A whole new section means a whole new feature here at Gay Gamer, so to kick off both the tabletop gaming section and the new month here’s the first Monthly Tabletop Preview. From now on, early every month, we’ll bring you the run down on a bundle of the new tabletop gaming, books, accessories, gadgets, and gizmos releasing (or, at least, planned to release) in the upcoming weeks. While it’d be incredibly difficult to keep track of every new project from every gaming company out there, this monthly preview focuses on what’s new and exciting from some of the biggest and best names in gaming goodness.

A return to the misty realm of Ravenloft is the big news this month with Wizards of the Coast’s new adventure, Expedition to Castle Ravenloft. A re-imagining of Tracy and Laura Hickman 1983 classic I6: Ravenloft, Expedition, by designers Bruce Cordell and James Wyatt, takes players back to Barovia for a third edition clash with vampire count Strahd Von Zarovich. The new adventure supposedly takes a few liberties with established Ravenloft lore, evidenced right from the cover where Strahd looks less like a debonair prince of the undead and more like your gym coach dressed up for the Halloween Spooktacular Ball and Bake Sale (Drop and give me twenty! Blah!). While it’s super cool to see a return to Ravenloft, I think I’d rather have a new story than what looks like an attempted one-up on a D&D classic.

Aside from Expedition to Castle Ravenloft, the folks who make D&D, Wizards of the Coast, have a few more projects debuting in October.

• First off is the Complete Mage, a new book on everything magic. Looking mostly like a character book, it seems like a sequel to Complete Arcane (Incomplete Arcane?). with a bunch of new character options, prestige classes, feats, and the like, but with the bent that characters of any class can make use of the stuff inside. The WotC website has a PDF preview of the book’s table of contents here. From the looks of it, the book has something like sixty five feats (a few with fabulous names like Alacritous Cogitation and Dazzling Illusion), an extreme prestige class called the Ultimate Magus, and a magical location called Bigby’s Tomb (in case you were ever wondering what happened to the mage best remembered for using his hands). Oh, and it’s got an albino necromancer girl with a ferret infestation on the cover. Creepy.

• Following suit with the Special Edition Players Handbook and Dungeon Master’s Guide comes the Special Edition Monster Manual. While the first two special editions were pretty much the same books as the originals with a bit of errata, the Monster Manual gets the “me too!” treatment. Unlike the others, though, the MM is supposedly getting a bunch of expanded information, a new layout, and thirty-one new illustrations. There’s been some question about the verity of these new features, but if they’re in there, that’s awesome. I’m hoping the poor derro finally get some artistic lovin’. Even though the cover we’re showing here from the Wizards of the Coast website is only black and white, you can pretty much bet that the final version will have shiny silver lettering on embossed black leather. What might be harder to guess at: what color the bookmark’s going to be.

• Now you can play D&D with your granddad! For a company who’s minis are typically pre-painted and plastic, WotC’s Limited Edition Dragon Chess Set looks surprising classy. With resin pieces depicting Bahamut, Tiamat, and all the staple metallic and chromatic dragons, as well as a mahogany and leather board, it looks like Wizards went all out on this on. The set also comes with rules for a few variant chess games (ala Nightmare Chess). The Fall release date seems a bit sketchy, but supposedly the Dragon Chess Set should be out sometime this month or soon after.

Not much new is happening over in the World of Darkness this month, but here’s the run down from White Wolf.

• Deseo aspirar su sangre! I admit that I was a little hesitant when I heard that they were doing World of Darkness: Mexico —maybe it’s too much Anne Rice junk-food reading or just the lingering gothic ideal that vampires come from European countries too small to appear on the globe—but taking a second look, this actually sounds pretty cool. This 192-page hardcover setting book details Mexico for all World of Darkness games, with info ranging from ancient blood rites to local locos. Maybe coolest of all, though, the goth kids over at White Wolf coxed Brom into doing the cover. I don’t know what they’re bribing him with, but Wow does it look hot.

