Karavansara

East of Constantinople, West of Shanghai


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The Ministry of Thunder is up and running!

 

The Ministry of ThunderIt should have been easy – pick up a drunk Italian in a fifth-rate Shanghai dive, and then deliver him unharmed to an Irish guy in Foochow Road.
A small simple job, just what Felice Sabatini needed to pay his way out of town.
Nice and smooth.

But this, of course, was before the guys in black pajamas, with their throwing stars.
Before the knife-fight in the back of a runaway rickshaw.
Before the gunfight on the bank of the Foochow Creek, and the dragon waiting in the depths of the river.
Before the Irish guy turned out to be a Chinese woman, and beautiful.

They said it would be easy.
Well, they lied.

Continue reading →


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Introducing Acheron Books

AcheronBooks_logo_payoff-2ITALIAN SPECULATIVE FICTION DISTRIBUTED WORLDWIDE, IN E-BOOK FORMAT


Acheron Books is the first publishing house that produces Italian fantasy, science fiction and horror fiction and distributes it worldwide in the English language in e-book format.

Acheron’s distinctive quality is that it selects the best speculative fiction written by Italian authors who take inspiration from the rich Italian historical and folkloristic tradition.

The name “Acheron” represents the meeting of two worlds: Italian fantastic fiction, represented by the Acheron River from Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy and the mysterious Acheron Empire created by Robert E. Howard.

Acheron also means above all transformation and evolution.

This is why we chose as our symbol the Acherontia Atropos moth (one of the species of Death’s-head Hawk moth well known to the fans of “The Silence of the Lambs”): Italian speculative fiction remained closed for decades in national boundaries, and now, thanks to our English translations, it will transform and be available to readers all over the world.

What sets Acheron Books apart? Continue reading →


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Writing fluff

Air_FluffMore talking aloud with myself, in English, about my current project.
In roleplaying games, “Fluff” is the name usually given to the gaming material that describes the setting – as opposed to the “Crunch“, the rules and mechanics of the thing.

Fluff is what I like in games – and what I normally write in gaming books.
After all, to me, roleplaying games is about living adventures in strange and new worlds – rules are for the weak.

Right now, in the early phases of my new work, I’m trying to decide how to present the fluff in my book. Continue reading →


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Beyond Thirty

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Beyond was the great unknown. Even the geographies of my boyhood showed nothing beyond. We were taught of nothing beyond. Speculation was discouraged. For two hundred years the Eastern Hemisphere had been wiped from the maps and histories of Pan-America. Its mention in fiction, even, was forbidden.

Edgar Rice Burroughs‘ The Lost Continent, originally published as Beyond Thirty in 1916 (but written the previous year), is a slim adventure novel that I read a few years back, and is not one of the most famous of ERB’s creations. Continue reading →


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A new gaming project

I started working on a new roleplaying project – at the moment it is still very hush-hush, but it’s certainly the largest, most complicated RPG project I ever had to face: I’m designing a whole world, and I have to write about it in a way that will make it accessible to players.
The estimated word count comes close to 80.000/100.000 words.
That’s huge.

worldbuilding-wordle4

Writing for gaming is very different from writing fiction, it requires a much more delicate balance between invention and organization.
They don’t call it “game design” for nothing. Continue reading →