rarely has a dramatic an effect on most people, there are some who will admit that they can feel the pull of the moon, at least in subtle ways — and crime statistics bear this out year after year. For those rare few for whom the moon activates a profound curse, the world becomes a different place entirely – a world filled with soft, slow creatures to be hunted, attacked and devoured. Give thanks that those with such a curse are still a rarity…

In Curse of the Full Moon, James Lowder has collected 19 tales from an impressive collection of horror luminaries: George R.R. Martin, Ursula LeGuin, Ramsey Campbell, Charles DeLint, Michael Moorcock and Neil Gaiman are just a few of the names any fan of contemporary fiction will recognize, but the list doesn’t end there. Joe R. Lansdale, Nancy A. Collins, Peter S. Beagle, Gene Wolfe and Harlan Ellison also contribute tales to this collection.

“He is the legendary Lord of the Vampires. Dracula. Who would dare attempt to overthrow him? Only Dracula’s son Xarus, a ruthless and clever upstart with the bold ambition to unite all the world’s vampire sects under one flag. But Xarus’s older brother Janus isn’t sure he likes the idea of a new regime and seeks allies to oppose Xarus. The ultimate battle to control Earth’s Creatures of the Night unfolds, with the future of the vampire race and possibly the Marvel Universe at stake.“

I wasn’t super blown away by the artwork in this story. However it was strong enough for me not to hate it. When it came to character designs, I don’t know why Dracula was changed at all. Hell he looked like he was one of the Voltron bad guys. Sure it would have been strange to see all these other cool vampires and then some dude in a cape, so I will give them that, but why not just update him to look like he is the most intriguing looking man in the room. Almost like a president.

His name is Brunner. Goblins, vampires, fugitives, and even dragons – they’re all fair game for this lethal killer’s blade. Across the length and breadth of the grim Warhammer Old World, Brunner plies his trade, applying his skills and intelligence to track down and slaughter sinister fiends. But he also faces challenges from within his own dubious profession as a rival bounty hunter stakes a claim to his bounty. Enter the dark and dangerous world of a ruthless bounty hunter.

So about a month ago, when I was looking for something to read that didn’t concern itself with hordes of zombies and or the living dead in the big box book retailer I happened to glance over at the Sci-Fi section and see this wonderfully packaged series of books by author Jeff Somers, they had a smart design and yeah as shallow as it sounds, I look for that sort of thing when I purchase a book. Because you can at times- judge a book by its cover. Presentation is over half the product, and yeah, OK, I have been burned before by the way something has so handily caught my eye on the shelf.

Seeing that it was put out by Orbit books, who also put out Feed by Mira Grant, one of my 2010 top picks for Zombie reading, I was intrigued enough to purchase The Electric Church.

The Pathfinder Tales are a series of novels set in the fantastic new Pathfinder RPG setting. Having read several tie-in novels for a wide variety of settings/ games I was excited to give this a shot. I think my excitement was well placed; the novel is a lot of fun and a fantastic “first look” in to rich Pathfinder setting.

The author does something we see little of these days (it seems) in utilizing the first-person perspective. Admittedly it took a chapter or so to warm up to it, but it seemed to really work. The first person perspective makes the events of the story seem a bit more personal and the author did a fine job in making some really interesting characters.

It’s come to my own personal attention that there are no longer any things in this world that excite me. It’s not that I am some dispassionate postmodern intellectual existential snob, OK-maybe I am, but it’s not as if my world view doesn’t allow for some joy. And when I got the email from Jacob over at Permuted Press, regarding an opportunity to review “Day by Day Armageddon: Beyond Exile” from Zombie fiction legend, JL Bourne, I danced the dance of a thousand joys; which if you don’t know what that is –well, imagine a fully grown man running around flapping his arms like a 12 year old girl who just got to meet “Edward” from the “Twilight” saga.

Yeah- I will hang my head in shame as I write this. But my joy is still there, you can’t take that away from me.

As the Introduction states, this is a distillation of the core of Chaosium’s Basic Role Playing system, the mechanic that has powered many of the company’s best-known games such as Call of Cthulhu and RuneQuest. While the full system fills many pages, it is simple enough for the core to be presented fully-playable here, as an introduction or for use with a setting other than the main game lines.

The Introduction continues with an explanation of what role-playing games are all about, particularly useful if you’re using this work as an introduction to this type of game as well as to the BRP system. In describing what role-playing consists of, mention is made of the range of genres and settings you can play in…

After the horrors of Istvaan V, Horus declares outright war against the Imperium. In the shadows of the Emperor’s Palace, powerful figures convene. Their plan is to send a team of assassins to execute the arch-traitor Horus and end the war for the galaxy of mankind before it has even begun. But what they cannot know is that another assassin is abroad already, with his sights firmly set on killing the Emperor.

The Officio Assassinorum: we’ve been waiting on something like this for decades, and James Swallow delivers it. As expected it involves scheming at the top levels of the Imperium in order to end this civil war as quickly and painlessly as possible – anything to save The Emperor and his Imperium.

“Rome wasn’t built in a day… but it may crumble in one. Titans battle in the arena. A thumb turns down. A sword comes down. A dead man… stands up? Racing through dark, narrow tunnels beneath the Colosseum, two heroes and a child join together to escape their pursuers. Pursuers who were once men. Hungry men. Undead men. Rombies. Friends, Romans, Countrymen… Lend me your brains!“

Have you ever picked up a book where you knew the tone of the story just from the art? Well that is what you have here. A beautifully done issue, that the art really depicts what is going on in the story. Gore-geous looking zombies and nice crisp panels page after page.

I find that as time goes on and I continue reading more and more works in the survival horror/zombie fiction genre that there are good stories, there bad stories and then there are the exceptional ones, that no matter how many times you’ve seen or read the formula-and of course dear reader there is always a formula- you don’t get tired of it. Those works of fiction are the best examples of what the “Zombie” has to offer, and many times it’s the simple disconnection from the everyday, the little glimpses of truth which hold the story up. The idea of modern man faced with the unexplainable horror of reanimated corpses thirsty for flesh, with no rhyme or reason for their new existence,and how they deal with it- those are the greatest aspects of the genre.

This work opens with ‘Double Feature,’ a scholarly essay comparing and contrasting 1930s horror movies with Lovecraft’s work: similar themes but different treatments. Lovecraft describes everything in detail while movies suggest with light and shadow, much being left to the viewer’s imagination. Many elements are common to both, but the movies have more random, innocent victims while most of Lovecraft’s bring horror upon themselves; and in the movies the monsters usually are defeated by the final reel… even if they return in the sequel! Your games will likely draw on both horror movies and the written word, and those pesky Mythos horrors have a habit of popping up in the next adventure.

Shadows of Leningrad is the third in Goodman Games’ Age of Cthulhu series. These adventures, set in the 1920s, allow for pulpish globetrotting (Luxor and London set the scenes for the first two adventures). While these adventures can possibly become rather violent, their design strongly favors a traditional investigative format. With an unforgiving setting (early Communist Russia), a generous sampling of supernatural entities, and mundane threats, the adventure proves to be a daunting one.

The book’s smart layout ran a printer-friendly gambit of basic two-column text, minimal artwork, and good looking bordering along the headers and footers. When sidebars popped up, they were positioned at the bottoms of the pages.