Black Gate – Page 547 – Adventures in Fantasy Literature

What Lies Beyond The Yawning Portal? Some of the Best Adventures in Gaming

Sunday, March 26, 2017 John ONeill Comments 6 comments

Now here’s a splendid idea, long overdue. Next month Wizards of the Coast is releasing an anthology of some of the finest D&D adventures ever created — including Gygax’s masterpiece Against the Giants, and the insidious and infamous Tomb of Horrors — under one cover, all updated for use with the Fifth Edition of the rules. There’s a lot of excitement building for this book, and rightly so… it’s a great way for modern players to experience some of the classic dungeon crawls that transformed early players into life-long gamers a generation ago.

Dread tales told in the dead of night!

When the shadows grow long in Waterdeep and the fireplace in the taproom of the Yawning Portal dims to a deep crimson glow, adventurers from across the Forgotten Realms, and even from other worlds, spin tales and spread rumors of dark dungeons and lost treasures. Some of the yarns overheard by Durnan, the barkeep of the Yawning Portal, are inspired by places and events in far-flung lands from across the D&D multiverse, and these tales have been collected into a single volume.

Within this tome are seven of the most compelling dungeons from the 40+ year history of Dungeons & Dragons. Some are classics that have hosted an untold number of adventurers, while others are some of the most popular adventures ever printed. The seeds of these stories now rest in your hands. D&D’s most storied dungeons are now part of your modern repertoire of adventures. Enjoy, and remember to keep a few spare character sheets handy.

For use with the fifth edition Player’s Handbook, Monster Manual, and Dungeon Master’s Guide, this book provides fans with adventures, magic items and deadly monsters, all of which have been updated to the fifth edition rules. Explore seven deadly dungeons in this adventure supplement for the world’s greatest roleplaying game.

Tales from the Yawning Portal will be released in hardcover on April 4. It includes the following seven adventures.

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7th-9th April is Conpulsion! Edinburgh’s Ultimate Roleplaying and Tabletop Convention!

Sunday, March 26, 2017 M Harold Page Comments 0 Comment

255 conpulsion16-98 (2017_02_21 14_24_17 UTC) — Scotland’s biggest weekend gaming convention

255 conpulsion16-157 (2017_02_21 14_24_17 UTC) — I’ll be doing a writing workshop based on my Storyteller Tools

If you’re anywhere near Edinburgh, then don’t miss Conpulsion this Easter!

It’s basically Valhalla for geeks, a temporary Nerdtopia — think Burning Man, but with less sun and more dice.

We’re talking two and a bit days of actual table top gaming in a popup community that you wish would just settle down and start its own township!

It’s Scotland’s biggest weekend gaming convention, and it is a splendid experience. (See reviews for 2014 and 2o15)

There are dozens of roleplaying games squirrelled away in the Gothic venue’s labyrinth, all refereed by experienced GMs. These run morning, afternoon and evening, so it really is possible to roleplay solidly for two days.

There are whole areas devoted to modern board and card games, some of them entirely new, plus various LARP games and panel discussions.

There’s also always wargaming going on, especially X-Wing and Warhammer 40K, but also games you won’t have heard of, or are yearning to try.

The atmosphere is inclusive and have-a-go, with roleplaying sessions aimed at a range of ages and experiences, and board and wargames hosted by enthusiastic demonstrators.

Overall it’s a really good chance to try out — or at least, watch — the kind of games that look tempting but are a bit too expensive to just buy on the off-chance that they are any good. It’s also the place to pick up copies of games without having to pay shipping — a refreshingly retro experience in an era when the Internet is usually cheaper.

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The Poison Apple: Have Long Sword Will Battle, An Interview with Martin Page

Saturday, March 25, 2017 Elizabeth Crowens Comments 1 comment

Martin Page demonstrating German Longsword at Compulsion

Martin Page is a regular contributor to Black Gate and writes novels, such as the alternate history mash-up Swords versus Tanks and non-fiction books like Storyteller Tools, under the pen name, M. Harold Page. He lives in Edinburgh, Scotland and teaches Medieval German longsword at Edinburgh’s Dawn Duellists Society.

Martin, what have you been working on?

I’ve been taken a break from blogging while working on a space opera series. I’ll shortly return with a series of articles on the new edition of Traveller, the famously gritty Science Fiction roleplaying game.

Traveller?

Massively influential game from the same era as Dungeons and Dragons but still going strong. Traveller has been around so long at this point that people recommend books or TV series that are strangely like the game, because they were probably heavily influenced by it!

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The Complete Carpenter: The Fog (1980)

Saturday, March 25, 2017 Ryan Harvey Comments 3 comments

In my John Carpenter career retrospective, I’ve now crossed the Rubicon: moving past the director’s most famous and successful film and entering the 1980s, a decade his movies helped define and often looked far beyond … frequently to their initial box office detriment.

