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New Treasures: Against the Slave Lords

New Treasures: Against the Slave Lords

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Against the Slave LordsI think the release of Against the Slave Lords is cause for celebration.

Against the Slave Lords is a hardcover collection of four interconnected Advanced Dungeons & Dragons adventure modules, the A1 – A4 series Scourge of the Slave Lords, originally published in 1980 and 1981. It includes new forewords by the four surviving designers. Lawrence Schick, for example, relates how his inspiration came from fellow author and dungeon master Harold Johnson:

In his campaign one night, Harold had our characters get captured, whereupon he took away all our stuff and threw us in a dungeon. The challenge: escape without relying on all our carefully hoarded adventuring gear. Were our characters people with skills and brains, or were they really just lists of equipment?

It also includes the maps and all of the original black-and-white interior art. Most intriguing of all, there’s also a brand new fifth adventure that sets the stage for the entire series, published here for the first time. Danger at Darkshelf Quarry is designed for low-level players (levels 1-3).

Why celebrate? It signals that publishers Wizards of the Coast are serious about bringing the canonical works of first edition D&D back into print. I was plenty excited at their last premium hardcover reprint, Dungeons of Dread, as it collected some of the most famous adventures written by AD&D‘s creator, Gary Gygax — including Tomb of Horrors and The Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth (still one of my favorite adventure modules of all time) — all of which were long out of print and hard to find.

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Get Four E-books from Orbit for Just $2.99 Each

Get Four E-books from Orbit for Just $2.99 Each

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Blood RightsEvery month, Orbit Books offers one of their top-selling science fiction and fantasy titles in e-book format for just $2.99. This month, they break with tradition and offer you no less than four terrific titles:

Blood Rights — Born into a life of secrets and service, Chrysabelle’s body bears the telltale marks of a comarrae — a special race of humans bred to feed vampire nobility. When her patron is murdered, she becomes the prime suspect, which sends her running into the mortal world…

Germline — War is Oscar Wendell’s ticket to greatness. A reporter for The Stars and Stripes, he has the only one way pass to the front lines of a brutal war over natural resources buried underneath the icy, mineral rich mountains of Kazakhstan. Heavily armored soldiers battle genetically engineered troops hundreds of meters below the surface. The genetics — the germline soldiers — are the key to winning this war, but some technologies can’t be put back in the box.

Tempest Rising — Living in small town Rockabill, Maine, Jane True always knew she didn’t quite fit in with so-called normal society. During her nightly, clandestine swim in the freezing winter ocean, a grisly find leads Jane to startling revelations about her heritage: she is only half-human. Now, Jane must enter a world filled with supernatural creatures alternatively terrifying, beautiful, and deadly.

Feed — The year was 2014. We had cured cancer. We had beat the common cold. But in doing so we created something new, something terrible that no one could stop. The infection spread, virus blocks taking over bodies and minds with one, unstoppable command: FEED.

Support one of the best genre paperback publishers out there, and grab some terrific book bargains in the process. Get all the details at The Orbital Drop.

New Treasures: The Thousand Names by Django Wexler

New Treasures: The Thousand Names by Django Wexler

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The Thousand NamesWhen I was younger, I had very specific criteria for selecting fantasy reading material. I relied exclusively on the jacket copy, blurbs, and author reputation. But after reading numerous crummy books, I decided to switch things up a bit, and only buy books with great cover art.

That worked pretty well for about a decade. By the time I was 40, I’d refined my cover selection process even further. Now I base it almost solely on color. Lush greens and gold — that’s the ticket for the best in fantasy entertainment. Take it from the voice of experience.

Based on the excited buzz around Django Wexler’s The Thousand Names, and the righteous color scheme on the cover, I expect great things. But here’s the jacket copy in case you want to decide things the old fashioned way.

Enter an epic fantasy world that echoes with the thunder of muskets and the clang of steel — but where the real battle is against a subtle and sinister magic…

Captain Marcus d’Ivoire, commander of one of the Vordanai empire’s colonial garrisons, was resigned to serving out his days in a sleepy, remote outpost. But that was before a rebellion upended his life. And once the powder smoke settled, he was left in charge of a demoralized force clinging tenuously to a small fortress at the edge of the desert.

To flee from her past, Winter Ihernglass masqueraded as a man and enlisted as a ranker in the Vordanai Colonials, hoping only to avoid notice. But when chance sees her promoted to command, she must win the hearts of her men and lead them into battle against impossible odds.

