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Category: Editor’s Blog

The blog posts of Black Gate Managing Editor Howard Andrew Jones and Editor John O’Neill

KenzerCo Announces HackMaster Basic is now Free

KenzerCo Announces HackMaster Basic is now Free

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hackmaster-basic2Free stuff!

When I was working at Motorola in the late 90s, the lawyer whose office was just down the hall had his own game company. His name was David Kenzer, and his company was Kenzer & Company. Tuns out they published one of my favorite comics, Jolly Blackburn’s hilarious Knights of the Dinner Table. Once I made this discovery, Dave and I collaborated on a bunch of projects, one of which became Black Gate magazine.

One of the most successful products Dave and his team of geniuses ever produced was the HackMaster role playing game. Conceived as a clever parody of Dungeons & Dragons — and a fully functional RPG — it was published under a license from Wizards of the Coast and won the coveted Origins Award for Game of the Year 2001. It was a huge labor of love for all involved, and I was drafted to write the “HackMaster Smartass Smackdown Table” (HSST), a simple tool to help Game Masters discipline unruly players.

For the last ten years, HackMaster has been expanded with over fifty supplements — including the brilliant Annihilate the Giants (a parody of Gary Gygax’s classic adventure module Against the Giants), Little Keep on the Borderlands, and my favorite, the out-of-print The Temple of Existential Evil (new copies of which currently sell on Amazon for north of $500). HackMaster Basic, a 192-page single volume collection of the essential rules, was published in 2009 and helped introduce a whole new audience to the game.

I left Motorola in 2006, but kept in close touch with Dave. For the past few years, KenzerCo has been working in secret on a complete revamp of HackMaster, and the results have been at last unveiled with HackMaster Fifth Edition. The Hacklopedia of Beasts, a 384-page full color deluxe hardcover and one of the most visually gorgeous game books I’ve seen, arrived first. And now KenzerCo has announced The HackMaster Player’s Handbook, a 400-page leathered book that includes everything you need to play.

To celebrate the arrival of Fifth Edition, KenzerCo has announced that they’re making the PDF version of HackMaster Basic completely free. This book serves as a gateway to the dynamic thrill of the HackMaster game, and I highly recommend it.

Why not check it out? You can learn more, and get the free download, at the KenzerCo site here.

Enjoying Vintage Comics with The Toon Treasury of Classic Children’s Comics

Enjoying Vintage Comics with The Toon Treasury of Classic Children’s Comics

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toon-treasure-of-classic-childrens-comics2One of the great things about the 21st Century? Cheap comic reprints (I know, that’s top of your list too, right?)

Seriously. When I was growing up, if you wanted to know what happened in Amazing Spider-Man #65, you had to find someone five years older than you and pester the hell outta them until they told you. As comic archival systems went, it was crude and had little to recommend it.

Not today. Now you have an embarrassment of choices. Want the color reprints of Amazing Spider-Man? The cheap black-and-white? Hardcover or paperback? Digital or paper? Paper or plastic? Bah. All these choices make me grumpy. I miss nagging all the teenagers in my neighborhood. Yelling at them to get off my lawn isn’t the same.

And here’s the other thing. If you want to read premium reprints of superhero, sci-fi, or horror comics from the 50s through the 90s, life is grand. Just browse the graphic novel section at Barnes & Noble or Amazon and you’ll see what I mean — the choices are staggering. Marvel, DC, Gold Key, Charlton, EC… they’re all there, and in quantity.

But if you’re interested in children’s comics from the same era? Good luck.

There are a few intrepid publishers bucking the trend. Fantagraphics has one of the most ambitious publishing ventures in the history of comics with The Complete Peanuts, collecting all 17,897 daily and Sunday strips by Charles M. Schulz (18 hardcover volumes, so far). And let’s not forget Pogo: The Complete Daily & Sunday Comic Strips by Walt Kelly, or the extensive Disney comics of Carl Barks — especially his Donald Duck and Uncle Scrooge — published by Gladstone and Boom! Studios over the years.

But these publishing projects assume you’re already a dedicated fan, and willing to shell out $30 (or more) per book for archival quality hardcovers. What if you just want to sample some of the best from the golden age of kid’s comics? For that, I heartily recommend Art Spiegelman and Francoise Mouly’s wonderful volume, The Toon Treasury of Classic Children’s Comics.

