Free Friday Finds

Happy Friday! Here are a few freebies from cool sites.






E-Fiction
At Daily Science Fiction, "The Mysterious Barricades" by Lyn C.A. Gardner.
"Lucy bent over the shoebox, sifting through curling paper and cracked photographs. So many secrets."

Online HERE.



At Munseys, "The Graveyard of Space" by Milton Lesser from Imagination April, 1956.
"Nobody knew very much about the Sargasso area of the void; only one thing was certain: if a ship was caught there it was doomed in— The Graveyard Of Space"


In e-book download and Munseys and Project Gutenberg.



At Fantastic Worlds, "Spawn of the Stars" by Charles Willard Diffin (1930).
"The Earth lay powerless beneath those loathsome, yellowish monsters that, sheathed in cometlike globes, sprang from the skies to annihilate man and reduce his cities to ashes."


Online HERE.


BestScienceFictionStories.com reviews and links to "The World That Couldn’t Be" by Clifford D. Simak (1958). "Like every farmer on every planet, Duncan had to hunt down anything that damaged his crops—even though he was aware this was—"

The review and link are HERE.



At Feedbooks, "Black Rain" by Ian Sales (2010).
"The settlement on Titan, one of the moons of Saturn, is only just hanging on. When a teenager goes missing, a search party is organised. What Dr Albarn finds while looking for the missing girl could have profound repercussions for them all..."


This short story is available in free e-book downloads HERE. [via Free SF Reader]



Audio Fiction
At Escape Pod, episode 281, "You’re Almost Here" by Melinda Thielbar, read by Mur Lafferty.



Streaming and in MP3 download HERE.




At The Dunesteef Audio Fiction Magazine, "Catastrophe Baker And A Canticle For Leibowitz" by Mike Resnick
"I was standing at the bar in the Outpost, which is the only good watering hole in the Plantagenet system, lifting a few with my old friend Hurricane Smith, another practitioner of the hero trade. Somehow or other the conversation got around women, like it always does sooner or later"

Streaming and in MP3 download HERE or read online here.


At The Classic Tales Podcast, episode #200 "The Raven and other poems," by Edgar Allan Poe


In MP3 download HERE.





Serial Fiction
At Book View Cafe, Polar City Blues chapter ten by Katharine Kerr, the conclusion. "In some ways Polar City Blues is my tribute to the classic SF I read as a teenager. In other ways, it’s a heavily Revisionist book, where the Hero is female and the Object of Desire is male. Mostly, however, it’s a fast-paced adventure story complete with dead bodies, hookers, drugs, mysterious aliens, and several high-speed chases both on the ground and elsewhere."— Katharine Kerr


Online HERE. Or start from the beginning here.




Gaming
At RPG Creatures, another cool, well illustrated monster for nearly any fantasy rpg (and most horror ones).
"Now and then, in the temporary thoughtless conflicts of living couples, the negative energy peaks and summons a Hon'Gaddha ghost into the material plane of existence. Attracted to the living likeness and memory of its former life, the ghost is thus drawn back to an undead existence in the world. Here it will reach out hungrily towards the love left in the living, and try desperately to consume it."

Online HERE.



New early edition D&D traps at Ancient Vaults & Eldritch Secrets. These are the Unmaking Harp, Writ of Safe Passage, and Halfling Helmet of Hugeness.

More magic items can be found by following the thread HERE.




At A Character for Every Game, tons of very usable maps for most fantasy games.



This map is from "The Grand Ruins - Interior structures" HERE, and many more can be found by following the "maps" tag HERE.




Comics
At Diversions of the Groovy Kind, "Frozen Beauty" a Creepy fantasy story drawn by Richard Corben.



Online HERE.




At Ditko Comics "He's Coming For Me!" from Unusual Tales #9 (1957). An invisible man story that is legitimately unusual.



Online HERE.



At The Comic Book Catacombs, Zudo the Jungle Boy in "Bloodthirst!" from America’s Biggest Comics Book #1 (1944). Apparently all the cool names for Tarzan clones had been taken by 1944.


Online HERE.