The fates of both these soldiers and all the men they lead depend on the newly arrived Colonel Janus bet Vhalnich, who has been sent by the ailing king to restore order. His military genius seems to know no bounds, and under his command, Marcus and Winter can feel the tide turning. But their allegiance will be tested as they begin to suspect that the enigmatic Janus’s ambitions extend beyond the battlefield and into the realm of the supernatural — a realm with the power to ignite a meteoric rise, reshape the known world, and change the lives of everyone in its path.

The Thousand Names was published today by Roc Books. It is 513 pages in hardcover, priced at $25.95 ($12.99 for the digital edition). It is the first novel of The Shadow Campaigns.

Read all of our recent New Treasures articles here.

Fantasy Out Loud III: Suffer the Children?

Fantasy Out Loud III: Suffer the Children?

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the-mysterious-benedict-society-0316003956-l_5462In the original 2011 edition of Fantasy Out Loud, I took a stab at reviewing the fantasy books I had read aloud to my children. Back in those halcyon days, The Hobbit was front and center.

Some eighteen months later, my boys are older and taller, but not necessarily wiser. Much to my chagrin, older son Corey, aged thirteen as of this writing, no longer wants me to read aloud to him prior to bedtime. On his own, he’s lately polished off all four of the Hitchhiker’s Guide books, and is now slamming through Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End, which he describes as “weird.” (We’ll see what he says when he gets to the end, one of the best reveals in written English.)

But, because Corey is tackling these titles on his lonesome ownsome, this column is necessarily dedicated to eight-year-old Evan, who still can’t get enough of pre-bed daddy readings.

In the last year, fantasy titles we’ve tackled include The Warriors: Into the Wild, The Mysterious Benedict Society, Black Beauty, Summerland, Tuck Everlasting, and Magic By the Lake.

Well, all right: Black Beauty isn’t strictly fantasy, since author Anna Sewell never allows Beauty to actually speak, but for a horse to be so observant, so proscriptive, so downright brilliant?  Sounds like fantasy to me.

Here’s the rub: Evan did not like these books equally. Nor do his growing sense of taste and literary discretion always parallel, sadly, my own. At least two of the books above were volumes I would have preferred to hurl across the room, but in one case especially, despite my jaundice, Evan was enraptured.

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New Treasures: The Beautiful Land by Alan Averill

New Treasures: The Beautiful Land by Alan Averill

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The Beautiful LandI’d never heard of Alan Averill, but I think that’s because this is a debut novel. I like debuts — they make me think I’m the first to discover an exciting new writer. I get to tell all my friends and be cool. Being cool doesn’t happen to me very often, believe me, so anything that even hints at the possibility gets a closer look.

The Beautiful Land is a tale of dimension-hopping and alternate realities. Over at io9, Charlie Jane Anders called it “a great love story disguised as a thriller.” Here’s the book description.

Takahiro O’Leary has a very special job… working for the Axon Corporation as an explorer of parallel timelines — as many and as varied as anyone could imagine. A great gig — until information he brought back gave Axon the means to maximize profits by changing the past, present, and future of this world.

If Axon succeeds, Tak will lose Samira Moheb, the woman he has loved since high school — because her future will cease to exist. A veteran of the Iraq War suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, Samira can barely function in her everyday life, much less deal with Tak’s ravings of multiple realities. The only way to save her is for Tak to use the time travel device he “borrowed” to transport them both to an alternate timeline.

But what neither Tak nor Axon knows is that the actual inventor of the device is searching for a timeline called the Beautiful Land — and he intends to destroy every other possible present and future to find it.

The switch is thrown, and reality begins to warp — horribly. And Tak realizes that to save Sam, he must save the entire world…

The Beautiful Land was published by Ace Books on June 4. It is 362 pages, priced at $16 in trade paperback ($9.99 for the digital edition).

See all of our recent New Treasures here.

New Treasures: Philippa Ballantine’s The Order of Deacons

New Treasures: Philippa Ballantine’s The Order of Deacons

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The Order of DeaconsI can’t be the only one who really enjoys these low-cost omnibus editions produced by the Science Fiction Book Club.

