New Treasures – Page 196

New Treasures: Menzoberranzan: City of Intrigue

Friday, August 24, 2012 John ONeill Comments 4 comments

One of my favorite RPG settings of all time is Menzoberranzan, the 1992 boxed set from TSR that drew liberally from R.A. Salvatore’s best-selling Drizzt Do’Urden novels. Written by Ed Greenwood, Salvatore, and Douglas Niles, the box detailed the famous City of Spiders, the subterranean birthplace of the drow ranger, in three thick books and a set of gorgeous maps. Packed with 20,000 drow inhabitants, hundreds of thousands of humanoid slaves, and countless secrets and simmering rivalries, the home of the drow was an ideal adventure site for intrepid (and suitably high level) players.

Released nearly 20 years ago for second edition AD&D, Menzoberranzan has not seen an update since and has been out of print for over 15 years. It was featured in the popular Menzoberranzan PC game from SSI/DreamForge, part of their Forgotten Realms product line, in 1994, and very prominently in the six volume War of the Spider Queen novels, but it’s been far too long since my favorite underdark city-state appeared in a new edition.

The wait is finally over. Wizards of the Coast has released an updated version in Menzoberranzan: City of Intrigue, now available in hardcover:

The profane beauty of Menzoberranzan reflects the true nature of the drow and Lolth, their vile spider queen. Within sculpted palaces, factions vie for dominion, spin webs of conspiracy, wage war on the surface realms, and spread poisonous rumors. Meanwhile, predator stalk the twisted streets, plotting murder and mayhem. The city has no pity for fools and weaklings.

Menzoberranzan: City of Intrigue breathes new life into the fabled home of Drizzt Do’Urden and leaves no stone unturned. This book explores the city, tells the stories behind important drow houses and factions, and peeks at the mysteries waiting to unfold in the deadliest city of the Forgotten Realms world. This product is compatible with all editions of the Dungeons & Dragons Roleplaying Game and features a poster map of the city.

Menzoberranzan: City of Intrigue is 128 pages in hardcover, heavily illustrated in full color. The poster map is rather colorless, but large and extremely detailed. It was released on August 21 for $29.95.

You can see all of our recent New Treasures here.

Athans & Associates Releases Tales From The Fathomless Abyss

Thursday, August 23, 2012 John ONeill Comments 0 Comment

I’ve never been a huge fan of shared-world anthologies — which is strange considering I was a voracious fantasy reader at the height of the genre, the late 80s, the era of Terri Windling’s Borderlands, C. J. Cherryh’s Merovingen Nights, Will Shetterly & Emma Bull’s Liavek, George R.R. Martin’s Wild Cards, and the great granddaddy of them all, Thieve’s World.

But some recent projects have begun changing my mind. It started with Welcome to Bordertown, the 2011 anthology that our own Patty Templeton called, in her own special manner, “Really GD awesome. I freakin’ loved it.” It continued with Scott Taylor’s Tales of the Emerald Serpent, the tremendously successful 2012 project that includes fiction from Lynn Flewelling, Harry Connolly, Juliet McKenna, Martha Wells, Julie Czerneda, and many more.

Now comes word of a shared world project that sounds just as intriguing: Tales From The Fathomless Abyss.

Descend into the world of the Fathomless Abyss, a bottomless pit that opens who-knows-when onto who-knows-where, just long enough for new people from a thousand different worlds and a million different times to fall in and join the fight for survival in a place where the slightest misstep means an everlasting fall into eternity.

Tales from the Fathomless Abyss features six new short stories, and it’s only the beginning. From here, each author will branch out to spin a series of new books sharing this impossible, explosive, infinite setting.

The anthology is edited by Philip Athans. It includes an intro by Ken Scholes and original contributions from Mike Resnick & Brad R. Torgersen, Jay Lake, Mel Odom, J.M. McDermott, Cat Rambo, and Philip Athans. Two of the promised follow-on titles have already been released: Devils of the Endless Deep by Phil Athans, which expands on his short story from the anthology and plays with the strange time travel aspects of the Fathomless Abyss setting, and J.M. McDermott’s Nirvana Gates, which takes the setting to the next, deeper level. It also features an excerpt from the next book by Cat Rambo, due in two months. That one will be followed by standalone novellas by Mel Odom, Mike Resnick and Brad Torgerson, and Jay Lake.

