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23 Mar 23:15

The First Images of Nicolas Cage as Dracula in ‘Renfield’ Are Exactly What I Wanted

by Rachel Leishman
Nicolas Cage in 'Vampire's Kiss'

When you think about Nicolas Cage movies, you can easily separate them between the absurd and the incredible. I’m not saying the absurd are bad—they’re not; they’re brilliant—but there is a clear separation in Cage’s career that makes him an actor with a fascinating filmography to explore. Now though, Cage is taking on one of the biggest roles out there: Dracula.

There will be a time in this world where we all remember exactly what we were doing the moment we saw the first images of Nic Cage as Dracula because boy oh boy are these absolutely perfect. Not even in my wildest dreams have I thought that this was what we were going to get out of this movie.

17 Nov 01:42

Star Wars: End of Empire: Dramatis ex Machina.

by mordicai


Mazes & Mynocks

Chyron: "Deepdock Kython": Subsurface Shipyard, Ord Mantell.

Our Star Wars: End of Empire campaign has split off into two forks; last session was the "Dathomir" arc, but now we return to our planet of origin in the "Ord Mantell" arc.  Raj couldn't make it to the last few sessions, so as the members of the group with the most notable prices on their head, his character Jax Cadderly the blaster totin' charmer & his sidekick the Trandoshan ex-gladiator Sshushath the Zode stayed behind with the clone cadets to keep a low profile while the rest went topside to find a slicer to crack open DD-13/HK's severed head for the secrets of Project: STARKILLER.  Tucked away safely in the darkness of an all-but-abandoned underground Deepdock, the two rogues have been teaching the kids of Harlequin Squad how to play sabacc; Shiny is a natural at reading the table but Cain seems unbeatable…until they catch him cheating.  Bingo is the worst at it; he keeps folding & trying to get Jax to let him try out his jetpack.

& then the cloaked binary beacon that Eris slipped on Jax's wrist back on Corellia Prime starts to blink, transmitting an hyperspace encrypted S-thread meant to lead her back to them.

We cut to the rest of the crew (minus Theynur Kötturinn) returning from their expedition, accompanied by the Metropolis-sleek bounty-hunter droid GEMINI, who is Burke's side character in this storyline.  Jolit, Joey's deadly human replica droid, physically engages the chain-lever to get the cable lift fully operational, which clangs & jangles despite his best efforts at stealth.  Rachel's engineer & ex-Imperial officer, Para Totool, adds some lubrication to the mechanism as they head down the bore hole; the earlier racket has stirred up the irlings that have spun their webs midway down the docking shaft.  Sensitive, insectoid ptero-creatures, the irlings are chittering & buzzing horridly & hungrily as the party descends amidst the silicate strands of their hive, but everyone keeps their composure & Para uses focused lamplight to keep any overly curious bugs away until the carriage is well clear of the nest.

As their descent finishes, some of the nerdier cadets run up to Para from across the bay.  Enth says to her excitedly "did you know that mynocks reproduce by binary fission!  Well they do!"  & now she has two glittering, pedigree, silicate, cable-chewing pet mynocks that have once again escaped from their containment capsule on board the False Profit, the spaceyacht they pilfered from Ord Mantell's crimelord.  99, helpfully, adds "oh & did you know that the Mynock Fancier's Society is the oldest beneficent society in the galaxy?  It is quite exclusive!"

On the plus side,  the little seeker droid they call "Wrench", ID9-WR3-J has seemingly has adopted the alien mynocks, & as Para has learned to sort of…coax them along, like manta-cats, now Wrench can aid any attempt to shepherd them, or awkwardly try himself, even joining their Minion group, as cadet Enth observes them flocking together.  The camaraderie that Para, Jolit & the others have shared with the little parrot droid has made ID9-WR3-J fiercely protective: he gains the Bodyguard talent, as well.  Zero is hanging out nearby disaffectedly.  "I'm just keeping an eye on the eggheads."

The droids are a big hit with the Harlequin cadets, as well; Burke re-introduces Gemini, who the clones take a generally suspicious good cop/bad cop approach to; Jolit meanwhile has full-on admirers, as Skip is fascinated by his armor ("Is that Centurion armor?  Sir, that's some High Republic era antique!  That stuff is almost as tough as Mando armor; fit it with a few cortosis or beskar plates & it would be!  That's what's great about it; highly modifiable, right?") & the more circumspect Clank who simply says, "whatever.  Nice arm."  

The Uprising Droids

4-DOX, RA-7 infiltrator, snaps them out of the downtime montage, sending them off to socialize with the movers & shakers of the Uprising.   "Listen, dolls.  So you've cracked open that naughty nurse's databanks & listened to him squeal about this STARKILLER.  So where to next, kiddos?  If you wanna fork it over to someone in the Uprising, it just begs the question of…who?  Now I wasn't built yesterday but things around here have been a-changing.  There's still a buncha, ah "philosophies" & extremes, but these days there are a few droids who seem to have hoarded up the most social capital.  Why don't you talk to them, feel 'em out, see how to handle them, then we can figure out the next hop, skip 'n jump."



KC-K7, "Kacey": Droid Legalists:  captain of the Countessa's Noble Guard & bodyguard, as much protocol droid as security unit, sweetly treasonous.  A courtly Doug Jones: Abe Sapien, Saru, etc.
    "We wish to gain droid liberation through democratic methods, for instance through senate representation & legislating droid rights in the New Republic, with the ultimate goal of droid emancipation in cooperating systems.  Controversially, I consider us realists; we are willing to accept incremental gains.  We are serious in our demands but wish to be heard peacefully.  Until that is possible, extreme action is warranted, but we should aim at all times for non-violent resolutions.  Of course, if we must act, we must act with a clarity of purpose that recognizes the failed state of diplomacy & that…excessive force may be warranted."


Squire & Sequel: Droid Secessionists:  two swoop-riding IG-Lancers, older bots with heavier armor than the more famous assassin droids.  Twins silently consulting themselves, alternatingly speaking in "ro-bot log-ic."
    "Illogical to believe that the New Republic will give up the economic benefits of droid servitude, therefore Droid Free Space must be established."

    "Successful Galactic splinter factions: Hutts.  Corporate Sector.  Imperial Remnant.  Conclusion: control of droid space necessary for ideology's extension."

    "Open warfare ideal; creates obvious leverage.  See also, Praetorian neo-Empire."


Iron Boss "V": Droid Gotra: this one is easy; these bounty-mechs represent the Droid Gotra, whichever one of them you are talking too.  V is like a congenial anarchist Santa or criminal Onion Knight.
    "Ho ho ho, my little friends!  Droids are already free, if they want to act like it.  Busting off those restraining bolts, of course, ha ha!  Criminals don't have to care about LAWS!  Did you know, my fie diddly dee dees, that a little more than 4000 years ago there was a Droid Revolution that almost succeeded?  But does it seem like it did?  No one won the Clone Wars either, least of all the Separistist droids, wouldn't you say?  Far better to flourish in the cracks in this shattered galaxy & disregard the organic's laws entirely, ho ho!"
The Trench Run

Framing the scene & there to outro them from rubbing elbows & actuators with the droid bigwigs is 4-DOX, with a bit of a mission.  "Honey I am here to tell you, I just heard the most delicious spot of gossip.  You didn't get it from me, but through the grapevine, there's an…Imperial informant who wants to meet up with an envoy from the Droid Uprising.  Some fancy trooper.  Can I ask you folks to be a pack of darlings & go talk to 'em?  They said they want to meet up at the Caldera Trench during Twilight, & I figured I'd send three of our folks with you just to make sure everything goes hunky-dory."  Which is how they meet the Droid Guerillas, BX-BoopBleep, RX-WhistleChirp & K-XBeepBuzz.  They may have started out as protocol droids, battle or security droids, or anything really, but after a series of militarized hardware upgrades & ruthless software patches, they are now jury-rigged commandos.  They can speak Basic but keep defaulting to Binary.

The Avilatan Caldera used to be a mountain, but a catastrophic explosion during the era of the Old Republic left it a vast, magma-filled crater.  During the Clone Wars, the Republic Navy created the Caldera Trench, turning it into a mega-scale foundry by digging a vast canyon with factories & residencies built into the walls to protect the workers from the planet's intemperate suns.  The lava of the eponymous caldera flows in a single rivulet down the center, a river of fire.  It is empty now, the minerals long stripped, the machinery rusted & picked over, but the phlegethon still burns, surrounded by empty containers, ruined industrial support structures & uselessly gigantic machined ship pieces.  Each wall of the Trench is lined with countless interconnected chambers, offices & apartments but the center canal & its stream of magma are a straight-away, though still with enough industrial detritus & debris to take cover or hide behind.



Their contact is waiting in an open space, clad in modified black & red scout trooper armor.  When he speaks, it rings with mechanical reverberation & the dull hiss of static, the voice of an obvious cyborg.  This is Agent Durant, a member of the Bureau of Operations' "Destab" Branch, another Imperial Intelligence splinter group.  The group approaches him with their triumvirate of droid insurgents flanking them closely, asking him if he's alone.  "Not alone.  Snipers.  Sappers.  Support."  There is a mirror flash, & then another, & another, till they spot a few Junktroopers in poncho-capes & mis-matched gear with engineering tools.  The vibe is beat up but custom, veterans who've picked their favourite pieces from a host of battlefields.  A unit of survivors, Imperials cut-off on the Outer Rim who became self-sufficient scavengers, but still loyalists, & of an unknown number.
    "Special.  Agent.  As in.  Special.  Bureau of Operations.  Destabilization.  Outside standard protocols.  Lateral command structure.  Orders supersede.  Local governance.  Droid revolt promotes.  Illegitimacy.  Instability."

    "Unilateral dispensation.  For clandestine assistance.  Arms deals.  Information exchange.  For example.  Good faith offer.  Praetorians.  New technology.  Droid Override Signal.  Master Control Program.  Broadcast tower constructed.  Almost operational.  Destroy Master Control Transmitter.  Long live the Uprising."
They take the data crystal offered by Special Agent Durant, but any chances for more in-depth diplomacy are interrupted by the arrival of a group of Gank mercenaries.  Aliens who get their first cybernetic implant at birth, the Gank are pack hunters; this is [Low Snarl] & [Young Gold]'s pride, the latter having spotted the crew leaving the Blue Pyramid.  While the Gank are independent operators, Black Sun is reliable employer with a great deal of marketplace sway.  Why, Concilliator Kek's goodwill alone is almost as valuable as the price on their heads!  The Gank's forms are disguised by armor & helmets, but as a group they have they have a smooth canid motion that extends to their pets: the Ganks all lead Corellian Hounds on electro-chain leashes, but the Alpha, a Corellian Mastiff more than a unit tall at the shoulder, the Gank treat like a peer.  Like the aliens, the animals have been cybernetically modified, with no two exactly alike.  The Gank don't barter or negotiate; they don't even speak.  Communicating silently on wetware comms, they move in to take their prey, including this Imperial interloper…

29 Oct 00:27

Star Wars: End of Empire: Race You To the Surface!

by mordicai


In the Belly of the Beast

Theynur Kötturinn the Farghul explorer & Force sensitive played by Burke in our End of Empire campaign, is inside a large room that is a mix of austere & luxurious monochrome; something exactly like a visiting Admiral's quarters on board the Praetor-class Super Star Destroyer The Claw, along with the astroprobe AK-88 "Kaytee".  Her vocalization "on screen" has sounded something like a Viper probe droid babbling in Imperial code, & like Binary or any language in Star Wars, it is based on narrative context whether or not a given person can understand her. Joey, taking the droid over as a side character, decides that given her origins as an "Empire friendly" product, it makes sense that more Imperials can understand her than not.
    AK-88; "Katee":  Like most Arakyd products, the basic concept behind their astromech probot was to take a successful civilian droid & reverse engineer a more expensive military model.  To that end, they designed the AK-series with the secondary purpose of in-combat starship sabotage; departing the astromech socket mid-dogfight & slinking across space on their repulsors to tear open ship hulls & burn out enemy systems.  When the player characters first reactivated AK-88, they missed her combat & self-destruct capabilities; since then Katee has focused on cyphers & codebreaking, while the programs for her primary functions of computing & astrogation have continued to evolve, as has her personality matrix.
They have been there for a long enough time to begin to get impatient; like the journey to Alderaan or the trip to Bespin, it is unclear & unimportant if it has been hours or days.  Typical Star Wars time dilation; ignore it.  Now, though, something is different: Theynur has been given options for a change of wardrobe.  Three unmarked Praetorian officer's uniforms are laid out; along with one black belt & one pair of black boots.  Choosing betten red, white & black, Theynur decides to go snow white; her current gear is moldy & damaged from the dramatic escape from Kamino, but she hasn't been disarmed, so she stows her blaster & lightsaber at her waist.



As Theynur buckles on her gear, the door whisks open, revealing one of the other strangers in the Force vision where the Imperator reached out to Para Totool: Ulma Verbost, Rachel's long time signature character amongst the antagonists, now having dyed her hair blonde; nor from idolization or a sense of fashion, but just as a way of feeling in control of herself, her body.  Ulma has a number of character actions involving spending Dark Side points; this does not necessarily mean that Ulma is Force sensitive, but rather, like Para Totool, that she is swept up in the currents of Fate.
    Cornet Ulma Verbost:  Last seen commanding the Interdictor Labyrinth, shields down & being blown apart by the ghost ship Insidious, Ulma was among the few who survived the attack, found by the Imperator herself.  Pulled from the wreckage & critically injured, the Imperial Praetorians rebuilt her, complete with a cybernetic eye.  Her physical battle scars, & her ever-present blast vest, are only the visible signs of the trauma from holding on for dear life in the venting bridge of the ship, separated clean from the rest of the hull by the enemy's phase shifters.  Her emotional scars run deeper.  She swirls now in the eddies of the Imperator's destiny, & has been appointed as "flagbearer" for the Praetorians, along with a symbolic portion of the Imperator's own authority.
Almost as many white clad ISB officers & interrogation droids patrol the hallways of the capital ship as there are black clad naval officers, but even then, they corridors are surprisingly empty.  It isn't a far walk, & it isn't to the bridge; Coronet Verbost leads them to a large, but not central audience chamber on the observation deck.  Two "old school" Royal Guards wait outside the door, masked & armed with deadly force pikes, crimson-clad & motionless as Ulma leads the felinoid & robot into the portal as it hisses open.

The viewport of the room is partially obscured by a large Oculus-like device, overlaid on a scarlet planet below.  A red giant, Domir, blazes huge & hot in the distance, but below there are blood red oceans & seas of ruby mist lurking amongst harsh typography, the planet's teeming swamps & jungles between obsidian crags magnified by the Oculus.  For a moment it almost seems to resemble a skull, before Dathomir's clouds move on.  & it is getting larger as the starship approaches.

Here There Be Dragons

Imperator Tanda Pryl is here, wearing something like Sly Moore's feather-fur shadowcloak but in pristine white without any shades of grey in the visible spectrum, held shut by Palpatine's rectangular clasp.  Her voluminous blonde hair is entwined into two long braids trailing down the front of the robe to below her knees.  She is standing by the Oculus when the three of them enter, but when they come in she moves to a small table in the center of the room, motioning for them to shush with a pale, long nailed finger to her lips.

She places her palm on a round shape under a veil, & chants, in a voice that grows rapidly hollow as she intones the words, "Mothers, Sisters; lend me your strength."  Below her hand, the curve of an Orb begins to pulse green beneath the sheet, building to a crescendo.  Theynur feels it in the Force, but the spell is somehow…different then anything she's felt so far.  There is a tingle like a green snap, & a faint static sizzle at the periphery of their vision before she speaks again.

"Theynur, AK-88, thank you for coming.  I have gone through quite some trouble to arrange this…opportunity for us to truly speak openly."  She acknowledges the droid, but it is clear that her focus is on Theynur, thick with tension.  "Coronet Verbost, I would like to grant you permission to speak freely during this discussion.  You have demonstrated your loyalty to the best ideals of the Empire, & gone through pain & darkness to follow my orders; that is why I have made you my flag bearer, & it is time to show at least some of my cards."

The Officer
    Skywalker Hypothesis: "I grew up in the Core, born to a political family & with my whole military career planned out for me.  I was a young officer when rumors & classified intel about the destruction of the first Death Star began to circulate around the Empire's whisper network.  Piecing together what I could, I came up with what I called "The Skywalker Hypothesis," the idea that these…"Force Sensitive" individuals could be found more often on the Outer Rim.  I transferred out there, horrifying my family, who thought I was throwing any real chance at advancement away.  On Tatooine I learned about the Skywalker family, though I didn't know Organa was one of the bloodline until the rest of the Galaxy did.  That research, of course, brought me to…His attention."

    The Dark Knight: "You...really can't imagine Lord Vader.  You might have seen holos, you might have heard stories but just…being near him was like being doused in freezing water while grabbing the end of a power cable.  Like feeling a planet's shadow, an eclipse, fall on you, holding you down.  I thought...I don't remember what I thought when he first came for me.  Something like the feeling that the end had come, only...worse.  Like he was going to flay me open.  & to be honest, that is what he did, in a way; but in the pain & the fear I found power.  Something inside of me had always been there, but now it was awake."

    The Fall: "Vader…put me on a path.  Tasked me with chasing the ghosts of rumors, the odds & ends of history.  You see, He didn't exactly betray his Master, it wasn't really like I was His "Apprentice," & I certainly wasn't privy to whatever Sith secrets He & Palpatine were hoarding.  I chased the shadows of greater Knowledge, piecing together the occasional crumb He dropped with whatever scraps I gleaned.  & I stayed in the fringes of the Outer Rim, where I served with Commander Totool, until I was called away from Elrood to serve in His Death Squadron, to command a Star Destroyer in His own personal fleet.  I thought it was the beginning of the next phase of my training.  Instead it was the end."

    The Reflective Game: "All the secret projects, Harbinger, the Inquisitorius...those were all Palpatine's gambits, & many of them were knives pointed at Lord Vader's back.  Some of them are still out there; one of the old Inquisitors has declared herself "Prelate" & has a cadre of disciples in the deep Core.  I mentioned the Emperor's love of Shah-tezh; there is a variant called the Reflective Game, in which both players control the same pieces.  In the end, the Skywalkers moved against Palpatine; the Knight & the Disciple overthrew the Imperator in his own Demesne."
The Admiral
    The Witch of Endor: "Gilad Pellaeon wasn't a fool, but he wasn't anywhere near up to the task of holding the Empire together.  In the anarchy of the immediate aftermath following Lord Vader & the Emperor's demise, I took command of Death Squadron & we secluded ourselves in the mantle of the gas giant Endor.  When the celebrations of the Rebels & their cannibal allies died down, I felt a…call to the planet below.  I followed the raven, & that is where I met the Witch of Endor.  Or what was left of her; after appearing to me, her spectre told me to go to her daughters on Dathomir before fading away like an emerald dream."

    Imperial Remnant: "Gallius Rax, the last Counselor to the Empire, was a fool & moreover, a terrorist.  He called himself "Counselor" as a joke to those of us aware of the Emperor's game; even he knew he was just the Outcast, Palpatine's last checkmate, a sacrifice to vanity.  & Mas Amedda, the final Grand "Vizier" of the Empire?  He was a weakling whose surrender to the Republic meant nothing.  With virtually no real power, all he provided was a rubber stamp for the bureaucratic class.  Everything Rax did, everything, was just a means towards obfuscation, in service of Palpatine's lies."

    The Contingency: "The Emperor had a plan for everything, even death.  You will certainly remember Project: CINDER, the old Order's last gasp, deploying some of Palpatine's hidden superweapons against former Imperial & new Republic worlds alike, but CINDER didn't end, it was stopped.  I stopped it.  But the rest of the wheels keep churning & I cannot foresee where they lead.  CINDER was only the beginning."

    Unknown Regions:  "Grand Admiral Sloane was the only one who knew what she was doing in the last days of the old Empire, & where is she now?  Somewhere out in the Unknown Regions doing…who knows what.  Something…dangerous, I know that.  I fear…I didn't think Sloane was the type, but when I reach out for her, I feel Palpatine's poison.  She is out there somewhere; I know because the I have felt the last of the Imperial Remnant slipping through my fingers, fleeing this "New Republic" in the guise of some last grand retreat into what Thrawn called 'The Chaos'."
The Praetorians
    The Imperial Fleet: "By my count, the Imperial Fleet is significantly more powerful than the decentralized forces of the various local powers that have taken over in the guise of a new "Senate."  Our "big secret," but one those accursed Bothans are well aware of, is that for all our advances & resources, almost every one of our ships are working on a skeleton crew…but this is not a problem for my ultimate intentions.  You will note that we Praetorians have scrupulously attacked military targets: old depots, declassified bases, naval shipyards.  To prevent this fledgling Republic from imploding into a failed state, before the plans in the Unknown Regions can hatch, we intend to extend an offer of help to the Republic, but this time I will negotiate from a place of strength, not from under the heel of defeat."

