In Hunter: The Vigil, you choose between three tiers of gameplay. At tier one, your characters will fight monsters with little to no support. They may find allies along the way, but they’re on their own. At tier two, you play hunters backed by a compact that typically operates on a regional level. Your hunters have more guns and gear to fight the darkness. At tier three, you play cogs in a global conspiracy that has plenty of resources — and politics to boot. Conspiracies have more information about the supernatural than they let on, but even then…it’s unclear if the lore they’ve acquired is accurate or not.

With Dancing with Tombstones, Michael Aronovitz, the author of Alice Walks and The Sculptor takes us deep inside the haunt of our most secret repressions. Today, Michael stopped by to talk to us about using horror to fill the empty spaces in genre fiction and how this new collection of tales was created during a […]

The ancient powers never fully went away. They wander our roads and cities, mingling with the teeming masses of humanity. Characters in Scion Second Edition begin as humans touched by fate, heirs to great powers and incredible destinies. In the core setting for Scion, characters discover they are the children of Gods, inheriting mantles, accomplishing great deeds, and deciding their own destinies. It’s a game about divinity and humanity, and everything in between — and now, with these two expansions, everything beyond as well. Scion: Dragon and Scion: Masks of the Mythos open new pathways, new origins, and new secrets for Scion Second Edition.

The world is ill. You have everything to lose through its sickness.

Your own blood will rebel against you. Your own herd.

Your own loved ones. Do not believe that just because you’ve had a hundred years on this earth, you’ll be exempt. Just because you were ignorant of it until now does not make you immune. Your waking to the reality of this world — of the great machine in its heart, and the sickness in its veins — is just the first step. You must find others like you and me and make them swear to drive back this Contagion. This world doesn’t have long left. You may be a monster, but perhaps with other monsters, you can drive back the destruction of everything.

After successfully fulfilling the Kickstarter and shipping books to distributors, Onyx Path Publishing has released Geist: The Sin-Eaters Second Edition in digital and hardcover formats.

Geist: The Sin-Eaters Second Edition contains:

– The complete rules for playing a Sin-Eater in the Chronicles of Darkness, including systems for organizing and directing the efforts of large-scale organizations like Sin-Eater cults or organized-crime families.
– Burdens, krewe Archetypes, and a host of unique powers to create your Sin-Eaters and the strange death-cults they build.
– Example settings from across the globe and history, from the tumult of Washington, D.C. in the 1960s to medieval Carcassone to present-day Beijing.
– A detailed look at the Underworld and its denizens, from the terrifying Kerberoi to the never-born Chthonians.

The Vampire: The Masquerade – New Blood Starter Pack is a print & play PDF bundle that embraces you into the World of Darkness and Vampire: The Masquerade.

Designed with new Storytellers and players in mind, it features a new story that teaches you to play this new edition of the roleplaying game, a rules reference guide, printable enemy and victim cards, 7 player characters, and a relationship map.

You wake up in a meat locker with vague memories of what happened last night. Something about you is not quite right. As you come to your senses, you realize that you have a hunger you’d never experienced before. Gradually, you’ll come to realize that you’ve been Embraced into the world of Kindred – or vampires to those not in the know.

This story takes you through your very first steps in Vampire: The Masquerade. Whether you will be the Storyteller running this, or a player participating in the story, this product doesn’t require any previous knowledge of or experience with the game.

DriveThruRPG has launched their annual Halloween sale, and as usual, it’s a doozy; thousands of items — more than ten thousand items on Drive Thru RPG alone — are marked at 25% off. As usual, the suite of Drive Thru sites — DriveThruRPG, DriveThruFiction, DriveThruCards, DMsGuild, and Storytellers Vault — are each offering this sale on a huge selection of items. I thought I’d take a moment to highlight several items I’m particularly fond of to illustrate the depth and breadth of what’s available now through October 31. Most (but not all) follow the Halloween theme of horror and the supernatural.

The annual Halloween Sale is on at DriveThruRPG! With 25% Off these titles, it is the perfect time to try something new and spooky to truly terrify your players!  1. Little Fears Nightmare Edition In this game you assume the role of children being haunted and hunted by monsters that the adults do not believe […]

Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s Certain Dark Things, about a Mexican vampire on the run from gangs, the police, and rival vampires trying to wipe out her family.

The story begins with Domingo, a teen-aged picker who makes his living going through garbage to find things to salvage and sell. On his way to work, he sees a striking young woman on the train, and he finds himself smitten — even obsessed — with this strange young woman walking a rather vicious-looking dog.

I was fifteen at the time of my first escape. Made friends with a passing biker girl and persuaded her to give me a lift. I got sick the moment we left the diner on the outskirts of town behind – just this overwhelming vertigo and the sensation of falling endlessly. I threw up in my borrowed helmet. The biker girl insisted we rest at the diner while I recovered, then made off without me.

My anniversary is coming up tomorrow though, forty-five years after that first ride. My biker girl is back in town too, all lines and grey hair, retracing the steps of her youth. She apologized for leaving me all those years ago, and offered to try again. We’re leaving tomorrow. I told her not to stop, not to turn back no matter what. I am leaving this town dead or alive.

The Contagion Chronicle is an overarching compendium of chronicle hooks, riveting settings, and Storyteller aids to help present all the Chronicles of Darkness game lines with one consistent story. In the chronicle, the Contagion acts as a motivational force and inspires the formation of factions where vampires, werewolves, mages, mummies, etc. come together in new and unique ways.

