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Author: John ONeill

Future Treasures: Temple of Elemental Evil Board Game

Future Treasures: Temple of Elemental Evil Board Game

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Temple of Elemental Evil Board Game-smallThe Temple of Elemental Evil, written by Gary Gygax and Frank Metzner and published by TSR in 1985, is considered one of the greatest RPG adventures ever created. When Dungeon magazine ranked them in 2004, on the 30th anniversary of the Dungeons & Dragons game, The Temple of Elemental Evil was voted the 4th greatest D&D adventure of all time. In his 1991 history of role-playing games, Heroic Worlds, Lawrence Schick wrote “If you like huge classic dungeon crawls, this is probably the best of the lot.”

It has seen several incarnations since its original release, including a Fourth Edition re-release of the first chapter, The Village of Hommlet, and a popular computer game version, developed by Troika Games and published by Atari. It remains the only computer game ever released set in Greyhawk.

Now Wizards of the Coast is converting this grandaddy of all dungeons crawls into a board game, to be released in April of this year. Here’s the description from the WotC website:

In the Temple of Elemental Evil board game, you play as a heroic adventurer. With amazing abilities, spells and magic weapons, you must explore the dungeons beneath the Sword Coast where you will fight monsters, overcome hazards and find treasure. Are you ready for adventure?

The Temple of Elemental Evil board game features multiple scenarios, challenging quests and cooperative game play designed for 1-5 players. The contents can also be combined with other D&D Adventure System Cooperative play board games, including The Legend of Drizzt and Castle Ravenloft.

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New Treasures: Righteous Fury, by Markus Heitz

New Treasures: Righteous Fury, by Markus Heitz

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Righteous Fury Markus Heitz-smallAmerican readers, I think, could use a little more exposure to European fantasy. So I’m pleased to see Jo Fletcher Books bringing German author Markus Heitz to this side of the pond.

His series The Dwarves was an international bestseller, and now he launches a brand new series with Righteous Fury, originally published in Germany in 2009.

In Dsôn Faïmon, realm of the cruel and surpassingly beautiful artist-warriors known as the älfar, the military is planning a campaign against the enemies of the empire. Caphalor and Sinthoras are separately looking to enlist a powerful demon to strengthen their army, but the two älfar have very different goals.

While Caphalor is determined to defend the borders of the empire, the ambitious Sinthoras is intent on invasion. In order to expand the borders of Dsôn Faïmon, he has set his sights on the kingdoms of dwarves, elves, and men — a decision that, should it come to pass, may have far-reaching consequences for him and for the älfar.

Righteous Fury, the first volume of The Legends of the Älfar, was published by Jo Fletcher Books on February 10, 2015. It is 402 pages, priced at $24.99 in hardcover and $11.99 for the digital edition. It was translated from the German by Shelagh Alabaster.

See all of our recent New Treasures here.

Vintage Treasures: Pamela Dean’s Secret Country Trilogy

Vintage Treasures: Pamela Dean’s Secret Country Trilogy

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The Secret Country-small Pamela Dean Hidden Land-small Pamela Dean The Whim of the Dragon-small

We’ve been talking a lot about the early days of Dungeons and Dragons recently, and that put me in mind of the early novels directly inspired by fantasy role playing. The most famous examples are probably Andre Norton’s Quag Keep (1979) and Joel Rosenberg’s long-running Guardians of the Flame series, starting with The Sleeping Dragon (1983).

Pamela Dean’s Secret Country Trilogy is another early example, although it’s not as well remembered today. It began with The Secret Country (1985), featuring a group of friends who become stranded in the fantasy realm they thought they had created.

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Marvel Team Up: Spider-Man to Appear in Captain America: Civil War?

Marvel Team Up: Spider-Man to Appear in Captain America: Civil War?

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Marvel Civil War-smallWhen unidentified hackers released a host of embarrassing Sony Pictures internal e-mails last year, one of the things they revealed was that Sony, who owns the film rights to Spider-Man, had unsuccessfully negotiated with Marvel Studios, producers of Iron Man, Captain America, and The Avengers, on a possible Spider-Man/Avengers crossover. Just the possibility was tantalizing to Marvel fans, even if it looked like it hadn’t amounted to anything.

Now Marvel and Sony have announced that the crossover will occur after all. Both studios have confirmed that Spider-Man will first appear in a Marvel film, followed by a Spider-Man film to be released on July 28, 2017. While exact details have not been released, speculation is rampant that the likeliest candidate for the first project is the third Captain America film, Captain America: Civil War, based on the best-selling storyline that prominently featured Spider-Man, Iron Man, and Cap in its comic book incarnation back in 2006.