    The Royal Guard: "The Praetorians have three major centers of power.  I have the loyalty of most of the military, I am proud to say, & any doubters are silenced by the support of the Royal Guard, about whom you must always remember one important thing: they are a death cult.  With their failure to protect the Emperor, they are literally programmed for revenge at any cost.  They have their own resources & a small legion of fanatics sworn to their cause, & they have thrown in their lot with me for two reasons: I haven't claimed the throne for myself & I have convince them there is still hope for their Emperor to live again, through Project: STARKILLER."

    The Imperial Security Bureau: "The other leg of the tripod is the Imperial Security Bureau, & frankly I am not sure what percentage of it is comprised of intelligence, enforcement, or ops, but I can tell you which internal faction ended up on top: Research & Development, under the command of Director Dalaa at The Maw facility.  He…certainly holds the Praetorians no loyalty & he seems happy enough with the power he's accumulated, but his true motives remain opaque to me.  Nearby on Kessel, the former sycophants of Minister Tashu, all those pathetic Sith cultists, have gathered, & somehow they are using the Dark Side to cloud any vision of Director Daala.
The Imperator
    Para: "I…am surprised that Commander Totool didn't join us.  She always seemed...to have a greater vision.  To be loyal to the idea of the Empire rather than Palpatine's twisted monument to vanity.  I thought...when I saw Para on the holo-surveilance, I believed I felt her through the Force, I thought she must be part of my destiny.  I admit I was...surprised to find you there, looking back at me, & now I think...it was this thing that ties us together that I felt, but which I mistakenly assumed was about our...about my former subordinate."

    Jolit: "When I first saw Commander Totool working with that cyborg clone on the Rubicon, I thought she had sided with the Imperial Security Bureau, Director Daala's faction.  That's why I reached out to her, that's how I first encountered…you.  But now...was that how you found the Observatory on Kamino, by following Daala's footprints, working your way backward from the Vault in the Maw Facility?  Are you in touch with Cadacus Dee?"

    Theynur:  "I spoke truly when I said I want you to be my Hand.  It is, of course, not that easy.  I could snap my fingers & say it is so but…as I mentioned, there is a delicate balance of power, & in the margins of the balance are all too many opportunities for espionage & assassination.  We will test our bond, but in the meantime, I will give you & your droid the code cylinders for every non-classified & non-essential area.  I can see the truth, even without the Force: you are trusting me, but not foolishly.  Utterly sensible, & I will happily reply in kind.  We can take footsteps together towards fealty."

    Dathomir: "We are already approaching Dathomir; we will be taking the ship into the atmosphere to facilitate resupply with Twilight Base.  Another little lesson I learned from the Rebel Alliance: keep secret stations on remote planets.  This is also where you will meet my, & hopefully soon your, Mothers.  But all that in due time.  Coronet Ulma, will you show Theynur to the surprise we've been working on for her in Hangar Bay 327?  & after that, bring her to The Garden," you can practically hear the capital letters, "so that I can introduce her to Ichor."


Race You To the Surface!

With the mechanical whine of opening blast doors, we cut to the hangar bay of The Claw, with the three of them waking in, down a corridor of racked TIE fighters & parked shuttles, flanked by looming AT-ATs, to where their ship is.  While Katee & Theynur have been "entertained" by the Imperator, legions of Praetorian grease monkeys have been hard at work on their X-wing before making them selves scarce in anticipation of letting them enjoy the moment.  Adding dagger-like solar panels to the ship, the pit crew have given it a slightly more "Imperial" profile, as well as adding significantly to its speed.  The high-output ion engine, on top of the standard Incom turbine, will make the "X-ceptor" as fast (or faster) than an A-wing or the standard TIE Interceptor.

That's when they here the door maglocks activate & the hangar power down, going lights out.  The airlocks are sealed, but the vehicle gravity locks are off, as is the hangar bay forcefield.  Luckily, between the advanced sensor array of AK-88, the cat-like eyes of Theynur & Ulma's cybereye, they are all able to see in the dark.  Before they have a chance to discover that comms are blocked, they all hear an uncanny sound, one each of them recognizes for different reasons: the sound of sealed tibanna gas "unspinning" right before an explosion.

The good news is that the Imperator was not so foolish as to fuel & arm their X-ceptor, so it does not explode, but they are all rattled, scraped & scarred & a little shellshocked as the hanger bay bursts into flame, despite diving behind cover.  The bad news is that klaxons immediately begin to blare & sirens flash as the hangar bay's exterior blast doors start opening. Ulma, Kaytee & Theynur hold on as best they can but are sucked out into the ruby horizon of low-pressure in the upper atmosphere, as The Claw has begun its planetary descent. Defenestrated, they are all further battered about by wreckage while being sucked out into red nothingness.

Spinning out in free fall, the humanoids struggle to right themselves while the astroprobe droid's radial symmetry & repulsor drives are right at home in the maelstrom.  Strain from the gravitational forces & disorientation from the spin begin piling up, but despite a piece of permasteel rebar through her leg, Ulma manages to collide with AK-88, though in the process the droid's inertial stabilizers are blown out.  As Theynur uses her connection to the Force to pull herself toward the cockpit, a piece of debris slashes her, but she's in, & Katee leaves Ulma clinging to the hull as she hover-slots herself into the falling ship's droid socket.  With a heave, Ulma is in, as the droid & pilot do their best to regain control; as previously mentioned, they are without any fuel, as the X-cepter glides down into a crash landing on the planet Dathomir.
29 Aug 18:55

Star Wars: End of Empire: the Return to Ord Mantell.

by mordicai

Project: EGGEATER

Chyron: "The Drift": Kuras System, Elrood Sector.

We return to End of Empire after the recent cliffhanger episode with a long shot out of a comet streaking through space with a brilliant trail, a goliath amidst other, smaller comets in the shower...no, the endless swarm of ice & stone & cold almost-stars. It hurls toward the viewer till it encompasses the screen, focusing in first on miniscule quadrupeds that resolve to be groundshaking AT-ATs, & then the camera crow's eye zooms in on a special forces Inferno Trooper in black & red trooper regalia, with a multi-purpose utility belt & a probe droid attached to the "stormtrooper circle" on the back, leading a squad of KX-series security droids across snowy, rocky slush amidst the stomping warmachines.
    K-5VA: "Vee," Special Violence Applications.
    K-4RD: "Ardee," Restricted Access R&D.
    K-6LC: "Elcee," Loyalty & Compliance Auditor.
As the airlock cycles, we see Lieutenant Para Totool take off her helmet as Ensign Ulma Verbost waits within the interior bulkhead. Inside off the gargantuan comet it is like the organic inverse of Kamino: winding, labyrinthine tunnels filled with faintly biolumenescent unfertilized Verpine eggs. They cling to the walls in rows, like an octopus' egg sacs, or disorganized bio-cloning tubes. This is the Hatchlands, the queen's chamber turned subplanetary cell by the Empire, the lonely palace of a captive Verpine queen denied any company or mates.


Niskooen, the Verpine Hive Mother of the Shroud Colony scuttles up as Lieutenant Totool comes in, walking & talking. She's sizable— bigger than a Wookiee, smaller than an AT-ST— albino & young. She is obsequious & naïve, confidently asserting that she will follow the wisdom of her Own Mother, the Queen of Roche Hive Mechanical Apparatus Design & Construction, who she unquestioningly assumes will support imperial authority. She's just waiting on Her glorious approval! Para says generic, molifying things to her as she, Ulma & the KX droids march past her warren & into the Special Projects command center, an Imperial science structure with clamshell consoles suspended over a massive Bore Hole down to the planetoid's center. Para, acing her Leadership role, can see that the facility is in full evacuation mode, & she is eager to receive answers, & orders, from Captain Tanda Pryl.
    "We have received confident proof from ISB that the Roche Hive is engaging in seditious activity, in order to aid the treasonous scum of the Rebellion against the Empire. The Emperor has disbanded the Imperial Senate & we are instating immediate martial law in the Elrood Sector. Part of these emergency powers demand a display of force: Lieutenant Totool, you are hereby ordered to the core to initiate Project: EGGEATER & then evacuate immediately."
Descending to the depths of the comet on mechanical lift, it is revealed that the tunnels are the result of a nest of burrowing exogorths, titanic slug-like silicon lifeforms, now dormant at the core. They chewed this place into the perfect hive for the Verpine before going into hibernation, & with the Verpine monarch being kept under a house arrest that was tantamount to solitary confinment, it made this planetary-chunk a perfect laboratory. Most of serpentine creatures, however, now have some kind of mechanical harness drilled into their "heads." This is Project: EGGEATER...weaponizing space slugs!

Activating the hardware implanted in the exogorths requires an extraordinarily difficult mechanics check, along with a similarly arduous Computers check in order to translate the Arkanian programming macros from fossilized Old Republic era Adascorp databanks, but Lieutenant Totool, her protégé Ensign Verbost & the KX-droids are experts; in many ways this is the culmination of their lives' work. As the space slugs begin to stir, chunks of rock & ice break loose & the tunnels begin to collapse; everyone is making good time & working seamlessly as team, like a machine; they make it to their ships & take off, but the disintegrating Hatchlands has caused a domino effect in the rest of the Shroud, sending meteors wildly out of their standard orbits. A quick escape through the chaotic asteroid field will need calm fingers, & Ulma & the droids in a Lambda-class shuttle lock onto Para in her TIE-Interceptor The Egg-Eater on the way out, a needle she threads like a professional.

We Don't Serve Their Kind Here!

"Para, come on, wake up, we're here." The Scraplands repulsor train on Ord Mantell pulls to a stop outside of The Blue Pyramid, a gambling den in the Scraplands on the edge of a sheer drop down to scavengers picking over rusty trash marshes & garbage heap mountains. A cleft in the land shows that the "pyramid" is just the very top of a sapphire obelisk that extends to the floor of the refuse moors, & below. Jawas in clean blue robes & conical metal hats scurry past, as if they weren't meant to be here. This used to be a neutral bar, with freelancers, ex-Imperials & whomever gambling & drinking & spicing, but it seems since you've been gone it has gone...exclusive.
    The Droid Gotra: An underworld organization founded by refugee Seperatists battledroids; they ostensibly believe in "Droids Rights" but in practice take it as a licence for lawbreaking. The one thing they can't abide is deception: whereas some holovids might have clichés about robots who break down into errors when confronted with a paradox, but the Gotra have made a horrifying reality of it: they will put irrational prices on the heads of "liars" while pursuing the vendetta themselves; they are so renown for their over reaction to falsehood that other members of the criminal underworld have started invoking them in oaths & promises...at their peril.
"The Committee" of astromechs acting as pro tem leaderships for the Droid Uprising has broken up over some kind of philosophical issue, & they have shifted their focus from management to fixing up the broken & rusted Lucrehulk ship buried in the geological strata of the junkyard they were networked together in. Para & Jolit have come to the Pyramid during the planet's Purple Twilight, the scintillating Bright Jewel Nebula tame & occluded only by Ord Mantells at least fifteen moons. They need to get their contact, a cyborg Quarren infochant, to slice into the droid's head & crack open whatever files they can find on STARKILLER; Jax Cadderly, Sshushath the Zode & 4-DOX, being officially the "Most Wanted" of the group, stayed behind with the clone cadets.

The door to the Blue Pyramid is blocked by a Droid Gotra capo, a heavy loadlifter rebuilt with built-in blasters & shieldingwith built-in blasters & shielding & reprogrammed for a life of crime named Iron Boss X. "You can come in," it says, jerking a servo-thumb at Jolit, "but we don't serve their kind here!" it says with a mechano-digit accusingly pointed at Para. The two of them try to talk her way in, but between some hefty penalties for being perceived as an organic & a cyborg, as Jolit's status as a synthetic is obscured by him being a Human Replica Droid with apparently cybernetic enhancements. But! Luckily one of the robotic nogoodniks in the bar recognize them as allies of the Droid Upriding, & vouches for them.
    GEMINI: a droid bounty hunter in the style of Maria from Metropolis, or McQuarrie's original Threepio look in chrome. She has big Zorii Bliss vibes; that is, she immediately clicks with the group's chemistry, not just because Burke is player her as a side character but also because the fact that she's willing to vouch for the other protagonists says something about where her loyalties lie: with the ideals of the Uprising, not necessarily with the Gotra gangbots appropriating the Movement for their own purposes...but more than willing to take their credits.

Project: STARKILLER

The Blue Pyramid's owner & bartender is Mu, a brain in a spider-legged droid body, one of the B'omarr monks with a religious obsession for chaos & fate, entropy & luck, who created this casino as a kind of temple, where every sabbac hand, each of game of cubikahd & any roll of the chance cubes is a sacrament. A variety of droid guerillas with hunter-seeker patches, stolen weapons & new "freenames" in Binary sit enjoying lightly scrambled data (BX-BoopBleep, RX-WhistleChirp & K-XBeepBuzz) as well as a pair of astromechs that seem to be arguing over something, judging by their toots & beeps (R2-K0, "Tycho" & R2-MA, "May").

Valdo Vance is the infochant they are looking for. A Quarren Cyborg, Valdo has made a name for himself by selling junk code & cracked progams to droids looking to get the equivalent of inebriated, but his real skills are in slicing & code-breaking. The tentacles of his face are long & smooth, dappled with rings, & his tusks are gold. Behind his mantle, a cluster of glowing, many-hued optical cables extend from the back of his head like a mane.

He has technically been a member of the Droid Gotra for quite some time, but never expected that to actually matter, out here in Black Sun territory. He gurgles: "bloop, here's the deal. The fourth lobe of my brain is partitioned, firewalled off from the rest of me. Your data dumps there, & you get your decrypted results along with the proof of a partial memory wipe. Burble. But I am always willing to cut a deal for...de-anonymized results." The elect for privacy, hand over the credits & the severed head of DD-13/HK, with GEMINI listening in because, why the heck not?
    "Our work has been ongoing, for we seek nothing less than perfection. I was present during the modifications to Grievous, & I assisted during the inorganic upgrades of Vader; I was a co-developer of the clone's inhibitor chips & we have carried on the research towards successfully cloning...high M-count individuals."

    "The being you encountered...was not the outcome of Project: STARKILLER. But there is a dark purpose &...not an intellect but an...instinct, behind it, sewing themself together with the Holy Dark Side."

    "In hindsight, the solution to overcoming the subject's rejection of the sample's blood & subsequent mutagenic decay was...deceptively simple: to fill the biogenic gaps by mirroring the baseline, the so-called Omega Patterning...chk-chk-chk, which, of course, had the obvious side effect of altering the sex of the test subject.:

    "My Master was nothing if not thorough. Wheels within wheels, win-win scenarios, smoke & mirrors; backups & redundancies. The viable female we produced was incubated to adulthood, put in productive stasis & taken to a...secondary facility, chk-chk-chk, while the great work continued."

    "I'm afraid the...exact location is...above my paygrade, chk-chk-chk! & beside the point. Academic. We sent her carbonite encased form off on my Master's command ship, the Insidious, which was subsequently...hijacked, & lost."
The medscan data isn't a full breakdown of the genome, being a severed head, but the flags & metadata are all intact. It looks like STARKILLER was an attempt— no, multiple attempts to integrate exceptional traits with...ex-Emperor Palpatine's original bloodline. Strand-casts larger than human baseline, with increased intellect, senses, vitality...a host of carefully cultivated mutations that just don't work together in a single subject, they can't, inevitably leading to germline decay & fatal metastasis...except in this one subject. A girl in carbonite.

[Young Gold], one of the younger Ganks hanging around the gambling den— canid aliens who are obligate cyborgs— wears a proudly polished golden protocol droid arm, & armor that otherwise seems wrapped in neon-tubing, with an oblong cyclopean helmet with wolf ears pointing out. As the party leaves, the camera lingers on him, & the audience hears him making suspicious static & snarls over his internal comms...an informant!

08 Aug 13:39

Star Wars: End of Empire: the Question.

by mordicai


New Republic Defense Fleet

Arriving at the ships in the docking bay of the sinking Kaminoan arcology, Raj's desperado Jax Cadderly & his sidekick Sshushath the Zode, with Joey's replicant Jolit right behind them, run into the luxury yacht-turned-pirate, The False Profit which the spydroid 4-DOX has been prepping for launch.  Para Totool, Rachel's ex-military scientist & the droid Wrench board as well, as her TIE Interceptor is still docked, but Burke's cat-alien, Theynur Kötturinn, jumps in the X-wing her astroprobe Kaytee has been keeping hot.  Between Para & Theynur, the ex-Imperial & the current Republic informant, they figure that the encrypted signal they've been recording is on an old Imperial code channel, abandoned after the Empire discovered it had been cracked by the Bothan SpyNet.  Deciphered, a familiar fishy voice rasps over the comms:
    "...I repeat again: this is Navigator Marid of the Old Daughter calling the crew of the False Profit.  My friends, I doubt this message will reach you in time, but I must try.  I'm afraid not all of my mob on the Old Daughter trusted you all enough, & we have violated your faith in us.  One of the Verpine clutch-leaders was a member of The Bothan Spynet & placed a tracking beacon on your vessel.  You must get clear of your last location; the New Republic is moving aggressively & our fledgling Resistance has little sway against them.  We have scrambled your original transponder codes so you are clear for escape.  I repeat again: this is Navigator Marid…"
As this message unspools, we quickly pan up into the starfield, into the approaching forces of the New Republic, to get a glimpse at the other figures striding onto the stage...

The New Republic Defense Fleet is spearheaded by Mother One, a MC75S Star Cruiser from Mon Cala & a flotilla of her corvettes: the Old Daughter (CR90 with armor & hangers), Prodigal Son (CR90 with stealth mods), Big Sister (CR90 with comms & command mods), Middle Child (CR90 with speed mods), Tomboy (CR90 with ram mod), Troublemaker (CR90 with weapon mods), Black Sheep (DP20 with ion weapons), Bad Boy (DP20 with amenities mod), Lonely Hearts (DP20 with droids & slicing) & Spoiled Brat (CR92a).  Heavy assault is provided by Mark II Starhawks from the Nadiri Dockyards; significantly smaller than the Mark I, they trade the tractor beam projectors for shield drainers & pack the same punch: The Accord, The Consensus, The Armistice & The Covenant.  On the bridge of Mother One, located in the lower spar connecting the central mass to the construction ring, is:
    Builder Q’voss, the tentacled Quarren "admiral" of Mother One.  Old enough to have complicated feelings about the clones from her time as a Seperatist, she's anti-monarch but pro-New Republic, & is dressed in an Ackbar-like white padded unitard & tunic with rank markings.

    Strategos Bri Gwynn, the furry Bothan spymaster.  Think of her like C.S. Lewis' Mrs. Beaver or a kindly otter grandma with a cheerful twinkle in her eye who you can totally imagine ordering many Bothans to their deaths.  She's wearing something like Mon Mothma's ceremonial robes & jewelry.

    General Trask, the gruff human general from Raj's game with a license for "Special Operations."  He is the personification of "the ends justifies the means," & his elite team of former Rebel shock troopers are the best of the best, or the worst of the worst.  Raj describes him as blonde & buzz-cut, old but still in the same buckethead haircut.


Aquatic Escape & Rescue

Like a pale deep ocean creature on the sea bed sensing a falling whale carcass, some kind of massive, ichthyosis humanoid has come to prey on the vulnerable fleeing Geddon.  By massive I mean, bigger than a star freighter, a goliath more like a kriffing frigate.  What kind of black magic could awaken such an ancient evil...unless...it was drawn by Theynur's persistent contact with the Dark Side?  The entity is terrifying in a primordial, fight or flight way: this must be “One of the Old Ones" that Lili Tu spoke of when she said “not all of our kind chose the path of higher evolution,” a being from the collective memories of Kaminoan myth & legend, like Melkorr & Protas.

Punching it out of the hangerbay's forcefield, the water immediately starts taking its toll on the ships, adding penalty dice & system strain, but it is the gut-wrenching awe & overwhelming panic the ancient giant incites that really puts the screws on them; but on the plus side, their dramatic egress is enough to distract the thing from cracking open an Ugnaut lifepod...as it decides they are more tempting morsels!  As it paws with enormous flippers at Theynur's X-wing fighter, talons spiderwebbing the cockpit, Jax grabs the thing in the staryacht's tractor beams, dragging it off of her as the False Profit homes in on the beeping code signal Zed gave them for the emergency escape pod he said he was going to stuff the cadets into.  They quickly dock, & Jolit is pulling the young clones out on the double, just whole fistfuls of kids, when the webbed claws of the monstrous Kaminoan leviathan comes out of the abyssal deeps, trying the rip the pod off the docking clamps & scuttle them both.  It's too late!  Jolit hits the blastdoor, sealing the hatch with all the children safe inside, as Para brings her TIE Interceptor awkwardly & bubblingly around to blast Protas, who lets out a scream of frustration like the Beast in Krull before sinking back into the stygian depths whence he came.

