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RPG (Arbiter of Worlds): This week marks the 24th episode of my series of instructional videos about how to be a better gamemaster. In this week’s video, I discuss how to mash up your favorite RPG system with another system to make a unique hybrid game. Car Wars + Traveller yields Driver. Cyberpunk + Runequest yields Runepunk. It’s time to smash the system!

H. P. Lovecraft (Giant Freakin Robot): Horror has proven to be one of Hollywood’s most profitable genres, and every year, a new low-budget film comes out and dominates the box office for weeks, if not months, at a time. A major, big-budget H.P. Lovecraft production has yet to happen, even though Cthulhu is one of pop culture’s most popular monsters, so what’s the problem?

Cinema (Godzilla Movies): As we await the new trailer for Godzilla Minus One (2023), dropping tonight, the teaser for the trailer revealed some interesting hints at the movie’s story. Here’s some of the biggest reveals so far: 1947? A message to the Prime Minister of Japan is dated, “10 February, 1947.” Although we’ve known for some time that the film would take place immediately after the post-war in the late 1940s, this is the first time we’ve been given a definitive year as to when the film takes place. Read More

7th Century Britain is not your normal setting for an historical novel. A. B. Higginson’s Wulfhere is the only one I can think of. Wulfhere was a five part serial in the pulp magazine Adventure in mid-1920.

Higginson was a Canadian with a military background. Wulfhere was his only published work. Sort of like Arthur A. Nelson, another writer who had one novel in Adventure, the sublime lost Viking city in Africa Wings of Danger.

Wulfhere begins with three men in a snowstorm coming across a hut inhabited by an old man. He is Edbert, of the royal family of East Anglia. He tells the travelers his tale while they are snowed in. Read More

Every week, the Castalia House Blog spotlights some of the many new releases in independent, pulp, and web novel-influenced science fiction and fantasy.


Combat Frame XSeed Illustrated Tech Guide II – Brian Neimeier 

Space is a graveyard

Meet the advanced war machines fighting for the fate of Earth!

Get the official specs on every Ynzu War era CF, plus fighters, ships, and more!

Learn the stories behind the mechs and pilots of the post-future!

See your favorite combat frames illustrated in gorgeous full color!

Access top secret weapon intel you won’t find anywhere else!

Put the secrets of every UCP, Ynzu, and PAX mech right at your fingertips.

Read the tech guide now!


Gemini Outsider (Gemini Man #3) – J. D. Cowan and Thomas Plutarch

Set in the world of Heroes Unleashed, and as relayed by Thomas Plutarch, this is the story of the Gemini Man! Join Matthew White and Jason Vermilion as they are given ancient artifacts that thrust them into the world of heroes. Now they must traverse unfamiliar worlds, fight uncompromising villains, and face magic of the like no one has yet seen before. This is the story of Castor and Pollux, the two warriors who would become the Gemini Man!

Matthew and Jason have finally escaped the forces on their tail. But all is not what it seems in the quaint town of Riverview. Hidden monsters and psycho killers emerge from the shadows to drag them back into the void. A madman closes in! But can they even fight back without their powers?


Guardians of the Twilight Lands (Books of Unexpected Enlightenment #6) – L. Jagi Lamplighter

An old enemy returns!

With the Heer of Dunderberg dead, Rachel Griffin is determined to save her beloved Roanoke Academy before time runs out, but to do this, a new covenant must be forged with the island’s fairies. On top of this, an old enemy has escaped and might reappear any moment

Rachel has learned not to wish on stars, but what should she do when she yearns for help? She is troubled by other questions, too: Where do the dead go? What became of her beloved late grandfather? Most annoying of all, with such a wonderful boyfriend, how can she be in love with two boys?

As her fourteenth birthday approaches, the answer to these questions awaits her, along with wonders such as she has never seen.

But there are terrible things ahead, too.


Hear, O Earth! (A Prayer for Earthrise #1) – Daniel Arenson

They came from beyond.

From beyond the galaxy. From beyond human understanding. They came with one mission.

To kill us all.

Some call them aliens. Others call them gods. Their tentacles grip worlds. Their malice destroys civilizations. They’ve crushed a million planets.

And now they crave Earth.

Marco and Addy, veterans of the Alien Wars, are retired. They fought for many years. They saved Earth many times. Now they’re raising their children in a peaceful forest. They’ve earned this peace.

But Earth needs them. More than ever.

