Books | Karavansara

8 November 2017
by Davide Mana 2 Comments

English Eerie – a solo rural horror game

What_fearful_shapes I write a lot about games, these days.
English Eerie is a single player roleplaying game written by Scott Malthouse.
Described as a Rural Horror Storytelling Game for One Player, that’s what it does, and it does it quite nicely – using narrative cues to help the player tell a ghostly story in the form of a diary or journal.

Inspired by the works of M.R. James, Algernon Blackwood and Arthur Machen, English Eerie is a writing game – the player is required to build a story, and write it down, based on a set of details presented in a “scenario”, plus random factors represented by playing cards and a die. Continue reading →

8 November 2017
by Davide Mana 3 Comments

Gold & Glory – Seven Deadly Dungeons

This is almost an instant post: I have just closed my first game of Gold & Glory, the new Savage Worlds supplement by my friend Giuseppe Rotondo.
And boy it is a smash.

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The idea behind Gold & Glory is quite simple: transform Savage Worlds into a fast, furious and fun version of the old Red Box.
Plug in Giuseppe’s rules, and you’ll be running dungeon crawls like in the good old days in no time, with the added variety of the SW rules. Continue reading →

6 November 2017
by Davide Mana Leave a comment

Thriller of the Week!

I am quite happy to announce that Pro Se Press’ latest project, The Pro Se Thriller of the Week has been launched today with the publication of the first HARRIDAN story.

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“PRO SE THRILLER OF THE WEEK,” says Tommy Hancock, Editor in Chief of Pro Se Productions, “is a marriage of prose storytelling with a model that has worked for decades, first in radio, then in tv and even in comic books. Regularly scheduled ‘episodes’ of stories released once a week, spotlighting four different series. Ebooks allow for publishers to do so many unique things, and Pro Se intends to take full advantage of that, setting up our own network of sorts with scheduled ‘programming’ that will appeal to fans of all types and create an excitement for all the stories to come. We are very excited ot kick this concept off with PRO SE THRILLER OF THE WEEK and have so much more to come.”

Featuring a fantastic cover as well as digital formatting and logo design by Antonino Lo Iacono and Marzia Marina, HARRIDAN: SACRIFICIAL LAMB is available for only $1.49 at https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0776M2KPF/ref=sr_1_1…. The PRO SE THRILLER OF THE WEEK is also on Kindle Unlimited, meaning members can get each episode for free.

And yes, hopefully you’ll see something of mine in this series, too.

4 November 2017
by Davide Mana Leave a comment

In bed with the vampire Genevieve

Sort of a follow-up to yesterday’s post, this one.
A few days back, on my Italian blog, I mentioned The Vampire Genevieve, a volume that collects Kim Newman’s contribution to the Warhammer Fantasy line of books.
Thebook, that’s been resting on my nightstand for ages, is worth a new read – because it’s true, I re-read, year-in, year-out, either Gene Wolfe’s The Book of the New Sun or Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast, but there is sitill room enough for other big, massive books.
In particular, two books I return always happily are Roger Zelazny’s Amber Chronicles and Kim Newman’s The Vampire Genevieve.

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As Newman himself explains in the funny, insightful introduction to the volume, the Warhammer novels were mercenary work the young writer did to make ends meet, lured by a promise of unimagined riches and literary fame.

The end result is weird, in a very good way.
Let’s see a little bit of history. Continue reading →

3 November 2017
by Davide Mana 2 Comments

Hammer-style sword & sorcery

cover There’s a thing we’ve been talking for a while, with my friend Alex – that is a fine Italian writer of genre fiction – about doing something somehow similar to the legendary Hammer “failed pilot” Captain Kronos, Vampire Hunter¹.
And indeed Alex did something like that, with his series about the Uhlan, a fine line of horror/adventure books.
As I said, we talk about something of that kind roughly once a year, usually in the whereabouts of Halloween, when we reminisce like old men about old Hammer movies, old games of Ravenloft and even more obscure geekeries like Chill, the old, classic horror game.
We might call it Hammer Style Sword & Sorcery – that is not a thing, as far as I know, but works with us.

Let’s sum up the basic elements of this project that will never be… Continue reading →

2 November 2017
by Davide Mana Leave a comment

Pulp Egypt

Gaming supplements can sometimes be wonders of research and scholarship.

Selection_885 I mentioned a while back the monumental Masks of Nyarlathotep Companion.
Now, from the depths of my collection, I have recovered another wonder of a lost age – Peter Schweighofer’s Pulp Egypt – Adventures along the Nile, 1933-1939.
One of the best generic gaming resources I ever bought.
In 176 pages, Peter Schweighofer packed a ton of useful information.

Timeline from Predinastic era to the 1930s? Check
Gazzeteer and visitor’s guide to 1930s Egypt? Check.
Egyptian odds and ends and strange artifacts? Check.
Lots of information for game-masters interested in running various kinds of Egyptian adventures? Check.

The lot with maps, photos, and a very neat layout.
The information is synthetic and to the point, and nicely indexed.
There’s even an article on assembling a pulp adventure soundtrack.
And it’s system agnostic, as they say – you can run it on whatever system you like.
Beautiful.

And this beauty will be particularly useful both for my long-in-the-coming re-run of Masks of Nyarlathotep and for my current serial project.
How neat is that?

30 October 2017
by Davide Mana Leave a comment

Three evenings with the Green Man

Ghost stories.
It’s the season, isn’t it?
ffdgfdg So, stop me if you’ve heard this one: there’s a haunted inn on the road to Cambridge, called The Green Man. It’s haunted by the ghost of a 17th century dabbler in the mystical arts, a man that was denied a proper burial because of his trafficking with pagan rituals, and maybe because he killed his wife. And there’s the current owner of the inn, slowly soaking himself in scotch, and trying to get both his wife and his mistress in the same bed together. And maybe he sees ghosts, or maybe it’s just DT.
And there’s a bit of satire of the Cambridge environment, and of academia, and of modern people and of modern Church. And God makes an appearance, and everything is so witty, and sometimes so sexy, it’s hard to believe it can also be so scary.