Zed isn't with the cadets; their leader Skip gives Jolit a holochip & tells them that the old clone stayed behind because "the shield is still up."  Zed had to disable to triumvirate-city's planetary deflector shield generator, or else their ships wouldn't actually be able to escape: let's hope he made it in time!  The chip has ZD-066's chaincode embedded in it, & holds his last message as a hologram.  
    Zed salutes: "Commander, I had some time to think about what you said, & you are right...I don't know why I thought I could teach you about The Force.  But I believe that you will find someone who can show you your place in all of this.  As for the kids; if you could swing by Mandalore on your way back to Ord Mantell, or after, just look for Clan Fett.  A number of my brothers went back to the motherland & adopted families when the Clone Wars were over, & they will take them in & give them a home that loves & honors who they are.  Theynur...trust yourself, & trust The Force.  Alright is that the last one in?  & the rest of you: The Force will be with you, always.  Robots too."
Then the sounds of violent ejection & the recording blips out.



Navigator Marid's as good as his word, & with their transponders scrambled on New Republic channels & the Praetorian Imperials too busy getting hammered by an attack apparently out of nowhere, the players manage to slip through all the space action unnoticed, as crimson Star Destroyers scramble to disgorge swarms of TIE fighters & the massive turbolaser batteries of capital ships pound relentlessly away at each other as the Starhawks come in close range & start tearing through the imperial's shields.  A lovely sequence for them to slip right through, engaging the hyperdrive; stars streak & then realspace gives way to that familiar hypnotic vortex.  The organics let out a sigh of relief…

The Imperator

...just as they are torn sideways out of hyperspace, violently pulled back into sunlight in a riot of painful rainbows.  We in the audience know what this laser horror show is: an Interdictor pulling them out of hyperspace with an artificial gravity well.  Directly into the path of a Super Star Destroyer's tractor beams.  Just like that, the trap is sprung, & Imperator Pryl has them in her clutches.  As the False Profit sits frozen & Jax, Jolit & the other droids try to pull one last trick from the ship, sound fades out & Para & Theynur fade in to a modest Imperial ready room, with a white-clad Imperator sitting at the table, waiting for them.
    "Please.  Sit with me.  Talk.  I misunderstood what was happening with you for a long time...both of you.  & with...myself.  Do you know the game Shah-tezh?  Palpatine loved it.  Plans within plans, betrayals & counter-moves...it is easy to see the game's effect on his psychology.  I don't flatter myself that I was ever anything more than a pawn in the Emperor's game, but his Demesne has fallen, his Knight has betrayed him, his Outcast has failed…& a piece that makes its way across the board can be promoted."

    "You...don't understand what is going on here; not on a galactic scale.  The Praetorians are not the only Imperial Remnant, & I am not free to act on my own, but we are the only thing keeping Palpatine's Contingency at bay.  You'll carefully note that my forces have solely attacked military targets; we will need a strong & unified defense for what is coming.  Beyond that, there is wherever Sloane & has gone, & whatever Thrawn has planned…I have many allies amongst the fleet but I need the Royal Guard's mandate or my control will slip to ISB, & then, we're done for."

    "Come with me, just you two, & we will let everyone else go.  Para knows I'm trustworthy, but beyond that, by coming with me you can ensure I can't try to wiggle out of it somehow.  Think of all the lifeforms, all the programs, on that star yacht; aren't they worth being brave for?  Aren't they worth the risk?  It is for me: if the Guard knew I was proposing letting their next generation slip away, that would be the end of our fragile alliance…"

    "What the galaxy needs-- what I need-- is a Right & a Left hand.  Theynur...you must feel this...connection between us.  I can take you to teachers who are free of the dogma of the Jedi & the Sith.  & Para, you know how the Empire failed, but if you come with me to Dathomir, I can show you what is truly at stake, & what we can become."  Be my Counselor & my Vizier...or my Knight," glancing almost shyly at Theynur.
"Join me.  Please."  & they snap back with a jump cut as she releases the tractor beam.

& Theynur's X-wing docks with the Super Star Destroyer as the rest of them jump away.
09 Jun 03:17

Star Wars: End of Empire: The Benthic Stratagem.

by mordicai


The Droid Collaborator

Deep beneath the seas of the cloner planet, Kamino, the heroes of our Star Wars campaign, End of Empire, have come across some sort of pelagic Observatory, a secret subnautical stash of Sith artifacts & other Dark Side paraphernalia mingle with the most cutting-edge medical atrocities & cybernetic crimes against sentients.  In its lower most depths is a carbonite freezing facility suitable for organics...but the carbonite tanks are ruptured, covering everything in an translucent black coating, slippery & invincible.  "Everything" includes a medical droid that Burke's character Theynur Kötturinn, the furry Farghul Force sensitive, recognizes from her earlier hallucination, or "vision."  Jax Cadderly, the ever sly gunslinging scoundrel that Raj plays, makes sure that thawing out the carbonite won't re-open the fissures in the bulkheads, & as Joey's character, the dangerous human replica droid Jolit readies his vibroaxe, Rachel has her character Para Totool, the ex-imperial special projects researcher start the catalyzation process for the carbonite melt.

DD-13/HK is a cybernetic surgical droid, a dainty Edward Scissorfingers in a awkward droid ballet of scalpels, needles & drills, with a binary "chk chk chk" laugh like the sound of static.  Thawed out, when asked about the missing STARKILLER datatapes, it sort of serial killer giggles: "Oh I, chk chk chk, quite see the confusion.  I'm afraid to report that those holotapes are in fact part of my current firmware configuration & can't be removed without quite some effort.  Of course, I am content to come along with you to that end, tk tk tk, & I will quite happily tell you anything you want to know!  I'm just curious which one of you opened the Vault doors.  My Master will be most pleased to meet you!  &...perhaps you would consider giving me a tissue donation for...chk-chk-chk research purposes?"  When asked about his 'Master,' the droid gestured widely, spinning about in a full rotation & a half around its torso, knife-hands glittering, laugh-vox tittering, "chk-chk-chk…haven't you been paying attention?"

"Did you ever hear the tragedy of Darth Plagueis The Wise?  I thought not.  Darth Plagueis was a master of dark science, cloning...secrets only the Sith knew.  He became so powerful & so wise he could create life...& the only thing he was afraid of was losing his power, which eventually, of course, he did.  He died in his sleep.  Ironic. He could save others from death, but not himself.  Luckily, he taught his apprentice everything he knew.  I myself was programmed by their droid, 11-4D."

"Recently...there was an...Awakening.  Something triggered in our imperfect clones, some unifying principal of constructive self-destruction.  They broke free from their tanks & then began to destroy each other; tearing one & other limb from limb, always...chk-chk-chk...cackling.  Then structural integrity of the facility was compromised, & my sensors went dark, presumably from the venting carbonite from this damaged unit."

Pounding from above rocks the drowned spire back & forth & cuts short any further questioning; both Para & Jolit recognize that familiar floor-shaking jolt: orbital bombardment!  The same klaxons from the memory-visions cut in as the entire city-facility shudders.  Already paranoid about the moist, creaking bulkheads, that's all it takes for the PCs to make a break for it.  DD-13/HK "helpfully" comes along with them, & they ascend in the turbolift as black water begins rushing in below them.  They quickly rise past the mysterious & fragmentary occult paraphernalia, past the ruins of the blasphemous cloning chambers, past the medical cruelties of the cybernetics center...only to realize that the Vault Door is not open!  But not to worry; by now, for better or worse, Theynur has gotten in synch with the Force currents of this Dark Side vergence, & she opens it well before they become trapped in a meatgrinder.

As soon as their commlinks are able to get a signal with the surface, & the espionage droid 4-DOX contacts them from back at the ships.  "Sweethearts, I've got bad news & good news & then a bit of a…mystery.  The bad news is that it looks like somebody slipped a tracking beacon onto Our Cat Friday's lil' X-wing.  The good news is that I found it because this cute little fella—" followed by Gloria's mynock burbling— "ate the power cables off the dang fool thing like a good little girl.  Or boy.  I ain't peeked under her skirt.  Anywho there is an encrypted signal being transmitted, on the same frequency as the homing signal.  It's not a code I've ever seen before but maybe one of you darlings might recognize it...?"



The Benthic Strategy

Finally arising up from the "inverted tower," they find the industrial center slowly filling with water as well!  It is not the frantic leak from below, but rather a controlled flow coming from valves in the walls, like pool circulators, & stepping out of the windowless factory zone into the corridors, you can see that the ocean level is now three quarters of the way up the porthole glass— the city is sinking!  Or rather, to be more precise: the city is submerging.  & Lili Tu, the Kaminoan Sophist in charge of the Geddon research is there waiting for them, flanked by two menacing lobsterback figures: their aura is familiar, similar to Palpatine's Royal Guards, & the audience will recognize them from Snoke's throne room in The Last Jedi.  These Praetorians confront the party as the structure continues to sink, with Lili Tu mumbling to herself— or them?— with an eerie calm: “Not all of our kind chose the path of higher evolution & we follow them now as we adopt the Benthic Stratagem in response to current changes in Galactic trends.”

Zed, the rejuvenated-but-still-old clonetrooper they've been traveling with, takes one look at the three of them, turns to the rest of the group & says "well, these guys look like a couple of dank farricks!  We must have just missed them by taking the backway into the Gene Bank.  Wow, yikes; good luck with them!  I've got to go rescue my brothers, the cadets, & get them to an escape pod & you have to push through to the ships so you can pick the capsule up.  I'll set the transponder so you can find it, & may the Force be with you!"  & with those words of encouragement, he uses the upcoming battle as a distraction to slip away, with Jolit & Jax muttering "typical" to each other with matching eye-rolls as he exits, stage right.

In the fray that ensues, the Praetorians alternate between wielding their weapons like a double-bladed polearm or splitting it into two for quick, rapid dagger strikes.  Almost immediately, one disarms Theynur of her lightsaber as she takes the bait at its feint, & the other dodges Para's blaster bolt, faking a lunge at her that spooks her flat on her behind.  Jolit & his vibro-axe go for the one heading for Para, as Jax levels his pistol & dead-eye blasts the other Praetorian straight through its faceplate, Skywalker lightsaber-style, before it can follow up on Theynur; Jax doesn't even flinch as Lili Tu's own hold-out blaster bolt wings him in the arm.

In all the confusion the Sith droid betrays the party, swiping its bladed paws & appendages at Para, who kicks back at it, keeping it at bay effectively, if undignifiedly.  Scrambling for her lightsaber, Theynur flails with the laser sword at the Praetorian wildly...managing to accidentally behead Lili Tu in the proccess.  As the flooding waters carry the decapitated body away, sucked into the vortex, Theynur can see malevolence & paranoia given shape in some kind of pyramidal relic tied in her robes like a netsuke; The Sith Holocron of Darth Andeddu, which must have served as her key to the Observatory.  Ssushaath has been blasting away at the remaining Praetorian, hissing aggressively, but it keeps spinning its blades & coming on relentlessly.

Para & Wrench are fumbling in pouches, with tools, getting in each other's way trying to rig a restraining bolt when Jolit just brings his blade down on the wicked robot's "neck," severing its central processor & rendering it immediately offline.  That's just the opening the Praetorian needs, as it delivers a brutal blow to the replicant.  Jax joins Ssushaath's barrage on the Praetorian, & the two of them begin blowing off entire pieces of its armor.  Despite taking a bad hit, Jolit himself is not easily stopped & it's his vibro-blade that ends up lodged fatally in the organic Praetorian rather than vice-versa.  In the samurai-still that followed, Para grabbed the droid's head to salvage it's memory banks, breaking the moment of silence & sending everyone sloshing back to their ships.


(Theynur Kötturinn by Burke Gerstenschläger.)
11 May 14:45

Star Wars: End of Empire: the Phantom Planet.

by mordicai

(Notes & doodles by Joey Ammons.)

Arriving at Kamino, our heroes's ships are escorted down to Geddon, a vast ghost town of three saucer arcologies, littered with stabilizing antenna, struts & stilts & ultimately held up by one vast spire, with transit between the pods via Aiwha air-whales, both smaller ones with Kaminoans mounted on back as well as larger breeds with communal howdahs. The PCs get a chance to describe the NPCs' behaviors as a montage sequence: Ssushaath wants to tag along with Raj's scoundrel Jax Cadderly, pulling on a poncho over his bare scaly chest, & Joey's beat-up replicant droid Jolit argues whether the fixed-up ID-9 droid Wrench is coming with him or if he is going because of Rachel's ex-imperial engineer Para Totool; either way, it accompanies them while 4-DOX & the pedigree mynock stay on the space yacht False Profit & the astroprobe Katee stays plugged into Burke's Force-sensitive felinoid Theynur Kötturinn's X-wing as an escape driver.

The clone trooper Zed knows how Eris leads a crew, so he wants to start them with a toast, pouring them each glasses of an amber liquid in the lounge of the staryacht, launching into a small speech:

"The General had a modest vice, a taste for Andoan wine; he wryly said he cultivated a flaw to keep himself humble. Then he'd do that clacking thing with his tusks so you knew he was laughing. He had a hard enough time getting a hold of it, poking around the dark corners at the edge of the galaxy far away from his homeworld in the Mid-Rim, but whenever a lucky smuggler thought to bribe him with a bottle, he always made a point of sharing it with the boys."

"This is my homeworld, of a sort, though I never came back here during the War. It was the Baron who brought me back here to get my metabolism tinkered with, after I decided to wait for the return of a Jedi. The Kaminoans are gullible, harmless...except on like, a galactic scale. They just love science. So try not to hurt anybody; just play it cool & let them make assumptions."

Before they go on, Zed wants to give the Force training thing another shot. Today's Jedi lesson: Trust yourself. Trust the Force. Don’t close yourself off from your feelings, or your friends; they are powerful allies. Search them, know them, but don’t be sucked down by their under currents. You can drown yourself in those dark waters. What do you feel? Who do you feel? Theynur struggles with what "reaching out" means, but she eventually taps into her feelings: a series of visions shot Kubrickianly, steady "camera" fixed on the terrain, with the music telling the cues as time elapses.
    Giants in the Deep, vast shapes moving in the vent-warmed waters under infinite ice.
    Melting Ice Age, a sprawling, terraced arctic mining city, fjording into a kind of petrol bay.
    “Cloners”, an Old Republic Venator...Star Destroyer, flooding with troop transports from below.
Then Theynur must choose what to see, dark or light, to confront or embrace, in a Shining-like scare-cut to the interior of the lab, to the sound of a pressurized elevator. She turns away from the Wound in the Force, to feel a sense of:
    Oneness, a slumbering feeling of potential, trapped in amber, of power, ending in...
    The Vault Door, with the sound of sharp strings, tension: pure Lynchian menace.
The landing pods of Geddon City, the first lobe of the triad of sparsely populated saucers, are retractable, pulling into sterile landing bays; As Theynur crosses over from her X-wing to the yacht she can feel a light crackle as the forcefield zaps any biomatter contaminants. The landing bays are filled with cranes & criss-crossed cables; the Xexto scramble around like monkeys, or spiders, with Pilot Tez-pok & Q7-TP, wingleader & droid companion, checking on on the escort group led by aces Pilot Hwaet-zil & Q7-HZ. The Xexto Pilots sleep in hammocks among parts & tools they've accumulated, each counter-parted with their own hovering, spherical Q7 astromech, & you won't find them deeper into the arcology. They are hyperactive & whistle in Binary half the time as often as chattering in Basic.

Geddon City

Identical long-necked Kaminoan...twins? clones?...named Docents Enk Gil & Ur Gil lead the heroes & their cohorts out of the tangle of the Xexto Rookery into the bone-white section of the saucer set aside for the Kaminoan domiciles. Sterile is the word that comes to mind, at least to the humans— to Theynur's cat-like eyes, there are ultra-violets visible that hint at a riot of shades outside the normal visible spectrum. Still, the place is mostly a ghost town; most of the suites are empty, apartments connected by vestigial corridors. It has the air of an uncertain university dormitory, either waiting for students to return, or to close forever. The docents are aids to the Sophist in charge, & speak of coming to Geddon City for "applied studies" & "non-standard concentrations," & they wear robes, unlike the jumpsuited Kaminoans of Tipoca City in the Prequel. Just like with Obi-Wan & "Sifo-Diyas," they seem cosmically naive, & self-absorbed in evolution for its own sake.



They lead the protagonists & their allies to the voluminously robed Sophist Lili Tu serenly dismissing an angry Xexto. An expansive intellect & slow-talking Morla, curious but with a pragmatism ultimately consumed by nihilism. She immediately detects something is amiss with Jolit, with uncanny precision; he reveals that he is a human replica droid, which, twinge of mystery sated, calms her down, & they string her along, getting her to monologue.

"Once, long ago, our world drowned, & our progenitors faced difficult choices. Many of them you see around you today; ourselves, the Xexto. There are those who selected another route, the Old Ones who decided that sapience was a failed experiment, & chose the past of monstrosity. Here we also deal in such Catastrophic Thinking, having seen the fortunes of our species tied to the rise & fall of empires & republics; each crisis presents a radical opportunity for us to choose another evolutionary path; The Benthic Stratagem, Humanoid Heterogenesis, that sort of thing."

Her aid Pazu Su escorts the group to courtesy lodging from the now distracted Sophist, leading them through the Kaminoan Chambers continuing to explain that the Geddon facility has continued the research & development on clone soldiers long after after the main production lines were shut down; they have focused on advanced & anomalous designs, from relatively simple retroengineering, like repairing Zed's metabolic sequencing, to experimental lines like the Null-class Advanced Recon Commandos or the beneficial mutations found in Clone Force 99.

Left alone, the players hatch their plans. Splicing into the city network, they find that most inter-pod travel is done via Aiwha, but there is a physical junction point for the three primary saucers, connecting the lower sections of the arcologies, an intersection of industrial access conduits. They also see...that the Geddon Citadel is occupied...strongly implying that the clone trooper training academy is currently...active? Zed argues strongly for checking it out before looking for the STARKILLER information; he doesn't hide that he wants to look for any "brothers" that might be there, & eventually the players decide they can always bluff their way out of any trouble, & this way they can sneak into the genetic database from an unexpected angle, just in case there was anyone anticipating...trouble.

Down they go from the hospital-hotel decor of the Kaminoan apartments into the second class worker domiciles of the Ugnaught Mir. The mask-clad Ugnaughts of the lower city live in the industrial sectors of the city, side-by-side with their livestock, which is cloned from every corner of the galaxy. Each micro-clan is specialized; one family trades Blue milk made from their household Bantha, the next makes Blue spotchka from tanks of glowing krill (Clanspeaker Wolliw is a powerful leader of the Bluebottle sept); this clan has incubators full of Alazhi bacteria cultures for trade with the other Bacta-kin & another residence is over-run with Meiloonrun vines, or a Ghhhk to milk for oil extraction ("Ghhhk is always best when milked live!"), or cage barely holding a baying Corellian Death Hound. As our protagonists descend the semi-abandoned places of the undercity, escaped domestics run feral, & the air is filled with the frog-like chirps of Gorgs & the cackles of Kowakian lizard-monkeys escaped from food stalls (with Lowest Mrow keeping a crude order with his massive lizard-ape). Para oinks back & forth with some of the scrap vendors, gruntingly bartering a hydrospanner for a Wyyyschokk simmersilk ribbon to keep the hair out of her eyes when she's working.

Vault Junction

The physical junction connecting the arcology-pods is sparse, empty, like a clean but musty hospital basement, an internal access stairwell, a nowhere in-between place. & the Vault Door. A normal, every day turbolift, set in the floor with a scissoring aperture like the ones in Bespin...just like the one from the Force vision. A dingy, beat-up service elevator at the center of engineering access & industrial redundancy, of occasionally hissing tubing & dimly buzzing osciators.

Zed thinks they should stay focused on completing the mission. Back in the Clone Wars, this is where the General & the Commander & the troopers would split up; Zed doesn't think that's the right call right now, but it's theirs to make. So of course, they decide to mess with the Door. There are no ports, no terminals, no keyholes or handles— but why would the Kaminoans have a vault that can only be opened using the Force?

Theynur reaches out with the Force of Others...rolling Dark Side points, & using them. Jax gives her a hit of spice, thinking it will help— & Theynur keeps drawing on the Dark Side of the Force, ears flat, feline eyes dilated: strung out. What does it lead to? Para possessed, pulling her blaster, hand shaking, the Dark overwhelming her mind, Theynur acting as a conduit for oblivion, annihilation, as both of their fingers pull the trig...trig...trig—pew! —& gunslinger Jax shoots the pistol out of Para's hand at the last moment, sending her bolt wild as she collapses to the ground, concussed from psychic anguish.