Best of all, the introductory anthology Tales From The Fathomless Abyss has been released at the can’t-turn-it-down price of $0.99 for the digital version. Check it out, and get in on the ground floor on an exciting new series. You can buy it today from Barnes & Noble and Amazon.com.

New Treasures: Kim Newman’s Anno Dracula: The Bloody Red Baron

Wednesday, August 22, 2012 John ONeill Comments 2 comments

Okay, technically, this is both a Vintage Treasure and a New Treasure. It’s a brand spanking new edition of a novel that came out nearly two decades ago, in 1995.

But what a novel. The sequel to Anno Dracula, one of the most acclaimed vampire novels of the 90s — an alternate history in which Count Dracula has killed Van Helsing, married Queen Victoria, imposed a police state and launched a terrifying new era of British vampire domination — The Bloody Red Baron picks up the story a few years later, at the dawn of World War I:

It is 1918 and Graf von Dracula is commander-in-chief of the armies of Germany and Austria-Hungary. The war of the great powers in Europe is also a war between the living and the undead. Caught up in the conflict, Charles Beauregard, an old enemy of Dracula, his protégé Edwin Winthrop, and intrepid vampire reporter Kate Reed go head-to-head with the lethal vampire flying machine that is the Bloody Red Baron…

One of the most fascinating aspects of Anno Dracula was the adroit manner in which Newman drew from real and fictional historical characters for virtually his entire cast — including Jack the Ripper, Sherlock Holmes, Inspector Lestrade, Allan Quatermain, Billy the Kid, Orson Welles, Oscar Wilde, Fu Manchu, The Invisible Man, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Carmilla, Doctor Moreau, Kurt Barlow (Salem’s Lot), Carnacki, Barnabas Collins (Dark Shadows), Daniel Dravot (The Man Who Would Be King), Count Orlok (Nosferatu) and even Carl Kolchak (The Night Stalker).

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New Treasures: Blaggard’s Moon, by George Bryan Polivka

Saturday, August 18, 2012 John ONeill Comments 0 Comment

I don’t know much about George Bryan Polivka, to be honest. But I know he writes books I want to read.

I first discovered him while doing research for my most recent article on remaindered fantasy at Amazon.com. Two novels in his pirate-y Trophy Chase Trilogy were heavily discounted, so I figured that was worth a look. In the process, I discovered this standalone fantasy tale and decided to take a chance. It arrived this week.

“This is the story of the great battle between the pirates of the world and the band of merciless men who would purge us from the seas and make the name Hell’s Gatemen a source of terror to us all.”

Thus begins the tale told by Ham Drumbone, a pirate storyteller with a gift for dramatic detail. It is recalled by Smith Delaney as he awaits a gruesome death at the hands of ancient beasts called mermonkeys, who are eager to devour his bones. In the process of remembering, this simple pirate ponders, in his always earnest and often whimsical way, the mysteries of true hearts wronged, noble love gone awry, dark deeds done for the sake of gold, and the sacrifices made for love.

For Ham’s story is about Damrick Fellows, the great pirate hunter, who works his way ever closer to the great pirate king, Conch Imbry, only to find his focus blurred by his love for the pirate’s woman, Jenta Stillmithers. In the end, Delaney must come face-to-face with himself, with his choices, with the power of love, and with a God who promises him both a hell richly earned and a grace given where none is deserved. A swashbuckling fantasy story for all ages from Emmy Award-winning author George Bryan Polivka.

A little research reveals Polivka won his Emmy in 1986 for writing his documentary A Hard Road to Glory, on the racial prejudice faced by African American athletes. It also reveals he writes primarily Christian fantasy, which ought to make an interesting slant on a pirate novel.

I also ordered The Legend of the Firefish and The Battle for Vast Dominion, two novels in Trophy Chase Trilogy which are still available at discount prices on Amazon, which also feature pirates, epic sea battles, magic, and plenty of buckles that swash. Not sure which I’ll dip into first, but I’ll report back here as I learn more.