The decade opens with Mr. Carpenter in a slight quandary: when you just made the most profitable independent movie of all time (a record unbeaten until The Blair Witch Project more than twenty years later), there’s going to be a bit of pressure for the follow-up. Carpenter stuck with the horror genre for his next film, although a much different type than the realistic slasher of Halloween. Taking inspiration from classic ghost stories, the vengeful corpses of EC Comics, and a trip to Stonehenge, Carpenter and producer Debra Hill came up one of the best low-budget horror elevator pitches: magical fog brings pirate leper ghosts to unleash their wrath on a small seaside town. Yep, pirate leper ghosts.

The Story

Antonio Bay, a sleepy coastal Northern California town where nothing happens, is preparing to celebrate its hundredth anniversary of being a sleepy coastal town where nothing happens. Then everything starts to happen at once when the ghosts aboard the Elizabeth Dane, a leper colony ship that sank near Spivey Point a century ago (timing!), slosh ashore in a shroud of thick, luminescent fog. It turns out Antonio Bay was founded on a double-cross that tricked the leper colony out of their gold and lured their ship with false beacons into wrecking on the shoals. The murderous specters and their pointy fishing tools make a mess out of the lives of folks in Antonio Bay, including lighthouse keeper and radio DJ Stevie Wayne (Adrienne Barbeau), the anniversary event organizer Mrs. Williams (Janet Leigh), a hitchhiking artist (Jamie Lee Curtis), and a priest who’s discovered the dreadful truth about the town’s history (Hal Holbrook).

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The Top 50 Black Gate Posts in February

Friday, March 24, 2017 John ONeill Comments 0 Comment

Back in December, Derek Kunsken’s enthusiastic review of Star Wars: Rogue One, “I Am One With the Force and the Force Is With Me,” shot up to #2 on our monthly traffic chart. Last month he claimed the #1 slot, and he didn’t need a blockbuster film to make it happen — he did it the old fashioned way, with a book review. The book in question was Thrill-Power Overload: A History of the British Comic 2000 AD, a detailed history of the legendary comic that launched Judge Dredd, Alan Moore’s D.R. and Quinch, Sláine, Rogue Trooper, Strontium Dog and countless others. Check it out.

Number 2 on the list for February was Mark Finn’s report on the Kickstarter for the first Skelos Press anthology, Chicken Fried Cthulhu, followed by Violette Malan’s survey of My Top Five Sword-Fight Movies, our obituary for GDW founder Loren Wiseman, and Andrew Zimmerman Jones’ interview with Paizo mastermind and Creative Director of their new Starfinder RPG, James L. Sutter.

Howard Andrew Jones’ review of one of his favorite recent games, the solitaire-suitable WWII simulation Heroes of Normandy, came in at #6 for February. At #7 was our report on the new Literary Wonder & Adventure Podcast from Robert Zoltan and his talking raven — featuring a lengthy interview with Black Gate‘s own Ryan Harvey on one of his favorite topics, Edgar Rice Burroughs. And close on its heels was our announcement of the 2017 Nebula Award Nominations.

Rounding out the Top Ten were Steven Brust’s summary of Five Roger Zelazny Books that Changed His Life, and Fletcher Vredenburgh’s January Short Story Roundup.

The complete list of Top Articles for February follows. Below that, I’ve also broken out the most popular overall articles, online fiction, and blog categories for the month.

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Wordsmiths: An Interview with Jerome Stueart

Friday, March 24, 2017 Brandon Crilly Comments 0 Comment

Last post, I had the pleasure of reviewing Jerome Stueart’s short story collection The Angels of Our Better Beasts, which is one of my favorite collections to date and something you all need to go read. (Seriously, here’s the link; I know you have money kicking around somewhere.) Jerome also did me the pleasure of an interview to discuss his writing practice, his previous projects, and some of the stories in his collection. I hope you enjoy as we ramble back and forth (and then go buy his book)!

Jerome Stueart writes fiction, memoir, science fiction and fantasy. His work has been published in journals, magazines, newspapers and on the radio–a list of which can be found under Written Work and Books. He’s a 2007 graduate of Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writing Workshop in San Diego and a 2013 graduate of the Lambda Literary Retreat for Emerging LGBT Voices. He teaches workshops on writing science fiction/fantasy and writing about faith. His co-edited anthology of science fiction/fantasy that explores faith, Tesseracts 18: Wrestling with Gods, was published by EDGE Science Fiction and Fantasy Publishing. His first novel, One Nation Under Gods, will be published in summer of 2018 from ChiZine.

Me: First off, thanks for taking the time for this interview, Jerome! There are a bunch of different things in Angels of Our Better Beasts that I want to ask you about. I’m going to start with the illustrations that you included with each story (and the sketches you create for people at conferences). Which came first for you: drawing or writing? And does one influence the other at all?