Because a war is coming. A war unlike any before. A war that can devour our very galaxy.

The enemy is almost here.

From the shadows of despair, heroes will rise. Heroes will sound the cry of our world, the prayer of our people. “Hear, O Earth! We will live!” Read More

This is a guest post from Jared:

Outlaws of the Marsh is one of four classic Chinese epics. The most famous of these four epics is probably Romance of the Three Kingdoms by Luo Guanzhong. Numerous international video games are based on this novel about the tripartite civil war that ended the Han dynasty. A runner-up to Three Kingdoms (as it is also called) is Journey to the West, featuring Sun Wukong, the monkey king. Numerous movies and television series are based on this epic some of which can be found on several streaming services like Amazon Prime and Hulu. The least famous of the epics is Dream of Red Chamber, a family saga about a noble Chinese family. Outlaws of the Marsh, despite the lack of international fame, remains a Chinese favorite that readers of standard historical fiction would enjoy for many reasons. Read More

Tolkien (Quillette): Fantasy is more popular than ever, and this is the direct consequence of Tolkien’s success. But the genre has survived by adapting, and in an age of secularism, that process has involved evaporating the religious themes Tolkien cared about so deeply.

Pulp (Pulp Flakes): Robert Reeves, the author of the Cellini Smith stories in Black Mask, is a mysterious character. The veil of mystery around Reeves starts with his life. He seems to appear out of nowhere in the magazines, showing no evidence of newspaper work or other professions connected to the publishing business. Who was he? Where did he come from? Why did he stop writing so soon?

Fiction (Ken Lizzi): It was the Darrell K. Sweet cover that lured me to the first book, The Lure of the Basilisk. This introduced me to the world of Lawrence Watt-Evans’ The Lords of Dûs tetralogy and his unique character, Garth the Overman. The overmen were, it seems, magically created genetic mutations of men, made larger, stronger, less emotional, and with certain other physical traits including a second opposable thumb, thicker skin, and Halloween mask facial features. Read More

Charles Hoffman has been one of the most perceptive writers on Robert E. Howard’s fiction. His “Conan the Existentialist” has been reprinted three times after its original appearance in Amra #61 in 1974. He has had non-fiction pieces in The Dark Man, Crypt of Cthulhu, Spectrum, The Cimmerian, and The Robert E. Howard Reader.

He co-wrote with Marc Cerasini The Starmont Reader’s Guide to Robert E. Howard in 1986, expanded as Robert E. Howard: A Closer Look. That book had a profound influence on me. Charles Hoffman is always able to find something new when he looks at Howard, Lovecraft, or horror fiction.

He has a new collection of essays: Beyond the Black Stranger and Others. New essays on Robert E. Howard and H. P. Lovecraft. Read More

Every week, the Castalia House Blog spotlights some of the many new releases in independent, pulp, and web novel-influenced science fiction and fantasy.


Before Us (The Abyss #2) – Nathan Hystad

They came from below but were they also here Before Us?

Wyatt survived the initial destruction, but he’s lost someone important to him. While he fights to distract himself from harsh realities, he ventures for the rendezvous point, eager to reconnect with his past.

Blaze and his son, Luke, travel south, deeper into Mexico, in an effort to shut the remaining Rings off at the Nu-En facility. But Alan’s odd behavior and sordid past leave many questions unanswered.

Luna discovers just how strong she can be, and treks across the deadly country with her new friend. While reluctant to trust anyone, Luna finds she has no choice.


BRASS, Inc. (The Phoenix Initiative #7) – William S. Frisbee

Rick Walker is a veteran, but he’s also the newest scout sniper with BRASS, Inc., the finest scout sniper company in the Mercenary Guild. They infiltrate undetected to identify and terminate targets, then exfiltrate after delivering surgical destruction. Assault troopers love to have them paving the way and clearing obstacles because BRASS gives them the edge.

When Ben’s Bravos took on the mission to rescue a scientist held in a jungle fortress, therefore, there was only one company to call to scout the objective—BRASS, Inc. Though newly assembled, Rick’s team was hired to provide the recon and firepower needed to ensure the Bravos could pull off their seemingly impossible mission.

To do that, though, Rick will have to show he has what it takes, even though everyone—including the woman he loves—expects him to fail. And when everything starts to go wrong, and it appears the Bravos have a traitor in their ranks, he finds himself the only one at the objective. And if he doesn’t succeed, everyone—including himself—is going to die.