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Dean Wesley Smith and Kristine Kathryn Rusch Announce Fiction River

Dean Wesley Smith and Kristine Kathryn Rusch Announce Fiction River

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pulphouse-fantasyPulphouse publishers Dean Wesley Smith and Kristine Kathryn have announced a new genre market, Fiction River:

Fiction River will be a bimonthly anthology series starting in April next year. Each anthology will be theme-focused and cross-genre containing all original fiction written by some of the top writers in fiction, including big names and names you might have never heard of.

Each anthology will be published in an electronic edition, a trade paper edition, and a very limited and numbered and signed hardback edition. (Signed by all authors and editors.) Readers will be able to buy each anthology individually or subscribe to the anthology series like a magazine.

As many of you know, Kris and I, in 1987, started Pulphouse Publishing with Pulphouse: The Hardback Magazine. We published those anthologies every three months. Fiction River will be like Pulphouse and Orbit and Universe and other major original fiction anthology series of the past. It will focus on top quality short fiction of all types, in a themed-anthology format.

Pulphouse was one of the most respected fantasy and science fiction markets of the 80s and 90s. They published twelve thick issues of Pulphouse: The Hardback Magazine from 1988 through 1993, and 19 issues of a weekly fiction magazine, also called Pulphouse (which was never quite weekly). They were nominated for a Hugo three times, and won the World Fantasy Award in 1989. After closing down Pulphouse Kristine Kathryn Rusch was the editor of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction for six years (1991 to 1997), and Dean Wesley Smith edited the anthology series Star Trek: Strange New Worlds.

To fund the project Smith and Rusch announced a Kickstarter project. By August 7, with 20 days still to go, they have surpassed their original $6,000 goal, with nearly $9,300 pledged.

You can read more about Fiction River here.

New Treasures: Clockwork and Cthulhu

New Treasures: Clockwork and Cthulhu

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clockwork-cthulhu-smallI don’t know much about this little artifact; but the moment I laid eyes on it, I knew I had to blog about it. It combines two of my favorite things: Cthulhu and Clocks.

Okay, not really. Would you believe Cthulhu and role-playing games? How about Cthulhu and giant clockwork war machines that lumber across the land?

Clockwork and Cthulhu is a supplement for the 17th century alternate historical fantasy world Clockwork & Chivalry, one of the most innovative settings ever produced for RuneQuest 2. And yes, I realize that if you don’t play RPGs, that sentence will not parse no matter how hard you mess with it. Just go with it.

England has descended into civil war. The earth is tainted by alchemical magick. Giant clockwork war machines lumber across the land. In the remote countryside, witches terrorise entire villages, while in the hallowed halls of great universities, natural philosophers uncover the secrets of nature.

War, plague and religious division make people’s lives a constant misery. But even greater threats exist. Witches whisper of the old gods. Royalist alchemists pore over John Dee’s forbidden translation of the Necronomicon, dreaming of powers that will allow them to win the war. Parliamentarian engineers consult with creatures from beyond the crystal spheres and build blasphemous mechanisms, unholy monuments to their alien overlords. Vast inter-dimensional beings seek entry into the world, while their human servants, corrupted, crazed and enslaved, follow the eldritch agendas of their hidden masters.

Clockwork & Cthulhu brings the horror of H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos to the 17th century alternate historical fantasy world of Clockwork & Chivalry.

You have to admit that sounds cool. Don’t you wish you played role-playing games now?

Clockwork and Cthulhu was written and designed by Peter Cakebread and Ken Walton, authors of Clockwork & Chivalry. It is 156 pages, and sells for $29.99. It is published by Cubicle 7 Entertainment; you can find more information here.

All Eyes on Mars as Curiosity Prepares to Land

All Eyes on Mars as Curiosity Prepares to Land

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marsAs I type this, the one-ton Curiosity, the largest rover ever sent to another planet, is nearing an historic landing on Mars. It is scheduled to land at 1:31 a.m. Eastern Standard Time tomorrow morning, in slightly more than two hours.

Curiosity is already famous for several reasons. The $2.6 billion atomic-powered robot carries perhaps the most sophisticated mobile lab ever built — including 17 cameras, a laser, instruments that can analyze soil and rock samples, and a telecommunications system that can beam the results hundreds of millions of miles back to Earth.

