Of Necromancers and Frog Gods: Part Two (The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes)

Of Necromancers and Frog Gods: Part Two (The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes)

FROG GOD GAMES

Last November, I did a post on the history of Necromancer Games. I wrapped up with, “And there, our saga of Necromancer Games draws to a close. But our story has most certainly not come to an end.” That’s because Slumbering Tsar would rise from the ashes and a new RPG company would be built on its foundations. Welcome to Part Two: Of Necromancers & Frog Gods.

Waking the Tsar

FGG_DesolationShortly after Necromancer hung it up, co-founder Bill Webb established Frog God Games just to publish Greg Vaughan’s The Slumbering Tsar as a fourteen-part subscription saga, to be issued as one massive book at the end of the project.

Starting at 7th level, Tsar is divided into three books. If you want to start from 1st level, I suggest using The Wizard’s Amulet and/or The Crucible of Freya, then part of Tomb of Abysthor as a 1st through 6th level lead-in. The Lost City of Barakus is another excellent option, though not as thematically linked. Though it wouldn’t take much to give the villainous Devron a tie-in to Tsar.

Book one, The Desolation, is three installments (parts) dealing with a small settlement in the barren plains. It totals about 125 pages and gives the party a staging area for adventuring towards Tsar. Think of a Necromancer version of The Village of Hommlet – but way nastier. The story of The Army of Light at the very end of part one is worth it alone for me.

Part two includes the Ashen Waste: with such highlights as The Tomb of the Sleeping Knight (not a lot of sleeping going on here) and the burial mound of the barbarian warriors led by Tark. The Chaos Rift, featuring The Sepulcher of the Last Justicar, is even more deadly.

Part Three gets the party to the walls of Tsar, though it might well perish in The Boiling Land or The Dead Fields first. And a sticky situation waits outside the walls…

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Black Gate Nominated for a World Fantasy Award

Black Gate Nominated for a World Fantasy Award

World Fantasy AwardThe 2016 World Fantasy Awards Ballot, compiled by the voting attendees of the World Fantasy Convention, has just been released. And I’m very pleased to note that several contributors to Black Gate feature prominently, including:

Long Fiction — “Farewell Blues,” Bud Webster (BG blogger and poetry editor)
Short Fiction — “Pockets,” Amal El-Mohtar (BG blogger)
CollectionBone Swans, C.S.E. Cooney (BG website editor)
Special Award, Nonprofessional — John O’Neill, for Black Gate

This is a tremendous honor for Black Gate, and for me personally. The awards will be presented at the World Fantasy Convention in Columbus, Ohio, on October 30th. I hope to see you there.

The winners in every category are selected by a panel of judges. Here’s the complete list of nominees, with links to our previous coverage:

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Is There Such a Thing as an RTS Board Game? Rivet Wars: Eastern Front Thinks So

Is There Such a Thing as an RTS Board Game? Rivet Wars: Eastern Front Thinks So

Rivet Wars-small

Last month I bought a copy of Rivet Wars, one of the most popular light war games on the market. It was designed by veteran computer game designer Ted Terranova (Rise of Nations), who worked hard to give the game the feel of a computer RTS (real time strategy) game…. and, going by the reviews, he largely succeeded. Here’s the description.

Rivet Wars is a miniatures boardgame that springs forth from the warped imagination of Ted Terranova – set on a world that never quite left World War I but with crazy technology like walking tanks, diesel powered armor, unicycled vehicles and armor plated cavalry! Don’t let the cute visuals fool you; it’s a world full of angst, war-torn camaraderie and dark humor. Rivet Wars is at its heart a strategy game, with both players deploying units each round to counter the threats set forth by their opponent and stay one tactical step ahead. Heavily influenced by Ted’s experience working on RTS games like Rise of Nations, players gather resources (bunkers and capture points) and use these to deploy streams of new units! There’s an ebb and flow on the tactical landscape and you can stock up surprises for your opponent to be unleashed even as he thinks he’s winning!

And here’s a peek at the back of the box.

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Tin House 64, the Summer Reading Issue, Now Available

Tin House 64, the Summer Reading Issue, Now Available

TIn House 68 Summer 2016-small TIn House 68 Summer 2016-back-small

Tin House is an American literary magazine, showcasing fiction and poetry from new and established writers. The magazine was founded in 1999, and has published fiction by Stephen King, Kelly Link, Jonathan Lethem, David Foster Wallace, and many others. The 2016 Summer Reading issue is huge — 224 pages — and filled with fiction. There are 11 stories, including five in translation, and an excerpt from the dark environmental thriller Marrow Island by Alexis M. Smith.

