[ATDrake]

New Humble Bundle is up, and it's for:

Humble Book Bundle Network Security & Certification presented by Wiley full of highly-specialized technical training books for professionals or those aspiring to be, by the publisher of the popular “Dummies” DIY series.

Fixed tiers of $1, $8, and $15 (no new titles added next week).

Network smarter, not harder. With this Network & Security Certification bundle from Wiley, you can secure a new ebook library to help you net-work smarter. Get Network Attacks and Exploitation: A Framework, Network Security Bible, Phishing Dark Waters: The Offensive and Defensive Sides of Malicious Emails, Microsoft Windows Networking Essentials, and more!

They are also offering the annual Yogscast Jingle Jam multi-media advent calendar bundle, which all proceeds at or above the $35 level to unlock the full contents go to charity. It's mostly games, but so far there's been at least one ebook (a tie-in novel for the Dark Futures game from Black Library), and a bunch of DRM-free games, and more are being revealed every day until Xmas.

As a reminder, expiring in a couple of days on Wednesday at 11 AM Pacific Time is the excellent Humble Book Bundle Stellar Sci-Fi & Fantasy presented by Tachyon chock-full of notable award-winning sfnal authors, many represented by collections of their harder to find short story work, and the Humble Comics Bundle Riverdale & Archie full of volumes featuring the classic characters, now turned into an apparently hit TV show, is also still available.

StoryBundle has a new bundle up for:

The Winter Wonderland Game Bundle containing non-fiction books about (mostly video) games and the gaming industry, both history and creative stuff including interviews and DIY.

$5 minimum nets you 3 titles, including an award-nominated worldbuilding guide (contains an essay by sf/fantasy author Michael A. Stackpole (Wikipedia) and an introduction by Tor-published author Ken Scholes), a collection of magazine articles, and an historical overview of point and click adventure games.

$15 top tier adds 7 more titles, including some ROM game hacks, a journalist's book on the rise of eSports, an actually rather interesting-looking book about localization explaining translator choices and cultural differences, plus some sort of retrospective on an installment in the popular Final Fantasy franchise, and some books of interviews with game developers.

Their previous Neo-Noir Bundle full of mostly indies in mostly sfnal crossover hybrid subgenres done in a retro pulpy style is still available, and offers a freebie novel for newsletter subscribers.

Unusually, Bundle of Holding is offering an sfnal prose bundle as well, repeating the Stone Skin Press bundle from RPG game publisher Pelgrane Press.

This is apparently their spin-off fiction publishing line, and for the top tier price, which is currently under $11 for 9 books, you get 7 prose anthologies + 2 webcomics collections, curated by Robin D. Laws (ISFDB). The anthologies are themed original works, not gaming tie-ins, as far as I can tell, and run a mix of sfnal genres from fantasy to horror to speculative crime, with themes like Shotguns v Cthulhu, The New Gothic, The Lion and the Aardvark (inspired by Aesop's classic fables), etc. All books are available as ePub/Mobi/PDF except for the webcomics, which are PDF only.

Contributing authors seem to be mainly newer ones, but there are also some works by fairly well-established authors like multiple award-winning horror author Ramsey Campbell (Wikipedia), Alex Bledsoe (Tor), Ekaterina Sedia (Prime Books), Tobias S. Buckell (Tor) and more.

Also, for fans of the late Jack Vance (Wikipedia), they are re-offering a previous bundle Dying Earth Compleat containing the officially-licensed RPG set in one of his most popular fantasy worlds. They have augmented the contents with 5 new titles since the last go-round. If you, like me, bought it last time, the new books have been automatically added to your account without having to make an extra purchase, which is really quite nice of them.

The other new offer is for The Dracula Dossier, a spies vs vampires game also out from Pelgrane.

Expiring tonight is The Worldbuilder's Toolkit +5 presenting backgrounder resources suitable for incorporating into many game systems, which is really quite nice (I bought it out of curiosity for the medieval society and weapons volumes, and found them reasonably informative and interesting). And still available for another week or so are Castles & Crusades +2 and the original Castles & Crusades Essentials, a vaguely historical fantasy adventure game from Troll Lord Games which uses something called the SIEGE Engine rules.