Infernal Bargains
Stories and Poems from the Deck of Destiny
What do a post-human starship captain, an actress of the macabre, a post-singularity revolutionary, and an exiled shapeshifter have in common? They are stories and poems that would never have been written without the “ Deck of Destiny” : the grim yet playful centerpiece of the Negocios Infernales roleplaying game. But the Deck has a second vocation— to inspire artists, via its ghoulish wisdom and bloody sense of humor, to create.
The designers of Negocios Infernales, award-winning writers C. S. E. Cooney and Carlos Hernandez, have created new works based upon the Deck of Destiny, with all its fanged philosophies and macabre musings on display. Every story and poem of Infernal Bargains began by pulling one or more cards from the Deck and resulted in the satirical, sordid, somber, spirited, and very, very sanguine works you will find herein. Taken together, they compose the haunted menagerie that populates these two writers' deepest unconscious fears and desires— and, perhaps, your own.
C. S. E. Cooney is the World Fantasy Award-winning author of Bone Swans: Stories. Other books include The Twice-Drowned Saint, Saint Death’ s Daughter, Dark Breakers, Desdemona and the Deep, The Witch in the Almond Tree and Other Stories, and the poetry collection How to Flirt in Faerieland and Other Wild Rhymes. Forthcoming from Outland Entertainment is Negocios Infernales, a TTRPG she co-designed with her husband Carlos Hernandez.
Carlos Hernandez has published more than thirty works of fiction, poetry, and drama, including Sal and Gabi Break the Universe, for which he won a Pura Belpre Author Award from the American Library Association, and its sequel, Sal and Gabi Fix the Universe. He is an English professor at City University of New York, and he loves to both play games and design them. He lives with his wife, Claire, in Queens, New York.
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