When I first heard about the Battlestar Galactica boardgame, earlier this year, I was interested in the game but not really dying to buy a copy. Sure, the Shadows Over Camelot-like approach to the game sounded fun, and the theme interested me, but I wasn’t so excited that I kept a close eye on rumors and new about the game. And when presented with an opportunity to buy the game at GenCon, I let is slip through my fingers (unlike The Black Goat of the Woods, which I immediately snagged). It wasn’t until I started hearing about the gameplay that I directed serious attention at the game.

Review by Philip Reed

Three new Shadowrun titles are now available at RPGNow!

Unwired

HACK THE PLANET!

Unwired is the advanced Matrix rulebook for Shadowrun, Fourth Edition. For everyday users, it explains how the Matrix works in easy-to-understand terms, and provides new software, qualities, and gear. For hackers and technomancers, it introduces new hacking tricks, malware, echoes, and sprites. It also covers system security and new Matrix phenomenon, from AIs to the resonance realms.Unwired contains everything players and gamemasters need for exploring the Matrix in Shadowrun.

3:16 designed by Gregor Hutton (Best Friends) is a winner of a High Ronny Award for Games Design.

Featuring a stunning cover by Paul Bourne (a|state, Cold City, Hot War) and haunting interiors by Gregor Hutton 3:16 is a visual treat.

This high-octane Science-Fiction role-playing game for 2 or more players has your Space Troopers killing bugs all across the Cosmos. You’ll advance in rank, improve your weapons, slay civilization after civilization and find out who you are through an innovative “Flashback” mechanic.

David Drake’s fiction has always been dark. His combat experiences in Vietnam made his fiction even darker and, in many ways, more honest and more horrifying. Earlier this summer Night Shade Books released the paperback edition of a collection of Drake’s “weird and fantastic” stories, Balefires.

The collection is rich with generous commentary from the author and a variety of fantasy, science fiction and horror stories. Shortly after the hardback release, Mr. Drake and I discussed writing and his experiences in Vietnam for an interview that ran in The New York Review of Science Fiction. What follows grew out of that larger conversation.

Interview by Jeremy Jones

Countdown is that very rare kind of book: a thriller that is genuinely thrilling. This is action-packed, non-stop adventure, combining the physiological, psychological and technological in a story that grabbed me immediately and didn’t let go.

The Great Plague twenty-five years ago caused havoc, and Earth hasn’t been the same since. It’s no wonder that everyone who survived is itching to catch a shuttle Offworld. Like Agent Orange, the Great Plague led to birth abnormalities: including Kira Jordan being born with psi abilities. But they’re only low-level…or are they?

Review by Tez Miller

Convention season has begun once more. The Flames Rising crew has a few favorites and we’re always looking for more places to check out and new events to try. While did not get the chance to attend WisCon right here in our hometown, there is always next year.

Coming up in the next few weeks are Origins Game Fair and Wizard World Chicago, both of which I hear are a fun time. We just might be stopping by WWC on Saturday June 28th, so let me know if you will be attending.

An upcoming convention we would love to check out is GenCon Oz, taking place July 3rd – 6th in Brisbane Australia.

The next big convention for us, and a personal favorite of mine, is GenCon Indy, taking place August 14-17 in Indianapolis, IN.

EVE Online: Empyrean Age will introduce Factional Warfare to the largest sci-fi MMO this June

CCP, one of the world’s leading independent game developers, has announced the features for the upcoming free expansion, EVE Online: Empyrean Age. Slated for a June 10 release, Empyrean Age brings an explosive end to the fragile peace that has existed for one hundred years between the four central races of New Eden and entices players to pledge fealty to their faction of choice to gain fame, wealth and power.

I’m a Gibson fan. I came up through the whole Cyberpunk thing – part of the reason I embraced the internet so readily – and followed onwards through the rest of his books as he became a publicly acceptable ‘important author’ rather than ‘just’ a science fiction author. Aside from a few short stories and things here and there I’ve read everything he’s put out from Burning Chrome to this, Spook Country.

Spook Country follows several different threads of stories and picks up on and carries along with a few bits and pieces from his previous novel, Pattern Recognition, which I loved and which suggests this may be part of a loose ‘trilogy’ much like his Cyberpunk trilogy (Neuromancer/Count Zero/Mona Lisa Overdrive) and his near-future trilogy (Virtual Light/Idoru/All Tomorrow’s Parties). This would seem to follow several patterns you can see in Gibson’s work…

Review by James ‘Grim’ Desborough

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past year you’ve probably heard of Mass Effect and, since I’m always late doing these reviews odds are you’ve already played it, or – lacking the luxury I have of spending more time playing games – are still playing it. A brief summation then at the start of this review is ‘buy it, it is good’. Above and beyond Bioware’s existing reputation for creating good computer game RPGs this shows they’re masters of it and, until they perfect freeform AI for running roleplaying games this is about as good as the genre gets.