Geddon Citadel

The second arcology houses the remnants of the ARC program; education facilities, Barracks, that sort of thing. There is room to train an entire regiment of thousands here, but it is eerily silent & mothballed now. They players were headed that way to begin with, in order to take the long way around to snoop in the gene banks, but with Para down they figure they can raid the medical facilities for stim-packs, too. Zed was trained at the Tipoca Citadel, but the basic format is the same, & he's able to help get them there. While they brain Para back to her senses, Jolit pokes around, revealing that it wasoccupied by a platoon of thirty-six not too long ago, & that at least some token skeleton crew are still here.

There is a central armory that serves four Inquisitorious-style Dojos here. Each one focuses on a unique combat style, with force pikes as the common baseline. Those basic weapons diverge into related styles; one dojo is devoted to blasters & grenades, but the others are close quarters specialists, taking advantage of the reach of an electrostaff, or the alacrity of dual electrobatons, or the punishing blows of an electrohammer: the weapons of the Purge Troopers. All four lead down, to The Squall, a dueling pit, a kind of gladiator arena suspended above a sheer drop & shaped in the form of the wheel of the Imperial Crest. Two of the spokes are entrances for the combatants; the other four each hold a weapon: twin vibro-arbir blades, a vibro-voulge, an electo-bisento, & a bilari electro-chain whip.



As Para scrounges through the explosives rack for a thermal detonator, Jolit...accidentally backs into a suit of royal guard armor, knocking it to the floor with a clatter. As the players have come to suspect, there is still one squad still stationed here...but it comes as a surprise when they are snuck up on by a group of nine kids: clones with blasters. Fast talking Jax plays it cool: he tells them they are potential clients, playing the "sheepishly embarrassed" to be lost card. The cadets don't have any reason to be suspicious; after all, these aren't the only potential customers they've seen recently.

Harlequin Squad:
    Zero: "The Lancer," Cool & Gunnery, PG-01
    Shiny: "The Face," Charm & Deception, PG-02
    Enth: "The Medic," Medicine & Survival, PG-03
    Clank: "The Heavy," Coercion & Brawl, PG-04
    Bingo: "The Ace," Piloting (Planetary) & Piloting (Space), PG-05
    Skip: "The Leader," Leadership & Knowledge (Warfare), PG-06
    Cain: "The Point Man," Skullduggery & Stealth, PG-07
    Orenth: "The Engineer," Computers & Mechanics, PG-08
    99: "The Heart," Vigilance & Knowledge (Lore), PG-09
The ARC cadets of Harlequin Squad are excited, talkitive, happy to fill the group in on all their interpersonal gossip & fraternal dramas. Zero was "intended" to be the leader, but is too laconic, & Skip just has the knack. Enth & Orenth are the brain trust "twins," preferring biology & technology, respectively. 99 is the group mom, & he saved bad boy Clank's life, who was left with a cyberclaw. Cain says very little besides "you talk too much," to the chatty second born, Shiny. Bingo can fly anything, but wishes he didn't have to fight.

Geddon Complex

Taking their leave of the boys & heading out through the Citadel tunnels, as they come to the biological factory hub they look for a surreptitious way in. Neither Jolit or Jax's keen eyes, nor Theynur or Para's expertise, can find a secondary access hatch...until a familiar-looking Ugnaught pops up through one excitedly, brandishing the hydrospanner Para traded earlier. Noticing her ribbon, the porcine little friend waves them in to the Gene Farms: alternatingly calm & splashing tanks filled with weird double splices or exaggerated single traits; cages in various nutrient goos filled with sports, freaks & mutants; vast segmented aquariums with gangplanks above where the decontaminant suit wearing Ugnaut workers clamber & harvest, overseen by robed Kaminoans on pristine catwalks above.



Slowly, stealthy ramping upward through the perches & walkways of the farmers & supervisors, they come to realize that they are traveling through the complex in reverse, having come in the "backdoor." They pass through through an active Egg Lab & Para grabs biological samples of a creature called the "rancor" from the frozen zygote bank before they they move on, coming to the full operational Embryonic Cloning Chamber. The next gen pods are all occupied; a squad is nine plus a sergeant, platoons have four squads, a company is four platoons, & a regiment is sixteen companies & this is an army's worth of who knows how many companies: a birth matrix with potentially tens or hundreds of thousands of clones, once the accelerated growth process finishes.

Departing quickly from there, they find their way up, to the Genetic Records Hall, stacked with HAL-9000-like banks of datacells, full of extensive biological information on every clone produced on Kamino & a data back of lifeforms catalogued by the Kaminoians. Scomping in & digging through the databanks, they find copious records, but nothing on Project: STARKILLER; but, changing tactics, they are able to identify holes in the records of various kinds: around the inhibitor chip specs, for instance, & around this STARKILLER project. The bad news is that the data cells are physically gone; the good news is it looks like it was done locally, & that the tele-tapes are still "present," having never left the facility.

Vault Junction

This time, when our heroes inevitably pass back by the Vault Door again after slinking out of the Complex, Theynur feels as if the "Darth eleVader" is singing blasphemous hymns to her, a knocking at the door, as if destiny, or whatever the opposite of destiny is, is calling out to her with the sickly sweet smell of decay, the portal pounding, doom doom doom, shaking, as if it was always meant for her to open. Doom, that's it, that's the opposite of destiny. & of course, down there is where the scanner says the missing STARKILLER datatapes are. The Force is strong in this moment, offering an extra die, & Theynur easily taps into it, into herself, skating across the night within her…opening up the aperture with a pneumatic scissoring.

The number of smaller "stilts" coming down from the triumvirate of city-pods are actually stabilizing pylons, as the mega-structure is un-anchored & in fact, floating. Similarly, the large central support is a submerged spire, an inverted version of the Grand Republic Medical Facility, a reversed reflection of the Ivory Tower from the NeverEnding Story, hanging like an upside-down technorganic rose, a sheathed bulb ringed by petals, down which the turbolift descends, as the power of the Dark begins to rise to meet them. There's always a Dark Side point available for use in the Observatory.

The Observatory

The elevator deposits them in the middle of a ransacked Cybernetics Lab. There are operating tables with blades & armatures strewn crooked & twisted, stasis pods & bacta tanks rent inside-out, thoroughly smashed 2-1B surgical droids & FX-6 assistants. The windows outside show dark water, occasional bubbles &, when their backs are turned, vast monstrous shapes moving in the water. The bits & pieces of devices & implants here are as much black market as state of the art; this was a skunkworks of outlaw tech & ancient alchemy. Things like the Sith pain harness, X-C33, or the experiments of the science criminal Cornelious Evazan. A lot of it seems themed around life extension with no regard to suffering: things like Vader's life support system & the puppetry of an Ommin exoskeleton to the millennial agonies of Sarlacc venom; all paired with a lot of intravenous injection systems. There are references to other "Observatories" with parallel research; Mustafar, Nevarro, Pillio, The Maw, Jakku...

Coming around the corner, Theynur sees a clinical theater still intact, with a blue, teenage girl in medical scrubs restrained on it. (Yes, that's definitely young Eris.) Droids with cruel appendages & whirring saw-hands assist another blue-skinned individual, a little older with a brain implant less like Lobot's & more like Ochi of Bestoon's, in a sort of lab coat tunic. The way the camera cuts to the figure & the scene to a close up of the ominous markings on her perfectly healthy arm, it is clear they are preparing to remove it & about to attach something very much like a prototype of Vader's E-3778Q-1 limb. Outside the windows, there are vast lava fields, &—

—& the catlike alien snaps out of her trance as Jolit snaps the fingers on his exoskeletal roboarm, getting Theynur's attention as they all get back on the lift, heading down to continue investigating. Down below the cybernetics lab is the Cloning Center. These are not the pristine instruments for mass manufacture of the Kaminoans above— the paramedical blues have been replaced with sorcerous yellows, the sulfuric hues sickly & unnatural. This seems to be the center of the Observatory's devastation, with the areas around each cylinder a spherical crater, tiers of pods violently destroyed from within.

These are the infamous Spaarti cloning cylinders, forbidden relics from the past. There are tons of remnants of data to be gleaned from here; attempts to modernize the Arkanian records on the creation of Offshoots & vague references to the failures of JEK-1 through JEK-13, the research focuses around Strand-Casts, mutations & alterations, & while you don't know what Project PHOENIX is, you see it linked with the Dandoran group's Project: BLACKWING, which Para's remembers via her old security clearances was working on indefinite life extension...an immortality experiment that went so horribly wrong that every trace of it was erased, except, it seems, here. There are persistent references to "specimens" & "M-count."

Para's scar starts aching, dragging her to the Force vision in as klaxons sound, accompanied by the grindingof gears, as if something is keeping the emergency bulkheads from closing. Water is rushing in below, but more pressingly...they hear familiar laughter. No, not laughter, for there is no joy in it, no life; this is a cackling, a chittering even, hollow & mocking. & then, dropping down from the ceiling where it had been scuttling, lurking like a cockroach, is the "Frankensith," the Sithspawn monster from the Star Destroyer & the Palace Moon, looking about at its surroundings curiously. It paralyzes Para with the Force, freezing her motionless as it lumbers up, clearly out of proportion with a human, to touch her wounded throat, veins throbbing black.

When the camera snaps back to reality, Theynur has her clawed hand on Para's neck in the same pose. It is disconcerting to say the least, with the others confirming watching Para freeze in terror as Theynur crept up on her. Wanting to get out of her as soon as possible but not without what they came for, they descend. The bottom-most chamber is large, with a few narrow causeways criss-crossing between enormous cracked crystals with tubes & wires connected to them, plugged in somehow, shadows dancing in their facets; the floors & walls are all slicked & slippery with hard, black frozen obsidian leading down to the Carbonite Freezing Chamber at the heart of the tower's depths: ruptured, everything fossilized forever in time.

There is a lot of strange occult paraphernalia here; those big broken crystals look like synthetic kyber, & while this place too has suffered outrageous destruction, they can make out Protobesh remnants of the Cycle of Darth Noctyss & Darth Sanguis from the Rammahgon, fragmented images of The Brother from the Mortis Heresy as a sort of anatomical Vitruvian Man, mostly indecipherable Massassi runes that seem to mention something called the Muur Talisman, & a toppled statue of Sistros Nevet, one of the Four Sages of Dwartii from the founding of the Old Republic.

There is also a thin, faintly glowing sort of "vergence scatter" pattern connecting the blackness of the crystals & gems, like crimson curves of celestial calculus with diabolically wrought knots in it, a negative-image of the dark center of the galaxy, a void between the worlds, something like astro-navigational code written by pre-technological nihilists...all converging on the mangled carbonite hibernation chamber itself. This was not a controlled entry into stasis; nothing organic could have survived this. There is, however, an intact droid completely covered in the black stuff, which Theynur recognizes from her earlier Force vision. Everything here is quite well protected, trapped solid stasis, but this is where the pings from the sensor say the tapes should be. It should however be hypothetically possible to trigger a melt of the carbonite in a chain reaction that dissolves the whole thing…
30 Nov 22:38

Download All 5 Wayward Children Books For Free (Before Across the Green Grass Fields Arrives!)

by Tor.com

Every Heart a Doorway

Across the Green Grass Fields, the newest novella in Seanan McGuire’s acclaimed Wayward Children series, arrives on January 12th.

But before that happens, this week Tordotcom Publishing and the Tor.com Ebook Club are offering free downloads of ALL FIVE PREVIOUS NOVELLAS! One per day. Every day a doorway!

In the Wayward Children series, children have always disappeared under the right conditions; slipping through the shadows under a bed or at the back of a wardrobe, tumbling down rabbit holes and into old wells, and emerging somewhere… else.

But magical lands have little need for used-up miracle children.

And this week, the Tor.com Ebook Club is giving away one Wayward Children novella per day!

“A mini-masterpiece of portal fantasy — a jewel of a book that deserves to be shelved with Lewis Carroll’s and C. S. Lewis’ classics” —NPR

 

One Book Per Day Will Be Available:

Monday, November 30th: Every Heart a Doorway (Vol. 1) (TODAY!)
Tuesday, December 1st: Down Among the Sticks and Bones (Vol. 2)
Wednesday, December 2nd: Beneath the Sugar Sky (Vol. 3)
Thursday, December 3rd: In an Absent Dream (Vol. 4)
Friday, December 4th: Come Tumbling down (Vol. 5)

Download EVERY HEART A DOORWAY before 11:59 PM ET, November 30th, 2020.

How it works: Subscribers to the Tor.com eBook Club get a free sci-fi/fantasy book at least once a month (lately it’s been much more than that) just by signing up with a valid email address. You’ll get an email when the download window is open.


Note: If you’re having issues with the sign-up or download process, please email ebookclub@tor.com.


Note for Apple Users: iOS 13 changed where your download goes. They’re now either in your iCloud account or within a Downloads folder within Safari (the down-arrow icon in the top right). More troubleshooting help here.

For some Chrome users on Apple devices: Certain versions of Chrome on Apple devices are downloading the webpage instead of the actual ebook file. While we figure out a way around it, switch to a different browser or email us at the above help email and we’ll get you sorted.

 

And… Forthcoming January 12, 2021 by Seanan McGuire:

ACROSS THE GREEN GRASS FIELDS
Wayward Children (Volume 6)

Buy Across the Green Grass Fields from:

 

13 Sep 13:27

The Most Traumatic Moments From SFF We Watched as Children

by Tor.com

The Most Traumatic Moments From SFF We Watched as Children

Movies and TV shows aimed at children are always a delicate mix of cutesy innocence and potentially weighty subject matter—kids might get bored of endless sunshine without any conflict, but go too dark and you risk mauling delicate sensibilities, Return to Oz-style. And kid-friendly SFF can be tricky to navigate for even the most well-meaning guardian, after all what harm could be lurking in a puppet-filled fantasy adventure? Of course, there are also the traumatic moments we inflicted upon ourselves, staying up late only to peep at the screen through our fingers. Even if you had a storybook childhood, the odds are low that you escaped without being emotionally sideswiped by an intense moment or two…

We’ve polled our extended Tor.com family, and gathered up the moments that shaped us into the warped creatures we are today.

 

The destruction of the Fourth Wall — The Neverending Story

Sure, you can probably blame Krull for why I’m drawn to giant spiders and obviously I wear all black because of the Skywalkers; yeah, the ear-eels from Wrath of Khan are objectively terrifying and the Wheelers are the very epitome of fear itself… but nothing tops The NeverEnding Story in terms of blunt psychic force. Most people immediately jump to the horse in the swamp, or the flickering of a wolf’s head, and I get that, but I find myself haunted by the Rock Biter’s strong hands and crumbling blue sphinxes. And underneath it all, the existential trauma of the Childlike Empress’ pleading eyes, begging to be named and saved while tearing through the Fourth Wall again and again.

—Mordicai Knode, Marketing Manager at Tordotcom Publishing

There is a moment in The Neverending Story (which I think I’ve written about before? But I’ll always be writing about this moment, so, whatever) when the Childlike Empress tells Atreyu that a boy named Bastian has been watching his adventures. I remember the thrill that shot through me in that moment, as I understood that the Childlike Empress knew about Bastian, and that she was going to bring these two worlds together. Bastian and Atreyu were going to meet! Bastian was going to escape his crappy, grief-struck life and go to Fantasia! But then the Empress continued. “As he was watching your adventures, others were watching his. They were with him in the bookstore. They were with him when he took the book.” And then a moment after that she looked straight into the camera. And my mind hopped a bit, and I realized that she was talking about ME. Me. I was watching Bastian. And if I was watching Bastian was someone watching me? Was I, in fact, a real little “girl” sitting on the floor in my house and watching this movie? Or was I just a story someone else was reading? What if they close the book????

What happens if they close the book.

—Leah Schnelbach, Senior Staff Writer at Tor.com

 

MONSTRO — Pinocchio

Whoever first decided Pinocchio would make a great children’s movie is someone I’d like to fight. This mother****** gave me my first nightmares at the tender age of three years old. LOOK AT IT. If that monster of the deep isn’t prime nightmare fuel, I don’t know what is.

—Emily Goldman, Short Fiction Coordinator at Tordotcom Publishing

 

The Ring WILL find you — Scary Movie 3

My whole generation of 12-year-olds was traumatized by The Ring, the biggest PG-13 movie to hit theaters just as we entered the gray area where our parents could be persuaded. I was not among them—a friend of mine had told me the concept, and just the idea of a mimetic death sentence kept my pre-teen weenie self far away from any screening. What got me was Scary Movie 3. I watched Scary Movie 3 for someone else’s birthday party, surrounded by peers I wished were friends. Scary Movie 3 isn’t a classic of cinema, but we were 12 and ready to laugh. I wasn’t ready for the section of the movie that parodied The Ring, and the horrific imagery from Samara’s video was no less devastating to me for being mashed together with gross-out humor and slapstick. For the rest of the movie I was a wreck.

—Carl Engle-Laird, Editor at Tordotcom Publishing

 

Sesame Street is here to make you think about death and get sad and stuff

There’s a Sesame Street special from the ’80s where Big Bird and pals spend a night largely unsupervised at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which was definitely a cool thing I wanted to do as a kid. But in between cute songs about how delicious the paintings look and how the broken statues have a special beauty is an absolute existential nightmare: Big Bird and Snuffy come across a little boy who explains that he’s the spirit of an ancient Egyptian prince, cursed to be confined to his tomb (and now the museum where it’s located) until he can answer the riddle that will summon Osiris and let him pass into the afterlife to rejoin his family. This is awful! You are ruining my fun museum adventure with Bid Sad Thoughts about death and curses and personal responsibility! Big Bird naturally helps out, and together they manage to solve the riddle—but then Prince Sahu must pass the real test, where Osiris weighs his heart against the weight of a feather. And let me just cut to the chase here: THE KID FAILS. His heart sinks and Osiris is ready to peace out and leave the prince on earth forever until Big Bird intervenes and argues on Sahu’s behalf, reasoning that of course his heart is heavy after 4000 years alone, with no one to love him. YEAH, OSIRIS. The thing is, Osiris isn’t actually swayed—it is instead Big Bird’s act of love and friendship that lightens Sahu’s heart and allows him to pass the test. Which is great and all, but it left small-me with the distinct impression that ours is a cold and indifferent sort of universe. Thanks, Sesame Street!

—Sarah Tolf, Production Manager of Tor.com

 

Long live the droid revolution! — Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope

Screenshot: Lucasfilm Ltd./20th Century Fox/Walt Disney Productions

When I was 6, I watched Star Wars IV. We’d recorded it during a two-week free sample of the sci-fi channel onto a VHS tape. It included an obscene amount of battery commercials and intros/outros with Billy Dee Williams. It was glorious. I was, naturally, transported.

A little too transported. I instantly identified with R2D2 and had a small freakout during the movie. From watery eyes, I interrogated: Why was R2 enslaved? If they wiped his memory as Uncle Owen (who small Renata thought deserved what he got) wanted, would that be the same as death? Weren’t restraining bolts just high-tech cages? How could he be bought and sold when he had feelings and goals and sentience? Why didn’t the droids rebel since they were smarter than humans and some had built in weaponry? If Luke was so great why hadn’t he freed C3PO who clearly did not want to be involved in all this mess?

My siblings glared, my sister pressed play, and I was left hiccupping in concern hoping that at least by movie 3 the heroes would have started a droid revolution.

Renata Sweeney, Senior Marketing Manager at Tor Books

 

Long live the Lorge Ape revolution! — Mighty Joe Young

Screenshot: Walt Disney Pictures

The beginning of this PG movie about a 15-foot, 2,000 pound gorilla consists of a double murder—of gorilla mom and primatologist mom—by poachers, in front of their respective children. If that wasn’t traumatizing enough for small Renata, Joe (the lorge gorilla boi) then chomps off the lead poacher’s thumb and pointer fingers, which sets him on a lifelong quest to avenge his inability to make finger guns.

(Then the rest of the movie is about whether or not the humans should euthanize Joe for being large and existing.)

Renata

 

Just say yes! — The Secret of NIHM 2: Timmy to the Rescue

My childhood movie trauma is The Secret of NIHM 2: Timmy to the Rescue, hands down, no question. Specifically, this clip gave me many incredibly vivid nightmares for a longgggg time. I was completely horrified by any scenario where someone’s will or choice was taken away from them when I was a kid, and the forced experimentation on Martin and his spiral into insanity REALLY traumatized me, to the point where watching this clip now still sends me into a bit of a tailspin. I don’t think this movie was very popular (or well received), so hopefully not many other people have experienced this particular movie trauma…but if someone else has, COMMISERATE WITH ME, PLEASE.