Developed by Matthew Dawkins and currently on Kickstarter.com with just over a week to go. We asked Matthew a bit about the project and his work at Onyx Path Publishing.

New Anthology of Scary Stories to Support Ongoing Wildfire Relief Efforts

Horror authors across Northern California have come together to release Tales for the Camp Fire, a new anthology of short stories, to support wildfire relief efforts. All profits from the sale of the anthology will be donated to wildfire relief funds administered by the North Valley Community Foundation.

On the morning of November 8th, 2018, the worst wildfire in the state’s history erupted in the foothills of Northern California. While emergency efforts were immediate, the Camp Fire burned for seventeen days before it was finally contained. It destroyed the town of Paradise and burned over 150,000 acres. At least 85 people died in the blaze. The impact of the fire was felt across the entire region as air quality became the worst in the world.

The latest addition the Chronicles of Darkness line of games from Onyx Path Publishing is here! Changeling: the Lost Second Edition has arrived in eBook and hardcover versions!

Changeling: The Lost Second Edition includes:

– Everything you need to create and play your own changeling, a human abducted by the fae and transformed by the experience.
– A complete setting of faerie wonder and macabre horror for the Chronicles of Darkness.
– A guide to changeling society, caught between the twin poles of human hearts and the vast fantastic.
– Supernatural powers, mystical oaths, and creatures out of legend.

Changeling: The Lost Second Edition is now available in PDF and Hardcover editions at DriveThruRPG.com and StorytellersVault.com!

“Fighting the Machine is like fighting the ocean. You literally cannot hurt it. Doesn’t matter how much poison we dump into the ocean. We’ll only kill the things in it. We’ll never kill it. Same with the God-Machine. Kill angels, traitors, stigmatics, cultists, cryptids, whatever, you’ll never hurt the Machine Itself. No, that doesn’t mean we stop trying. You stop trying, you drown. Screw that.”

—Mr. Bliss, Guardian Inquisitor

Available from Storytellers Vault

When I was approached about writing up the city I live in as a stretch goal for the Vampire: the Masquerade book Anarchs Unbound, I was thrilled. It was my first chance to contribute — in a meaningful, but small way — to the World of Darkness setting. My write-up was a side-bar, really — only about a thousand words — but the offer was made to me with a very short deadline in mind — less than a week, in fact — from accepting the job to turning over my completed draft. Once completed, I knew that there was more to this story, and I wanted the chance to expand on that very basic summary.

The Tipping Point of the Zombie Craze

The zombie genre, like all trends, waxes and wanes as excellent titles by talented people are drowned out by the cascading wave of others merely attempting to capitalize on the trend. It isn’t exactly difficult to understand why the undead find themselves coming and going through our collective consciousness, the themes and moods lend themselves to horrors and fears that have become all but ingrained into our very being. From the panic of diseases to the mutually assured annihilation of the species, the premise plays on the primal fears of the human experience.

I’ve never sailed the Amazon, I’ve never reached Brazil, But the Don and Magdalena, they can go there when they will! Unless I go to Rio, these wonders to behold Oh, I’d love to roll to Rio, some day before I’m old! — Rudyard Kipling, Just So Stories The Marvelous City Beneath the splendor of […]

Unknown Armies is an occult game about broken people conspiring to fix the world. It’s about humanity, and how those among us who are the most obsessed have the power to alter reality until it aligns with their fevered desires. It’s about getting what you want despite others trying to keep it from you.

Unknown Armies presents magick as it might exist in a world co-created by Tim Powers and James Ellroy, as twisting wrinkles in reality created by greater and greater risk, sacrifice, and obsession. In Unknown Armies we ask, what would you risk to change the world? Your friends? Your family? Your health? Your sanity? Magick finds a way to ask the very most from you, until you achieve what you want or you are left with nothing.

In Lee Murray’s most recent novel, Into The Mist, we follow the exploits of Sergeant Taine McKenna’s squad of professional soldiers, responsible for the safety of the group of geologists and biologists sent out to follow up on tantalizing news of the discovery of a large gold nugget. The squad is assigned to baby-sit this group of civilian scientists as they wander into the bush in search of the site where the gold was discovered. To make matters more complicated, shadowy corporate entities are interfering with the expedition, hoping to get the jump on their competitors and claim the mineral rights for their own firm. Tuhoe separatist rebels make an appearance as well, and they show up at a most inopportune time as the scientists and soldiers are struggling for their very lives against not only the elements and the rough terrain of Te Urewera National Park, but also against something more sinister — and hungry: a creature that seems hell-bent on picking them off one by one, and that shows a level of unnatural patience and cunning in hunting them down.

Many of the works of Edgar Allen Poe, while considered classics of literature today, don’t often match up with modern literary sensibilities. It was somewhat surprising for me then, to come across Red Stylo Media’s The Twisted Poe Anthology, an excellent collection of seven original tales inspired by the works of Poe. Published in 2011, this collection does not consist of adaptations — retellings of Poe stories — but rather, a brand new batch of original tales in the same spirit as Poe’s work. All of the individual stories are available as digital downloads for 99 cents each; I have added links to the descriptions of those stories for convenience’s sake.

The first story, “Absolution”, is written by Jason Ciaramella and illustrated by Enrique “Zeke” Savory, Jr. Absolution is a tragic tale of loss and guilt inspired by Poe’s poem “The Raven.”