Let’s be honest; who doesn’t love Count Dracula? The cape, the sex appeal, the slick hair, eschewing modern dentistry – he did it all, including upsetting more than a few well-to-do British noblemen. In Van Helsing, one player gets to play the toothy Count, while the remaining one to four players take on the roles of Jonathan Harker, Mina Murray, Lord Godalming and Abraham Van Helsing – the Hunters.

The board is a loose grid of spaces showing three levels of Dracula’s castle. Hunters move around the board looking for Dracula and his brides. The object of the game for them is to destroy five of the eight brides, or destroy Dracula himself if they like doing things the hard way. For the Count, his goal is to either transform all four of the Hunters into his minions or kill them, or to get four of his potential brides to the coffin space in his castle.

Another year’s in the books, one spent on the permanent and exhausting search through the horror movie scrap heap looking for the elusive hidden treasures. Unfortunately, this past year was a weak one. There wasn’t a whole lot to get excited about. Despite all the bad flicks, a few managed to rise above the fray, giving me hope for 2011.

As is usually the case, there were several remakes to take with a grain of salt. Some of them furthered the atrophying of the horror genre as it relates to studio backed filmmaking, others were much more horrible than horrifying, and all of them were unnecessary.

The Cold Ones is a novella by award winning author Elizabeth Donald. In Cold Ones, we meet Sarah Harvey, small-town bookstore owner with a secret: she’s not really a bookstore owner. It’s her cover; she’s part of a secret organization doing who knows what in this small coastal town. At least one other shop owner is another member of her team; their jobs are to keep an eye on the town and cover the rest of the team. The story begins with a scream as someone is attacked in the street by what turns out to be a quick, ferocious, zombie-like man, and as if that wasn’t bad enough, it represents only the beginnings of the trouble ahead…

The Cold Ones is a well-crafted tale; I was instantly sucked in and stayed up too late reading it. Ms. Donald does a very good job making her characters believable while avoiding most cliches found in supernatural fiction these days. This team of covert operatives is skilled and fairly bad-assed, but they are also fallible – they screw up occasionally and sometimes make poor choices.

Last week, I talked about why 13 GHOSTS is a classic horror film. For this week’s article, I decided to talk about a different kind of monster — THE BLOB.

“Released in 1988, The Blob remake is the kind of horror movie that makes you groan, laugh and scream. Creepy violins and cheerful images of a small town set the mood. The first people you meet? Teenagers!”

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.

This week we take a look at some horror-themed card games that deserve more attention. All are card or card/board hybrid games and all can be played in a relatively short (one hour or less) period of time.

The Werewolves of Miller’s Hollow by Asmodee Editions

WoMH is a party game, and follows the lead of popular convention games like Mafia. In Werewolves, players are dealt a character card – either villager or werewolf – which is kept secret. During the day turn, the players discuss who might be a werewolf and designate someone, suspected of being a werewolf, to be “executed.”

First let me state, that I am not the worlds largest Vampire fan. I don’t mean the RPG nor simply movies, or fiction- but as a franchise or archetype or whatever on a whole, the Vampire just doesn’t do it for me. So when the request came down through the digital bullpen that the powers at be who run this most fantastic site said they were looking for someone to write a blog post on Vampires, for our Vampire week, I shrugged my shoulders and put my digital hand up. Why not give it a shot?

Those of you familiar with what I have been doing on Flames Rising, know that I am pretty much a die hard and committed Zombie fan. I won’t go into anything related to Zombies here in too much detail, because this is supposed to be about vampires and I have already written about 150 words not concerning them, but I will say that I look forward to possibly doing my own little blog pieces solely on the walking dead, again though-this is about the living dead, or the undead, and we should begin. Ready?

Before I dive into this review, let me point out that it reads differently. I think a good review should not only weigh a product’s pros and cons. No, they should also speak to previous tastes and biases. Comparisons. Rather than dwell here, let’s dive right into the Hellfrost: Bestiary review.

Hellfrost: Bestiary (Triple Ace Games; 132 Pages) is a massive collection of fantasy monsters for the Hellfrost setting and Savage Worlds’ game engine. The book covers all manner of vile creature from the evil deer (page 20) to truly loathsome Dread Liche (page 84). These antagonists also offer many variations of trouble for PCs. There are “tanks” with toughness of 23, psionics, pesky swarms, and mystical adversaries. Trouble. Loads of trouble.

There are many ways to tackle a horror game. What one finds in a Call of Cthulhu game isn’t what they find in Geist. Heck, What you find in Call of Cthulhu isn’t really what you find in Cthulhutech. This is a great thing. Some groups want to spend the night warding off hordes of zombified neighbors while others want to take on the personas of uberpowerful creatures of the night. I mention this because I will be putting Bogeyman (Sane Studios, 164 pages) into a box with other games of a Clive Barker feel.

The chief feature to Bogeyman is that it’s runs off a card-based mechanic rather than dice. In fact, each player needs their own deck while game masters require two (and you want to keep them separate). Beyond that, the typical gaming fare–character sheets, snacks, pens, paper–mostly fill out this game’s requirements. The only bit lacking are the “beads of sweat,” which I think is a terrifically named aspect. These little tokens have many uses, most of which are linked to impulses.

