Any Samurai Cat fans in the house? My love of Mark E. Rogers’ ultra-violent, lavishly illustrated satires eventually led me to his ultra-violent, theologically complicated, completely un-illustrated Blood of the Lamb series of sword and sorcery novels. They’re part of a larger sequence that includes at least five more entries, but I haven’t read them, so I can’t speak to their quality.

I find these totally engrossing (I actually picked up the first one to try to find a detail for this entry and accidentally wound up re-reading all three over the course of a day and a half). The story focuses on members of an order of warrior monks that combine a number of aspects of Jewish, Christian and Islamic beliefs as they investigate a supposed false prophet whose story follows the same beats as that of Jesus. A second plot involves a murder mystery, political intrigue and a sorcerous attempt to bring about the apocalypse. When the two threads collide, the result is brutal, dark and unexpected.

The whole thing is weird (made more so by the fact that the world seems to be a version of our own) and the magic system is cartoonish, feeling very Dragon Ball Z in all honesty. Still, I am kind of disappointed that these books never made it into the classic fantasy canon – I’d love to see people’s takes on them, but there aren’t really any to be found.

Of particular note to RPG fans is the cover of The Riddled Man, which was painted by Den Beauvais, who did a number of iconic Dragon Magazine covers, including the four chess-themed ones I covered last year. The Riddled Man is a central character of the books, an omen of doom and one, filled with arrows as he is, that I find extremely evocative.

Check ‘em out, you can find ‘em pretty cheap out there.