It’s also famous for a series of videos depicting the “Seven Minutes of Terror,” the almost impossibly complex landing sequence — involving the world’s largest supersonic parachute, a sky crane, and no less than 76 precisely timed explosive charges — that will decelerate the rover from 13,000 miles an hour to zero in just seven minutes, delicately depositing it on the Martian surface. At 1,986 pounds, Curiosity is much too large for any previously-designed landing sequence to work.

I cannot do justice to the amazing scheme JPL has cooked up to slow the rover. I leave that to William Shatner, who narrates a 4-minute summary of the planned landing here. No, he’s not kidding. It really is that crazy.

I am very, very excited about this landing tonight. But like the entire staff of NASA, and much of the rest of the world, I’m also very concerned about all the things that could go wrong. I will spend much of the next two hours with my fingers crossed. CNN will be broadcasting live coverage of the landing, starting at 11:30 p.m. Eastern tonight.

I’m rooting for you Curiosity. Make it down in one piece, buddy.

Update: NASA reports that the SUV-sized Curiosity touched down safely on Mars, transmitting black and white images back to Earth. Higher resolution color images are expected later in the week. Way to go, Curiosity!

The Top 30 Black Gate Posts in June

The Top 30 Black Gate Posts in June

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June was a terrific month for the Black Gate blog. Traffic has been steadily increasing for the past two years, and in June we reached a total of 2,300 blog posts. The top article for the month was “Selling Philip K Dick” from June 11, and the most popular link on the website was to the collected “New Treasures” columns.

The complete list of the Top 30 blog posts in June at Black Gate follows.
the-simulacra-philip-k-dick

  1. New Treasures
  2. Selling Philip K Dick
  3. Black-Gate-goes-to-the-summer-movies-Snow-White-and-the-Huntsman
  4. Vintage-Treasures-George-RR-Martin’s-Nightflyers
  5. The-best-of-modern-arabian-fantasy-Saladin-Ahmed
  6. Drinking-atlantis-no-chaser-Conan-the-Barbarian-2011
  7. Black-Gate-goes-to-the-summer-movies-Prometheus
  8. TSR’s-Amazing-science-fiction-anthologies
  9. The-best-of-modern-arabian-fantasy-CA-Suleiman
  10. Cerebus
  11. Art-of-the-genre-the-art-of-a-future-fallen
  12. Brave
  13. Fall-from-Earth-a-review
  14. Thank-you-Martin-H-Greenberg-and-Doug-Ellis
  15. New-Treasures-the-sword-sorcery-anthology

    16. …

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New Treasures: The Black Opera by Mary Gentle

New Treasures: The Black Opera by Mary Gentle

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the-black-operaI don’t know if British fantasy author Mary Gentle is all that well known here in the US. But in my native Canada — and especially among the fantasy fans I circulated among in Ottawa — she is highly respected indeed.

Her first novel was Hawk in Silver, published in 1977 when she was only eighteen. But it was her two linked science fiction novels Golden Witchbreed (1983) and Ancient Light (1987) that really put her in the map. Her first major fantasy novel was Rats and Gargoyles (1990), the first volume of the White Crow sequence; perhaps her most acclaimed recent work has been Ash: A Secret History (2000, published in four volumes in the US) and Ilario (2007).

She’s also well known for Grunts! (1992), an action-packed send-up of epic fantasy, which follows Orc Captain Ashnak and his war-band as they take arms against the insufferable forces of Light — including murderous halflings and racist elves — who slaughter his orc brothers by the thousands in their path to inevitable victory.

Her newest novel is The Black Opera, and it has all the hallmarks of Gentle’s original and thought-provoking fantasy:

Naples, the 19th Century. In the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, holy music has power. Under the auspices of the Church, the Sung Mass can bring about actual miracles like healing the sick or raising the dead. But some believe that the musicodramma of grand opera can also work magic by channeling powerful emotions into something sublime. Now the Prince’s Men, a secret society, hope to stage their own black opera to empower the Devil himself – and change Creation for the better! Conrad Scalese is a struggling librettist whose latest opera has landed him in trouble with the Holy Office of the Inquisition. Rescued by King Ferdinand II, Conrad finds himself recruited to write and stage a counter opera that will, hopefully, cancel out the apocalyptic threat of the black opera, provided the Prince’s Men, and their spies and saboteurs, don’t get to him first. And he only has six weeks to do it…

The Black Opera was published in May by Night Shade Press. It is 515 pages (including a one-page appendix, “Rude Italian for Beginners,”) and is available for $15.99 in trade paperback and $9.99 in various digital formats.