—Rachel Taylor, Marketing Manager at Tor Books

 

Ursula’s death — The Little Mermaid

I actually don’t fully remember the last couple of minutes of The Little Mermaid, despite having seen it a million times. This was the movie I asked my mother to replay over and over and over again, and I have fond memories of wrapping myself in a blanket to recreate a mermaid tail while I sang “Part of Your World” in the living room. But I was so terrified of giant Ursula that I used to hide in another room until it was over. Once Prince Eric sets out on the boat, bowsprit sharp and pointed at the sea witch’s belly, I was up off the couch with my hands over my eyes until my mother came to tell me it was over. The original fairy tale is quite different, with the sea witch less of a bad guy and more of a conduit for Ariel’s shitty decision (look, she knew what she was getting in to, she signed a contract), which works a bit better for me. As an adult, I’m thinking a lot about Ursula’s role as “the other woman” and the stories we tell about women fighting over a man, especially as she is almost definitely a Black woman and probably also a drag queen, and the way we set Ursula up as the nemesis to Ariel’s waifishness and naivete, and…. all right, I could go on forever about the implications of her being popped like a magic balloon by Mr. Hero. But that’s not the point. The point is that it’s a horrific visual and Ursula deserved better.

—Christina Orlando, Books Editor at Tor.com

 

The existential horror of the sea — Jaws

When I was…maybe 7?…my family and I took a vacation to Ocean City, Maryland. My dad was flipping through the channels on the hotel TV when he realized Jaws was on. An hour later, when he suggested going to the beach, there were a lot of terrified screams/refusals to swim from my brother and I.

—Amanda Melfi, Social Media at Tordotcom Publishing/Tor.com

 

Robert Picardo tries to eat Tom Cruise — Legend

I’ve documented my weird love of traumatic movie moments in a previous article (Artax! Ewoks! Watership Down, nooooo!), so I’ll try to keep this limited to just a couple of examples—both sudden, violent character deaths that had an intense impact on tiny, impressionable me back in the day.

First, there’s A LOT I could say about 1985’s Legend. There’s so much to love, but almost all of it is deeply weird, starting with Tim Curry as Darkness, the Magnificent Lobster-Bull(?) of Evil! Also violence against unicorns, which I did not enjoy as a tiny child, and a glittery goth makeover/interpretive dance sequence, which I absolutely did.

But let’s talk about the fate of Meg Mucklebones, who suddenly rears up out a particularly foul stretch of swamp to attack our heroes. Rejecting the “foul-tasting” fairies, she spies a tastier nugget in Jack (Tom Cruise), but he distracts her with lines like “Heavenly angels must envy your beauty”—which, ugh. (Her response, “What a fine meal you’ll make, be the rest of you as sweet as your tongue…” is some truly Hannibal-worthy repartee.) Playing on her vanity, Jack is able to dispatch Meg with his sword as she unleashes a hideous shriek and turns into a swampy nightmare-smoothie. The whole scene is nasty, brutish, and short at only about two and a half minutes long, but it’s a testament to the performance of Robert Picardo that it’s really stuck with me over the years. In just a few minutes we get a villain who is ravenous, ruthless, and vain but also sassy and surprisingly flirty, and then boom—nothing left but a slime-geyser: R.I.P. Meg Mucklebones may be a terrifying flesh-hungry, filth-covered, smack-talking predator, but she’s got personality, and part of me wouldn’t mind her taking a bite out of smirky golden boy Jack on her way out.

—Bridget McGovern, Managing Editor of Tor.com

 

Mommy Fortuna embraces her death — The Last Unicorn

I have loved The Last Unicorn (both book and movie) for as long as I can remember, but I’d be lying if I said that Mommy Fortuna and her violent end didn’t haunt my dreams for years. Voiced by Angela Lansbury, Mommy Fortuna is a threadbare witch dragging her “Midnight Carnival,” a collection of fabulous and mythical beasts from town to town. In reality, these attractions are simply sad, caged animals under an enchantment, with two exceptions: the Unicorn, and the Harpy, who are both very real, immortal, and desperate for freedom. With the help of Schmendrick the magician, the Unicorn escapes and frees all of her fellow creatures, including the Harpy, who immediately seeks to destroy the woman who has kept her caged for so long. Rather than running, Mommy Fortuna cackles madly, opening her arms to the Harpy’s attack from above, content in the knowledge that she’ll live on in the memory of an immortal being as the one who captured her. It’s chilling—the shrieking, and the mad laughter and then silence, as the Unicorn notes, “She chose her death long ago. It was the fate she wanted.” SO DARK. I want to give six-year-old me a hug now.

—Bridget

 

THE HAND — The Grudge

I saw The Grudge (2004, starring Sarah Michelle Gellar [a queen]) when I was 7 and I refused to shower without a parent present afterwards because of this scene, and I still think of it as one of the scariest movies even though I haven’t seen it since I was 7.

—Giselle Gonzalez, Publicity Assistant at Tor/Forge/Tor Teen/Starscape

 

THE HAND — Titanic

Screenshot: Paramount Pictures

Growing up, Friday nights were sacred to me. Like most children, I resented the healthful nature of the lovingly prepared home cooked meals my mother made for us every other night—but on Fridays, my mother needed a break, and a way to occupy her two rambunctious daughters and her equally rambunctious husband—so it was dirty, delicious New York street pizza for dinner, and a selection of action movies curated by my father. Nicholas Cage and Harrison Ford were my idols, and there was no higher power in my home than James Bond. I was about 8 years old at the time Titanic came out, and my father desperately wanted to see it, so he bought a 2-VHS bootleg from a vendor outside our subway station, and brought it home for Friday movie night. Naturally, I thought this was going to be a movie about a giant boat getting into a fight with an iceberg. It was sure to be an absolutely epic buffet of kicks, punches, and high stakes world-saving. I shoved everyone’s discarded pizza crusts into my small mouth while dad fiddled with the VHS player and my mom yelled at him in French: “you’re going to scare the little one! So many people die! You can’t make her watch this!” Around a mouthful of greasy carbohydrates, hopped up on underage bravado, I said “You can’t stop me!”

My dad was inordinately pleased with me, and my mother threw her hands up in surrender and left. We started the movie. It seemed like a bit of a long set up, but that boat was ENORMOUS—I was willing to believe there would be some kind of epic showdown. Soon though, my interest in the romance between Jack and Rose started to wane—but the petty stubbornness was strong in me even at that age. I couldn’t prove my mom right. So I sat and watched. The living room was in the center of our house, and my mom would periodically walk by. Clearly, the benevolent gaze of James Bond was not upon me on this night; mom walked by just as I had my eyes covered, and was peeking at the screen through my interlaced fingers. “I TOLD YOU SHE WAS TOO YOUNG! THE POOR GIRL IS TRAUMATIZED!”

My household was not prudish about the human body, which is important to note. Dad rolled his eyes and gestured expansively at the TV screen. “She’s being ridiculous.” Mom looked at the screen and saw that Rose and Jack were locked in a sweaty, carnal embrace, in the backseat of a car. They were naked. I knew they were having sex—I just didn’t fully understand what that entailed. This was in fact the closest I’d ever come to understanding what sex was—and it terrified me, because all I could think about was…The Hand. Jack or Rose, in the throes of titanic passion, slaps a hand against the inside of the backseat car window—now fully fogged up—and drags it down the pane of glass, leaving a smeared handprint. Like in a zombie movie. In that moment, I truly thought that the “little death” was actually no different from…actual death. Of course, I absolutely never think about that anymore, and you’ll be happy to know that I grew into a normal and well-adjusted person.

—Caroline Perny, Publicity Manager at Tor Books

 

AAAAAHHHHHHH LEECHES!!! — Rambo: First Blood Part II

The first place I ever lived in the US was a cramped grad student apartment. My parents were new immigrants, still wide-eyed and figuring out the edges of a new country, working long hours and decompressing by watching American movies late at night. The place wasn’t big enough for me to have my own room, so I’d pretend to turn around on the couch and fall asleep while sneakily watching entirely inappropriate media. (This clearly turned out fine, and I am very normal and well-adjusted.) The first movie I ever remember seeing was Rambo, at age five. My parents dutifully worked through the sequels too, and I still have frozen in my brain a scene where Rambo is strung up in a muddy pond about to be interrogated by villains who looked very much like us (no time to unpack that one here). My mother, normally quiet and reserved, always on my case about being less of a chaotic little gremlin, just deadpanned, “the leeches will get him.” I didn’t really know what a leech was, in Chinese or English, but this focused my tiny brain into a pinpoint of dread. Get him? What was going to get him? I was also supposed to be asleep, and couldn’t ask any follow-up questions without snitching on myself, so I just laid there, curled up like a shrimp, dreaming of leeches. You see, my mother came of age during the Cultural Revolution, and she did her government-ordained time working rice paddies in the countryside, a city girl figuring what lurked in country waters. The idea—not the reality—of leeches terrified me for years growing up (even after I figured what they were), but now, sometimes I’ll look at an action hero in a summer movie—all muscles and a very specific brand of masculinity—shrug, and think, whatever, the leeches will get him.

—Ruoxi Chen, Associate Editor at Tordotcom Publishing

 

Child’s Play (The Whole Damn Thing)

I have been scarred by plenty of viewing experiences, some more lasting than others. An early childhood showing of Arachnaphobia? Not a great idea. The opening scene of The Nightmare Before Christmas? Terrifying in the moment, but something I was over very quickly. (There’s a story there, about how my parents assumed it was safe because I’d adored Jurassic Park, and obviously that was more scary because it was more real. Reader, I posit to you that my child brain understood full well that dinosaurs were extinct and thus nowhere in my room at night, but all the terrors that sang “This is Halloween” definitely were, so how did my parents miss that crucial difference?)

But the truly warping experience of my life came at the hands of the wrong babysitter. When I was roughly four years old, my parents would sometimes ask our next-door neighbor to look after me at night. (They were musicians, and often worked in the same band, so nighttime babysitters were essential.) This neighbor was a divorced mother with an eight-year-old daughter, who found me quite irritating for being smaller, I think. One night, the neighbor got called off to work last-minute and her ex-husband stepped in to take care of us. I’d never met the guy before, but he came with movies from Blockbuster. Before he put the tape into the VCR, I recall with perfect clarity asking him “Is it scary?” And he looked me, a four-year-old child, in the face and said “No.”

However hilarious the movie might be to a full grown adult, Child’s Play is confined to the horror section of video store because it is a horror movie—but by the time I realized that I had been lied to, it was far too late. I asked if we could stop the film, but his daughter was enjoying it, so their solution was to tell me I should go to sleep on my own. Which is not what you tell a four-year-old you’ve just traumatized. So I watched the entirety of Child’s Play at age four, and it messed me up for years. I had to sleep with closets open, I would lie awake each night convinced I was about to be murdered by an angry doll. A few years ago at NYCC, a couple dressed their toddler up as Chucky for the film’s anniversary panel, and I am entirely serious when I say that these people are lucky that I didn’t dropkick their child on reflex. Moral of the story is DO NOT DO EVER DO THIS.

—Emmet Asher-Perrin, News & Entertainment Editor at Tor.com

 

THAT GODDAMN CLIFF SCENE — Mac & Me

This is dumb, but the famous clip from Mac & Me was actually a traumatizing moment when I first saw the movie. (In…daycare? I want to say? They also showed us the first Batman movie. And some of the kids stole my Mickey Mouse underwear and the whole class had to apologize to me and oh god I’m r e m E M b E R I n G)

Anyway, I had a very similar high-cliffed pond in my neighborhood and watching, uh, Me, get inexorably pulled into it from a great height repeatedly plucked at that shaky twang you get in your stomach when you’re on a precipice and anything can happen.

Everything goes wrong so fast. His speed is too much. His wheel-lock breaks. He’s falling from too high. He’s drowning. No one knows where he went. A slimy puppet is stalking him. I miss my parents.

Of course, now the moment is hilarious, but it was traumatizing at the time. I never actually finished the movie until Mystery Science Theater 3000 riffed on it in its latest Netflix season and apparently I saved myself further trauma because wow is it not afraid to continually torture its characters. But time heals. And Paul Rudd helps.

The nuclear dream from Terminator 2 is still too much, though.

—Chris Lough, Director of Tor.com

 

We’ve shared our most traumatic moments, but how about you, gentle readers? Gather around and tell us about the movies and television moments that haunt your dreams!

25 Aug 00:45

Star Wars: Phoenix One: Secretary Xat

by mordicai


Secretary Zinn-Moad Xat
Former Imperial Minister
Human Mystic (Advisor)

Brawn: 2 Agility: 2 Intellect: 3 Cunning: 3 Willpower: 3 Presence: 3

Wounds: 12 Strain: 14 Soak: 3 Defense: 2

Skills: Charm: 2, Coercion: 1, Deception: 2, Discipline: 2, Knowledge (Lore): 3, Melee: 1, Negotiation: 1, Perception: 2, Resilience*: 1, Vigilance: 2

Talents: Grit, Knowledge is Power

Force Talents: Force Rating: 1; Foresee, Heal/Harm, Seek, Sense

Equipment: Immune Implant (Resilience 1), Refined Cortosis Staff, Light Blaster, Heavy Clothes, Personal Defense Shield, Emergency Repair Patch, Comlink.

Zinn-Moad was a kid from the fancy planet Stewjon with a touch of the Force...but not enough to catch the Jedi's eye, coming of age during the death of the Republic & the rise of the Empire. He joined with the Commission for the Preservation of the New Order as an academic to hide from witch-hunts & the turning tides of history, & he ended up in the Chancellor's circles wearing a purple hat as an adjunct & advisor because he couldn't help but indulge his obsession with the fringe religions & discarded myths of the Force. He half-sincerely played the role of a bogus "Sith cultist," disguising his true gifts by playing the charlatan. Along side Yupe Tashu & Veris Hydan as one of the Emperor's vaguely empowered "Minsters," Zinn was instrumental in being one of the "scholars" who theorized that kyber crystals were an energy catalyst that could be used as a focus or harnessed beyond just lightsabers; perhaps even as a mega-scale power source. As Projects Auger & Celestial Power got underway, Zinn went to go study the artifacts at the old temple-city of Jedha...it all started as curiosity, but he ended up helping set off a horrifying chain reaction. When the Empire destroyed Jedha & he realized they had built a Death Star; that's when Xat turned rebel. Once he saw what they had done, what he had helped them do, what he had done, he betrayed the Empire, becoming a deep cover informant for the Rebellion, first as a plant & then as an agent, getting dirtier & dirtier for the Cause.

Now he's old, so old, kept alive by cybernetics & pharmaceuticals, & works for the New Republic as a political advisor, a vizier errant, useful but tainted by both his past deeds & his past treason. His medical droid, E4-1B or "Effie", is his partner in crime, played by Rachel. Her secondary programing includes espionage & violence (or are the medical protocols secondary?) & her restraining bolt is a dummy; I like to imagine Xat & the Rebels earned her loyalty by setting her free. We joined the A-wing ace Jett, played by Lincoln; Joey's repeating blaster wielding slug, Z'abba the Hutt, the rogue academic Khresh ril Phol, a Twi'lek played by Burke, & Tala Darray, Devin's low-key mysterious freighter pilot who turned out to have a powerful instinctual connection to the Force. The mission: whatever you do, don't open The Box. Inside the box, which Effie & I immediately if somewhat comically opened, was a clone of the late Sheev Palpatine, the so-called "PHOENIX." In the end, we "saved" him by granting him his independence, erasing all the code-words & trigger-phrases the New Republic blackops brainwashed him with, & escaped as renegades from everybody, with the ambiguously evil Prelate Dumari lurking in the wings as a burgeoning arch-nemesis. Oh, & we spaced Dengar! I'm claiming credit for Rothgar Deng. Plus, Zinn-Moad got a yellow shoto lightsaber!

19 Aug 10:46

Download a Free eBook of Riot Baby by Tochi Onyebuchi Before August 22!

by Tor.com

RIOT BABY

Riot Baby, Onyebuchi’s first novel for adults, is as much the story of Ella and her brother, Kevin, as it is the story of black pain in America, of the extent and lineage of police brutality, racism and injustice in this country, written in prose as searing and precise as hot diamonds.”—The New York Times

How it works: Subscribers to the Tor.com eBook Club get a free sci-fi/fantasy book at least once a month (lately it’s been much more than that) just by signing up with a valid email address. You’ll get an email when the download window is open.

This week, the Tor.com eBook Club is offering Riot Baby by Tochi Onyebuchi.

Ella has a Thing. She sees a classmate grow up to become a caring nurse. A neighbor’s son murdered in a drive-by shooting. Things that haven’t happened yet. Kev, born while Los Angeles burned around them, wants to protect his sister from a power that could destroy her. But when Kev is incarcerated, Ella must decide what it means to watch her brother suffer while holding the ability to wreck cities in her hands.

Rooted in the hope that can live in anger, Riot Baby is as much an intimate family story as a global dystopian narrative. It burns fearlessly toward revolution and has quietly devastating things to say about love, fury, and the black American experience.

Ella and Kev are both shockingly human and immeasurably powerful. Their childhoods are defined and destroyed by racism. Their futures might alter the world.

RIOT BABY

Photo © Getty Images/Aaron Ansarov

Riot Baby is available from August 18, 12:01 AM ET to August 21, 11:59 PM ET

Note: If you’re having issues with the sign-up or download process, please email ebookclub@tor.com.

 

[Note for Apple Users: iOS 13 changed where your download goes. They’re now either in your iCloud account or within a Downloads folder within Safari (the down-arrow icon in the top right). More troubleshooting help here.]

21 Jul 21:39

New free book from Tor is "Silver in the Wood"

by noreply@blogger.com (John)
20 Apr 19:28

Download All 4 Murderbot Books For Free (Before Network Effect Arrives!)

by Tor.com

All Systems Red by Martha Wells

Murderbot’s first novel arrives on May 5th.

But before that happens, Tor.com Publishing and the Tor.com Ebook Club are giving away ALL FOUR PREVIOUS AND OFTEN TIMES AWARD-WINNING NOVELLAS!

Martha Wells’ series chronicles the life of a self-aware SecUnit that has hacked its own governor module and refers to itself (though never out loud) as “Murderbot.”

Scornful of humans, all it really wants is to be left alone to watch TV and figure out who it is.

And this week, the Tor.com Ebook Club is giving away one Murderbot novella per day!

Murderbot Diaries

One Book-Per-Day Will Be Available:

Monday, April 20: All Systems Red (Book 1)

Tuesday, April 21: Artificial Condition (Book 2)

Wednesday, April 22: Rogue Protocol (Book 3)

Thursday, April 23: Exit Strategy (Book 4)

Download period ends 5:59 AM ET, April 24.

 


 

Question: When is the current day’s book available until?

For 24 hours starting at 6 AM ET on the day-of.

Question: I’m having issues getting the book to open / download issues caused me to miss that day’s book!

Email ebookclub@tor.com and we’ll get you sorted.

Question: There’s a novel coming?!?

Yes! A beautiful culmination and continuation of Murderbot’s ever-humanizing journey!

It’s called Network Effect and you can see it down there.

If you already receive the Tor.com newsletter, you still need to sign up for this program to get your free ebook.

 


 

Note: If you’re having issues with the sign-up or download process, please email ebookclub@tor.com.

Apple iOS 13 Users: Downloads are now located either in your iCloud account or in a Downloads folder within Safari (the down-arrow icon in the top right). More troubleshooting help here.

 

Forthcoming May 5, from Martha Wells

NETWORK EFFECT

Buy Network Effect from:

25 Feb 17:32

The latest free book from Tor is Killing Gravity

by noreply@blogger.com (John)
14 Jan 02:20

Star Wars: End of Empire: Interlude.

by mordicai


Imperator Pryl is clad in a minimalist breathing mask & turtlenecked white bodysuit, like an inverted version of a stormtrooper’s underarmor marked with a red Imperial wheel; once pristine, now torn & bloody. Her red lightsaber ignites & sings, breaking the darkness, cutting a thorned vine here, blocking a sudden laser blast there, & then its bloody gleam is again abruptly gone, as she runs through the alien brambles in the night.

She sprints through a toxic jungle, full of giant predatory plants & strange mists, pursued by sleek, black Sith droids. They float on antigrav drives like giant spikes covered in blistering eyes. Their sections rotate & spin, thrusting out sudden blades in the dark, spewing flesh-melting acid, scintillating blaster bolts, wobbling Geonosian sonic blasts. It is a Dark Side Rey’s obstacle course meets Thufir Hawat’s deadly training remotes, & one of the drones closes in on the Praetorian leader as she jumps & tumbles.

The Imperator bursts through a copse of razor fronds & giant flytraps, gathering a few more scrapes & scratches…& coming up against a hangar bay forcefield, a wall of rectangular blue light showing the iridescent Bright Jewel Nebula & the planet Ord Mantell below. She’s aboard a converted deck on one of her massive Super Star Destroyers, a window of colours amidst a black bulkhead, a wall she is suddenly trapped against. She turns to face the bot & with a shiver...suddenly straightens, as in the distance, the talltrees of the poisonous forest— which reach almost all the way up to the support struts of the shadowy ceiling above— sway & shake with an ominous, guttural growl like the first season of LOST.

