The first roleplaying game I owned was the 1977 Dungeons & Dragons Basic Set edited by J. Eric Holmes, as you’re all probably tired of hearing by now. Among the many memorable features of that boxed set was that some of its printings (including my own) did not include dice. Instead, these sets included a sheet of laminated paper chits printed in groups that mimicked the ranges of polyhedral dice (1–4, 1–6, 1–8, 1–10, 1–12, and 1–20). The purchaser of the game…
You know, I try not to play favorites with these New Treasures posts. The whole point is to present a diverse sampling of the most intriguing fantasy crossing my desk every week. It defeats the purpose if I keep talking about the same writers week after week, so I don’t do it. Unless your name is Guy Adams, apparently. I wrote up his novel of hidden laboratories, genetic engineering, and Sherlock Holmes, The Army of Dr. Moreau, back in August 2012, and his…
Right about now, the new SFWA Bulletin should be starting to hit mailboxes. The first SFWA electronic Bulletin won’t be far behind. It’s a new era for the Bulletin and one I’m really excited about. The Bulletin is one of those magazines that’s a particular challenge to edit. The SFWA membership is relatively small, but wildly varied in its needs and interests. Our members range in experience from a couple of years of sales to 50+ years of publishing, in markets…
Sax Rohmer’s Fu Manchu and the Panama Canal was first serialized in Liberty Magazine from November 16, 1940 to February 1, 1941. It was published in book form as The Island of Fu Manchu by Doubleday in the US and Cassell in the UK in 1941. The book serves as a direct follow-up to Rohmer’s 1939 bestseller The Drums of Fu Manchu and is again narrated by Fleet Street journalist, Bart Kerrigan. The second half of the book gets underway with…
“It’s some kind of zombie convention, did you know about this?” This is GCN photog Chris Zemko calling me last Friday night with a hot bit of industry news. Apparently a very significant event in the Chicago horror scene had eluded us (let me show you my shocked face) and Chris had just done a diving catch. A little bit of digging turned up the information that yes indeed, Walker Stalker Con was taking place in Chicago, at one of…
Sax Rohmer’s Fu Manchu and the Panama Canal was first serialized in Liberty Magazine from November 16, 1940 to February 1, 1941. It was published in book form as The Island of Fu Manchu by Doubleday in the US and Cassell in the UK in 1941. The book serves as a direct follow-up to Rohmer’s 1939 bestseller, The Drums of Fu Manchu, and is again narrated by Fleet Street journalist, Bart Kerrigan. The second quarter of the novel begins with Ardatha phoning…
Long before Edward, Angel, or Erik; before vampires owned bars, fell in love with humans, or (heaven forbid) sparkled in sunlight – there was The Vampire Lestat. Anne Rice single-handedly catapulted vampires into vogue in 1976 with her debut novel Interview with the Vampire. Until then, vampires hadn’t been cool since Bela Lugosi brought Dracula to the Broadway stage in 1927. Rice’s characters and subsequent novels spawned nothing less than a new vampire sub-culture in the early 80s, giving rise…
It seems like one of those creative pairings that could only happen in comics. Odd, then, that it was originally planned to be a film. In the mid-1980s, fashion and music impresario Malcolm McLaren called acclaimed comics writer Alan Moore. It seemed McLaren had some ideas for a film he wanted to make. The two men met and Moore was fascinated by one of McLaren’s notions: a movie that would be a modern retelling of the fairy-tale of “Beauty and…
I was playing Keep on the Borderlands this past week, certainly one of my all-time favorite modules, and as I flipped through it I came across a Jeff Dee illustration that had a Halfling in the background. As two weeks ago I’d done a piece here on BG called ‘The Top 40 RPG Artists of the Past 40 Years’ AND had left Jeff off that list, I couldn’t help but stare at the image and wonder why I had done…
So everyone in my office has been talking about the new HBO show True Detective, starring Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson. They talk in hushed whispers. “Hey, did you watch last night?” Suddenly, the volume drops and all I hear is a low buzz over the cube wall. I hear enough to know they’re taking about McConaughey and that new HBO show — and they’re obviously riveted. I haven’t seen it. Did see the cool ad and noticed how vastly different McConaughey looked,…