The Darkon Warriors Books 1-4/Legend Beyond The Stars/The Portal/Awakening The Warriors/Star Pirate's Justice


Book Description

In this anthology explore the Seven Galaxies and S.E. Gilchrist's bestselling science–fiction romance series The Darkon Warriors. In Legend Beyond the Stars, Captain Alana Knight volunteers to aid a dangerous operation to transport colonists between Earth and alien traders. When the colonists are betrayed and sold, Alana's mission is re–defined. Nothing will stop her from keeping those in her care safe and finding a passage home. But her new captor is nothing like she expects... In The Portal, when Janni, a young salvager, boards a space wreck, she is caught for daring to steal Darkon tech by the one man she had thought never to see again. Now they are trapped on a wreck and with an alien life–force hunting them. Will the patroller save her or abandon Janni to her fate? In Awakening the Warriors, Fran left her ordinary, safe life and volunteered as a colonist to terra–form a new earth. Now she is trapped in a prison cell on an alien planet a zillion miles from home and bound for a hideous death in notorious research chambers. She has one chance of escape: awaken the long dormant sexual urges of the Darkon Warriors shackled in the next cell. In Star Pirate's Justice, Carly has one focus in her life: to return home to her terminally ill younger sister. When she learns that a Darkon traitor possesses gateway maps to Earth, she uses all her skills to track him down. But capturing the charming star pirate turns out to be trickier than she anticipated...




Role-Playing Game Studies


Book Description

This handbook collects, for the first time, the state of research on role-playing games (RPGs) across disciplines, cultures, and media in a single, accessible volume. Collaboratively authored by more than 50 key scholars, it traces the history of RPGs, from wargaming precursors to tabletop RPGs like Dungeons & Dragons to the rise of live action role-play and contemporary computer RPG and massively multiplayer online RPG franchises, like Fallout and World of Warcraft. Individual chapters survey the perspectives, concepts, and findings on RPGs from key disciplines, like performance studies, sociology, psychology, education, economics, game design, literary studies, and more. Other chapters integrate insights from RPG studies around broadly significant topics, like transmedia worldbuilding, immersion, transgressive play, or player–character relations. Each chapter includes definitions of key terms and recommended readings to help fans, students, and scholars new to RPG studies find their way into this new interdisciplinary field.







The Will of the Empress


Book Description

Sandry, Daja, Briar, and Tris, are older now and back together again, in an exciting and much-awaited, stand-alone novel by everyone's favorite mage, Tamora Pierce. For years the Empress of Namorn has pressed her young cousin, Lady Sandrilene fa Toren, to visit her vast lands within the Empire's borders. Sandry has avoided the invitation for as long as it was possible. Now Sandry has agreed to pay that overdue visit. Sandry's uncle promises guards to accompany her. But they're hardly a group of warriors! They're her old friends from Winding Circle: Daja, Tris, and Briar. Sandry hardly knows them now. They've grown up and grown apart. Sandry isn't sure they'll ever find their old connection again - or if she even wants them to. When they arrive at the pala




Serving in Silence


Book Description

Most business owners go into business for themselves to increase their personal wealth, build an asset that they can either pass on to heirs or sell, and for greater flexibility or an enhanced quality of life. To do this, every business will eventually need employees. And this is the biggest hurdle a small business owner will face in growing the business. Common difficulties include finding a good fit for the growing enterprise; matching skill level with affordability; employee "management by abdication" issues; and the nightmare of compliance with regard to tax payment and reporting requirements. This book will provide a step-by-step guide to finding and keeping the right people. It provides suggestions on structuring the job, advertising and interviewing, creating job descriptions, and reviewing and rewarding team members. This book can help transition a one-man shop into a professional organization that will eventually be able to survive without the owner working at every task, thus building true business value.




Zoo Station


Book Description

This incredible autobiography of Christiane F. provides a vivid portrait of teen friendship, drug abuse, and alienation in and around Berlin's notorious Zoo Station. Christiane's rapid descent into heroin abuse and prostitution is shocking, but the boredom, longing for acceptance, thrilling risks, and even her musical obsessions are familiar to everyone. Previously published in Germany and the US to critical acclaim, Zest's new translation includes original photographs of Christiane and her friends.




I, Strahd


Book Description

...Some of the parchment pages were the color of cream, thick and substantial, made to last many, many lifetimes. Other pages were thin and desiccated, positively yellow from age, and crackled alarmingly as Van Richten turned them over. There were no ornate illuminations, no fussy borders, only lines of plain text in hard black ink. The flowing handwriting was a bit difficult to follow at first; the writer's style of calligraphy had not been in common use for three hundred years. No table of contents, but from the dates it looked to be some kind of history. He turned to the first page and read: I, Strahd, Lord of Barovia, well aware certain events of my reign have been desperately misunderstood by those who are better at garbling history than recording it, hereby set down an exact record of those events, that the truth may at last be known . . . . He caught his breath. By all the good gods, a personal journal?




Melodious Accord


Book Description




Wake Up and Smell the Coffee


Book Description

THE STORY: A meditation on making it to the top of the ladder, on falling off the ladder and on the exhilarating thrill of the ultimate crash and burn. Bogosian takes us for a ferocious ride through a cavalcade of colorful characters as he skewers