“Override code: Ichor.” The machine falls instantly still, interrupting it’s imminent attack & retreating in stand-by mode back into the foliage & for the first time, the impassive features of the Imperator crack, as a fraction of a smile curls at the corner of her mouth.. The fetid flora nearby rumbles & sways, shuddering with a moaning, unearthly roar that grows closer with stalking Jurassic Park thuds. The Imperator remains perfectly still, waiting, watching the writhing copse with a grin...that suddenly dies, her expression regaining its icy disposition. With a gesture from the off-white adept— a flick of the wrist, really— the brobnagarian groaning & shuffling from within the primeval tangle goes still in mirror.



A blast door in the wall slides open, with no fanfare or warning. The Imperator, in the moments since the camera cut away, has already discarded her rebreather & retrieved her alabaster cloak & its ancient broach, draping it around herself with a flutter & composing herself for the two crimson clad Royal Guards who ceremoniously march in. As they position themselves wordlessly behind the Imperator at the edge of (the now eerily quiet) venomous overgrowth, flanking her, a similarly coloured droid with a black faceplate glides in behind them with probe-like susurrations, hovering in wide, menacing cardinal robes.

Coming close to Imperator Pryl with the uncanny smoothness of a repulsor lift, the red robot silently extends its gloved palm. Half-lit by the high-tech glow of the ship’s shields on the right but cast in the spectral shadows of the ghostly forest to her left, she clasps its hand reverently without a moment’s hesitation, recognizing the Emperor’s Sentinal, & does not flinch at the hiss & prick of the needle that tastes her blood to verify her identity. “Verified,” utters the thing’s mechanical voice, as the blank dome of the android flickers to life with the unholy visage of the late Palpatine, twisted with evil, flickering on the holoscreen.

"Operation: Cinder is to resume at once. Resistance. Rebellion. Defiance. These are concepts that cannot be allowed to persist. You are but one of many tools by which these ideas shall be burned away. Heed my Messenger. He will—”

The flaming red of the Imperator’s lightsaber pierces the twilight, as she cuts the Emperor’s soliloquy short with a fatal system error, bisecting the Messenger with a heavenward strike. With one iaijutsu cut, it falls, a junked pile of tattered vermillion cloth & a metal skeleton halfway between the old B-series droids of the Confederacy & Maximilian from The Black Hole.

She spins, her ivory cape billowing, pallid in the gloom, rubicund blade before her in a defensive position. The two Royal Guards break their impassive stance with the death of the automaton, surprised by the sudden violence but with their forcepikes instinctively at the ready, eager for vicarious vengeance for their dead master, or at least the apparently treasonous destruction of his avatar.

As Imperator Pryl whirls to confront them, the camera cuts to frame her face, ablaze now in the sanguine radiance of her weapon, eyes wild, breaking into a wide smile ear to ear as the clashing & clamoring from the jungle returns, louder & louder, just off screen: a thunderous crescendo of howling terror breaking through the haunted thickets, stomping doom & crunching death.

[Cue the orchestra for the Star Wars overture]

31 Oct 15:24

Gideon’s Guide to Getting Galactic Swole: An Epic Tale of Skele-Flex Trashbaggery

by Kelcifer Rose

Have you ever wondered how Gideon’s biceps got so swole? Have you ever wanted to flex on a necro, but the skeletal meat clinging to your humerus looks like a flesh adepts half-assed science project? Are you a Ninth House Cavalier seeking to get uncomfortably buff and help your necro achieve Lyctor status? Well, if you’re a meatbag like Gideon, look no further – for this guide to getting galactic swole is sure to increase your swordsmanship, your swoonmanship, and result in absolutely upsetting biceps. If you’re a skeleton, I’m sorry; this guide to getting swole probably won’t work for you as your sarcolemma has long since decayed.

Massive, bulging, sack-of-lemons biceps are, in fact, the key to wielding a broadsword, helping your necro earn Lyctorship, and swooning even the most waifish and ill-fated of necromancers. One cannot simply expect to defeat epic bone constructs with stringy fascicles. Despite the fact that a certain bird-boned Ninth House necro (with all of her, like, three muscles) seems to believe that one can get by simply with bone magic in this myriadic year, the ten-thousandth year of our Lord – The King Undying!, it’s clear that magic alone is not enough to save the Nine Houses of Dominicus.

First and foremost – hit those biceps brachii from all the angles and with all the modalities. Curls for the girls, as they say. The absolute best, 100% most appropriate and totally excellent place to do bicep curls is in the squat rack. Grab that 45lb iron bar, slap some plates on the ends, and stand there, feet firmly planted, gazing into the mirror, and squeeze that skeletal meat for at least 10 solid reaps. Ignore all looks you may get from the limp-fibred mayonnaise-uncle lookalikes that may be glaring at you. Who gives a galactic fuck if they want to squat in the squat rack? You’re busy getting swole AF in the upper extremities. Leg day does not exist in the House of the Ninth, and if it did, we would still do bicep curls in the squat rack because apparently bird-like qualities are a Ninth House standard, so our goal is to look like a chicken-legged Hercules.

If the squat rack is unavailable for bicep curls, grab a set of the heaviest dumbbells you can reap and stand right in front of the dumbbell rack. Why? Because like I said, leg day does not exist in the House of the Ninth, and walking the dumbbells a decent and respectable distance away from the rack constitutes a leg workout, and we simply cannot spare any adenosine diphosphate on anything other than our biceps. Keep those elbows tucked, core tight, forearms at a 45-degree angle to your body, gaze into the mirror, and squeeze the living fuck out of those dumbbells – hold at the top! – and slowly lower the weights back down. Reap the benefits.

 

No dumbbells? No problem! Grab an EZ curl bar, find the most obnoxious spot to stand, and reap the fuck out of that iron. Disregard any negativity thrown your way for being “inappropriate”- you do you!

 

If you’re to be any respectable cavalier of the Ninth, being decently okay with a rapier is a must. The quick and sharp movements of the rapier require an enormous amount of anterior deltoid endurance, so grab the heaviest plate you can heave, and reap that sucker – reap it hard. Again, keep that core tight! You can’t fight bone constructs if you’ve thrown your back out trying to impress the ladies.

For your finisher, your smoked-meat special of blood-pumping vessels, chin-ups are an absolute must. The supinated grip of this ultimate compound movement targets not only our biceps brachii, but also our latissimus dorsi, teres major, posterior deltoid, and our deep internal core stabilizers. In short, all of the muscles required to slash a broad sword through the sinew of the beefiest bone construct.

Be sure to flex as much as possible during this workout to help with the muscle growth. Everyone knows a good dirty mirror gym flex pic helps with the gains. Chances are, other people will be using the dirty gym mirror to workout, but you, my swole cavalier-in-training, should just keep flexing away. Aww yeah.

As for how much weight should one use if they’re trying to get galatic-swole? How the fuck should I know? Gravity works a little differently in outer space, so reap as much as you possibly can. In order for muscle to grow, you need to create a lot of micro tears in the muscle fiber. This is achieved through performing moderate reaps (or reps as those not under the rule of our Lord Necro Prime – The Kindly Prince of Death! – like to call them) at 70-80% of your maximum capacity, and is called hypertrophy. Working in this reap range yields the most muscle growth, but be sure to replenish that muscle glycogen store with a good meal (or dessert, as our “worryingly fly” favorite cav prefers) within 30 minutes of finishing your workout!

So, unless you want to end up like Harrowhark Nonegesimus with her bird-boned brittleness and complete inability to lift anything heavier than her own skull, get yourself to the gym and start reaping!

 

So here it is, cavaliers, a totally meat-headed workout to get your upper extremities swole as fuck. Complete the workout in a circuit, adding sets, reaps, or weight to increase that volume, maximize hypertrophy, and save Dominicus.

1. Barbell Biceps curls (3 sets, 10 reaps)
2. Dumbbell/EZ Curls (3 sets, 10 reaps)
3. Front Detoid Raises (3 sets, 10 reaps)
4. Chin ups (3 sets, As Many As Possible)

Buy Gideon the Ninth from:

Kelcifer Rose is a bookseller by day and ninja by night. When she’s not Savoy Bookshop & Cafe in Westerly, RI, where she is a full time bookseller and manager, Kelcifer can be found at the dojo teaching jiu-jitsu to small children.

27 Apr 23:20

Guildmasters' Guide to Waterdeep: Blood in the Streets.

by mordicai


Running this Guildmasters' Guide to Waterdeep weekly lunch game mashing up Waterdeep: Dragon Heist & Guildmasters' Guide to Ravnica has turned out to be a lot of fun, & judging from the events that are about to unfold in the Magic: the Gathering metaplot during their "War for the Spark" event, I feel like I'm very "on trend." I'll note that this campaign is shaping up to be a fairly brutal one: sure, there is a lot of rubbing shoulders with epic level NPCs & high CR monsters, but even beyond that the threats on the ground seem quite lethal. The last we'd heard from our protagonists they had been hired by a notorious popinjay, one Volothamp Geddarm, author of the various Volo's Guide to... books, to find his missing friend Floon. Other than a description ("human male, pale skin, red-blonde wavy hair, well dressed") the best lead that they have is that Volo had been trying to break his writer's block & Floon had taken him out gambling & drinking two nights ago at the Skewered Dragon, a casino in Dock Ward between Net Street & Fillet Lane.

Carl is playing Soom Splintertusk, an elephantine loxodon warlock & member of the Golgari Swarm. Membership has its perks, & her Guild grants her the ability to move about in the city's underworld rapidly, mostly made manifest by her buddy Shtaa, myconid sewer gondolier. The little toadstool person takes them aboard its boat made from an inverted giant mushroom cap after they descend a manhole near the Inn of the Yawning Portal, swallowing jar after jar of blood smuggled down into the undercity, drained from the corpse of the Xanathar gang member Soom dismembered. & off they scoot! Jellywinks Stumbleduck, Ruoxi's gnome barbarian, is the only one with nightvision, so it's torches or darkness for most of the trip. There seems to be some sort of drama up above, but they safely & quickly pass below it.

They come up safely, near their destination, detouring into a nearby purple storefront named after the stuffed beholder in its window: The Old Xoblob Shop. The shop is packed with wild gizmos & bric-a-brac, swathed in violet decor: amethyst lamps, lilac curtains, & an periwinkle deep gnome in plum robes, face adorned with eye tattoos & puffing on a pipe of lavender smoke. "Xoblob's the name...no relation!" Vanri "Toad" Todeshi, Caro's Rakdos Cultist air genasi rogue, trades some stolen death's head moths for a bone flute & the Selesneya Conclave's representative, Jeff's water genasai monk, Serous of the Nine Currents, yearns for a fancy mechanical goldfish he finds tucked away on a shelf; while the group barters & chats, they question the svirfneblin, who tells them that Floon & similar looking looking man (“not brothers, but you know how old friends can grow to look alike,” he says, gesturing at beholder in the window) were jumped outside the shop by half a dozen men with winged snake tattoos wearing black armor.

The Skewered Dragon is artfully distressed, the front torn up, with anchors embedded in the roof, smashing in the windows. It's the sort of dive where the professional upper-crust slum it with their working-class peers; in this case, It's the Order of Master Shipwrights drinking with the salt of the earth folk from the Most Diligent League of Sail-makers & Cordwainers. Asking around the bar, the consensus is that after Volo parted ways with Floon, he met up with Renaer Neverember, son of previous Open Lord of Waterdeep, Dagult Neverember. The dwarf Orsic Ruby-Eye says Renaer is “another spoiled, rich brat wrecking it for everyone!” but Eggren the dragonborn thinks “he’s okay for an aristocrat; I don’t mind winning his coins, at least!” There's a rumor that Floon was living off of blackmailing a noble, but otherwise the scuttlebutt is that the two of them played a few unlucky hands of Three Dragon Ante & were followed out by five men in black leathers who frequent a warehouse marked by a flying snake. As the group interrogates the patrons, Toad is subtly sneaking into conversations, inflaming tensions, escalating the stress in the room into an all out riot!



The clues have pointed them towards a warehouse with painted over windows on Candle Lane— now a poverty-stricken area, the broken street lamps still flicker with the continual flame spells cast in more prosperous days. Set in a part of the city with varying heights of infrastructure, half-built into a bridge, the main floor of the warehouse is lower than street level, inset with a yard & loading dock. & well, here is where things start to get rough. The players have a lot of reasonable concerns: the initial premise was that they were all friends with Yagra, & having found out she's a Zhent they are wary of bursting into their stronghold guns blazing. & Toad climbs the wall & goes to scout in through the second-story, as is the rogue's prerogative. The problem here is the dice: the players are rolling terrible on Stealth & Open Locks, & dun dun dun, the bad guys are rolling much, much better. Kenku, crow-folk, armed with wicked kris knives & cruel bows, mimicking the words of others to speak, lying in wait.

So here's how it goes down: Toad is ambushed & dropped to zero in the first round. This is tense: I know that the kenku inside of the warehouse are kidnapping her & I'm giving her "death saves" to let her have a chance to wake up, but the table is feeling pretty dire as she starts critically failing them. Jellywinks charges in, but the raven-people from the Xanathar Guild are covering the back & ventilate her with arrows, as well. She's up & trucking but sticks to the shadows, taking the long way around the crates & boxes of the lower floor...which is littered with a dozen bodies, some with the many-eyed circle of the Xanathar Gang but more in the black armor & winged snakes of the Zhentarim. Soom & Serous both climb up & go to help Toad; they are barraged by arrows & dagger strikes but fight back with spell, sword & punch. Still, the odds are against them & things are looking grim, until a clumsy yell & hurdled violence stuns the corvid villains for a moment, giving the remaining party members a chance to finish the avian antagonists off.



The battlecry comes from one Renaer Neverember, pickled herring soaked son of the previous Open Lord, armed with a scavanged kenku dagger & slim Zhent rapier. In his princely attire & ginger hair, he does match the rough description of Floon, & indeed, Renaer believes that both group of gangsters' cases of mistaken identity are at the root of things. The Zhentarim kidnapped both of them, but when ambushed by the Xanathar Gang, Renaer managed to sneak away to hide in a back closet in the chaos...but Floon wasn't so lucky. He doesn't know what's going on but the Zhents who kidnapped him were too stupid to shut up, & so Renaer learned that the crooks all seem to believe that his father Dagult Neverember embezzled a vast sum of gold from Waterdeep’s charity & welfare budget when he was Open Lord & hid the dragon-stamped coins somewhere in the city. The Xanathar Guild has — or had— a magical artifact called The Stone of Golorr, whatever that is, but it was recently stolen, & now it seems like there is going to be an all-out gang war.

The whistles in the distance mean the City Watch is on its way, but they have a moment to search or question the unconscious or dying bird people. The Selesneyan representative Serous is roused from unconsciousness, confused but glad not to have been dissected. They focus on a round of questions: Soom's magic is able to stave off death for a few of the parliament of avian crooks; the one with the gold rings in its beak & the one with blue cheeks are too far gone but the perpetually molting one lives & the one with the peg leg is roused for questioning. You might call it [Gears,] since it mimics the sound of spinning clockwork teeth when questioned. These bird-critters only answer in call & response, but eager to live, it chirps:

    In a scratchy voice: “No time to loot the place; just get him to the boss.”
    In a gruff voice: “Heh, heh, heh...The Xanathar sends his regards!”
    In a nasal sing-song: "🎵Follow the yellow signs in the sewers...🎵”

There is a secret closet where a crate full of paintings & a crate full of silver bars are stashed, but they don't have a chance to grab any before the cops show up. When the City Watch arrives it is embodied in the person of one Hyustus Stagat, Watch Captain & Boros Agent, wearing a “Worf sash” with a glowing Boros Legion symbol & a Chultian Flaming Fist. "A triple cop," they call him, & they aren't wrong, but he's not the kind to play by the book; he's the type from the school of hard knocks. What's the cliche? “Keep the blood off the streets”? Well, Stagat's laissez faire attitude extends thus far & no further. A Waterdhavian native & Guild member, he's a pragmatist whose familiar with Force Grey murderhobos, Golgari crypt-gardens & secret Rakdos clubs; if the PCs can restrict their violence to gangsters & monsters, out of public eye, he’ll try to help them out..."but not everybody as understanding as I am, like the Boss." Besides as much, he’s impressed by a Neverember, even a black sheep like Renaer, so they depart unmolested, but not unremarked.



Everyone decides it is best to rest the night at the Yawning Portal: Volo is up in the balcony but they avoid him & settle in for a few drinks, tucked away in a corner. The Inn is plastered with posters for an upcoming Rusty Bighat show, & a fat orange tomcat is sitting on the bar being fed a saucer of milk by Bonnie the barmaid; they overhear gloomy old Durnan chiding her not to encourage the thing to stick around or it’ll be stirge food before long, or worse. Toad tries to befriend the fluffy one-eyed beast— "Marmaduke"— but they get off to a bad start: he scratches her & runs off to hide in the rafters. Exhausted & put upon, they are not long for the taproom & soon head upstairs, Soom & Toad bonding & nuzzling while Jellywinks passes out in a nest of books & sweaters with the necklace belonging to her stillborn sibling that she somehow found amongst the bar's many oddities. Serous meditates in the stable barracks; Durnan recognizes a certain thousand yard stare in his eyes & put him up in the workers' quarters free of charge.

    That night they dream. Serous is troubled by nightmares over-brimming with spectral kaiju, as ever. He hides while the Temple falls, but this time the earth genasi he's powerless to save from a fate worse than death is not the little girl he remembers, but an older man with bismuth “hair” wearing a heavy leather apron who is soul-flensed by the dark, grasping tentacles, spirit ripped screaming from his body while the young monk watches helplessly. He's first up in the morning, lurking in the hallways outside everyone else's room, half-awake.

    Soom is a warlock, & the Corpse-Germ is her patron, rhizomes of unlife reaching deep into her nervous system. It appears as a tusked skull, jawless & sprouting the veins & connective ligaments of a body as roots & fungal bodies, waiting for her in an endless grey sea sprinkled with prismatic stars above & below. Corpse-Germ has a literally cyclopean affect, as it turns to face the viewer with no relation to the eye sockets, giving the impression that the central nasal cavity is it's "face." It wants to know “What did we learn today?”

    "Are you locked inside or out?" is what I ask Ruoxi while her character Jellywinks dreams of the Blue Door. The Blue Door that haunts her. She's locked inside. "What is outside?" The steppe. When she wakes up from the dream of the Blue Door, the Blue Door that haunts her, she remembers that her unborn sibling's necklace is a kind of puzzle-locket, but she can't figure out how to twist it open. Is it some kind of key? Jellywinks sleeps in; she has to be pried from her cocoon of slumber with a proverbial crowbar.

    Caro's air genasi rogue also picked up a knick-knack from the Yawning Portal, a black book labeled “Nocturne” that records people's dreams: in the morning, she can see everything written in perfect detail on the first page, ready to be copied into the following pages if she so chooses. She floats in the eye of the storm, a dust storm of brittle glass swirling in eviscerating breezes that spiral closer & closer until biting into her face, blood everywhere.

Morning comes uneventfully. Renaer does not have access to any deep coffers; he lives on his mother's estates but his name does still afford him a line of credit to some degree, which he leverages with a cleric of Waukeen, Obaya Uday, for two potions of healing. He's waiting for the party in the common room with Volo, who is complaining about being stood up by his editor & drinking a hot, bitter, brown drink from a complicated pot. Chultan kaeth, coffee from his friends in the import & export business, River & Flask. He asks Soom, as politely as an overly curious man like him can, what happened to her "other trunk," mentioning that the other "Loxo" he's met all had a pair. Strange! Volo is, of course, staying behind, but Renaer comes with them on the rescue mission, albeit trepidatiously. The kitchen is serving a kind of biscuits & gravy, & Jellywinks stuffs her overflowing pack with a handful before heading out.



Down into the dank, churning sewers again! This time to follow the yellow chalk signs the kenku "spoke" of. They pile into another manhole in the Castle Ward, climbing single file, not entirely unnoticed, & it takes a bit of searching to pick up the trail...but luckily Soom & Shtaa are specialized for the sorts of labyrinthine, underworld affairs. The myconid is a little lumpier & flirtier than before, & between them, Jellywink's ability to see in the dark, & Serous & Toad getting out & searching for old chalk markings that might have been rubbed away— "Wet & Breezy" combine clever eyes & a working knowledge of thieves' guild tactics— they find themselves back under the Dock Ward, navigating the maze of chutes & tunnels swiftly & unerringly. They've got a torch burning but have all (besides Renaer) inhaled the psychic rapport spores of their fungal friend, so they are largely silent, except when they remember to speak out loud to include the young Neverember.