New Treasures: Sherlock Holmes: The Army of Dr. Moreau

Saturday, August 18, 2012 John ONeill Comments 4 comments

We see a lot of exciting, original fantasy every week here at the roof-top headquarters of Black Gate magazine. It’s good to see the genre is still filled with invention, and hot new writers throwing out new ideas like sparks off a forge.

But I’m not always in the mood for the new. Sometimes what I want is a fresh take on some of my old favorites. That’s why I enjoy Cthulhu fiction, for example, and William Patrick Maynard’s excellent Sax Rohmer articles and novels.

And that’s why I was very intrigued by Guy Adams’s Sherlock Holmes: The Army of Dr. Moreau, a potent literary mash-up that combines H.G. Wells and Arthur Conan Doyle. Guy Adams is the author of the Sherlock Holmes novel, The Breath of God, as well as The Case Notes of Sherlock Holmes and the horror novels The World House and Restoration. He’s also written several Torchwood novels, and a number of tie-ins to the TV series Life on Mars. Here’s the description:

Following the trail of several corpses seemingly killed by wild animals, Holmes and Watson stumble upon the experiments of Dr. Moreau. Through vivisection and crude genetic engineering, Moreau is creating animal hybrids, in an attempt to prove the evolutionary theories of Charles Darwin.

In his laboratory, hidden among the opium dens of Rotherhithe, Moreau is building an army of “beast men.” Tired of having his work ignored — or reviled — by the British scientific community, Moreau is willing to make the world pay attention using his creatures as a force to gain control of the government.

Any book that combines hidden laboratories, genetic engineering, Sherlock Holmes, and a plot to take over the world gets my attention.

Sherlock Holmes: The Army of Dr. Moreau was released on August 7 by Titan Books. It is 290 pages in trade paperback, priced at $12.95, or just $7.99 for the Kindle version. You can read the first two chapters here.

James Enge’s A Guile of Dragons Arrives

Friday, August 17, 2012 John ONeill Comments 11 comments

The official on-sale date isn’t until August 24, but I’ve now received multiple reports that James Enge’s A Guile of Dragons has arrived in stores. It’s also available for purchase online. We can’t postpone the party any longer.

James Enge’s first published story “Turn Up This Crooked Way” — the tale that introduced Morlock the Maker to the world — was in Black Gate 8. Morlock appeared in virtually every issue of Black Gate for the next five years; his last appearance was the novella “Destroyer” in BG 14.

James’ first Morlock novel, Blood of Ambrose, was nominated for the World Fantasy Award in 2010. It was followed by This Crooked Way, which collected a dozen short stories, including all six published in Black Gate, and The Wolf Age. A Guile of Dragons is the fourth in the series, and the first new Morlock book in almost two years. As we reported back in February, it is Morlock’s origin story:

Before history began, the dwarves of Thrymhaiam fought against the dragons as the Longest War raged in the deep roads beneath the Northhold. Now the dragons have returned, allied with the dead kings of Cor and backed by the masked gods of Fate and Chaos.

The dwarves are cut off from the Graith of Guardians in the south. Their defenders are taken prisoner or corrupted by dragonspells. The weight of guarding the Northhold now rests on the crooked shoulders of a traitor’s son, Morlock syr Theorn (also called Ambrosius).

But his wounded mind has learned a dark secret in the hidden ways under the mountains. Regin and Fafnir were brothers, and the Longest War can never be over…

The gorgeous cover is by Steve Stone. Click on the image at right to see the complete wrap-around image in HD.

A Guile of Dragons is 320 pages in trade paperback, published by Pyr Books. It is $17.95, and has an official on-sale date of August 24. But if you find it for sale and whisk it home before then, we won’t tell anyone.

New Treasures: The Book of Cthulhu, edited by Ross E. Lockhart

Thursday, August 16, 2012 John ONeill Comments 6 comments

It’s been a few good years for Cthulhu fans, with a number of high-profile, acclaimed anthologies offering brand new tales of everyone’s favorite genocidal cosmic entity, including Ellen Datlow’s Lovecraft Unbound (2009), Darrell Schweitzer’s Cthulhu’s Reign (2010), S. T. Joshi’s Black Wings of Cthulhu (2010), and Future Lovecraft (2011) edited by Paula R. Stiles and Silvia Moreno-Garcia, among others.