JS: Hey Brandon! Thanks for interviewing me. As to your question: I think you’re talking about in MY LIFE which came first. If so, drawing came first. I started drawing as a child — pictures of animals. Little cartoon talking animals, I think at first, based off a skunk puppet I bought when I was seven or eight. But immediately, I turned them into story. The skunk had a porcupine friend (both outcasts, of course) and they wandered through this flip pad I had. I also was introduced to comic books when I was nine or ten, and then my drawing took on more superhero images. Again, I immediately created a team and gave them personalities, but the drawings came just ahead by a nose.

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New Treasures: Hekla’s Children by James Brogden

Friday, March 24, 2017 John ONeill Comments 2 comments

James Brogden is an Australian horror writer with three novels to his credit, The Narrows, Tourmaline, The Realt, plus the collection Evocations. His latest is a modern-day dark fantasy about a teacher who has four students go missing on the same day… and the horror that begins when one of them returns alone.

Tim Lebbon calls it “Brilliant… full of great twists and beautifully drawn characters,” and Kirkus Reviews says it’s “genuinely scary… a wonderfully odd mix of dark Bronze Age fantasy and modern-day thriller, and it works.” Booklist gave it high praise indeed, saying

The engrossing plot features steadily intensifying dread… a fast-paced and terrifying ride as everyone tries to solve two mysteries, one modern and one ancient… a horror novel and a standout thriller that can hold its own against the best in either genre.

Hekla’s Children was published by Titan Books on March 7, 2017. It is 400 pages, priced at $14.95 in trade paperback and $7.99 for the digital version. The cover was designed by Julia Lloyd (click the images to embiggen). Read a brief excerpt at Dread Central.

Goth Chick News: The Horror of Adult Coloring Books

Thursday, March 23, 2017 Sue Granquist Comments 2 comments

Grimm Fairy Tales Adult Coloring Book-small

Grimm Fairy Tales Adult Coloring Book-back-small

The explosion in popularity of adult coloring books over the past few years is quite possibly one of the greatest things to happen for us big kids, who are stuck performing stupid “adulting” activities such as going to a day job and paying bills.

Relieving anger and stress by coloring complex and hilarious pictures, (seriously, check out the Farting Animals coloring book; you won’t be disappointed) has become a norm among grown-ups, resulting the marketing of implements significantly more expensive and fancy than the most coveted of childhood creativity tools; the 64-color crayon pack.

So it was only a matter of time before the “Shut the F*** Up and Color” and “Drunk, Foul-Mouthed Jerk Unicorns” coloring book creators sought to capture revenue from an even more diverse audience by venturing further into inappropriate subject matters such as the horror genre.

Welcome to the new world of coloring slashers, corpses and skulls.

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A Tale of Two Covers: The Collapsing Empire by John Scalzi, and The Corroding Empire by Johan Kalsi

Thursday, March 23, 2017 John ONeill

io9 is reporting that Amazon temporarily blocked sales of The Corroding Empire, the short story collection from pseudonymous “Johan Kalsi” that Castalia House created to troll John Scalzi’s new Tor release The Collapsing Empire.

The Collapsing Empire by John Scalzi was released from Tor Books Tuesday, almost a year after it was first announced. Earlier this month, Theodore Beale (aka Vox Day) revealed on his blog that The Corroding Empire from Johan Kalsi was available for pre-order… and would be released one day before Scalzi’s book. Amazon temporarily made the book unavailable to buy, but it looks to have been restored for the time being… There’s a reason Beale made a cover that looks exactly like Scalzi’s, and it’s not to ride his coattails. This is all part of Beale’s longstanding feud (or obsession) with Scalzi, who hasn’t shied away from criticizing him in the past.

I assumed the Castalia House release was a parody of Scalzi’s new book, but that doesn’t appear to be the case — it’s a straight up collection of SF stories, packaged to look virtually identical to The Collapsing Empire. I’m not sure of the exact point, but Theo is obsessively tracking the comparative sales of the two books on his blog.

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Reading for the End of the World

Thursday, March 23, 2017 Thomas Parker Comments 8 comments

Back in 1977, near the high water mark of an earlier age of apocalyptic expectations, Elvis Costello crooned a song about “Waiting for the End of the World.” It seemed to make sense in that era of turmoil and unrest at home and abroad, but the American landscape of the last year or so makes the turbulent 70’s seem like an age of cool, good humored rationality. (It wasn’t — trust me.)

I, along with Little Orphan Annie and MacBeth, still expect the sun to come up tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, but even so, it does indeed feel as if we have arrived at the end of something, and business as usual just won’t do anymore; adjustments are called for in many aspects of our lives, including (of course!) reading. Extraordinary times call for extraordinary literary measures. Therefore… to the barricades — uh, bookstores!

In the spirit of the incipient panic, withered expectations, and rampant paranoia that seem to dominate our current national life, I offer twelve books to get you through the next four years (however long they may actually last): a reading list for the New Normal.

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