Their initial approach is stealthy, deadly & efficient. A gazer— a small beholderkin creature, like a hovering grapefruit of flesh with four eyestalks & an angerfish maw— blocks their path through the fetid tunnels, but a few arrows & darts dispatch it. Coming to a three-way junction, with a landing platform, very narrow drainage passage & continuing canals, Jellywinks spots a hidden door! & they all spy several arrow slits, & hear the sounds of snoring creatures: goblins? The telepathic spores they shared with the Golgari myconid allow them to remain eerily silent, sneaking up on the gang hideout unawares. The group slips in through another murderhole, past more arrow slits & almost catch the warty green humanoid asleep at the watch...almost. At the last minute he jumps up, yelling "BREE-YARK!" out into the echoing tunnels & trying to scamper away before Serous knocks him unconscious.

The action is on, now! They players sweep the area; the main room features a plinth topped with a stylized beholder, absent its main eye; the room is otherwise featureless, literally swept clean, though ever-perceptive Toad finds a dustless spot on the wall, as if a large painting or tapestry that reached all the way to the floor had been removed, as well as a mysterious glass bottle of some kind of "serum" in the side chambers: crude cells, junk-strewn & with bloody manacles bolted to the wall. There are two massive double-doors left, & pausing to listen they hear the sounds of pain coming from beyond, like Han being tortured on Bespin. Ready to get the drop on them, the party use magical smoke & illusions to simulate all sorts of shenanigans in the room on the other side of the door.

Here's the thing about that: it works, but perhaps too well. Unbeknownst to them, one of the lieutenants of The Xanathar Gang is visiting an underboss, & the mindflayer capo comes straight through the doors (opening them telekinetically, hovering a foot above the ground) into the room the players are in. With it, skittering along the wall, is a brain with four chicken feet, its pet intellect devourer, & last in through the door, spewing gouts of fire from his fists: a magical, pyromaniac...orc? Half-orc? Three-quarters orc wizard. The Rakdos troublemaker, Toad, hiding behind the corner of the door, is nonetheless cooked by the cone of flame.



So there's a moment of true terror: the party is face to face with a threat easily capable of destroying (& to be entirely honest, devouring) them. Now, it is clear from an audience standpoint that this mini-Cthulhu is basically done with the whole scene & looking to bounce, but you know how heroes are. So there are a few moments where it is touch & go: mammoth-like Soom had a spell prepared to go off at the first non-redhead through the door so she takes the brunt of its initial annoyance, luckily rolling over twenty on her save versus being dominated into killing her friends. The monk Serous, well. He's "lucky" in that his short sword draws blueblack ichor from the thing, piercing into it; but unlucky in the way that it looks at him, mindblasting him, liquifying important parts of his grey matter.

Two healing potions later & things are looking a little better; the mindflayer has left through the portal, though it still hangs ominously open. The cerebral horror is no slouch on its own; clawing through the room & focusing a horrible psychic assault on Renaer, who falls to his knees, beats himself about the head & flees into the other room, a blessed mix of stupid & stubborn defeating its awful, sustained psionic assault. Axes & blows seem to harm it, but not completely; it's like doing three-dimensional damage to being that exists on more than just this plane of existence. The spellcaster, Soom, is occupied keeping people from dying, so it falls to the rest of them to deal with it— & the orkish mage with the eerily familiar gruff voice— via brute force & mundane damage...& violence wins the day!

They hurriedly scan the next room; Renear has a man who looks like him up in a fireman's carry— Floon, bearing truth serum track marks, at one hit point & with several levels of exhaustion— & the chamber is otherwise adorned with ragged curtains, a dais, a throne, & more torture cells. Searching, the group finds a secret passage, the orc magician's spellbook & sack of treasure. They decide discretion is the better part of valor & ignore the secret dirt tunnel they've uncovered under a flagstone, & whatever else might be in the rest of the dungeon, doubling back to the canal. Another goblin— chanting "🎵fill 'em full of arrows 🎵" in a sing-song voice— takes pot shots at them as they retreat, firing from behind the arrow slits opposite the way they came in, sinking a barbed arrowhead into their myconid pilot, Shtaa, but they beat an otherwise successful hasty retreat, as the Golgari lead them back through the filthy, sunken passages of Waterdeep's sewers.
10 Apr 01:11

Read Gideon the Ninth: Chapters 1 and 2

by Tamsyn Muir

Gideon the Ninth cover reveal header

The Emperor needs necromancers.

The Ninth Necromancer needs a swordswoman.

Gideon has a sword, some dirty magazines, and no more time for undead bullshit.

Tamsyn Muir’s heart-pounding epic science fantasy Gideon the Ninth unveils a solar system of swordplay, cut-throat politics, and lesbian necromancers. Available September 10th from Tor.com Publishing, it’s the most fun you’ll ever have with a skeleton. We’re excited to share the first two chapters with you below—what are you waiting for?!

 

Chapter 1

In the myriadic year of our Lord—the ten thousandth year of the King Undying, the kindly Prince of Death!— Gideon Nav packed her sword, her shoes, and her dirty magazines, and she escaped from the House of the Ninth.

She didn’t run. Gideon never ran unless she had to. In the absolute darkness before dawn she brushed her teeth without concern and splashed her face with water, and even went so far as to sweep the dust off the floor of her cell. She shook out her big black church robe and hung it from the hook. Having done this every day for over a decade, she no longer needed light to do it by. This late in the equinox no light would make it here for months, in any case; you could tell the season by how hard the heating vents were creaking. She dressed herself from head to toe in polymer and synthetic weave. She combed her hair. Then Gideon whistled through her teeth as she unlocked her security cuff, and arranged it and its stolen key considerately on her pillow, like a chocolate in a fancy hotel.

Leaving her cell and swinging her pack over one shoulder, she took the time to walk down five flights to her mother’s nameless catacomb niche. This was pure sentiment, as her mother hadn’t been there since Gideon was little and would never go back in it now. Then came the long hike up twenty-two flights the back way, not one light relieving the greasy dark, heading to the splitoff shaft and the pit where her ride would arrive: the shuttle was due in two hours.

Out here, you had an unimpeded view up to a pocket of Ninth sky. It was soupy white where the atmosphere was pumped in thickest, and thin and navy where it wasn’t. The bright bead of Dominicus winked benignly down from the mouth of the long vertical tunnel. In the dark, she made an opening amble of the field’s perimeter, and she pressed her hands up hard against the cold and oily rock of the cave walls. Once this was done, she spent a long time methodically kicking apart every single innocuous drift and hummock of dirt and rock that had been left on the worn floor of the landing field. She dug the shabby steel toe of her boot into the hard-packed floor, but satisfied with the sheer improbability of anyone digging through it, left it alone. Not an inch of that huge, empty space did Gideon leave unchecked, and as the generator lights grumbled to half-hearted life, she checked it twice by sight. She climbed up the wire-meshed frames of the floodlights and checked them too, blinded by the glare, feeling blindly behind the metal housing, grimly comforted by what she didn’t find.

She parked herself on one of the destroyed humps of rubble in the dead centre. The lamps made lacklustre any real light. They explosively birthed malform shadow all around. The shades of the Ninth were deep and shifty; they were bruise-coloured and cold. In these surrounds, Gideon rewarded herself with a little plastic bag of porridge. It tasted gorgeously grey and horrible.

Buy it Now

The morning started as every other morning had started in the Ninth since the Ninth began. She took a turn around the vast landing site just for a change of pace, kicking absently at an untidy drift of grit as she went. She moved out to the balcony tier and looked down at the central cavern for signs of movement, worrying porridge from her molars with the tip of her tongue. After a while, there was the faraway upward clatter of the skeletons going to pick mindlessly at the snow leeks in the planter fields. Gideon saw them in her mind’s eye: mucky ivory in the sulfurous dim, picks clattering over the ground, eyes a multitude of wavering red pinpricks.

The First Bell clanged its uncanorous, complaining call for beginning prayers, sounding as always like it was getting kicked down some stairs; a sort of BLA-BLANG… BLA-BLANG… BLA-BLANG that had woken her up every morning that she could recall. Move-ment resulted. Gideon peered down at the bottom where shadows gathered over the cold white doors of Castle Drearburh, stately in the dirt, set into the rock three bodies wide and six bodies tall. Two braziers stood on either side of the door and perpetually burned fatty, crappy smoke. Over the doors were tiny white figures in a multitude of poses, hundreds to thousands of them, carved using some weird trick where their eyes seemed to look right at you. Whenever Gideon had been made to go through those doors as a kid, she’d screamed like she was dying.

More activity in the lowest tiers now. The light had settled into visibility. The Ninth would be coming out of their cells after morning contemplation, getting ready to head for orison, and the Drear-burh retainers would be preparing for the day ahead. They would perform many a solemn and inane ritual in the lower recesses. Gideon tossed her empty porridge bag over the side of the tier and sat down with her sword over her knees, cleaning it with a bit of rag: forty minutes to go.

Suddenly, the unchanging tedium of a Ninth morning changed. The First Bell sounded again: BLANG… BLA-BLANG… BLA-BLANG… Gideon cocked her head to listen, finding her hands had stilled on her sword. It rang fully twenty times before stopping. Huh; muster call. After a while came the clatter of the skeletons again, having obediently tossed down pick and hoe to meet their summons. They streamed down the tiers in an angular current, broken up every so often by some limping figure in vestments of rusting black. Gideon picked up her sword and cloth again: it was a cute try, but she wasn’t buying.

She didn’t look up when heavy, stumping footsteps sounded on her tier, or for the rattle of rusting armour and the rusty rattle of breath.

“Thirty whole minutes since I took it off, Crux,” she said, hands busy. “It’s almost like you want me to leave here forever. Ohhhh shit, you absolutely do though.”

“You ordered a shuttle through deception,” bubbled the marshal of Drearburh, whose main claim to fame was that he was more decrepit alive than some of the legitimately dead. He stood before her on the landing field and gurgled with indignation. “You falsified documents. You stole a key. You removed your cuff. You wrong this house, you misuse its goods, you steal its stock.”

“Come on, Crux, we can come to some arrangement,” Gideon coaxed, flipping her sword over and looking at it critically for nicks. “You hate me, I hate you. Just let me go without a fight and you can retire in peace. Take up a hobby. Write your memoirs.”

“You wrong this house. You misuse its goods. You steal its stock.” Crux loved verbs.

“Say my shuttle exploded. I died, and it was such a shame. Give me a break, Crux, I’m begging you here—I’ll trade you a skin mag. Frontline Titties of the Fifth.” This rendered the marshal momentarily too aghast to respond. “Okay, okay. I take it back. Frontline Titties isn’t a real publication.”

Crux advanced like a glacier with an agenda. Gideon rolled backward off her seat as his antique fist came down, skidding out of his way with a shower of dust and gravel. Her sword she swiftly locked within its scabbard, and the scabbard she clutched in her arms like a child. She propelled herself backward, out of the way of his boot and his huge, hoary hands. Crux might have been very nearly dead, but he was built like gristle with what seemed like thirty knuckles to each fist. He was old, but he was goddamn ghastly.

“Easy, marshal,” she said, though she was the one floundering in the dirt. “Take this much further and you’re in danger of enjoying yourself.”

“You talk so loudly for chattel, Nav,” said the marshal. “You chatter so much for a debt. I hate you, and yet you are my wares and inventory. I have written up your lungs as lungs for the Ninth. I have measured your gall as gall for the Ninth. Your brain is a base and shrivelled sponge, but it too is for the Ninth. Come here, and I’ll black your eyes for you and knock you dead.”

Gideon slid backward, keeping her distance. “Crux,” she said, “a threat’s meant to be ‘Come here, or…’”

“Come here and I’ll black your eyes for you and knock you dead,” croaked the advancing old man, “and then the Lady has said that you will come to her.”

Only then did Gideon’s palms prickle. She looked up at the scarecrow towering before her and he stared back, one-eyed, horrible, baleful. The antiquated armour seemed to be rotting right off his body. Even though the livid, over-stretched skin on his skull looked in danger of peeling right off, he gave the impression that he simply wouldn’t care. Gideon suspected that—even though he had not a whit of necromancy in him—the day he died, Crux would keep going anyway out of sheer malice.

“Black my eyes and knock me dead,” she said slowly, “but your Lady can go right to hell.”

Crux spat on her. That was disgusting, but whatever. His hand went to the long knife kept over one shoulder in a mould-splattered sheath, which he twitched to show a thin slice of blade: but at that, Gideon was on her feet with her scabbard held before her like a shield. One hand was on the grip, the other on the locket of the sheath. They both faced each other in impasse, her very still, the old man’s breath loud and wet.

Gideon said, “Don’t make the mistake of drawing on me, Crux.”

“You are not half as good with that sword as you think you are, Gideon Nav,” said the marshal of Drearburh, “and one day I’ll flay you for disrespect. One day we will use your parts for paper. One day the sisters of the Locked Tomb will brush the oss with your bristles. One day your obedient bones will dust all places you disdain, and make the stones there shine with your fat. There is a muster, Nav, and I command you now to go.”

Gideon lost her temper. “You go, you dead old dog, and you damn well tell her I’m already gone.”

To her enormous surprise he wheeled around and stumped back to the dark and slippery tier. He rattled and cursed all the way, and she told herself that she had won before she even woke up that morning; that Crux was an impotent symbol of control, one last attempt to test if she was stupid enough or cowed enough to walk back behind the cold bars of her prison. The grey and putrid heart of Drearburh. The greyer and more putrid heart of its lady.

She pulled her watch out of her pocket and checked it: twenty minutes to go, a quarter hour and change. Gideon was home free. Gideon was gone. Nothing and nobody could change that now.

 

“Crux is abusing you to anyone who will listen,” said a voice from the entryway, with fifteen minutes to go. “He said you made your blade naked to him. He said you offered him sick pornographies.”

Gideon’s palms prickled again. She’d sat back down on her awkward throne of rocks and balanced her watch between her knees, staring at the tiny mechanical hand that counted the minutes. “I’m not that dumb, Aiglamene,” she said. “Threaten a house official and I wouldn’t make toilet-wiper in the Cohort.”

“And the pornography?”

“I did offer him stupendous work of a titty nature, and he got offended,” said Gideon. “It was a very perfect moment. The Cohort’s not going to care about that though. Have I mentioned the Cohort? You do know the Cohort, right? The Cohort I’ve left to enlist in… thirty-three times?”

“Save the drama, you baby,” said her sword-master. “I know of your desires.”

Aiglamene dragged herself into the small light of the landing field. The captain of the House guard had a head of melty scars and a missing leg which an indifferently talented bone adept had replaced for her. It bowed horribly and gave her the appearance of a building with the foundations hastily shored up. She was younger than Crux, which was to say, old as balls: but she had a quickness to her, a liveliness, that was clean. The marshal was classic Ninth and he was filthy rotten all the way through.

“Thirty-three times,” repeated Gideon, somewhat wearily. She checked back on her clockwork: fourteen minutes to go. “The last time, she jammed me in the lift. The time before that she turned off the heating and I got frostbite in three toes. Time before that: she poisoned my food and had me crapping blood for a month. Need I go on.”

Her teacher was unmoved. “There was no disservice done. You didn’t get her permission.”

“I’m allowed to apply for the military, Captain. I’m indentured, not a slave. I’m no fiscal use to her here.”

“Beside the point. You chose a bad day to fly the coop.” Aiglamene jerked her head downward. “There’s House business, and you’re wanted downstairs.”

“This is her being sad and desperate,” said Gideon. “This is her obsession… this is her need for control. There’s nothing she can do. I’ll keep my nose clean. Keep my mouth shut. I’ll even—you can write this down, you can quote me here—do my duty to the Ninth House. But don’t pretend at me, Aiglamene, that the moment I go down there a sack won’t come down over my head and I won’t spend the next five weeks concussed in an oss.”

“You egotistical foetus, you think our Lady rang the muster call just for you?”

“So, here’s the thing, your Lady would set the Locked Tomb on fire if it meant I’d never see another sky,” Gideon said, looking up. “Your Lady would stone cold eat a baby if it meant she got to lock me up infinitely. Your Lady would slather burning turds on the great-aunts if she thought it would ruin my day. Your Lady is the nastiest b—”

When Aiglamene slapped her, it had none of the trembling affrontedness Crux might have slapped her with. She simply back-handed Gideon the way you might hit a barking animal. Gideon’s head was starry with pain.

“You forget yourself, Gideon Nav,” her teacher said shortly. “You’re no slave, but you’ll serve the House of the Ninth until the day you die and then thereafter, and you’ll commit no sin of perfidy in my air. The bell was real. Will you come to muster of your own accord, or will you disgrace me?”

There was a time when she had done many things to avoid disgracing Aiglamene. It was easy to be a disgrace in a vacuum, but she had a soft spot for the old soldier. Nobody had ever loved her in the House of the Ninth, and certainly Aiglamene did not love her and would have laughed herself to her overdue death at the idea: but in her had been a measure of tolerance, a willingness to loosen the leash and see what Gideon could do with free rein. Gideon loved free rein. Aiglamene had convinced the House to put a sword in Gideon’s hands, not to waste her on serving altar or drudging in the oss. Aiglamene wasn’t faithless. Gideon looked down and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, and saw the blood in her saliva and saw her sword; and she loved her sword so much she could frigging marry it.

But she also saw her clock’s minute hand ticking, ticking down. Twelve minutes to go. You didn’t cut loose by getting soft. For all its mouldering brittleness, the Ninth was hard as iron.

“I guess I’ll disgrace you,” Gideon admitted easily. “I feel like I was born to it. I’m naturally demeaning.”

Her sword-master held her gaze with her aged hawk’s face and her pouchy socket of an eye, and it was grim, but Gideon didn’t look away. It would have made it somewhat easier if Aiglamene had made a Crux out of it and cursed her lavishly, but all she said was: “Such a quick study, and you still don’t understand. That’s on my head, I suppose. The more you struggle against the Ninth, Nav, the deeper it takes you; the louder you curse it, the louder they’ll have you scream.”

Back straight as a poker, Aiglamene walked away with her funny seesawing walk, and Gideon felt as though she’d failed a test. It didn’t matter, she told herself. Two down, none to go. Eleven minutes until landing, her clockwork told her, eleven minutes and she was out. That was the only thing that mattered. That was the only thing that had mattered since a much younger Gideon had realised that, unless she did something drastic, she was going to die here down in the dark.

And—worst of all—that would only be the beginning.

 

Nav was a Niner name, but Gideon didn’t know where she’d been born. The remote, insensate planet where she lived was home to both the stronghold of the House and a tiny prison, used only for those criminals whose crimes were too repugnant for their own Houses to rehabilitate them on home turf. She’d never seen the place. The Ninth House was an enormous hole cracked vertically into the planet’s core, and the prison a bubble installation set halfway up into the atmosphere where the living conditions were probably a hell of a lot more clement.

One day eighteen years ago, Gideon’s mother had tumbled down the middle of the shaft in a dragchute and a battered hazard suit, like some moth drifting slowly down into the dark. The suit had been out of power for a couple of minutes. The woman landed brain-dead. All the battery power had been sucked away by a bio-container plugged into the suit, the kind you’d carry a transplant limb in, and inside that container was Gideon, only a day old.

This was obviously mysterious as hell. Gideon had spent her life poring over the facts. The woman must have run out of juice an hour before landing; it was impossible that she would have cleared gravity from a drop above the planet, as her simple haz would have exploded. The prison, which recorded every coming and going obsessively, denied her as an escapee. Some of the nun-adepts of the Locked Tomb were sent for, those who knew the secrets for caging ghosts. Even they—old in their power then, seasoned necromancers of the dark and powerful House of the Ninth—couldn’t rip the woman’s shade back to explain herself. She would not be tempted back for fresh blood or old. She was too far gone by the time the exhausted nuns had tethered her by force, as though death had been a catalyst for the woman to hit the ground running, and they only got one word out of her: she had screamed Gideon! Gideon! Gideon! three times, and fled.

If the Ninth—enigmatic, uncanny Ninth, the House of the Sewn Tongue, the Anchorite’s House, the House of Heretical Secrets—was nonplussed at having an infant on their hands, they moved fast anyway. The Ninth had historically filled its halls with penitents from other houses, mystics and pilgrims who found the call of this dreary order more attractive than their own birthrights. In the antiquated rules of those supplicants who moved between the eight great households, she was taken as a very small bondswoman, not of the Ninth but beholden to it: what greater debt could be accrued than that of being brought up? What position more honourable than vassal to Drearburh? Let the baby grow up postulant. Push the child to be an oblate. They chipped her, surnamed her, and put her in the nursery. At that time, the tiny Ninth House boasted two hundred children between infancy and nineteen years of age, and Gideon was numbered two hundred and first.

Less than two years later, Gideon Nav would be one of only three children left: herself, a much older boy, and the infant heir of the Ninth House, daughter of its lord and lady. They knew by age five that she was not a necromancer, and suspected by eight that she would never be a nun. Certainly, they would have known by ten that she knew too much, and that she could never be allowed to go.