The announcement is bad news for fans of the Mark Webb-Andrew Garfield incarnation of Spider-Man, however, as BuzzFeed has confirmed that Garfield will not be reprising the role of Spider-Man. That’s unfortunate, as I thought he did a fine job.

The announcement clearly took some major behind-the-scenes effort, as it has shuffled the release dates for Marvel Studios major projects, pushing back almost all of their upcoming films to make room for Sony Pictures’ third Spider-Man picture. The release date for Thor: Ragnarok has been moved from July 28, 2017, to Nov. 3, 2017; Black Panther has been re-scheduled for July 6, 2018, Captain Marvel to Nov. 2, 2018, and Inhumans to July 12, 2019. The three announced Avengers films, Avengers Age of Ulton and Infinity War Part 1 and Part 2, are still scheduled to open on May 1, 2015, May 4, 2018, and May 3, 2019, respectively. Sony Pictures is also moving forward with their previous plans for Spider-Man spin-off films featuring the Sinister Six and Venom, although those release dates will likely be impacted as well.

Read the complete details at Marvel’s website.

James Mishler’s Color Maps of TSR’s Known World

James Mishler’s Color Maps of TSR’s Known World

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TSR Known World James Mishler-small

On Saturday Lawrence Schick posted The “Known World” D&D Setting: A Secret History here at Black Gate, a look behind the scenes at the early version of TSR’s Known World, one of the earliest published settings for Dungeons and Dragons. Yesterday Lawrence pointed me to James Mishler’s blog, Adventures in Gaming V2, where he said Mishler had “taken the maps from our article and transformed them into labeled, full-color wonders.” That’s an example of Mishler’s re-worked maps above (click for legible version). Here’s what Mishler said on his blog, in part:

Lawrence Schick, one of the early designers of Dungeons & Dragons at TSR, has revealed some interesting maps that detail the Original Known World that he and Tom Moldvay used in their Kent, Ohio Dungeons & Dragons campaign. If the “Known World” sounds familiar, it is because it is the world that was used in the 1981 edition of Basic/Expert Dungeons & Dragons, revealed in the module X1: The Isle of Dread and detailed further in the Expert Set book… He has posted several maps and note sheets with this article on the Black Gate website…

It is not exactly the same world, but instead is obviously the progenitor of the Known World that eventually evolved into Mystara. When Tom Moldvay, David Cook, and the rest of the development team for B/X needed to use a world, they went back and borrowed from Moldvay and Schick’s Original Known World. Many of the names and ideas survived; you can also see much of the TSR Known World geography owes its design to the Original Known World’s eastern half.

So as usual, when I get excited about mapping stuff, especially when it comes to one of my favorite campaign settings, I kind of took the maps presented and ran with them…

James took Moldvay and Schick’s hand-made Known World maps and knit them together with annotations of location names to create the image above. He also created Hexographer versions of the Western and Eastern Known World, and a jumbo map of both stitched together. See the impressive results on his blog.

New Treasures: Cherry Bomb by Caitlin R. Kiernan writing as Kathleen Tierney

New Treasures: Cherry Bomb by Caitlin R. Kiernan writing as Kathleen Tierney

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Cherry Bomb Caitlin R Kiernan-smallCaitlin R. Kiernan has received a lot of attention for her recent horror novels, especially The Red Tree (2009) and The Drowning Girl (2012). Her Siobhan Quinn urban fantasy novels had an unusual genesis, as she explains in the Author’s Note to this volume:

My thanks to my agent, Merrilee Heifetz, who urged me to do this after reading Chapter One of Blood Oranges, which I’d actually written on a lark, as a joke, a protest against what “paranormal romance” has done to the once respectable genre of urban fantasy. I honestly never intended to write a whole Quinn book, much less three.

Cherry Bomb is the third (and final?) volume in the series, following Blood Oranges (2013) and Red Delicious (2014). All three were published under Caitlin R. Kiernan’s pseudonym, Kathleen Tierney.

Here’s the back cover copy.

Meet Siobhan Quinn — Half vampire, half werewolf, and retired monster hunter. Or so she thought…

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Who Should Be Writing the Cthulhu Mythos Today? Announcing the Winners of Weirder Shadows Over Innsmouth

Who Should Be Writing the Cthulhu Mythos Today? Announcing the Winners of Weirder Shadows Over Innsmouth

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Weirder Shadows Over Innsmouth-small2Three weeks ago we invited Black Gate readers to win a copy of the new Lovecraft-inspired anthology Weirder Shadows Over Innsmouth, by suggesting who should be writing Lovecraftian horror today.

To make it challenging, all entries had to be a single sentence.

We received a near-record number of entries for this contest, too many to print here. But I’ve selected 20 of the more interesting, and reproduced them below.