Just another day as a scout sniper. BRASS (Balls) Included.


Light Unto Another World #9 – Yakov Merkin

In wartime, where great powers are concerned, there are often dark secrets, buried just below the surface.

Uncovering those secrets is important, but it is often dangerous, in more than one way.

Especially when those secrets are directly related to your own past.

Fresh off just barely turning a devious enemy plot on its head, Uriel and his team are back in action.

However, almost immediately, a new wrinkle is thrown their way, when they discover a girl who was altered and turned into a shapeshifter, just like Setzell.

While Setzell is overjoyed to find someone else like her, the new arrival sets off a chain of events that will see Uriel and his team facing down their vilest foes yet, with the lives of people they care about on the line.

Read More

The Thracians were one of the great barbarian peoples of ancient history. The Greeks lived in fear of invading hordes of Thracian warriors. Later, they were the backbone of Macedonian and other Hellenistic monarchies armies. Herod of Judea employed them. Spartacus was a Thracian.

Chris Webber’s The Gods of Battle (Pen & Sword, 2011) is an examination of the Thracians at war 1500 B.C. to AD 150. We know so little about the Thracians including their language. Everything written about them were by outsiders.

Webber reconstructs the Thracians at war. Their society has been described more than once as being like Heroic Era Greece. Thrace was never unified but remained divided under various tribes. The Odrysai did briefly have a large state that is the closest thing to the unified Thrace. Read More

Science Fiction (Fantasy Literature): Conquerors From the Darkness first saw the light of day as a $3.50 Holt, Rinehart and Winston hardcover in 1965, with a cover by Alan E. Cober. The novel was an expansion of Silverberg’s novella “Spawn of the Deadly Sea,” which had appeared in the April 1957 issue of Science Fiction Adventures magazine; a novella that I have not read.

Tolkien (Black Gate): J.R.R Tolkien’s 1937 children’s fantasy The Hobbit is one of the most beloved books in the world, and because it serves (according to the cover of my old Ballantine paperback) as the “enchanting prelude to the Lord of the Rings” it is also one of the most influential books of the last century, all of which means that those who would presume to adapt the story for other media would be wise to tread warily.

Crime Fiction (M Porcius): I recently purchased a copy of the big Fredric Brown anthology put out in 2012 by Bruin Crimeworks, Miss Darkness, and from the “Tinglers” section late last month I read four stories first printed in the 1940s.  There are four more stories under the “Tinglers” heading, one of which we read in July 2022 when we read a bunch of critically-acclaimed noir stories, “Don’t Look Behind You.”  Let’s read the other three today, one from the World War II era, two from the early Sixties. Read More

I like reading books about books. Paperbacks From Hell covered paperback horror from the sixities through the early nineties. Mike Ripley’s Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang cover British “thrillers” from the early 50s (Casino Royale) to the late 70s (The Eagle Has Landed).

I picked up the trade paperback edition from 2019. The hardback was first published by Harper-Collins in 2017. Mike Ripley discusses reading thrillers growing up in Yorkshire in the 60s. The thriller genre included Alistair MacLean’s WW2 novels, Ian Fleming’s “James Bond” series, or Wilbur Smith’s historical African adventures. The format was hardback with the bigger authors and then mass market paperback. Read More

“We solved every case we worked on. It’s just that the solutions weren’t always pretty. An explosion here, an inferno there, and in the end, we’re left with a mountain of corpses, and, incidentally, a solution.”–Kei, “The Great Adventure of the Dirty Pair”


When science fiction writer A. Bertram Chandler visited Japan in the late 1970s, he had no idea that a stray comment would spark a multimedia science fiction franchise. When his hosts, including Haruka Takachiho of Crusher Joe fame, took Chandler to see a joshi (women’s) wrestling match, the antics of Takachiho’s assistants prompted Chandler to say, “”the two women in the ring may be the Beauty Pair, but those two with you ought to be called ‘the Dirty Pair’.” That stray comment sparked a novella that mixed Western pulp science fiction, Japanese joshi wrestling and idol singing, and a double-helping of chaos into what would be a classic raygun romance–if the Dirty Pair’s infamy didn’t keep scaring off potential suitors.