Vintage Treasures: The Barbarians Anthology Series

Vintage Treasures: The Barbarians Anthology Series

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barbariansThere’s been some good discussion of Sword & Sorcery on the BG blog of late, from Brian Murphy’s excellent list of “A Half-Dozen Swords And Sorcery Short Stories Worth Your Summer Reading Time, and Howard Andrew Jones’s skillful examination of the writing technique of the genre’s patriarch, “Under the Hood with Robert E. Howard,” to Joe Bonadonna’s warm reminiscence of the very best S&S of his youth, “How I Met Your Cimmerian (and other Barbarian Swordsmen).”

I thought I was pretty well educated in Sword & Sorcery; but it’s the sign of a rich and vibrant genre that it can still surprise you after decades of collecting.

That’s exactly what happened when I found the artifact at left, buried deep in a paperback science fiction collection I recently purchased.

Barbarians was a major S&S retrospective anthology published by Signet in 1986. It was edited by Robert Adams, Martin H. Greenberg, and Charles Waugh, and contained stories by Fritz Leiber, Fred Saberhagen, Andre Norton, Karl Edward Wagner, and many more. It’s a thick paperback original with 13 short stories.

And no, I’d never seen a copy before — or its sequel. Here’s the back cover copy:

From a beautiful huntress with glittering eyes and a killing kiss to mighty Conan’s struggle in a deadly place beyond magic… from a distant planet fated to do battle with the forgotten past to primeval swordsmen pledged to protect a besieged land — here are tales of titanic strength and unearthly courage, of savage warriors facing incredible challenges in the far-flung realms of the imagination.

Sounds pretty good. Not entirely sure how this one escaped me for all these years, but I’m glad I’ve stumbled across it now.

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The Return of Brak the Barbarian

The Return of Brak the Barbarian

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witch-of-the-four-winds2E-book publisher Open Road Media has announced the publication of two omnibus editions of John Jakes’ fondly-remembered Sword & Sorcery hero Brak the Barbarian.

Witch of the Four Winds and Brak the Barbarian will be available in digital format at Barnes & Noble and Amazon.com on July 31 for $4.99 each (before discounting).

Brak the Barbarian first appeared in Fantastic magazine in the short story “The Devils in the Walls” (1963). Over the next few years, Jakes produced over a dozen short stories and novellas featuring Brak, that he gradually collected and expanded into five books, published between 1968 and 1980.

Brak the Barbarian contains the 1968 short story collection Brak the Barbarian and the novel Mark of the Demons (1969), plus additional Brak stories and an illustrated biography of Jakes with rare images from the author’s personal collection.

Witch of the Four Winds contains two more early novels: Witch of the Four Winds — originally published under that title in Fantastic magazine in 1963, and then revised and expanded in novel format as Brak the Barbarian Versus the Sorceress (1969) — and When the Idols Walked (Fantastic 1964, expanded and released under the same title in 1978), plus more bonus stories and an illustrated biography.

Jakes’ Brak the Barbarian stories were strongly influenced by Robert E. Howard’s Conan. In the YouTube video Open Road created to promote the launch of the digital editions, Jakes says:

I was directly influenced by Robert Howard, by the fact that there weren’t enough Conan stories to go around… I wanted to create a character much like Conan, put him in similar circumstances, and have a good time writing them.

For science fiction fans, Open Road has also collected two early SF novels by Jakes in a third omnibus collection: On Wheels (1973) and Six-Gun Planet (1970). It’s also available July 31.

New Treasures: Philip Jose Farmer’s Up the Bright River, edited by Gary K. Wolfe

New Treasures: Philip Jose Farmer’s Up the Bright River, edited by Gary K. Wolfe

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up-the-bright-river2

There’s no truth to the vicious rumor that I select candidates for my New Treasures column based solely on awesome cover art.

I also have to be able to get my hands on a copy. That’s two criteria, which I figure gives me a balanced approach.

Which brings us to today’s special guest, Up the Bright River by Philip Jose Farmer, a short story collection edited by Gary K. Wolfe. And its awesome wraparound cover, courtesy of Bob Eggleton (click for even awesomer high-res version).

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