Welcome to Dragon City, a grim, gritty metropolis ruled over by the Dragon Emperor, with legions of zombies scratching at the city walls by night.

Whether in the streets of Goblintown or the prestigious halls of the Academy of Arcane Apprenticeship, people try to scrape by, make a living, and survive from one day to the next. You, however, are looking for something more than simple survival. And in this city, if you don’t make your own adventure, another adventure is sure to find you.

Based on the fantasy noir novels of bestselling author Matt Forbeck and powered by Monte Cook’s Cypher system — written by Forbeck, with rules by legendary game designer Robert J. Schwalb — Shotguns & Sorcery: The Roleplaying Game contains everything you need to launch your campaign.

In the misty recesses of time, before the kingdoms and lands you know existed—before the elder elves, the dwarven ancestral lords, and even the dragons—civilizations undreamt rose and fell. And with their passing, they left behind remnants of the powers they wielded. They built citadels of metal, glass, and light, now hidden away in the […]

Go beyond the boundaries of the fantastic, award-winning Numenera setting.

Monte Cook Games is currently running an exciting Kickstarter campaign that will expand the Numenera RPG into new vistas, giving characters a chance to explore further than they ever dreamed. The campaign reached the origianl funding goal almost immediately after launching and now new stretch goals are offering backers expanded content, fiction, maps, and more.

Flames Rising is pleased to have award winning author and game designer Monte Cook drop by to tell us a little about some of the design goals of these new supplements and content being offered in this Kickstarter project.

THERE HAVE BEEN EIGHT PREVIOUS WORLDS.

Each world stretched across vast millennia of time. Each played host to a race whose civilizations rose to supremacy but eventually died or scattered, disappeared or transcended. During the time that each world flourished, those that ruled it spoke to the stars, reengineered their physical bodies, and mastered form and essence, all in their own unique ways.

Each left behind remnants.

The people of the new world—the Ninth World—sometimes call these remnants magic, and who are we to say they’re wrong? But most give a unique name to the legacies of the nigh-unimaginable past. They call them…

Tales from the Ninth World is available now in multiple eBook formats at DriveThruFiction.com!

From a world magically transformed entirely into glass to a distant future where the Catholic Church of Osirus uses two singularities to manipulate time, the science fiction and fantasy stories of Small Matters take the readers to places unlike any they have visited before.

Brought to you from the mind of master world-builder and storyteller Monte Cook, these seven short stories tell tales of vengeance and honor. Love and murder. Loyalty and greed. As the title suggests, these are personal tales, not of world-saving quests but of people who face tough decisions that affect their own lives. Not all of them choose wisely…

Flames Rising is pleased to present an exclusive pair of excerpts from this collection.

Happy 9th Birthday, Malhavoc Press!

Time to celebrate Malhavoc’s birthday and save!

It’s been NINE years since Malhavoc Press released The Book of Eldritch Might as a PDF. To celebrate, we’re discounting all of our eBooks 30% off or more for one week only, May 21 to 28, 2010. This is a great time to check out a book you passed on earlier or grab up the ones you’ve been meaning to get anyway – including big ticket titles like Ptolus or Arcana Evolved!

Time to stock up on those PDFs – for this week only you can buy many of our titles for less than five bucks each! Stop by and check them out on DriveThruRPG.com and RPGNow.com.

Dungeonaday.com, Monte’s new subscription-based adventure site, goes live today, offering game material and DMing advice to its members. Dungeonaday.com, in fact, builds an entire ongoing campaign with a new material updated every weekday.

Monte expressed excitement for the new format in which he could create and deliver game material. “It’s been very fun coming up with this concept and seeing where it can go, but the key component will be the feedback from members, so it still could go in all-new directions,” Monte said.

Dungeonaday.com will be updated every weekday with a major encounter, plus frequent blog and podcast updates, monthly bonus encounters, and more. Members will find an active forum where they can ask questions, give feedback to Monte, exchange tips and ideas with each other, and help build Dungeonaday.com into a community of dungeon (and dragon) enthusiasts.

The latest addition to the Halloween Horror series is from game designer and author, Monte Cook (Worlds of Their Own, Ptolus). Monte took a short break from researching his latest project for this bit of horror.

There are things in the deep best left alone, things that are very hungry…

The Kragethogil and the Reapers

Created by Monte Cook

Sometimes, the most terrible thing is that which you never see. The kragethogil dwells deep underwater, a monstrously vast, ghastly abomination of spiny tendrils and sightless eyes. No one knows precisely what it looks like, because the creature never comes to the surface, and never confronts its prey.

That’s for the reapers to do.

Through a horrific psychic intrusion, the kragethogil spawns tiny extensions of itself within the minds of swimmers and fishermen straying into waters they should have avoided. After a brief and bloody gestation, the telepathically implanted larva takes control of the host and transforms it from within, assimilating its flesh into its own. The result is a reaper.

Key Encounters: The Volcanic Shrine combines the writing and imagination of fan favorite Monte Cook with SkeletonKey Games‘ best selling miniatures-scale tiles to bring a detailed encounter to your table top. The Volcanic Shrine is a major encounter for fantasy d20 games that can be built with the 20 brand-new, custom designed miniatures-scale tiles included in the product. The encounter details the link between a massive lake of lava deep underground and the Elemental Plane of Fire itself. This encounter could be used as the center point of an entire adventure involving creatures of flame and the evil plot of a dark elemental creature known as Kaliastrix.

We’ve covered vampires, zombies, magic and more in past Flash Fire Mini-Reviews. This week we’re going to take a look at a genre that often blends Sci-Fi with Horror and Adventure with Mystery…sometimes all at once.

Post-Apocalypse stories often show a bleak future, but can offer a bit hope as well.

The civilized world has come to an end, in the rubble the survivors battle horrors and each other in an attempt to gather resources and perhaps to rebuild their world. Post Apocalyptic settings are the subject of this week’s Flash Fire Mini-Reviews.

We’ve got a mix of games, fiction and a movie to explore this week. Each with a different spin on just what Post-Apocalypse means…