The Lovely Angels (don’t ever call them the Dirty Pair to their faces) is the code name for a pair of young trouble consultants. Kei, the narrator for the stories, is a brash, boastful, and lively hothead lifted from the covers of the pulps. Her partner, Yuri, is a demure Japanese beauty that acts as the brake to Kei’s recklessness–and the occasional focus of Kei’s jealousy as well. Together, Kei and Yuri form a set of complementary opposites–and a psionic duo straight out of John W. Campbell’s dreams. The resulting property damage, however, is straight out of a nightmare. In the best tradition of wrestling heels, the ensuing chaos is never quite their fault.

Like many Japanese stories, The Great Adventure of the Dirty Pair wears its inspirations on its sleeve. From wrestling, the series gets the outfits, names such as Lucha and the WWWA ( World Welfare Works Association from the World Women’s Wrestling Association), Kei and Yuri’s larger than life personalities, and their heelish yet sincere protests that the disasters in their wake are never their fault. The names Kei and Yuri are taken from the same assistants who entertained Chandler. From American science fiction pulps, the Dirty Pair steal liberally. Rayguns, heatguns, flying saucers, and Campbelline psionics feature prominently in the stories. Kei’s hair and build is classic pulp cover-girl, while the interior art is a mix of 1940s Weird Tales interior art and manga. Their adventures are the sort of trigger happy-detective story that filled the hero pulps. And, yes, that is a coeurl Kei and Yuri are riding on the cover, complete with the nickname “Black Destroyer”–and the special diet and property damage required by a hyper-intelligent alien cat. The result is a strange East-meets-West version of Northwest Smith, if Northwest Smith and Yarol were replaced by sorority girls.

While the two novellas in The Great Adventure of the Dirty Pair are standard futuristic versions of crime tales, complete with the requisite twists and betrayals, Kei’s narrative voice is the star of the show. Her larger-than-life exuberance practically drips from each word, even after translation into English. Some of this is due to Kei’s constant wrestling-style self-promotion, but Dark Horse did a masterful job in translation. Few English-language science fiction stories–and almost no light novels translated since–have such a vivid, unrestrained, and selfish voice animating their words, much less one trying to style herself as a heartbreaker and a lifetaker to potential partners and rivals alike.

At the end, when the villains are arrested, all the worlds are wrecked, and the refugees resettled, the Dirty Pair novel always preserves its pulpy sincerity, complete with the foreboding that the Lovely Angels will soon wreak their accidental havoc on a new world. Read More

Every week, the Castalia House Blog spotlights some of the many new releases in independent, pulp, and web novel-influenced science fiction and fantasy.


My Sister Suprema – Chuck Dixon and Anthony Gonzales-Clark

Randy is a bright young boy who devours comics and dreams of becoming a superhero. One day, he discovers a secret formula on the Internet that claims to provide an individual with superpowers. After assembling all the ingredients and technology required, he experiments with the process, but the whole thing goes terribly wrong. Somehow, by accident, his big sister Cecelia ends up with the very superpowers he’d been seeking for himself. And she has no idea what to do with them.

It falls to Randy to help her figure out what her powers are, select a costume, choose a superhero name, and teach her what it means to be a superhero. But while Randy and his sister are trying to figure things out and hide her new powers from their parents, the villain whose formula Randy inadvertently discovered is hunting for the thieves who stole his secret.


Preservation (Battle Mage Farmer #6) – Seth Ring

Insane cult trying to undermine the stability of society? Powerful mage whose very presence unmakes the world?

John doesn’t care. He’s getting married.

After rescuing Katrine, sealing himself into a manaless state, and defending against the most dangerous beast tide the world has ever seen, John only has one thing on his mind. Getting married, and going on a honeymoon. Oh, and trying to figure out a way to keep the world in one piece.

That quest will take him to worlds unknown, and pit him against enemies beyond anything he has ever faced. Thankfully, he’s not alone, and between Ellie and Ferdie, he has the best companions a simple farmer could ask for.


The Serpent Stairs (Essence Wielder #1) – Dan Michaelson and D. K. Holmberg

Dax Nelson was destined to protect the empire. When he’s gifted the power of an unusual essence, everything changes.

The Great Serpent grants a gift of powerful essence to those who come before him. The experience, and the gift, is unpredictable but all have a vision of the Great Serpent so they can understand the purpose of their essence.

Not Dax.

With his new essence, rather than learning from his father, he now must go to the Academy to learn to control his essence. It’s not fire as all in his family possess, but even the most powerful in the Academy don’t know what it is—or what it means for Dax.

And the only thing he remembers from his visit to the Serpent Stairs may be key to stop an attack on the empire, if he can understand his essence in time.

Read More