In his Editor’s Note, Rob Spillman gives us a sneak peek at the contents.

Booksellers like the ones I met in Denver challenge us to keep seeking out the most exciting and thoughtful work by new and established writers from all over the world, and because of them we’re confident there is an audience for their work. In this issue we’re proud to bring you five fabulous translations, among them Dorthe Nors’s “By Sydvest Station,” translated from the Danish by Misha Hoekstra, and Jean-Philippe Toussaint’s “The Dress of Honey,” translated from the French by Edward Gauvin. Alexis M. Smith’s debut novel, Glaciers, was an indie sensation, and here we feature an excerpt from her follow-up, Marrow Island. Smith is joined by other indie darlings, Deb Olin Unferth, Josh Weil, and Saša Stanišic, as well as esteemed poets Dorianne Laux and John Ashbery, who return to our pages. We’re also happy to welcome new-to-us poets Anna Journey and Sam Riviere.

Here’s a look at the complete Table of Contents.

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Here Be Spiders: Arachnophobia & Arachnoquake

Here Be Spiders: Arachnophobia & Arachnoquake

Arachnophobia-small Arachnoquake-small

After watching and reviewing all five of the Tremors movies lately, I decided to turn my attention to movies about critters that mostly dwell above the ground — spiders.

Arachnophobia, a big-budget mainstream effort from 1990, is one of the better known examples of this sub-sub-genre. Then there’s Arachnoquake, one of those SyFy originals (yes, one of those) that came out in 2012.

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New Treasures: Invaders edited by Jacob Weisman

New Treasures: Invaders edited by Jacob Weisman

Invaders Jacob Weisman-small Invaders Jacob Weisman-back-small

When I was at the Nebula Awards weekend I had a chance to catch up with my friend Jacob Weisman, publisher of Tachyon Books, and I asked him about his upcoming anthology Invaders: 22 Tales From the Outer Limits of Literature. I had assumed it was a collection of alien invasion tales but, as he patiently explained to me, that’s not it at all. Jacob has gathered a superb batch of stories by literary authors who have invaded science fiction — and left distinct footprints behind. Here’s the Publishers Weekly review.

In this very fine reprint anthology, Weisman has brought together 22 SF stories by authors who, although not generally associated with the genre, are clearly fellow travelers (not the ominous invaders suggested by the title). Among the major names are Pulitzer Prize–winner Junot Díaz, George Saunders, Katherine Dunn, Jonathan Lethem, Amiri Baraka, W.P. Kinsella, Steven Millhauser, Robert Olen Butler, and Molly Gloss. Among the best of the consistently strong stories are Díaz’s “Monstro,” the horrifying tale of a disease outbreak in Haiti; Gloss’s near-perfect first-contact story, “Lambing Season”; Kinsella’s totally bizarre “Reports Concerning the Death of the Seattle Albatross Are Somewhat Exaggerated”; Ben Loory’s fable-like “The Squid Who Fell in Love with the Sun”; and Saunders’s “Escape from Spiderhead,” a deeply sexy tale of wild experimental science. In general, the stories tend toward satire and emphasize fine writing more than hitting genre beats — technology is usually a means to an end rather than the center of the story — but most of them could easily have found homes in SF magazines. This volume is a treasure trove of stories that draw equally from SF and literary fiction, and they are superlative in either context.

Here’s the complete table of contents.

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Future Treasures: The Race by Nina Allen

Future Treasures: The Race by Nina Allen

The Race Nina Allen-smallI quite enjoy Nina Allen’s regular column in Interzone magazine. Which I guess is kind of an odd way to introduce her, but it’s true. She’s also a fine short story writer who’s earned a lot of accolades in a short period of time — including the British Science Fiction BSFA Award, the Grand Prix de l’Imaginaire, and the Aeon Award. She’s been shortlisted for the British Fantasy Award four times, and was a finalist for the 2014 Shirley Jackson Award.

