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Get a Fresh Take on Dungeons & Dragons in Volo’s Guide to Monsters

Get a Fresh Take on Dungeons & Dragons in Volo’s Guide to Monsters

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There have been 18 different iterations of the Dungeons & Dragons Monster Manual since Gary Gygax authored the first one in 1977. Over at Polygon.com, Charlie Hall has authored a fascinating article about the upcoming 5th Edition resource book Volo’s Guide to Monsters, which takes a fresh angle to the D&D monster book — by adding a story. Hall talked to lead designer Mike Mearls to get the scoop.

This time around, [Mearls] and his team have decided to do something a little bit different. Their next take on the Monster Manual will be called Volo’s Guide to Monsters and, for the first time, it will have a lot more character to it.

“It’s risky,” Mearls said. “In the end, it’s still a giant book full of monsters. No one would argue with that. But I just think that if that’s all the Monster Manual is, then we’re selling ourselves short. So the idea was, the kind of genesis of it, was that want to do something that’s more story oriented.”

Volo’s Guide will have a narrator — two actually. One will be Volothamp Geddarm, an over-the-top, braggadocious explorer. The other will be Elminster, the wise Sage of Shadowdale. And the two will often be at odds with one another. Their differing accounts will be scattered throughout the book, and take the shape of comments scribbled in the margin.

Put simply, the goal is to create a book that high-level players and dungeon masters will enjoy reading. The goal, in the end, is to inspire new stories at the table, not simply reinforce the lore of the Forgotten Realms and ram storylines down player’s throats.

“I have this pet phrase I use,” Mearls said. “I like to say that we’re living in a post Game of Thrones world. Fantasy has changed.”

Read the complete article, “Dungeons & Dragons is changing how it makes books,” here. It includes several full-color sample pages from the upcoming book.

Volo’s Guide to Monsters will be published by Wizards of the Coast on November 15, 2016. It is 224 pages, priced at $49.95 in hardcover. There is no digital edition.

New Treasures: A City Dreaming by Daniel Polansky

New Treasures: A City Dreaming by Daniel Polansky

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a-city-dreaming-daniel-polansky-smallDaniel Polansky is a writer on the move. His novel Low Town was called “A fantasy-crime hybrid with serious noir chops… festooned with sorcerers and demons in a pre-industrial otherworld setting” by the Winnipeg Free Press, and his Tor.com novella The Builders was nominated for a Hugo Award.

His newest novel, in which a powerful magician returns to New York City and reluctantly finds himself in the middle of a war between the city’s two most powerful witches, was released in hardcover from Regan Arts earlier this month. David S. Goyer, screenwriter for the Dark Knight Trilogy and Man of Steel, says “Imagine a mash-up of Trainspotting and Harry Potter and you might end up with something as wonderfully gonzo as A City Dreaming.”

“It would help if you did not think of it as magic. M certainly had long ceased to do so.”

M is an ageless drifter with a sharp tongue, few scruples, and the ability to bend reality to his will, ever so slightly. He’s come back to New York City after a long absence, and though he’d much rather spend his days drinking artisanal beer in his favorite local bar, his old friends — and his enemies — have other plans for him. One night M might find himself squaring off against the pirates who cruise the Gowanus Canal; another night sees him at a fashionable uptown charity auction where the waitstaff are all zombies. A subway ride through the inner circles of hell? In M’s world, that’s practically a pleasant diversion.

Before too long, M realizes he’s landed in the middle of a power struggle between Celise, the elegant White Queen of Manhattan, and Abilene, Brooklyn’s hip, free-spirited Red Queen, a rivalry that threatens to make New York go the way of Atlantis. To stop it, M will have to call in every favor, waste every charm, and blow every spell he’s ever acquired—he might even have to get out of bed before noon.

Enter a world of Wall Street wolves, slumming scenesters, desperate artists, drug-induced divinities, pocket steampunk universes, and demonic coffee shops. M’s New York, the infinite nexus of the universe, really is a city that never sleeps — but is always dreaming.

Our previous coverage of Daniel Polansky includes Those Below, the second book of The Empty Throne, Low Town, and The Builders.

