Marc Aplin's Blog, page 27

A pair of roleplaying game (RPG) supplements this time, filling in some of the character options that didn’t fit into the Soulbound core book. (You’ll find these reviews a lot more comprehensible if you read my review of the Soulbound core book first.) Champions of Order expands on playing characters from the Grand Alliance of […]

Spirits of Vengeance is an epic, martial arts, horror fantasy. It follows an ensemble cast of aging martial artists and mischievous spirits as they wander the sundered empire of Ipia, battling a rogue’s gallery of yokai (Japanese spirits or monsters). In this world, yokai are always the result of a human who died an unhappy […]

There are some genres that are so similar they tend to blur together. However, there are differences that should be noted. For example, horror can be defined as a story where the protagonist seeks to destroy a supernatural threat in order to save themselves or others. Southern Gothic fiction is a story focused on the […]

“West Side Story meets Fists of Fury.” Australian-born-and-raised, American-educated, ethnically Chinese author Chloe Gong became a social media sensation with her TikToks drumming up anticipation for her YA historical fantasy debut, These Violent Delights. With a title taken from a line in Shakespeare, it should come as no surprise that Simon and Schuster marketed the […]

As many of you know, I am one of the many fans of Critical Role, a show where a bunch of nerdy ass friends play Dungeons & Dragons. I watch pretty much all of their content (Narrative Telephone anyone?), so when they announced the one-shot lead by cast member Ashley Johnson was going to be […]

Today we are lucky enough to reveal the cover for the last book in Alicia Wanstall-Burke’s Coraidic Sagas: Empire of Shadows! But first the author herself would like to say a few words. – – – 2014—the year I started writing The Coraidic Sagas—in so many ways, for so many reasons, feels like a lifetime […]

I loved this book. I loved this book. I loved this book! I went back over the reviews I’ve written for Fantasy-Faction and found I’ve used love to describe aspects of books I enjoyed, but I haven’t flat out said “I loved this book” without caveats or equivocations on this site. Precedent broken. If you […]

And today we come to the end of Round One in the 7th Annual Self-Published Fantasy Blog-Off (SPFBO) with our pick for the winner of the semi-finals! Congratulations to Kerstin Espinosa Rosero and Burn Red Skies! This book will go on to the finalist and compete against nine other books to be the winner of […]

After much deliberation we have come to our picks for our Round One semi-finalists! This year was tricky, because each judge picked a different book as their overall favorite, meaning our second place book is actually two books! This is a review for one, you can find the review for the other here. If you […]

After much deliberation we have come to our picks for our Round One semi-finalists! This year was tricky, because each judge picked a different book as their overall favorite, meaning our second place book is actually two books! This is a review for one, you can find the review for the other here. If you […]