Omnibus editions have been a tradition for the SFBC for as long as I’ve been a member (don’t ask how long that is). One of the first books I purchased from them — and still one of my favorite SF books, period — was H. Beam Piper’s The Fuzzy Papers in the mid -1970s, containing Little Fuzzy and Fuzzy Sapiens. The most recent was probably E.E. Knight’s Enter the Wolf, containing the first three novels of his terrific Vampire Earth saga: Way of the Wolf, Choice of the Cat, and Tale of the Thunderbolt.

At the same time as I purchased Enter the Wolf, I also acquired The Order of the Deacons, which collects the first three volumes of Philippa Ballantine’s A Book of the Order series. I’ve been intrigued by these books for a long time, and was impressed by the snippets I read from Geist, the opening book. Here’s the description for Geist:

Between the living and the dead is the Order of the Deacons, protectors of the Empire, guardians against possession, sentinels enlisted to ward off the malevolent haunting of the geists…

Among the most powerful of the Order is Sorcha, now thrust into partnership with the novice Deacon, Merrick Chambers. They have been dispatched to the isolated village of Ulrich to aide the Priory with a surge of violent geist activity. With them is Raed Rossin, Pretender to the throne that Sorcha is sworn to protect, and bearer of a terrible curse.

But what greets them in the strange settlement is something far more predatory and more horrifying than any mere haunting. And as she uncovers a tradition of twisted rituals passed down through the dark reaches of history, Sorcha will be forced to reconsider everything she thinks she knows.

And if she makes it out of Ulrich alive, what in Hell is she returning to?

The omnibus also includes Spectyr and the most recent volume, Wrayth. Philippa Ballantine is also the co-author, with Tee Morris, of the Ministry of Peculiar Occurrences novels (as “Pip Ballantine”) and the Shifted World fantasy series, which began with Hunter and Fox. With luck, those will get a SFBC omnibus treatment too.

The Order of Deacons was published by SFBC in January 2013. It is 787 pages in hardcover, priced at $17.99. There is no digital edition. It is available exclusively to Science Fiction Book Club members; learn more at the SFBC website. Cover art by Karla Ortiz.

New Treasures: Titan

New Treasures: Titan

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Titan Avalon HillThere are classic fantasy games and there are classic fantasy games. Jai Kamani and David A. Trampier’s Titan, a massive game of conflict between mythological armies of ogres, unicorns, griffons, and other creatures, was perhaps the most ubiquitous fantasy game of my youth. There were copies everywhere, tucked under arms at gaming conventions and on the shelves of department stores.

Titan was first published in an ultra-rare first edition in 1980 by tiny Gorgonstar, Inc. It was later made a hit by Avalon Hill, and remained in print for nearly two decades until Avalon Hill was sold and ceased operations in 1998. After that, copies of the most popular fantasy board game of the 80s and 90s gradually became harder and harder to find.

I remember getting my boys excited about Titan by nostalgically telling tales of epic battles between behemoths, dragons, and trolls. They clamored to play it.

I’d never owned Titan, but that’s not a problem in the age of the Internet. I found a pristine copy on eBay and hung on during a spirited bidding war. 90 bucks later, it was on my kitchen table.

Still in the shrink wrap.

It was perfectly preserved. My boys stood at my side, ready to go, anxious to throw down some dice, and experience some of that legendary Titan action. To shred the shrink and punch out counter sheets that had staunchly stood fast for over twenty years. My hands gripped the game, hesitating.

I couldn’t do it.

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New Treasures: Fiery Edge of Steel

New Treasures: Fiery Edge of Steel

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fiery-edge-of-steelJill Archer’s first Noon Onyx novel, Dark Light of Day, served up a truly post-apocalyptic setting. And I don’t mean global warming or an inconvenient economic collapse. Armageddon is over, the demons won, and the few surviving humans worship patron demons just to survive. Sorta makes Mad Max look more like Mad Men, just with cooler fashions.

The second book in the series, Fiery Edge of Steel, has now arrived and it looks even more intriguing. It tosses an unusual mystery, a remote outpost, and an ancient and evil foe into the mix.

Lucifer and his army triumphed at Armageddon, leaving humans and demons living in uncertain peace based on sacrifice and strict laws. It is up to those with mixed demon and human blood, the Host, to prevent society from falling into anarchy.

Noon Onyx is the first female Host in memory to wield the destructive waning magic that is used to maintain order among the demons. Her unique abilities, along with a lack of control and a reluctance to kill, have branded her as an outsider among her peers. Only her powerful lover, Ari Carmine, and a roguish and mysterious Angel, Rafe Sinclair, support her unconventional ways.