Review by James ‘Grim’ Desborough

I am an unabashed Peter F Hamilton fan. I was initially introduced to his work by my great friend (and co-writer on The Munchkin’s Guide to Powergaming) Steve Mortimer through his Mindstar series (a bio-modified psychic detective of sorts in a post-warming, post flood, post ‘socialist’ Britain) and then followed on through the brick-like Night’s Dawn series and on into Pandora’s Star. Most of his books I have liked I great deal (apart from Misspent Youth) to the point where I even negotiated, and held for a year, the RPG rights to Mindstar and Night’s Dawn – but nobody was interested in pursuing it.

Review by James ‘Grim’ Desborough

Welcome to another collection of Mini-Reviews here on Flames Rising!

This week we are going to focus on some of the cool products published by some of the sponsors of the “Favorite Horror Game Contest” and the creative games they have released. Next week will be a few more of sponsors’ products. Including amazing art and funny cards.

So sit back and enjoy this collection of zombies, cannibals, strange creatures and nightmare cities…

Ok, I’m getting excited about the upcoming Battlestar Galactica Season Four. I’ve watched the Teasers and I’ve got the Razor DVD. What I don’t have is the Life Size Cylon. “Each Cylon is hand-made using only the finest materials and overseen by the ‘Robot Man’ himself, Fred Barton.” Can you imagine that thing sitting here […]

Bioshock tells the tale of a fallen utopia, I’ll try not to give too much away but you play jack, a survivor of a plane wreck in the mid-atlantic (actually the North Atlantic near Greenland and Iceland where the main plane route is if the coordinates given for Rapture’s location are right) who discovers this rotting vision and plays a key role in breaking a stalemate between two opposing forces there.

Review by James ‘Grim’ Desborough

The guys over at Rogue Games have made a couple of interesting announcements recently that are good news for fans of Sci-fi and Horror games. First up is the announcement that the sci-fi RPG Thousand Suns is available for pre-order at IPR. If you are curious about this game, take a look at the Design […]

Orbit is an older game, 2003, but we picked up a copy on the bring-and-buy table at Gencon UK so I thought I might as well review it. Some shops seem to still have copies for sale and you can, apparently, still get copies from the creator.

What the game is, or at least what it tries to be, is a sort of ‘Heavy Metal’ (the film) in game form, intermingled with some psychobilly retro-fifties styling. The book is soft back, reasonably well printed and weighs in at 258 pages all told. I had high expectations for this game as I sensed a kindred spirit to ’45: Psychobilly Retropocalypse but these expectations weren’t particularly fulfilled.

The movie gets right to it with an action packed wrestling match and swordfight. Antique dealer Russell Nash (Christopher Lambert) lives a quiet life in modern-day New York. Unbeknownst to the world, The Gathering of Immortals has come, and Nash is really Connor MacLeod, a five hundred year-old highlander who must fight for The Prize. Connor and the other remaining immortals must battle to the death. The victor cuts off his enemy’s head and absorbs his lifeforce, called the Quickening. Clancy Brown plays the evil and powerful Viktor Kurgan, an ancient Immortal who has a history with the Highlander.

In short, Cold Space has the benefit of a setting which promotes instantly understandable motivations for action and this should at least help players and GM alike structure a campaign and anticipate what kinds of scenarios are likely to be played out. The game is not likely to promote a richer appreciation of the reality of recent history than one of basic confrontation but, then, that is not really its purpose. My immediate response is to conceive of campaigns or characters who would subvert what seem to be the premises of the historical background but then I am nearly always an outlier when it comes to these things.

The fleet of the Warmaster’s 63rd Expeditionary Force have departed the shattered system of the interex en route to Davin at the behest of First Chaplain Erebus of the Word Bearers Legion. Expecting to find a world left under control and compliance of the Imperium of Mankind, the newly christened Sons of Horus Legion instead finds treason. The occupational forces left behind by the Warmaster Horus himself have turned against the Emperor and the ideals of the Imperium’s Great Crusade, and Horus vows revenge against those he once trusted who have betrayed him.

The fictional universe represented by Warhammer 40,000 is intricate and full of no small amount of intrigue. There are hundreds of factions at work and in motion, set against one another. Plans within plans, mechanizations and motivations that prop up the grim darkness of the war without end in the 41st Century of the Imperium of Mankind. Within the pages of the Horus Heresy, a trilogy-in-progress, what can be described as the single most important chain of events in the history of humanity are brought to light and out into the open in colored detail rather than objective narration from the Imperial point of view; the civil war that befell the Imperium after the spiritual corruption of the Warmaster Horus, mightiest of the Primarchs.

When USA Network’s limited series The 4400 premiered in the summer of 2004, the opening teaser said a lot. A little girl abducted; a soldier in Korea disappears; 4,400 abductees get dropped off by a comety ball of light. The Seattle branch of Homeland Security had its hands full, and over 7 million fans tuned in-setting records as the highest-rated and most-watched original cable series premiere to date.