• Exalted’s The Compass of Celestial Directions Volume 1: The Blessed Isle wins this month’s convoluted name award! The setting book is the first in a series describing some of Creation’s more exotic locales, this one featuring the Blessed Isle, along with mass combat traits for the realm’s Imperial Army, dominion traits for the Mandate of Heaven, info on the island’s rulers and armies, and details on its gods and monsters. I honestly don’t know what all of that means, but it’s an Exalted book so whatever it is it’ll look gorgeous. In case you’re not familiar with Exalted (first of all, shame on you), you can find out more about this high-powered, wuxia-styled game of martial arts, magic, and super-hero-like abilities (think the movies Hero and House of Flying Daggers combined with Lord of the Rings) at White Wolf’s Exalted page here. Also—although thier page isn’t quite done yet—the distinctive style of Udon Entertainment is half of what makes Exalted look so incredible, and you can check out more from them here.

Along with their magazines, Paizo Publishing gets artsy this month.

• Besides Steve Prescott’s amazing rendition of Tiamat on the cover, The Art of Dragon complies art from Dragon magazine’s 30 years of publication in one 160-page hardback. If you know D&D you’re familiar with names like Jeff Easley, Larry Elmore, Clyde Caldwell, Tony DiTerlizzi, and Wayne Reynolds. They’re all in there, and a lot more. The coffee table style art book is filled up with tons of fantasy images, tracing a timeline of what were and what are some of the coolest images in fantasy, bar none. Taking a utilitarian view, even if you don’t need just another picture book, it’s always handy to be able to point to a specific piece of art when gaming and say “You see this.” Besides the basic version, Paizo’s even doing a leather-bound special edition that you can only get online here.

• Get your RPG and CCG fix at once! The many-titled Game Mastery Item Cards: Relics of War treasure cards are twelve-card booster packs of weapons, magic items, and other treasure that GMs can hand out to their players, showing and telling players exactly what swag they got. A handy little record keeping tool, each card has a picture (all by French artist Vincent Dutrait) on one side, and, on the other, a description of the item, room for notes, and a place for a DM’s code to keep track of what the treasure really is. Each pack has ten cards that are all of the same rarity—so there’s no super hard to get cards—has a range of card types (a few armors, weapons, scrolls, potions, etc), and a guaranteed foil. I really hope my foil is a Charizard.

The most tenacious company in gaming, Green Ronin, has a slew of products off at the printer right now, several of which should hit this month.

• First off is the second in Green Ro-neen’s Bleeding Edge line of mature adventures, W. Jason Peck’s Beyond the Towers. This magical romp through the charming Carrion Swamp puts players at odds with a gaint monster-infested bog, the powers of a mysterious ruin, and—from the look of the cover—a missing member from the cast of Dinosaucers. Joking aside, the premise of Green Ronin’s new Bleeding Edge series sounds pretty solid: adventures featuring adult themes and elements, presented in an unflinching manner. We’re not talking porn and hardcore sickness here, but more serious situations than you might normally find in your everyday “bust down the door and take the orc’s gold pieces” style adventure. The first in the series, Robert J. Schwalb’s Mansion of Shadows is already out and has been greeting some pretty good buzz. You can check out the whole line of Bleeding Edge adventures here.

• So is that a Mutants & Masterminds Pocket Player’s Guide in your… um… pocket or…? Oh… it is. This abridged handbook strips out all the GM information and rules for running the game and gives players all the rules they need to make characters and get right down to saving the world. Pint-sized and cheep, this seems like a perfect way to have an extra copy of the rules floating around the table without shelling out another $40.00. If you haven’t already gotten your super powers, check out the Mutants & Masterminds main website here. The game does a fantastic job of creating its own unique and interesting super-powered world while giving all the right nods to Marvel, DC, and Indy classics gone by, and making the rules set flexible enough to let you create pretty much any power or character you can imagine. It’s also super handy to have the plot for your next adventure be as close as your comic book collection.