A City Dreaming was published by Regan Arts on October 4, 2016. It is 304 pages, priced at $25.95 in hardcover, and $9.99 for the digital edition.

The Best British Fantasy & Horror from Salt Publishing

The Best British Fantasy & Horror from Salt Publishing

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With the surprising number of Years Best anthologies on the market these days — nearly a dozen, by my count — it takes something pretty darn special to get me to pry open my wallet for another one.

Salt Publishing has accomplished exactly that with their dual series, The Best British Fantasy, edited by Steve Haynes. and Best British Horror, edited by Johnny Mains. Where the other Years Best series mine the same American magazines and anthologies for the same batch of writers year after year, these books have the compelling advantage of drawing from a wholly different market. Featuring top-notch authors like Lavie Tidhar, Mark Morris, Ramsey Campbell, Sam Stone, Steph Swainston, Nina Allan, Guy Hayley, V.H. Leslie, Robert Shearman, Michael Marshall Smith, Helen Marshall, and many others, these books offer a refreshing change of pace for jaded SF and fantasy readers.

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Future Treasures: Boy Robot by Simon Curtis

Future Treasures: Boy Robot by Simon Curtis

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boy-robot-smallSimon Curtis is a young musician who’s had a lot of success as an independent recording artist. His debut novel introduces us to seventeen-year-old Isaak, who discovers he’s not truly human…  and that there’s a secret government organization dedicated to eradicating those like him. Boy Robot is is fast-paced science fiction debut from SImon & Schuster’s teen imprint, Simon Pulse, arriving in hardcover at the end of the month.

There once was a boy who was made, not created.

In a single night, Isaak’s life changed forever.

His adoptive parents were killed, a mysterious girl saved him from a team of soldiers, and he learned of his own dark and destructive origin. An origin he doesn’t want to believe, but one he cannot deny.

Isaak is a Robot: a government-made synthetic human, produced as a weapon and now hunted, marked for termination. He and the Robots can only find asylum with the Underground — a secret network of Robots and humans working together to ensure a coexistent future.

To be protected by the Underground, Isaak will have to make it there first. But with a deadly military force tasked to find him at any cost, his odds are less than favorable.

Now Isaak must decide whether to hold on to his humanity and face possible death… or to embrace his true nature in order to survive, at the risk of becoming the weapon he was made to be.

Boy Robot will be published by Simon & Schuster on October 25, 2016. It is 415 pages, priced at $17.99 in hardcover and $10.99 for the digital edition. The cover is by Will Staehle.

Weird Frontier: California’s Strange Fiction

Weird Frontier: California’s Strange Fiction

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Southern California exists on borrowed life. Four hundred miles of water, sucked from the Sierra Nevada into a river of steel and rebar and concrete. It plows through hot basins of Joshua trees, up barren hills dusted with scrub oaks, through sunblasted pumping stations that roil and hiss. It traces a line along the edge of Lancaster, California, springing tract homes and strip malls, green lawns and chlorine-wet children. It is a thing that does not belong, and like all such things, there is an old story at its heart.
~  Five Tales of the Aqueduct, By Spencer Ellsworth

I have a few distinct childhood memories: racing through my great-grandfather’s orange groves on his retired cowponies with my cousins; attending a funeral for the son of my grandfather’s clients, Mexican ranchers from Monterey, after the man was gunned down by an LA gang; the colors and scents of San Francisco’s Chinatown; learning how to avoid stumbling over cartel drug fields; the effigy hanging over Main Street, celebrating my hometown’s violent judicial past; visiting my uncle, who was employed as an electrical engineer on the Predators. A mélange of cultures and histories, the weird and illegal and far-future all mixed into that wild, weird empire-state known as California.

It’s no wonder that California is the land of science fiction and weird fantasy. There’s a little bit of everything there, all mixed together and blurring together, and where the lines cross, it can get weird. One of my favorite authors, Clark Ashton Smith, wrote about my hometown, referencing El Dorado moonshine and the Placerville Bank. He corresponded with H.P. Lovecraft, the masters of Eastern and Western Weird frequently mingling their tales and sharing characters and mythologies.

