Twenty years ago, the Merge brought armies of monsters flooding into the West Coast. Dungeons popped up in shopping malls, airports, and Starbucks. Walls were built to contain the spread, but the promise of priceless loot dropped by the creatures inspired a new type of gold rush. Clay Jaeger has nothing left outside the walls. Civilization took everything he worked for, chewed it up, and spat it out. Now Clay, his wife Alex, and his beer-loving, chainsaw-toting brother, Joe, are going west to try their hand at monster killing.

When regular high schooler Grady Hake is mistakenly taken by the Angel of Death, he thinks his life is over. Then, he wakes up on a prison shuttle bound for Van Diemann’s Planet, a penal colony run by brutal gangs of criminal cultivators. This is his life now, and if he wants to survive it, he’ll have to learn to harness his unique Death Spirit, make friends with alien outcasts, appease a band of hungry ghosts, and fight his way into one of the strongest gangs on the planet.

Recent college grad Sam King was hoping for a backpacking trip across Europe as a graduation present. Instead, he’s going to get a different kind of trip: a three-month stint in the ultimate immersive gaming experience. As a lifelong geek, gamer, and outsider, it’s a better gift then he’d ever dreamed.

Wounded Army vet Logan Murray thought mimics were the stuff of board games and dungeon manuals...right up until one ate him. In a flash of snapping teeth, Logan suddenly finds himself on the doorstep to another world. He’s been unwittingly recruited into the Shadowcroft Academy for Dungeons - the most prestigious interdimensional school dedicated to training the monstrous guardians who protect the Tree of Souls from so-called heroes. Heroes who would destroy the universe if it meant a shot at advancement.

Boyd Knight found his calling when he joined the Marines and qualified for the elite Force Recon. He'd found a tribe and a family, so when a hand grenade landed near his team, he jumped on it without thought or regret. But instead of winding up dead, he wakes up butt-naked in a cave full of monsters with a knife in one hand and a pistol in the other. He's been chosen by Raguel, the Five-Faced God of Justice, and entrusted with the power of the Vigil Bound.

Immerse yourself in a world of strong men and the beautiful women who adore them. From Dragon Lords and Greek Gods to Dungeon Masters and Barbarian Kings. Whether you're an avid harem fan or just want to spice up your sci-fi and fantasy habit, Dangerous Playmates from Black Forge Books brings battle babes and bad boys together in an explosive boxed set you'll listen to again and again.

Running on the world's fastest quantum computer is a very special game: one where retirees leave their flesh-and-blood lives in search of endless adventure. Weapons, spells, gold, experience points.... These are the marks by which life is now measured. Ethan Crane wants none of it. In fact, he never wanted to retire at all, let alone play a game for all eternity. But now he's on a mission to find his wife - a wife he just discovered is still alive and inside the game. Nothing will stop him from reaching her. Not even himself.

Corporate flameout Ned Altimer dreams of leaving his world behind. So, when Earthblood Online splashes onto the VRMMO scene, he dives in and never looks back. His advantages are twofold: exclusive access to the game’s three-day Head Start period, and a ridiculously handsome talking axe named Frank who has knowledge of the game’s deepest secrets...if the magnificent Frank ever feels like sharing them.

A man. His ex-girlfriend's cat. A sadistic game show unlike anything in the universe: a dungeon crawl where survival depends on killing your prey in the most entertaining way possible. In a flash, every human-erected construction on Earth - from Buckingham Palace to the tiniest of sheds - collapses in a heap, sinking into the ground. The buildings and all the people inside have all been atomized and transformed into the dungeon: an 18-level labyrinth filled with traps, monsters, and loot.

The world is devolving into chaos as a game-like system has reduced the population to a series of statistics and screens. Confusion reigns as everyone struggles to survive in this new reality. Everyone but one man. Anthony Franklin has a secret. One that gives him an edge. He has lived through this exact series of events...99 times in a row.

Five days after Owen Zastava Pitt pushed his insufferable boss out of a 14th story window, he woke up in the hospital with a scarred face, an unbelievable memory, and a job offer. It turns out that monsters are real. All the things from myth, legend, and B-movies are out there, waiting in the shadows. Some of them are evil, and some are just hungry. Monster Hunter International is the premier eradication company in the business. And now Owen is their newest recruit.

When he was 19, James Stark was considered to be one of the greatest natural magicians, a reputation that got him demon-snatched and sent downtown - to Hell - where he survived as a gladiator, a sideshow freak entertaining Satan's fallen angels. That was 11 years ago. Now, the hitman who goes only by Stark has escaped and is back in L.A. Armed with a fortune-telling coin, a black bone knife, and an infernal key, Stark is determined to destroy the magic circle.

Ex-trailer trash. Ex-res. Dishonorably discharged ex-Force Recon Marine and MP. Ex-con. Ex-biker. Ex-FBI informant. Ex-wrestler. It’s a lot of x’s to have by your name. It can give you a bad attitude, and it is not a good resume for most walks of American life. But it’s not a bad career track at all for a fixer in Los Angeles, and if the name of the new job is surviving the end of the world? Put it this way. Staying alive in the post-apocalypse can be a real bitch. Sometimes it takes a real bastard.

