Fiction - Free
Stories inspire all of us. They scare us, excite us, and let us create better games.
We are pleased to present a set of free stories for you to read.
A Miskatonic University Tale by Molly Tanzer
Graduate programs at any university are a grind, a perpetually uphill marathon that exhaust even the most brilliant scholar. At Miskatonic University, the perils facing the unsuspecting grad students include far darker, stranger things than cutthroat departmental politics and shrinking financial aid. This Simcha discovers when she takes up a predatory professor's offer of access to an unpublished Sherlock Holmes tale penned by the consulting detective's creator, Arthur Conan Doyle.
Molly Tanzer’s short fiction The Deductive Method was commissioned especially for Chaosium’s Miskatonic University: The Restricted Collection board game Kickstarter, and released exclusively to backers in late 2018. Here it is now available as a free download for everyone to enjoy!
Go here to download the story.
About Molly Tanzer: Molly Tanzer is the author of Creatures of Will and Temper, Creatures of Want and Ruin, and Vermilion, as well as the British Fantasy and Wonderland Book Award-nominated A Pretty Mouth. She is also the co-editor of Mixed Up: Cocktail Recipes (and Flash Fiction) for the Discerning Drinker (and Reader). For more information about her critically acclaimed novels and short fiction, visit her website, mollytanzer.com, or follow her @molly_the_tanz on Twitter or @molly_tanzer on Instagram. Her latest novel is Creatures of Charm and Hunger.
A surrealistic nightmare by Joshua Alan Doetsch
Joshua Alan Doetsch's short fiction features in the Madness on the Orient Express anthology, edited by James Lowder, and published by Chaosium 2014.
Go here to read the story.
Joshua Alan Doetsch is a sentient word virus spreading across the collective unconscious through the vector of human language. He's taken on many forms as short stories, coalesced as the novel Strangeness in the Proportion, and shaped himself into an anthropomorphic guise as Lead Writer of such video games as Age of Conan and The Secret World. He also writes for tabletop games like Vampire the Masquerade and Scarred Lands and occasionally does voice acting. Help him spread the weird by visiting his Patreon, for stories and audio fiction, at patreon.com/joshuadoetsch. You may also summon him, with offerings of cuttlefish ink when the stars are right, at joshuadoetsch.com or @JoshuaDoetsch on Twitter.
And please check out some of our selected anthologies and other select titles.