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Top 10 Things To Do in a Fictional Castle
For those of us who like a touch of the magical and the medieval, nothing quite beats a visit to a fictional castle. But with all those trap doors, winding passageways, and changeable stairs, it’s hard to know where to start and how to make the most of your time. Yes, you may already have […]
SPFBO3: Cover Contest!
The Self-Published Fantasy Blog-Off (#SPFBO) 3 is set to begin on July 1! Read all about it on Mark Lawrence’s blog, or check out our rundown of how Fantasy-Faction will be handling Round One! Last year’s cover contest was a huge success. Each of the ten bloggers nominated the top three covers from their batch […]
Cover Reveal for Under the Pendulum Sun by Jeannette Ng
Fantasy-Faction is excited to host the cover reveal for Jeannette Ng’s Under the Pendulum Sun! Due out in October 2017 from our friends at Angry Robot, Under the Pendulum Sun is a creepy, dark gothic fantasy in which missionaries visit fairyland to spread the word of the Lord. What they don’t bank on however, is […]
Monthly Short Story Winner: Potions and Elixirs
Outside of RPGs and adventure games, potions hadn’t been very popular until a certain professor humiliated a little wizard student lesson after lesson in his potion class. This month our entrants were to show us there is more to potions than Severus Snape, Felix Felices and Polyjuice Potion. Rules: 1. This must be prose or […]
Evil is a Matter of Perspective: An Anthology of Antagonists
In 2016 Grimdark Magazine successfully ran a Kickstarter to pull together Evil is a Matter of Perspective: An Anthology of Antagonists. It’s full of authors Fantasy Faction readers will love and the public release paperback is dropping on the 16th of June. The full list of authors is impressive, featuring R. Scott Bakker, Adrian Tchaikovsky, Michael R. […]
UK Games Expo 2017 Recap
Recently (Friday 2nd of June 2017 to Sunday 4th of June 2017) I attended the UK Games Expo, which was held at the NEC near Birmingham. As expected for a board game fair, most of the popular games could be bought there, from the Pandemic series to Fantasy Flight Games’ franchises to slightly lesser known, […]
Wonder Woman – Spoiler Free Movie Review
Alright, before I start this review, I should make a few things clear. I am not a big fan of DC’s Extended Universe thus far. Which is a polite way of saying I think Man of Steel, Batman v Superman, and Suicide Squad were all awful awful films. I could very easily write a week’s […]
Monthly Short Story Winner: Based On A Random Wikipedia Article
I don’t think we ever had a prompt that was so not fantasy related and so open. We were really curious about the stories this prompt would produce and the wide variety of themes: steampunk, portal, grimdark, military, parallel universe – depending on the article you got, anything was possible. Writer’s had to take the […]
The SPFBO: Introducing Round One!
So, here we are again. The Self-Published Fantasy Blog-Off (#SPFBO) 3 is set to begin on July 1! Read all about it on Mark Lawrence’s blog, or check out our own announcement here. For now, here’s a rundown of how Fantasy-Faction will be handling Round One. As you know, 300 competing titles have now been […]
Wading in the Cultural Shallows: How Irish Mythology Became A Commodity for Fantasy
One night at a party I was introduced to a woman who proudly informed told me she’d named her baby daughter ‘Banshee’ in celebration of her Irish heritage. Even at the time I was pretty stunned by the announcement. For an Irish person (and I would have thought most people would have known this), this […]
Is This Normal Around Here?
So you get home to your enchanted castle, hand your coat to the golem butler who waits by the door, tut sadly at Markus; the caretaker who’s trying to fill a light globe and letting all the fairies escape, then you head to the kitchen where your goblin chef has an entire pig roasting on […]
Monthly Short Story Winner: Well-Known Fairy Tales from a Different Point of View
We know these stories by heart – but only from the hero’s POV. Did you ever think about the motivation and justification the big bad wolf had for eating Red Riding Hood’s Grandma? Maybe he was the good guy and we got it all wrong? Remember, the winners write history and they never picture themselves […]