Two winners were randomly drawn from a list of all qualified entries, and those two lucky readers will both receive a copy of Stephen Jones’s new horror anthology Weirder Shadows Over Innsmouth, on sale now in trade paperback and digital formats from Titan Books.

First up is Jeffery Helms:

The writer I would most like to see write a Lovecraftian horror story today is Scott Snyder, whose comic work has elements of history, folklore, myths, and horror.

That’s certainly a fascinating choice. Scott Snyder’s work on American Vampire and Batman has garnered a lot of attention, and I’d like to see what he could do in Lovecraft’s back yard, too.

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Monolith’s Conan Board Game Raises Over $2 Million on Kickstarter

Monolith’s Conan Board Game Raises Over $2 Million on Kickstarter

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Conan Monolith-small

Earlier today the Kickstarter campaign for a new Conan miniatures game from start-up Monolith Board Games surpassed $2 million — more than 25 times the $80,000 goal. Monolith has no track record, but they’ve done a fine job generating excitement. Game components  — including double-sided boards and over 70 plastic miniatures — look excellent, and the art, chiefly by Adrian Smith, is terrific. Here’s the description of the core game:

Conan is a miniature-based board game that pits one player, the overlord, who controls hordes of savage tribesmen, no-good lowlifes and undead minions against 1 to 4 players who incarnate the legendary Conan and his fellow adventurers. The gameplay is asymetric, as the overlord possesses a large selection of models and objectives which are his own, whereas the brave heroes are played from a first person perspective, much like in a role playing game. An adventure can be played out in 1 hour on one of the beautiful game boards as you pit your wits, daring and tactical acumen against your opponent.

Who the heck is Monolith, and why should you be giving them your hard earned money?

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Future Treasures: The Silence by Tim Lebbon

Future Treasures: The Silence by Tim Lebbon

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The Silence Tim Lebbon-smallTim Lebbon’s novels include the post-apocalyptic fantasy Echo City, and the dark fantasy Noreela series (Dusk, Fallen, The Island). He won the Bram Stoker Award in 2001 for his short story “Reconstructing Amy,” and Dusk won the British Fantasy Society’s August Derleth Award for best novel of the year in 2007. He had a bestseller in 2007 for his novelization of 30 Days of Night.

His latest is an end-of-the-world thriller featuring a horror born deep in the heart of the Earth…

The End of our world. The beginning of another.

In the darkness of an underround cave system, blind creatures hunt by sound. Then there is light, there are voices, and they feed… swarming from their prison, the creatures thrive and destroy. To scream, even to whisper, is to summon death. As the hordes lay waste to Europe, a girl watches to see if they will cross the sea. Deaf for many years, she knows how to live in silence; now, it is her family’s only chance of survival. To leave their home, to shun others, to find a remote haven where they can sit out the plague. But will it ever end? And what kind of world will be left?

We last covered Tim Lebbon with his 2014 novel Coldbrook.

The Silence will be published by Titan Books on April 14, 2015. It is 361 pages, priced at $14.95 in trade paperback and $9.99 for the digital edition.

Suzette Haden Elgin, November 18, 1936 – January 27, 2015

Suzette Haden Elgin, November 18, 1936 – January 27, 2015

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Locus Online is reporting that fantasy author Suzette Haden Elgin, author of The Ozark Trilogy and the Coyote Jones novels, died last month.

Elgin’s first publication, “For the Sake of Grace,” the first part of her long-running series featuring Trigalactic Intelligence Service agent Coyote Jones, appeared in the May 1969 issue of F&SF. Her first novels — The Communipaths (1970), Furthest (1971), and At the Seventh Level (1972) — were part of the same series. They were collected in an omnibus volume from Pocket Books, Communipath Worlds, in 1980 (below, cover by Mara McAfee).

Communipath Worlds-small Twelve Fair Kingdoms-small The Gentle Art of Verbal Self-Defense-small

Twelve Fair Kingdoms, the first novel in The Ozark Trilogy, came in 1981 (above, cover by Michael Flanagan); it was followed by The Grand Jubilee (1981), and And Then There’ll Be Fireworks (1981). Perhaps her most popular genre work, the Native Tongue trilogy — Native Tongue, The Judas Rose, and Earthsong (cover here) — were published between 1984 – 1994.

Elgin’s breakout book, the non-fiction bestseller The Gentle Art of Verbal Self-Defense, was published in June 1985. Among the book’s other accomplishments, it helped put fledgling publisher Barnes & Noble on the map, selling over 250,000 copies. Elgin founded the Science Fiction Poetry Association in 1978. She died on January 27, 2015, at the age of 78.