Robert "Bubba" Brabham never wanted to hunt monsters. He mostly wanted to drink beer, hunt deer, and chase women, like every other giant redneck in the world. But life interfered, and Bubba found himself holster-deep in the family business: monster hunting. Now he's the Southeastern Regional Hunter for the Holy Roman Catholic Church...Bubba has to save the world from the things that go bump in the night! Just as soon as he's done with his beer. And maybe after one more lap dance.

Jeb Trapper tried to kill himself. The gun jammed. Two months later, the vet is now participating in underground trials of ecstasy to treat his PTSD. Everything seems to be going great until Jeb is teleported into a tutorial, along with everyone else on Earth. Now, he has to choose the level of difficulty. There's just one problem: He's high as a kite, and nothing seems impossible.

Twenty years ago, the Merge brought armies of monsters flooding into the West Coast. Dungeons popped up in shopping malls, airports, and Starbucks. Walls were built to contain the spread, but the promise of priceless loot dropped by the creatures inspired a new type of gold rush. Clay Jaeger has nothing left outside the walls. Civilization took everything he worked for, chewed it up, and spat it out. Now Clay, his wife Alex, and his beer-loving, chainsaw-toting brother, Joe, are going west to try their hand at monster killing.

Jack Mitchell knows he won't survive the impact of the massive asteroid hurtling towards Earth. He's not one of the handful of lucky lottery winners scheduled for rescue. But he did luck into a NexGenVR capsule, which means Jack can risk a one-way trip to the world of Viridan Gate Online (V.G.O.), an ultra-immersive fantasy role-playing game. Taking that leap of faith, though, means permanently trapping his mind in the game and killing his body in the process.

The Resistance is fractured. The remaining survivors are buckling under the might of the malicious Tyrant King. Enter Roark von Graf, hedge mage, lesser noble of Traisbin, and one of the last freedom fighters. Desperate and unhinged, Roark crafts one final attempt to overthrow the king. The plan goes awry, and Roark finds himself tumbling headfirst into an interdimensional portal. On the other side, he finds himself stranded in an unexpected place - an ultra-immersive fantasy video game called Hearthworld.

Alan Campbell thought he'd gotten his dream job working on a revolutionary VRMMORPG with Osmark Technologies, until the project was canceled. He has one weekend to dive into an untested world full of intrigue, violence, and corruption to prove that Viridian Gate Online works, but the AIs running the game have their own plans for his soul. Set a year before the events of Viridian Gate Online: Cataclysm, Viridian Gate Online: Nomad Soul takes you back to when VGO was just a game, or so it seemed.

Meet Alexander Krup, your average high school graduate turned video game beta tester. Working for a strange company nobody has ever heard of, he earns his pay by the achievement. After a string of bad luck, including his girlfriend dumping him, he wakes up one seemingly average day and is suddenly faced with blue boxes of text that float in the air. While coming to grips with the fact that he might by hallucinating, a representative of his mysterious employer communicates through the menu boxes to offer a fresh life in another world.

Dan has accidentally "Noclipped" into the Backrooms—a bizarro, extra-dimensional Alice-in-Wonderland world, overrun with horrific nightmare creatures known as the Dwellers. No one ever gets out. Hell, forget about leaving, if Dan wants to survive the week, he's going to need to harness the strange game-like magic of the Backrooms, make some very sketchy allies, and carve out a little safe haven to call his own.

Orodan was an orphaned street rat who clawed his way to the county militia with hard work. When calamitous events unfold and draw him into events bigger than himself, Orodan's battle-loving disposition leads to a warrior's death. Then he wakes up again at the start of the Cataclysm. Then again. And again. In a world of skills, titles, and blessings, a smart time-looper would perhaps scheme, plan, amass equipment, and allies. But not Orodan. If there's one thing he's good at, it's stubbornly trying the same thing over and over again via brute force till it's done.

Becoming a knockoff Dracula in tight leather pants was never part of Vincent’s plans. Neither was being summoned to another world by a cult of vampire wannabes. But both happened. Now, Vincent’s left to pick up the tattered pieces of his humanity as he tries to grow strong enough to keep his family safe. The world is filled with nightmares, and the looming threat of losing his soul stands between his goal and his reality, so it’s not like it will be too hard or anything. Hell should tremble. A good man is going to war.

A world on the precipice of the apocalypse. A secret forged in the flames of war. A chance to start over. For John Sutton, only one of those three things matters. Retired from a decade of brutal war, he wants nothing more than a quiet pastoral life while he does his best to stem the steady increase of his Doom Points before they hit 100, signaling the start of the end. He’s been given a small farm on the outskirts of the empire as thanks for his service, but no matter how far he travels, it's impossible to escape the war's devastating effects on the world.

Kaiju: Battlefield Surgeon. Survival horror. One of the most brutal, most terrifying full-immersion games ever made. A place where fantasy characters such as elves and dwarves clash with technology, where giant monsters roam the hills, entrusted with protecting the gates of heaven from the demons who would tear it all down. A game where one plays the last of the battlefield surgeons: a healer tasked with keeping the behemoths alive at all costs. But on this server, they don't care about the game. They've come because of the game's most unique feature: full pain.