The Race is her first novel. It was first published in the UK by NewCon, a small press. Tor.com described it as “a progressive sci-fi novel set in a future Great Britain scarred by fracking and ecological collapse,” and Kirkus Reviews praised it as “a brilliantly weird world that’s utterly riveting.” Titan Books is re-issuing it in trade paperback in the UK and the US this month, with a knockout new cover designed by Julia Lloyd. Here’s the description.

A child is kidnapped with consequences that extend across worlds… A writer reaches into the past to discover the truth about a possible murder… Far away a young woman prepares for her mysterious future…

In a future scarred by fracking and ecological collapse, Jenna Hoolman’s world is dominated by illegal smartdog racing: greyhounds genetically modified with human DNA. When her young niece goes missing that world implodes… Christy’s life is dominated by fear of her brother, a man she knows capable of monstrous acts and suspects of hiding even darker ones. Desperate to learn the truth she contacts Alex, who has his own demons to fight… And Maree, a young woman undertaking a journey that will change her world forever.

The Race will be published by Titan Books on July 19, 2016. It is 400 pages, priced at $14.95 in trade paperback and $7.99 for the digital edition. The cover was designed by Julia Lloyd. Read a brief excerpt from Chapter One at Tor.com.

John DeNardo: In Defense of Media Tie-Ins (Part 1)

John DeNardo: In Defense of Media Tie-Ins (Part 1)

Dan Abnett Eisenhorn-smallJohn DeNardo has closed up shop at his Hugo Award-winning blog SF Signal, but he continues to write about SF and fantasy in his regular column at Kirkus Reviews. One of his best recent articles — indeed, one of the most enjoyable blog posts I’ve read in a long time — was his passionate and articulate defense of Media Tie-ins, published on June 15.

As much as I bemoan the poor public of image of science fiction by mainstream readers, there’s an even worse injustice going on. Some people in those very same slighted genre circles are often quick to dismiss a certain type of book: media tie-ins. These are the books that are based on a story most often found in another media (like film, television, and games) but could be sourced from other literary properties as well. These are the Star WarsStar Trek, and Dungeons and Dragons prose novels that the bookstores like to relegate to the end of the science fiction and fantasy bookshelf section. They are positioned like an appendix in a non-fiction book “in case you’re interested in more reading.” You know, if you’ve run out of other things to read…

So, yes, media tie-ins are worth your time. I’ll even back that up: one of the best set of books I’ve ever read — in any genre — was the Eisenhorn trilogy by Dan Abnett. The books are set in the richly-imagined Warhammer 40K universe, which is based on the popular role playing game. (Even WH40K itself is an offshoot of the fantasy RPG Warhammer, for which there are even more prose novels.)  Abnett is a one of the most skilled master storytellers you’ve never heard of.  This is the series that I point to when anyone is quick to dismiss tie-in fiction. The fact that it is set in the Warhammer 40K universe is incidental, though if you are familiar with the games, that would be an added bonus when you read them. I don’t play the game, but that didn’t stop me from losing sleep because I couldn’t stop turning page after action-packed page, or cheering when a bad guy finally got his comeuppance.

Read John’s complete article here.

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Check Out the Latest Fantasy Fiction at Tor.com

Check Out the Latest Fantasy Fiction at Tor.com

Terminal Lavie Tidhar-small Dune Time Jack Nicholls-small The Destroyer Tara Isabella Burton-small

Yeah, I’m still getting caught up, so it’s not really the latest fiction at Tor.com. But I’ve made it into April, so that’s progress!

Anyway, here’s a fine new batch of fantasy and adventure SF short fiction from Michael R. Underwood, Joan Aiken, Lavie Tidhar, Jack Nicholls, and Tara Isabella Burton, all available for free at Tor.com.

The Destroyer” by Tara Isabella Burton
Posted April 20, edited by Ann VanderMeer. Art by Ashley Mackenzie (above right)
Fantasy, Science Fiction || In a futuristic, fascistic Rome, a brilliant, unstable scientist proves that she can transcend the human body’s limitations. The test subject? Her own daughter. A mother-daughter mad scientist story, “The Destroyer” asks how far we’ll go to secure our own legacies — and how far we’ll run to escape them.

Dune Time” by Jack Nicholls
Posted April 19, edited by David Hartwell. Art by Mark Smith (above middle)
Contemporary Fantasy, Magical Realism || Isolated in the desert with his brother, Hasan learns that there is more to the legends of the dunes than he initially believed.

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