After I got done reading CHANGES by Jim Butcher, the twelfth novel in the Dresden Files series, the first words that popped into my head were, “Holy hell.” First? There is absolutely no way that I can review this book without spoiling something for someone, so consider this a warning – if you don’t want anything spoiled for you, then don’t read this review. Second? If you’re a fan of the Dresden Files, then this is “the” book for you.

Okay, now back to the review. The first chapter opens up with a sucker punch to the gut. (You can read the first chapter of CHANGES on the author’s website.)

Hello, horror fans. As the ghost of Halloween past, I feel it is my duty to remind you that the past is sometimes more enticing than the present.

This time last year, FlamesRising.com offered you a series of treats that came in a variety of flavors.

Throughout October, several horror authors and game designers lent a hand (and even a finger or two) to record their tales describing a broad range of monsters — including ghosts not unlike myself.

Welcome to the third of the 13 Doors: an exclusive look behind the door at the upcoming Little Fears Nightmare Edition – The Game of Childhood Terror.

Door #3: Monster Factory

Little Fears Nightmare Edition is a game about kids fighting monsters. We already know about the kids, so what about the monsters?

The monsters in Little Fears Nightmare Edition can come from anywhere, that’s part of what makes them so much fun. Monsters can come from your own bad dreams, the fears of the players, urban legends, myths, cryptozoology, regular old zoology, a movie, literature—anywhere. Monsters in Little Fears are anything people fear. Fear is what gives them life, shape, form, power. Without people fearing them, they’re not really monsters at all.

This week we’re releasing the following kits in the Collection of Horrors: Mother of All Wrong Turns, Caveat Emptor, Body of Evidence, Good for the Soul and Serpent’s Tooth. Mother of All Wrong Turns is already up!

Just learning about the Collection? The Collection of Horrors is an anthology of Storyteller tools inspired by the Horror Recognition Guide that you can either use in conjunction with the Guide or as part of your existing Hunter: The Vigil chronicle.

Check out all of the Hunter: the Vigil products at the Flames Rising RPGNow Shop.

Strange Encounters

The Vigil brings no easy explanations — every night is a new mystery, a bizarre creature, an unknown terror. But hunters are humans, and humans must categorize — they take notes, keep journals, snap pictures and attempt to illustrate the horrors they meet on the hunt. By doing so, hunter cells try to find patterns, solve enigmas, and most important of all, keep hold of their sanity in these long, dark nights.

A Chronicle Book for Hunter: The Vigil

The Horror Recognition Guide is available at the Flames Rising RPGNow Shop.

Since monsters of various types are pretty much White Wolf Publishing’s stock and trade, it makes sense that they would attempt to diversify their product line to include horror-themed board or card games. One of White Wolf’s offerings, Monster Mayhem, has each player taking on the role of a different classic monster, seeking out victims and devouring those parts of them each fiend finds most delectable.

Players begin by selecting one of the five monsters – Vampire, Werewolf, Mummy, Zombie or Poltergeist – and placing the token for that monster on its starting space. The board is a grid of hexagons, and the players flesh out the city by placing the notable location tiles, either randomly or according to one of several sample layouts provided. Each player then draws three victims from the Victim deck and places that card by their monster’s data card.

Murder Most Foul What at first seems a case of an insane but isolated killer expands to put the cell at the mercy of an enemy that lives off violence itself, and can only be defeated by an act that could make the hunters killers on a par with the mass murderers they oppose. The […]

The old woman totters off to enjoy her breakfast, as tiny drops of bile patter on the street behind her.

People are turning up dead with their organs missing, but there’s no evidence of scars or surgery. The deaths are clearly unusual and perhaps even supernatural, and when one victim dies right in front of the hunters, their involvement becomes crucial. While the hunters may at first believe they are simply tracking down a monster, their investigations soon reveal a pattern to the killings, which implies some guiding intellect behind the travesties.

A story in the Storytelling Adventure System for Hunter: The Vigil.

Spearfinger is available now at the Flames Rising RPGNow Shop.

I was excited to receive my review copy of this corebook. There are genres that I enjoy and there are genres that I love. Preventing Apocalypses falls into the latter category. In fact, I hoped it could provide the mechanics for a two-year old campaign I have been running.

The idea of agencies combating the supernatural, while not original, remains a wide open field. There are several facets of the genre that can be explored, be it comedy, splatterpunk, or Lovecraftian horror. The game’s subtitle–An Action, Horror RPG . . . with a twist of Humor–relates the focus of API. This is a lighter look at the supernatural, something along the lines of Hellboy.

Review by Todd Cash

Two reasons to celebrate the season with Postmortem Studios this year!

Today we have published our 100th Clipart Critter so, if you’re a budding – or existing – publisher and are looking for some excellent, cheap artwork to use in your products, or if you are a Game Master looking for something to visualize your scenes and your big baddies, or if you’re a player looking for a character image, now is a great time to bag yourself some excellent artwork by industry veteran Brad McDevitt (Traveller, Nightlife and many more).

One of the challenges of any fantasy role-playing game is coming up with new, unpredictable and fearsome foes to tangle with your heroes.

“The Random Esoteric Creature Generator” by Goodman Games is sub-titled “For Classic Fantasy Games and their Modern Simulacra.” Simply put, it’s a monster-maker for d20 and similar fantasy
role-playing games.

The 31-page .PDF document is filled with random roll charts to help you design bizarre and unique creatures, giving you everything from size and body shape to special attacks and defenses.

Review by Michael Erb