However, if you’re new to the Cthulhu mythos, or just want to sample the best Lovecraftian horror of the last eight decades, your options are a little more limited. Paula Guran’s New Cthulhu: The Recent Weird (2011) offers an excellent cross-section of fiction from the last decade, with short stories by Neil Gaiman, John Langan, China Miéville, Michael Shea, Charles Stross, and many others. At 528 pages, it’s a veritable feast of modern cosmic horror, but since the oldest story dates from the year 2000, it doesn’t really count as a true survey of the very finest Cthulhu fiction.

That title, I think, goes to Ross E. Lockhart’s The Book of Cthulhu. It includes some of the most famous Cthulhu stories of all time, including T.E.D. Klein’s “Black Man With a Horn” (1980), Brian McNaughton’s “The Doom That Came to Innsmouth” (1999), and fiction by Charles R. Saunders, Ramsey Campbell, Bruce Sterling, Laird Barron, Kage Baker, Thomas Ligotti, Gene Wolfe, and many others.

Although Lockhart draws heavily from modern writers, there’s surprisingly little overlap with Guran’s volume — a scant four stories. You could probably get away with getting both, in fact. I’m glad I did.

Ross E. Lockhart is the managing editor of Night Shade Books. A second volume, The Book of Cthulhu 2 — reprinting stories by Fritz Leiber, Neil Gaiman, Laird Barron, Michael Chabon, and many others — is scheduled for release in October.

The Book of Cthulhu is 530 pages in a handsome trade paperback, with cover art by Obrotowy. It was released in August, 2011 by Night Shade Books, with a cover price of $15.99.

Mindjammer Press Publishes Sarah Newton’s Mindjammer

Monday, August 13, 2012 John ONeill Comments 5 comments

I first encountered Sarah Newton in 2010, when Howard Andrew Jones mentioned how impressed he was with Mindjammer, a far future transhuman space opera setting she wrote for the Starblazer Adventures RPG. I picked up a copy of her massive Legends of Anglerre fantasy roleplaying game on the strength of his rec and wasn’t disappointed. It was a gorgeous and inventive game based on the popular FATE system and we reviewed it in detail in Black Gate 15. I was especially impressed with Sarah’s crisp prose and attention to detail.

We don’t let talent like that get away if we can help it, so we recruited Sarah as a BG contributor last year. Her detailed appreciation of a classic urban setting, Pavis – Gateway to Adventure: The Classic RPG City is Back! (parts One and Two) was one of the most popular gaming articles we’ve published on the website this year.

Now Sarah has published her first novel, Mindjammer, through the brand new Mindjammer Press. Mindjammer Press, a new roleplaying and fiction imprint, has announced plans to publish both the Mindjammer roleplaying game and a new line of associated fiction. Their publication schedule includes the upcoming second edition core book, Mindjammer: The Expansionary Era — with vastly expanded content, new and detailed background material, and all new artwork — in spring 2013. It will be followed by the Solenine campaign pack, based on the setting for the first novel, a new and revamped Black Zone campaign, and the second novel in the Mindjammer series, Transcendence. Here’s the description for the first novel:

IT IS THE SECOND AGE OF SPACE… In the seventeenth millennium, the New Commonality of Humankind is expanding, using newly-discovered faster-than-light travel to rediscover lost worlds colonised in the distant past. It’s a time of turmoil, of clashing cultures, as civilisations shudder and collapse before the might of a benevolent empire ten millennia old.

In the Solenine Cluster, things are going from bad to worse, as hyper-advanced technologies destabilise a world in chaos. Thaddeus Clay and his SCI Force special ops team are on the trail of the Transmigration Heresy. What they find is something beyond even their imagining – something which could tear the whole Commonality apart…

Mindjammer is receiving a lot of positive press from readers both inside and outside the gaming industry. Here’s what Stargazer’s World said about it:

What I also enjoyed tremendously was that Mindjammer is a science fiction story that really deserves the name. The technology described sounds plausible and the Commonality era feels “real.” And even though Mindjammer is highly entertaining it also makes the reader ponder a couple of philosophical questions like what makes us human and is there a way to cheat death? In my opinion good SF should not only entertain but make us ask questions. Mindjammer does that all the time…

Mindjammer is a very exiting and intelligently-written novel that should be on the reading list of every SF fan!