When Noon is shipped off to a remote outpost to investigate several unusual disappearances, a task that will most likely involve trying and killing the patron demon of that area, it seems Luck is not on her side. But when the outpost settlers claim that an ancient and evil foe has stepped out of legend to commit the crimes, Noon realizes that she could be facing something much worse than she ever imagined…

Fiery Edge of Steel was published by Ace Books on May 28. It is 330 pages, priced at $7.99 for both the paperback and digital editions.

See all of our recent New Treasures posts here.

New Treasures: Out of Space

New Treasures: Out of Space

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Out of Space Pelgrane PressIt’s been far too long since I’ve game mastered a Lovecraftian horror RPG. I miss the high-stakes drama, the desperate battles, the sheer cosmic scale and invention of Lovecraft’s horrors. Most of all, I miss the shell-shocked expressions on my players faces, the cries of “Dear God! Why would you do that to us? Why — why??” Good times, good times.

My favorite recent Lovecraftian horror RPG is Kenneth Hite’s Trail of Cthulhu, from the marvelous Pelgrane Press. They’ve been supporting it with a series of terrific PDF releases, including The Repairer of Reputations a massive 44-page adventure based on the classic story of the same name by Robert W. Chambers, in which the alien beings described in the play are as real as the players believe them to be. And the 40-page Hell Fire, set in the seedy underclass of 18th century London, where a horrifying plague is ravaging the city, its victims in the grip of a sinister entity bent on engulfing the world in disease and death.

Now Pelgrane Press has assembled both of those adventures, and three more — Flying Coffins, set in Winter 1918 above the skies of France, as players take the role of members of the Royal Flying Corps stationed near the Front, confronting rumors that the next big push is about to begin… and that recent Germany victories in the air are due to supernatural assistance; Many Fires, in which the Investigators take on Pancho Villa’s bandit army in the mountains of northern Mexico, as well as something ancient and obscene that lies smoldering among ruins older than the Aztecs; and finally The Millionaire’s Special, which invites the players to travel first class on the maiden voyage of the Titanic, where they are invited to a private viewing of one of the world’s great curiosities, a cursed Egyptian mummy.

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New Treasures: The Simon & Kirby Library: Science Fiction

New Treasures: The Simon & Kirby Library: Science Fiction

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The-Simon-and-Kirby-Library-Science-FictionJoe Simon and Jack Kirby were perhaps the most important and successful comic team of the 1940s and 50s. Together they created Captain America (among many other popular creations) and produced an incredible body of work spanning numerous genres. Joe Simon was the first editor of Marvel Comics and the legendary Jack Kirby later partnered with Stan Lee to create some of the most enduring characters of the 20th Century, including Iron Man, The Fantastic Four, The Hulk, The Silver Surfer, Daredevil, Thor, the X-Men, and countless others.

The Simon & Kirby Library: Science Fiction is packed with dozens of stories, many of them photographed from the original artwork. This is essential pulp science fiction, with tales of brave spacemen, intrepid jungle explorers encountering lost civilizations, living shadows, crash landings on bizarre alien worlds, sinister robots, giant monsters battling desperate armies, beautiful barbarian princesses, impossible inventions, and much more.

The Simon and Kirby Library: Science Fiction spans more than 20 years, beginning with the first stories Joe Simon and Jack Kirby ever produced together (beginning in June 1940) — their ten-issue run of Blue Bolt adventures. Then the Cold War years will be represented by Race For the Moon, featuring pencils by Kirby and inked artwork by comic book legends Reed Crandall, Angelo Torres, and Al Williamson.

Other rarities from both decades are included, and as a bonus for readers, the volume features stories illustrated by Crandall, Torres, and Williamson — without Kirby.

The book also includes an introduction by Watchmen co-creator Dave Gibbons. This is the fourth volume in The Simon & Kirby Library, following Superheroes, Crime and the best-selling Horror.

The book is in full-color throughout, and most of the art has been restored and vibrantly re-colored by Harry Mendryk. My only complaint about this volume is that only a handful of covers are included, in a sparse 3-page cover gallery in the back.

The Simon & Kirby Library: Science Fiction was published by Titan Books on June 4. It is 352 pages in hardcover, priced at $49.95. There is no digital edition.