Welcome, my most esteemed guest, to another edition of the Backstage Pass! Our usual columns are filled with intrigue, so I do hope you roam far and wide and deep as I have much to offer. Our vampires must keep pushing forward despite their newfound knowledge of one another in A Vampire’s Vengeance. A mysterious note arrives from a shadow organization known only as “Umbra”; you can read it yourself in Umbra Unlimited. Our classic horror feature brings a wanted outlaw together with one of his victims in The Blackthorn Gallows. And finally, we become a little better acquainted with the stranger in Bus Driver. So much action and intrigue! Where will you begin?

As a final thought, I want to point out that not a single word of this edition—nor any prior—whether expository or narrative (read: editorial content or stories) has been written with the use of AI. I now feel it entirely necessary to state this fact since AI has become prevalent in a number of ways across society, and I want to reassure you, my dearest guest, that what you consume here is all dreamed up by a human—me—and created by hand, the old fashioned way. Enjoy it as you like, though if you are inclined to attempt to feed my work to any AI model or platform, then I curse you with coffee that will always be either not hot enough, or not cold enough, nothing but red lights when you are in a hurry, and as miserable a death as can be called down upon you. If you don’t feed my work to AI, you can ignore all of that.

Let’s get into it →

I am seriously considering removing this section, as lately I feel like a broken record, always discussing infrastructure and software development and not the stories I should be discussing here. It is not my intention to leave works in a half finished state, but the underlying structural work to bring the Calamity to life cannot be ignored either!