Mindjammer is available now in Kindle format for $3.99 and in print for $15.95, both from Amazon. Check it out.

New Treasures: Bentley Little’s Indignities of the Flesh

Monday, August 13, 2012 John ONeill Comments 0 Comment

I try to keep up on the latest in horror, I do. But it’s challenging. There’s a lot of fresh talent emerging, exciting new work from established authors, and classic stuff I really should make time for. What do I buy, and what do I make time to read?

Lacking a real plan, I’ve fallen back on a tried-and-true strategy that introduced me to the best fantasy and science fiction decades ago: I buy the books with the best covers.

Which brings us handily to Indignities of the Flesh by Bentley Little. Isn’t that a cool cover? Creepy claw-handed dudes, glowing blue hair, and cosmic-colored pajamas. I was reaching for my credit card before I’d finished reading the title. (Click on the image for a bigger version.)

Indignities of the Flesh is a collection of 10 short stories by the acclaimed author of nearly two dozen horror novels. Bentley Little won the Bram Stoker Award for Best First Novel for The Revelation in 1990; he was nominated again for Best Novel in 1993 for The Summoning. I have his previous short story collection, The Collection, which is now out of print and highly prized by collectors. Here’s the book description for Indignities:

Herein you’ll meet: the mischievous “Rodeo Clown”, who may very well be evil incarnate, or perhaps little more than an innocent bystander in a ring of coincidence; a man obsessed with dental hygiene to the point of stalking, in “Brushing”; a cynic forced to tag along on an ill-advised trip to a faith healer in “Documented Miracles”; a demented birthday girl whose equally demented birthday wishes are about to come true, in “Happy Birthday, Dear Tama”; a family on the run from cartoonists in search of their god, in “Looney Tunes”; and a man who pays the ultimate price for circumventing a parking attendant in the never before published, “Valet Parking.”

Rounding out the collection are “The Black Ladies” and “The Piñata,” a pair of unsettling stories culled from childhood nightmares, the surprisingly poignant “Even the Dead,” which documents the last days of a tender partnership between two friends, only one of whom is still alive… Indignities of the Flesh is a superlative gathering of the kind of twisted, darkly humorous, and mind-bending stories for which Bentley Little is best known.

Indignities of the Flesh is 208 pages in a deluxe hardcover edition from Subterranean Press. It is $35, and was released on May 31. The cover and interior pen-and-ink illustrations are by the talented Bob Eggleton. Learn more at the Subterranean website.

New Treasures: Wizards of the Coast Releases Dungeon Command

Saturday, August 11, 2012 John ONeill Comments 5 comments

I’ve been relieved and gratified to see the resurgence in fantasy board gaming over the last decade.

With the demise of the great board game companies of my youth — SPI, Yaquinto, Avalon Hill, FASA, GDW, Metagaming, Task Force, and many others — it looked like the hobby that fired my imagination and gave me such pleasure for decades was headed for extinction. But Fantasy Flight, Wizards of the Coast, Days of Wonder, and a handful of other companies have turned that around in the last few years, releasing terrific titles that have rejuvenated the entire genre, like RoboRally, Small World, Ikusa, and the epic Conquest of Nerath.

It hasn’t happened in a vacuum. Part of the credit goes to the explosion of interest in miniatures. Games Workshop’s Warhammer, Privateer Press’s WarMachine and Iron Kingdoms, Wizkids’s HeroClix, and collectible miniature games from Wizards of the Coast and many others, have made table top gaming cool again, getting young gamers to put down their game controllers and pick up dice.

Wizards of the Coast has really been at the forefront of fantasy board gaming, especially recently. Just in the past few years they’ve released a surprising number of innovative and successful titles, including Lords of Waterdeep, The Legend of Drizzt, Castle Ravenloft, and many others.

Now they’re at it again with a major new launch: Dungeon Command, a head-to-head miniatures skirmish game designed for two or more players.

It looks like a lot of fun. And best of all, the components of Dungeon Command are 100% compatible with other popular Wizards of the Coast games: the miniatures and dungeon tiles can be used with the D&D RPG, and the unique cards provided with each miniature can be used with D&D Adventure System board games like Castle Ravenloft, Wrath of Ashardalon, and The Legend of Drizzt.

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