The Black Seal #4 is coming

Despite my comments in my last post, it seems The Black Seal #4 is on its way, or so says editor and publisher Adam Crossingham in a recent discussion we have. He even informed me some of the articles I wrote way back in 2005 will appear, which I'm currently reviewing now. Here is the press release:

Sixtystone Press have released all current back issues of The Black Seal magazine as PDFs for sale. First published at the turn of the millennium through to 2005, issues 1, 2 and 3 of the "Magazine of Modern Horror Gaming" are now available individually or as a bundle.

Adam Crossingham, Managing Editor, commented that "All sales of The Black Seal #1-3 will go towards facilitating the publication of The Black Seal #4 and The Black Seal's Cthulhu By Arclight".

Now we just have to see if the other UK Cthulhu magazine of that era, The Whisperer, from Severn Valley Press follows suit...Surprised to see The Black Seal in PDF after all this time? So was Sixtystone Press.

Adam went on to say:"After a lengthy absence, a failure to foresee the importance of the PDF market, and a catastrophic hard drive failure The Black Seal is back from the dead and now available in PDF.

The survival of The Black Seal #1 and #2 is remarkable - all the Quark Xpress source files were lost in that catastrophic hard drive failure, but luckily two test PDF files were discovered on a flash drive and brought lovingly back to life."

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.