And that’s just one example. A small sample of founding SF authors from, inspired by, or living in California includes Bradbury, Le Guin, Dick, Vance, Gibson, Powers, and Heinlein. The state still inspires many authors and series, and Silicon Valley itself is like something out of a science fiction novel.

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Into the Mystic: The Mask of the Sorcerer by Darrell Schweitzer

Into the Mystic: The Mask of the Sorcerer by Darrell Schweitzer

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oie_1852341b75ezo3oI read a lot of fantasy — most of it older works — and yet Darrell Schweitzer’s mesmerizing The Mask of the Sorcerer (1995) had escaped my attention until fairly recently. Around the time I reviewed another of Schweitzer’s books, Echoes of the Goddess (2013), John Fultz told me that if I was looking for something really wild, Mask was where to go, so I bought it. And for two years it sat there on the virtual TBR stack. When John (who described it as “Harry Potter in Hell” and wrote an appreciation of Schweitzer here at Black Gate ten years ago) and others recently recommended it as a work of S&S horror, I finally picked it up. I have read some extraordinary novels this year, several of which I will positively reread in the years to come. The Mask of the Sorcerer (MotS) is one of those.

MotS is about the education of sixteen-year-old sorcerer, Sekenre. In a land inspired by ancient Egypt, he learns that magic and sorcery are two very different things:

Sorcery is not magic. Do not confuse the two. Magic comes from the gods. The magician is merely the instrument. Magic passes through him like breath through a reed pipe. Magic can heal. It can satisfy. It is like a candle in the darkness. Sorcery, however, resides in the sorcerer. It is like a blazing sun.

Sorcerers draw on deep forces, often by evil means. When one sorcerer kills another, the killer absorbs his victim’s soul and knowledge. There’s a cumulative effect to this, so one victory can yield the spirits of dozens of previously defeated opponents.

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New Treasures: High Stakes: A Wild Cards Novel, edited by George R.R. Martin & Melinda M. Snodgrass

New Treasures: High Stakes: A Wild Cards Novel, edited by George R.R. Martin & Melinda M. Snodgrass

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wild-cards-high-stakes-smallWild Cards is one of the longest-running shared universes in existence, outlasting Robert Asprin’s Thieves World, Emma Bull and Will Shetterly’s Liavek, C. J. Cherryh’s Merovingen Nights, and many others (the only one with a comparable run I can think of is Janet and Chris Morris’ Heroes in Hell, which began in 1986). The first volume, Wild Cards, was published in 1987 by Bantam Books; there have been 23 novels and anthologies since then, from 31 authors and four different publishers. That’s a heck of a run.

The premise of the series is pretty appealing for anyone who likes superheroes or pulp fiction.

In the aftermath of World War II, an alien virus struck the earth, endowing a handful of survivors with extraordinary powers. Some were called aces – those with superhuman mental & physical abilities. Others were termed jokers – cursed with bizarre mental or physical disabilities. Some turned their talents to the service of humanity. Others used their powers for evil.

Wild Cards is their story.

It’s been in the news recently primarily because it’s the next big series licensed to television by George R.R. Martin, hot on the heels of his globe-spanning success with Game of Thrones. Universal Cable Productions (The Magicians, Mr. Robot) acquired the rights this summer, and brought on co-editor Melinda Snodgrass as executive producer.

The 23rd book (excuse me, “mosaic novel” — really an anthology with a fancy name) in the series is High Stakes, written by Melinda M. Snodgrass, John Jos. Miller, David Anthony Durham, Caroline Spector, Stephen Leigh, and Ian Tregillis, and edited by George R.R. Martin and Melinda M. Snodgrass. It was released in hardcover by Tor on August 30.

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John Crowley’s Aegypt Cycle, Books One and Two

John Crowley’s Aegypt Cycle, Books One and Two

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613744Elsewhere in the hallowed halls of Black Gate, you can find my musings on what I consider to be among the best and most endearing fantasy novels ever written, Little, Big. Perhaps its author, John Crowley, could have hung up his spurs after that one, certain that his honorifics were now firmly in place, his spot in the pantheon assured. But then, Little, Big was never a major financial success, never “popular,” and besides, Crowley is that rare jewel, a writer who is also a thinker, and he wasn’t done thinking.

