Invoke your Imagination

With Free Stories!

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.

The Deductive Method

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 This Simcha discovers when she takes up a predatory professor's offer of access to an unpublished Sherlock Holmes tale penned by the consulting detective's creator, Arthur Conan Doyle.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.

Stained Windows

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.

The Paper Shield

The Paper Shield by James Lowder

Professor Thaxton's quest for the secrets of lost Atlantis may instead reawaken its doom. Go here to read the story.

About James Lowder: James Lowder is the author of the bestselling, widely translated novels Prince of Lies and Knight of the Black Rose, along with roleplaying game material, comics, film reviews, essays on pop culture, and two dozen short stories for such anthologies as Shadows over Baker Street and Tales of the Lost Citadel. As editor, he has helmed more than twenty anthologies, including Madness on the Orient Express and the award-winning Hobby Games: The 100 Best. He has directed book lines and series for a wide variety of publishing houses and currently serves as executive editor for Chaosium. His work has received six Origins Awards and two ENnie Awards, and been a finalist for the International Horror Guild Award and the Stoker Award.

And please check out some of our selected anthologies and other select titles.