The Indie RPG Awards

The World of Near is the setting portion of the game. It's larger than the rules booklet and looks more like the major roleplaying game it is, with color covers and such.

Though the great Caliphate has been dissolved and the unity of Iberia's Muslims lost, their power has not failed entirely. The taifas have their armies, and at the heart of those armies are the noble orders of Muslim Knights. These Knights swear solemn oaths to revere Allah and his Prophet, to fight for the defense of the innocent, and to honor a strict code of ethics and morals in order to bring about peace and justice for their society. They are warriors and poets, and they are the last hope of a people who do not see their doom before them.

Their inevitable failure is a thing to be mourned most deeply.

Mighty-thewed barbarians and grim mercenaries roam the desolate plains of Ohio. Giant snakes, and those who worship them, prowl the ruins of St. Louis. Pirates battle the Japanese invaders in the South China Sea. Bold British agents, equipped with experimental bio-technology, thwart the insidious infiltration of Stalin's humanzees. Sky-raiders strike from hidden bases in the Sahara, deros skulk in South American caverns, and the Texas Rangers fight electrical death worms to save Los Alamos.

Kenneth Hite (Adventures into Darkness, Trail of Cthulhu) presents a world of savage swords and rocket men, of were-serpents and war-apes, from Australia's battered Empire to the proud city-state of Chicago.

The Day After Ragnarok includes:

• Complete rules and guidelines for creating a hero suited for these dark times, including new Hindrances and Edges.
• Dangerous ophi-tech devices built with knowledge torn from the Thing that nearly killed the world: fiber bombs, Marconi pistols, jet-packs, and more!
• A grand tour through the post-apocalyptic world of 1948, from the drowned East Coast to the Soviet empire behind the Serpent Curtain -- including the Top Five Places to Be Attacked By Pirates, the Top Five Places to Find A Remote Castle Ruled By A Madman, and much more!
• Stats for more than thirty foes to shoot, stab, or sneak past: Serpent cultists, Spetsnaz troopers, swamp devils, and ... snakes! Giant, 80-foot long snakes, that is!
• Over 20 pages of pure adventure: Four campaign types, each with a sample campaign laid out in nine scenario seeds. A massive Adventure Generator, helping you build every tale from the Hook to the Henchmen to the Twist ending! Four worked examples, taking the Adventure Generator's raw numbers and running.
• Plus old-school random encounters for the desolate wastelands of America -- will you face slave-raiding Klansmen, the terrifying fly-by-night, or a desperate band of escaped Wehrmacht P.O.W.s?

And across it all lies the trillion-ton corpse of the Midgard Serpent, killed by Truman's atomic fire but still poisoning the Earth with every night that passes. Welcome to the world at the end of the world.

Welcome to... The Day After Ragnarok

A wide-ranging and friendly journey through H.P. Lovecraft's tales of cosmic terror and wonder, the Tour de Lovecraft is the ideal companion to the work of the twentieth century's greatest American horrorist.

Kenneth Hite has spent decades reading and re-reading Lovecraft and his heirs, slipping through their forests of verbiage to discover the solid literary ground beneath. With his game designer's eye for structure and connection, in this book he reveals the threads and themes that run throughout Lovecraft's masterpieces. The Tour de Lovecraft alternately ambles and careens through all fifty-one of the Master's horror tales in chronological order from "The Tomb" to "The Haunter of the Dark," offering cheerful opinion, incisive literary criticism, playful speculation, and the occasional unhinged rant. It's a response to Lovecraft, and to his occasionally humorless critics, that offers you Edmund Burke's Gothic perspective on Cthulhu side-by-side with "The Haunter of the Dark" considered as Grail quest.

Bloodstained Stars contains expanded source material for waging war and combatting the Vaylen threat in Christopher Moeller's Iron Empires universe. It is also a setting book for the Burning Empires roleplaying game (but contains no mechanics).

The book itself is 144 Pages, hard cover, digest sized. The cover is cloth-wrapped, debossed with a foil-stamped wheel.

A yearly zine about women in gaming, by women in gaming. Articles, essays, recipes and community listings about events, resources, upcoming projects and publications by women, and networking for editors, artists and other role playing game professionals. The 2009 issue includes:

• I'm Your Man, by Jenni Dowsett
• The Girls in the Group, by Meguey Baker
• Designing Women, by Jennifer Schoonover
• The Female Mongoose, by Charlotte Law
• Indie Publishing Smurfette No More, by Emily Boss