Among the works that have followed is The Aegypt Cycle, beginning with The Solitudes and Love and Sleep, then extending into Demonomania and Endless Things. I read The Solitudes in early 2015, and, having finished, set it down with a pensive hmmm, the same restless yet satisfied noise made by those who encounter an attractive puzzle box more devious and brilliant than themselves.

At the risk of sounding like a bent brown puppet from The Dark Crystal, let me repeat that: Hmmm.

Little, Big is sufficiently mysterious for most mortals, the equivalent of a buffet so satisfying and sumptuous that one reaches the end and returns at once to the beginning, eager to begin again. (Which I, in fact, did; I read the damn thing twice in a row.)

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Future Treasures: Where the Time Goes by Jeffrey E. Barlough

Future Treasures: Where the Time Goes by Jeffrey E. Barlough

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Back in July, Fletcher Vredenburgh reviewed the opening novel in Jeffrey E. Barlough’s Western Lights series here at Black Gate.

I’m not exactly sure what made me buy Dark Sleeper… I’m thinking it was more the Jeff Barson painting of woolly mammoths pulling a coach across a dark, snow swept landscape. Whatever the reason, I’m happy I did, as the book turned out to be a very strange and often funny trip through a weird and fantastical post-apocalyptic alternate reality.

In Barlough’s fictional world the Ice Age never fully ended. With much of its north covered by ice and snow, medieval England sent its ships out around the world looking for new lands… With great cities such as Salthead and Foghampton (located around the same places as Seattle and San Francisco), the western colonies flourished and expanded. Then, in 1839, terror struck from the heavens… Something crashed into the Earth, and almost instantly, all life except in the western colonies, was obliterated and the Ice Age intensified. Now, one hundred and fifty years later, the “the sole place on earth where lights still shine at night is in the west.”…

For nearly twenty years now Barlough has been creating a truly unique series that has seems to have escaped too many readers’ attention… If you have the slightest affinity for the works of Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, or the steampunk works of Tim Powers and James Blaylock, then I highly recommend Dark Sleeper.

The ninth novel in the series, Where the Time Goes, sees Dr. Hugh Callander return home to find the town of Dithering gripped by fear. Livestock are being lost, and townsfolk are mysteriously disappearing. Is it poachers, thieves or murderers? Or might the ancient tales of a ravenous beast in the nearby cavern of Eldritch’s Cupboard be true? Where the Time Goes arrives in trade paperback from Gresham & Doyle on October 31st.

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Caterers to the Damned, Zombie Gladiators, and Lovecraft’s Dreamlands: Catching Up With Tor.com Publishing

Caterers to the Damned, Zombie Gladiators, and Lovecraft’s Dreamlands: Catching Up With Tor.com Publishing

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One of the most exciting developments in publishing over the last year has been the blockbuster launch of Tor.com publishing. They’ve really shaken up the industry with a knockout line-up of original novellas — including the Nebula award-winning Binti by Nnedi Okorafor, Daniel Polansky’s Hugo-nominated The Builders, Emily Foster’s acclaimed epic fantasy The Drowning Eyes, and many more.

A big part of the reason I enjoy about the Tor.com novella line so much — beside the fact that they’re fun, easy reads — is that the publisher has shown a willingness to experiment with series fantasy. And so we have Guy Haley’s post-apocalyptic adventure The Emperor’s Railroad, set in a world of strange robots and gladiatorial combat with zombies; Paul Cornell’s Witches of Lychford, in which a trio of New England witches warily guard the boundary between two worlds, and a gateway to malevolent beings beyond imagination; Andy Remic’s Song For No Man’s Land trilogy, The Great War retold as an epic fantasy featuring a subterranean Iron Beast; Matt Wallace’s Sin du Jour books, featuring the comedic misadventures of New York’s exclusive caterers-to-the-damned, and others.

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