• Awesome, awesome, awesome idea: a full-color tarot-style version of what is both easily one of the most famous and infamous artifacts in the histroy of D&D, the Deck of Many Things. Elaine Bettocchi does the art for this twenty-four-card deck which sounds like the coolest gaming prop since the Ravenloft tarokka deck. If fate isn’t with you, you might pull The Void (Body functions, but soul is trapped elsewhere, or if you get a lucky pull, I bet you can think of a few uses for the Knight card (Gain the service of a 4th-level fighter). All-in-all, from what I’ve seen on the box cover, I can’t say that I’m the biggest fan of the art (sorry, I just tend to like darker stuff), but the chance to whip this out at a game instead of just a deck of Bicycle playing cards seems super cool. And you know, if this goes over well, who knows what other artifacts might come down the line? I’d love to get a Nerf sphere of annihilation.

Goodman Games also runs the gamut with a variety of blasts from the past this month.

• Perhaps the biggest deal in old-school gaming since, well, DDC #1 Idylls of the Rat King, Goodman Games’ Dungeon Crawl Classics finally find a home in Dungeon Crawl Classics #35, Gazetteer of the Known Realms. Not just an adventure, it’s two adventures, a world book describing the newly created world of Aereth, four color poster maps, a GM’s guide, and a shiny red box to keep it all in! Aereth also does an interesting bit of revisionist history, placing every DDC ever written somewhere on its map, making it the default world for Goodman Games products, past and future. You can find out more about what comes in the Gazetteer of the Known Realms and check out some of the art from the boxed set at the preview here.

• So tell me if you’ve heard this one. There’s this town that’s in peril, and these weird monsters no one’s ever seen, and they come from a spaceship, oh, and there’s lasers. While S3: Expedition to the Barrier Peaks covered this ground back an 1980, Dungeon Crawl Classics #36: Talons of the Horned King looks to be a nostalgic homage to one of the most famous adventures in gaming. Although the adventure definitely seems to be taking a page from classics past, there looks like there’s gonig to be pleanty of unique wrinkles, like a circle of evil druids and the backdrop of a harsh frozen land. Overall, though, the adventure seems like it screams “Screw magic missile, gimmie a ray gun!” Oh, and maybe best of all, the adventure comes in pretty peachy pink!

• Bulking up their line of “If they were any more old school, they’d be lead” miniatures, Brother Jharo, Human Monk; Rez-Zomar, Goblin Warchief; and Lawrence Gannu, Wererat Champion release this month. Being a wererat, Lawrence (who appeared in DDC #1) is a multiple piece set, which includes his human form, a sneaking, sword-weilding rat hybrid form, and—best of all—rat friends! You can check out Goodman Games’ whole run of Dungeon Crawl Classic Miniatures right here.

In vaguer news, new products from two of the granddads of gaming are due out in the coming weeks (or soon after).

• Not content to muddle through a single world, Forgotten Realms creator Ed Greenwood explores an entirely new world in Castlemourn. Created in tandem with Margaret Weis Productions, (stewards along with Sovereign Press of the Dragonlance campaign setting and creators of the Serenity roleplaying game) not much is known about the setting yet except what was released in the Castlemourn Player’s Guide at this year’s Gen Con Indy. From we’ve heard, the world has rebelled agaisnt the various races living on it, becoming exceptionally harsh and dangerous. All the while, in quite a turn from the magic overloaded Forgotten Realms, Castlemourn is a place where magic is rare and mysterious. Whatever the details of the world end up being, though, it turns out that Greenwood knows a thing or two about making fantasy worlds, so it should be pretty good.

• From Troll Lord Games and the great granddaddy of RPGs, E. Gary Gygax, comes Gygaxian Fantasy Volume IX: Lejendary Pantheons. This tome of gods describes fourteen different pantheons, along with related demons, devils, demigods, and monsters, most being reinterpretations of real-world myths and religions. Also, being Gygax, it sounds like there’s going to be game stats for all these guys, so if you’ve ever wanted to go lay the smack down on Vishnu, here’s your chance.

And there it is! If there’s any other RPG releases coming down the line for October that you think warrant mentioning, please do post a comment down below and give us all the heads up. Thanks a lot and good gaming!