The Return of The Black Seal

Many, many years ago (circa 2003 to be precise) I restarted my writing career in gaming writing for the Call of Cthulhu role-plyaing game. One of the first magazines to publish me was The Black Seal. It was a classy gaming magazine designed to support not only the Call of Cthulhu role-playing game, but the spooks and the mythos setting Delta Green.

The Black Seal only survived long enough to see three issues, as editor Adam Crossingham went on to edit Worlds of Cthulhu but there were some very fine articles in their pages, with authors such as Dan Harms, Ben Counter, Brian M. Sammons and William Jones. Unfortunately the magazine went out of print almost as soon as each issue came out, and so has been unavailabke until now.

Adam recently informed me that The Black Seal has returned in PDF format, now available at DriveThruRPG. Individual issues can be purchased here:

• The Black Seal #1
• The Black Seal #2
• The Black Seal #3

I appeared in issues 2 and 3, and many of may articles, particularly my role-playing gaming scenario "The Spiraling" was the basis for my Harrison Peel novella collaboration with John Sunseri, "The Spiraling Worm".

I had articles planned for The Black Seal #4, alas that magazine never came to be, but there was a pretty cool cover prepared by David Lee Ingersoll, which I've included below. Perhaps I should post some of those articles here on my journal.

Terrors From Beyond Artwork

I'll soon be appearing in a book for the Call of Cthulhu role-playing game called Terrors From Beyond, a collection of six horror gaming scenarios set in the 1920s. I'm one of the six contributing authors, with a scenario I set in Haiti called "The Burning Stars". The collection is edited by Gary Sumpter and features well known gaming authors such as Brian M. Sammons, Glyn White, Brian Courtemanche and John Almack.

I'd forgotten about this book as the manuscript was sent to the publisher nearly two years ago and I didn't hear much since. Then I was browsing the web the other day and discovered some of the artwork for my scenario posted online here. The artist is David Grilla and he's very talented. I'm looking forward to seeing what else he contributed to the book.

The other extremely talented artist featuerd in Terrors from Beyond is David Lee Ingersoll, whom I've worked with previously on several books including the cover for The Spiraling Worm. I've seen the two illustrations he did for "The Burning Stars" and they are just as good as David Grilla's work. Very different styles, but as equally effective.

So hopefully this means Terrors from Beyond will be out soon, and that it will be a very impressive looking collection.