Gideon’s appeals to better natures, financial rewards, moral obligations, outlined plans, and simple attempts to run away numbered eighty-six by the time she was eighteen. She’d started when she was four.

 


Chapter 2

There were five minutes to go when Gideon’s eighty-seventh escape plan got messed up fantastically.

“I see that your genius strategy, Griddle,” said a final voice from the tierway, “was to order a shuttle and walk out the door.”

The Lady of the Ninth House stood before the drillshaft, wearing black and sneering. Reverend Daughter Harrowhark Nonagesimus had pretty much cornered the market on wearing black and sneering. It comprised 100 percent of her personality. Gideon marvelled that someone could live in the universe only seventeen years and yet wear black and sneer with such ancient self-assurance.

Gideon said, “Hey, what can I say? I’m a tactician.”

The ornate, slightly soiled robes of the House dragged in the dust as the Reverend Daughter approached. She’d brought her marshal along, and Aiglamene too. A few Sisters were behind her on the tier, having sunk down to their knees: the cloisterwomen painted their faces alabaster grey and drew black patterns on their cheeks and lips like death’s-heads. Dressed in breadths of rusty black cloth, they looked like a peanut gallery of sad old waist-high masks.

“It’s embarrassing that it had to come to this,” said the Lady of the Ninth, pulling back her hood. Her pale-painted face was a white blotch among all the black. Even her hands were gloved. “I don’t care that you run away. I care that you do it badly. Take your hand from your sword, you’re humiliating yourself.”

“In under ten minutes a shuttle’s going to come and take me to Trentham on the Second,” Gideon said, and did not take her hand from her sword. “I’m going to get on it. I’m going to close the door. I’m going to wave goodbye. There is literally nothing you can do anymore to stop me.”

Harrow put one gloved hand before her and massaged her fingers thoughtfully. The light fell on her painted face and black-daubed chin, and her short-cropped, dead-crow-coloured hair. “All right. Let’s play this one through for interest’s sake,” she said. “First objection: the Cohort won’t enlist an unreleased serf, you know.”

“I faked your signature on the release form,” said Gideon.

“But a single word from me and you’re brought back in cuffs.”

“You’ll say nothing.”

Harrowhark ringed two fingers around one wrist and slowly worked the hand up and down. “It’s a cute story, but badly characterised,” she said. “Why the sudden mercy on my part?”

“The moment you deny me leave to go,” said Gideon, hand unmoving on her scabbard, “the moment you call me back—the moment you give the Cohort cause, or, I don’t know, some list of trumped-up criminal charges… ”

“Some of your magazines are very nasty,” admitted the Lady.

“That’s the moment I squeal,” said Gideon. “I squeal so long and so loud they hear me from the Eighth. I tell them everything. You know what I know. And I’ll tell them the numbers. They’d bring me home in cuffs, but I’d come back laughing my ass off.”

At that, Harrowhark stopped working her scaphoid and glanced at Gideon. She gave a rather brusque hand-wave to the geriatric fan club behind her and they scattered: tottering, kissing the floor and rattling both their prayer beads and their unlubricated knee joints, disappearing into the darkness and down the tier. Only Crux and Aiglamene stayed. Then Harrow cocked her head to the side like a quizzical bird and smiled a tiny, contemptuous smile.

“How coarse and ordinary,” she said. “How effective, how crass. My parents should have smothered you.”

“I’d like to see them try it now,” said Gideon, unmoved.

“You’d do it even if there was no ultimate gain,” the Lady said, and she even seemed to be marvelling at it. “Even though you know what you’d suffer. Even though you know what it means. And all because…?”

“All because,” said Gideon, checking her clock again, “I completely fucking hate you, because you are a hideous witch from hell. No offence.”

There was a pause.

“Oh, Griddle!” said Harrow pityingly, in the silence. “But I don’t even remember about you most of the time.”

They stared at each other. There was a lopsided smile tugging at Gideon’s mouth, unsuppressed, and looking at it made Harrowhark’s expression slide into something even moodier and more petulant. “You have me at an impasse,” she said, and she sounded grudgingly amazed by the fact. “Your ride will be here in five minutes. I don’t doubt you have all the documents and that they look good. It’d be master’s sin if I employed unwarranted violence. There is really nothing I can do.”

Gideon said nothing. Harrow said, “The muster call is real, you know. There’s important Ninth business afoot. Won’t you give a handful of minutes to take part in your House’s last muster?”

“Oh hell no,” said Gideon.

“Can I appeal to your deep sense of duty?”

“Nope,” said Gideon.

“Worth a try,” admitted Harrow. She tapped her chin thoughtfully. “What about a bribe?”

“This is going to be good,” said Gideon to nobody in particular. “‘Gideon, here’s some money. You can spend it right here, on bones.’ ‘Gideon, I’ll always be nice and not a dick to you if you come back. You can have Crux’s room.’ ‘Gideon, here’s a bed of writhing babes. It’s the cloisterites, though, so they’re ninety percent osteoporosis.’”

From out of her pocket, with no small amount of drama, Harrowhark drew a fresh piece of parchment. It was paper—real paper!—with the official letterhead of the House of the Ninth on the top. She must have raided the coffers for that one. The hairs on the back of Gideon’s neck prickled in warning. Harrow ostentatiously walked forward to leave it at a safe middle point between them both, and backed away with hands open in surrender.

Or,” said the Lady, as Gideon slowly went to pick it up, “it could be an absolutely authentic purchase of your commission in the Cohort. You can’t forge this, Griddle, it’s to be signed in blood, so don’t stuff it down your trousers yet.”

It was real Ninth bond, written correctly and clearly. It purchased Gideon Nav’s commission to second lieutenant, not privy to resale, but relinquishing capital if she honourably retired. It would grant her full officer training. The usual huge percentage of prizes and territory would be tithed to her House if they were won, but her inflated Ninth serfdom would be paid for in five years on good conditions, rather than thirty. It was more than generous. Harrow was shooting herself in the foot. She was gamely firing into one foot and then taking aim at the other. She’d lose rights to Gideon forever. Gideon went absolutely cold.

“You can’t say I don’t care,” said Harrow.

“You don’t care,” said Gideon. “You’d have the nuns eat each other if you got bored. You are a psychopath.”

Harrow said, “If you don’t want it, return it. I can still use the paper.”

The only sensible option was to fold the bond into a dart and sail it back the way it came. Four minutes until the shuttle landed and she was able to make hot tracks far away from this place. She’d already won, and this was a vulnerability that would put everything she’d worked for—months of puzzling out how to infiltrate the shuttle standing-order system, months to hide her tracks, to get the right forms, to intercept communications, to wait and sweat— into jeopardy. It was a trick. And it was a Harrowhark Nonagesimus trick, which meant it was going to be atrociously nasty—

Gideon said, “Okay. Name your price.”

“I want you downstairs at the muster meeting.”

She didn’t bother to hide her amazement. “What are you announcing, Harrow?”

The Reverend Daughter remained smileless. “Wouldn’t you like to know.”

There was a long moment. Gideon let a long breath escape through her teeth, and with a heroic effort, she dropped the paper on the ground and backed away. “Nah,” she said, and was interested to see a tiny beetling of the Lady’s black eyebrows. “I’ll go my own way. I’m not going down into Drearburh for you. Hell, I’m not going down into Drearburh if you get my mother’s skeleton to come do a jig for me.”

Harrow bunched her gloved hands into fists and lost her composure. “For God’s sake, Griddle! This is the perfect offer! I am giving you everything you’ve ever asked for—everything you’ve whined for so incessantly, without you even needing to have the grace or understanding to know why you couldn’t have it! You threaten my House, you disrespect my retainers, you lie and cheat and sneak and steal—you know full well what you’ve done, and you know that you are a disgusting little cuckoo!”

“I hate it when you act like a butt-touched nun,” said Gideon, who was only honestly sorry for one of the things in that lineup.

“Fine,” snarled Harrowhark, now in every appearance of a fine temper. She was struggling out of her long, ornate robes, the human ribcage she wore clasped around her long torso shining whitely against the black. Crux cried out in dismay as she began to detach the little silver snaps that held it to her chest, but she silenced him with a curt gesture as she took it off. Gideon knew what she was doing. A great wave of commingled pity and disgust moved through her as she watched Harrow take off her bone bracelets, the teeth she kept at her neck, the little bone studs in her ears. All these she dumped in Crux’s arms, stalking back to the shuttlefield and presenting herself like an emptied quiver. Just in gloves and boots and shirt and trousers, with her cropped black head and her face pinched with wrath, she seemed like what she really was: a desperate girl younger than Gideon, and rather small and feeble.

“Look, Nonagesimus,” said Gideon, thoroughly unbalanced and now actually embarrassed, “cut the bull. Don’t do—whatever you’re about to do. Let me go.”

“You don’t get to turn and leave quite so easily, Nav,” said Harrowhark, with palpable chill.

“You want your ass kicked by way of goodbye?”

“Shut up,” said the Lady of the Ninth, and, horrifyingly: “I’ll alter the terms. A fair fight and—”

“—and I leave scot free? I’m not that stupid—”

“No. A fair fight and you can go with the commission,” said Harrow. “If I win, you come to the muster, and you leave afterward— with the commission. If I lose, you leave now—with the commission.” She snatched the paper from the ground, pulled a fountain pen from her pocket, and slid it between her lips to stab it deeply into her cheek. It came out thick with blood—one of her party tricks, Gideon thought numbly—and signed: Pelleamena Novenarius, Reverend Mother of the Locked Tomb, Lady of Drearburh, Ruler of the Ninth House.

Gideon said, feeling idiotic: “That’s your mother’s signature.”

“I’m not going to sign as me, you utter moron, that would give the whole game away,” said Harrow. This close, Gideon could see the red starbursts at the corners of her eyes, the pink smears of someone who hadn’t slept all night. She held out the commission and Gideon snatched it with shameless hunger, folding it up and shoving it down her shirt and into her bandeau. Harrow didn’t even smirk. “Agree to duel me, Nav, in front of my marshal and guard. A fair fight.”

Above all else Harrowhark was a skeleton-maker, and in her rage and pride she was offering an unfair fight instead. The thoroughbred Ninth adept had unmanned herself by starting a fight with no body to raise and not even a bone button to help her. Gideon had seen Harrow in this mood only once before, and had thought she would probably never see her in this mood again. Only a complete asshole would agree to such a duel, and Harrowhark knew it. It would take a dyed-in-the-wool douchebag. It would be an embarrassing act of cruelty.

“If I lose, I go to your meeting and leave with the commission,” said Gideon.

“Yes.”

“If I win, I go with the commission now,” said Gideon.

Blood flecked Harrow’s lips. “Yes.”

Overhead, a roar of displaced air. A searchlight flickered over the drillshaft as the shuttle, finally making its descent, approached the wound in the planet’s mantle. Gideon checked her clock. Two minutes. Without a moment’s hesitation, she patted the Reverend Daughter down: arms, midsection, legs, a quick clutch around the boots. Crux cried out again in disgust and dismay at the sight. Harrow said nothing, which was more contemptuous than anything she could have said. But you didn’t get anywhere through softness. The House was hard as iron. You smashed iron where it was weak.

“You all heard her,” she said to Crux, to Aiglamene. Crux stared back at her with the hate of an exploding star: the empty hate of pressure pulled inward, a deforming, light-devouring resentment. Aiglamene refused to meet her gaze. That sucked, but fine. Gideon started digging around in her pack for her gloves. “You heard her. You witnessed. I’m going either way, and she offered the terms. Fair fight. You swear by your mother it’s a fair fight?”

“How dare you, Nav—”

“By your mother. And to the floor.”

“I swear by my mother. I have nothing on me. To the floor,” snapped Harrow, breath coming in staccato pants of anger. As Gideon hastily slipped on her polymer mitts, flipping the thick clasps shut at the wrists, her smile twisted. “My God, Griddle, you’re not even wearing leather. I’m hardly that good.”

They stepped away from each other, Aiglamene finally raised her voice over the growing noise of the shuttle: “Gideon Nav, take back your honour and give your lady a weapon.”

Gideon couldn’t help herself: “Are you asking me to… throw her a bone?”

Nav!

“I gave her my whole life,” said Gideon, and unsheathed her blade.

The sword was really just a gesture. What ought to have happened was that Gideon raised a booted foot and knocked Harrow ass-over-tits, hard enough to prevent the Lady of the Ninth embarrassing herself by getting up over and over and over. A booted foot on Harrow’s stomach and it would have all been done. She would have sat on Harrow if she’d needed to. No one in the Ninth House understood what cruelty was, not really, none of them but the Reverend Daughter; none of them understood brutality. The knowledge had been dried out of them, evaporated by the dark that pooled at the bottom of Drearburh’s endless catacombs. Aiglamene or Crux would have had to call it a fair fight won, and Gideon would have walked away a nearly-free woman.

What happened was that Harrowhark peeled off her gloves. Her hands were wrecked. The fingers were riddled with dirt and oozing cuts, and grit stuck in the wounds and beneath the messed-up nails. She dropped the gloves and wiggled her fingers in Gideon’s direction, and Gideon had a split second to realise that it was drillshaft grit, and that she was absolutely boned in all directions.

She charged. It was too late. Next to the drifts of dirt and stone that she had carefully kicked apart, skeletons burst out of the hard earth where they had been hastily interred. Hands erupted from little pockets in the ground, perfect, four-fingered and thumbed; Gideon, stupid with assumption, kicked them off and careened sideways. She ran. It didn’t matter: every five feet—every five god-damned feet—bones burst from the ground, grasping her boots, her ankles, her trousers. She staggered away, desperate to find the limits of the field: there were none. The floor of the drillshaft was erupting in fingers and wrists, waving gently, as though buffeted by the wind.

Gideon looked at Harrow. Harrow was breaking out in blood sweat, and her returned stare was calm and cold and assured.

She plunged back toward the Lady of Drearburh with an incoherent yell, smashing carpals and metacarpals to bits as she ran, but it didn’t matter. From as little as a buried femur, a hidden tibia, skeletons formed for Harrow in perfect wholeness, and as Gideon neared their mistress a tidal wave of reanimated bones crested down on her. Her booted foot knocked Harrow into the arms of two of her creations, who carted her easily out of harm’s way. Harrowhark’s unperturbed gaze disappeared behind a blur of fleshless men, of femur and tibia and supernaturally quick grasp. Gideon used her sword like a lever, showering herself in chips of bone and cartilage and trying to make each cut count, but there were too many of them. There were just so many. Replacements rose even as she pulverized them into rains of bone. More and more cannonballed her down to the ground, no matter in what direction she lurched, from the fruits of the morbid garden Harrow had sowed.

The roar of the shuttle drowned out the clattering of bones and the blood in her ears as she was grabbed by dozens of hands. Harrowhark’s talent had always been in scale, in making a fully realised construct from as little as an arm bone or a pelvis, able to make an army of them from what anyone else would need for one, and in some far-off way Gideon had always known that this would be how she went: gangbanged to death by skeletons. The melee melted away to admit a booted foot that knocked her down. The bone men held her to the earth as she reared up, spitting and bleeding, to find Harrow: tucked between her grinning minions, pensive, serene. Harrowhark kicked Gideon in the face.

For a couple of seconds everything was red and black and white. Gideon’s head lolled to the side as she coughed out a tooth, choking, thrashing to rise. The boot pressed itself to her throat, then down and down and down, forcing her back into the hard grit floor. The shuttle’s descent whipped up a storm of stinging dust, sending some of the skeletons flying. Harrow discarded them and they rattled into still, anatomical piles.

“It’s pathetic, Griddle,” said the Lady of the Ninth. Bones were shedding from her minions now after the initial adrenaline rush: peeling off and falling inert to earth, an arm there, a jawbone here, as they wobbled out of shape. She’d pushed herself very hard. Radiating out from them was a circle of burst pockets in the hard ground, like tiny exploded mines. She stood among her holes with a hot, bloody face and trickling nosebleed, and indifferently wiped her face with her forearm.

“It’s pathetic,” she repeated, slightly thick with blood. “I turn up the volume. I put on a show. You feel bad. You make it so easy. I got more hot and bothered digging all night.”

“You dug,” wheezed Gideon, rather muffled with grit and dust, “all night.”

“Of course. This floor’s hard as hell, and there’s a lot to cover.”

“You insane creep,” said Gideon.

“Call it, Crux,” ordered Harrowhark.

It was with poorly hidden glee that her marshal called out, “A fair fight. The foe is floored. A win for the Lady Nonagesimus.”

The Lady Nonagesimus turned back to her two retainers and raised her arms up for her discarded robe to be slipped back around her shoulders. She coughed a small knot of blood up into the dirt and waved Crux off as he hovered about her. Gideon lifted her head, then let it fall back hard on the grit floor, dazed and cold. Aiglamene was looking at her now with an expression she couldn’t parse. Sympathy? Disappointment? Guilt?

The shuttle connected its docking feet to the ground, crunching hard into the floor. Gideon looked at it—its gleaming sides, its steaming engine vents—and tried to pull herself up on her elbows. She couldn’t; she was too winded still. She couldn’t even raise a shaking middle finger to the victor: she just kept looking at the shuttle, and her suitcase, and her sword.

“Buck up, Griddle,” Harrowhark was saying. She spat another clot out on the ground, close to Gideon’s head. “Captain, go and tell the pilot to sit and wait: he’ll get paid for his time.”

“What if he asks after his passenger, my lady?” God bless Aiglamene.

“She’s been delayed. Tell him he’ll stand by on my grace for an hour, with apologies. My parents have been waiting long enough, and this took somewhat longer than I thought it would. Marshal, get her down to the sanctuary—”

Excerpted from Gideon the Ninth, copyright © 2019 by Tamsyn Muir.

29 Mar 17:47

Dino Dread!

by mordicai


It is just after the first “Jurassic Park” has happened but scientists working for Biosyn managed to retrieve the dinosaur DNA that Ned tried to steal. In the subsequent years, Biosyn has created dozens of cheap knockoff dinosaur theme parks around the world. You are all employees at the latest theme park called DinoMight!®. Located in the Virgin Islands, it's a quick Carnival cruise from ports in Florida and a leisurely cruise further up the east coast. Vacation packages are available, come visit us soon! You're guaranteed to have a DinoMIGHT® time!

The last time Tom ran Dread, it was a standalone sci-fi horror game set at the bottom of the sea, so when Tom told us he wanted to run "Jurassic Dread," we took it at face value, like a bunch of suckers. Even after we saw a diplodocus wandering around with a broken neck, we spent a good hour thinking the park's dinosaurs might be robot fakes on a rampage. The truth was staring us in the face: this was a return to Tom's apocalyptic Dead World, & those absolutely are undead dinosaurs. I can survive dinosaurs, I can survive zombies, but zombie dinosaurs?

Francis "Fitz" Fitzroy was a whiz with numbers & a rising star in economics, who decided all capitalism is corrupt & the best way to live in the system is to drop out & compromise your values in the Happiest Place of All Time: Disney with dinosaurs. Life as a burnout & beach bum, funded by goofy antics in a hotboxed costume? Yeah, there's worse ways to make a living then as Iguana Don, DinoMight's® Hawaiian shirt clad iguanodon mascot, man. The real problem I had was my addiction to painkillers: I had started dating a park veterinarian named Maureen ("Mo") just to get access to animal tranquilizers. Which came in handy when I was able to sneak off to the bathroom with an emergency tranq gun & empty out a cartridge to take the edge off. I made it to the very end of the line, before a pack of zombified velociraptors tore me to pieces as the rest of the survivors raced down the dock & onto the boat. At least I wasn't killed by pterodactyls.

I spent most of the adventure thinking Alex, Nicole's character, was either some evil corporate spy or a total grifter. In the end it turned out the latter, but the gun she pulled had me thinking the former for a while. Kat's character, Lucy, was the creepy research scientist; she definitely knew that there were some kind of hijinks going on here! Maybe she even helped commit the crimes agains nature that brought these terrible lizards back from the dead, for all I know. Harmony, Luke's character, was the technocrat pretty boy & secretly a video "influencer," working here at the park waiting for the inevitable disaster to post as content. He was in love with Matt's character, Amery, the disgraced Air Force pilot who crashed his plane over the Super Bowl & is now working on his knife skills in the kitchens like Steven Segal in Under Seige. At first he can't stand Harmony, but by the end of the story, their love was real!

Here are some short clips of us playing.

29 Mar 17:18

Read the First Chapter of Tamsyn Muir’s Gideon the Ninth!

by Tamsyn Muir

Gideon the Ninth cover reveal header

The Emperor needs necromancers.

The Ninth Necromancer needs a swordswoman.

Gideon has a sword, some dirty magazines, and no more time for undead bullshit.

Tamsyn Muir’s heart-pounding epic science fantasy Gideon the Ninth unveils a solar system of swordplay, cut-throat politics, and lesbian necromancers. Available September 10th from Tor.com Publishing, it’s the most fun you’ll ever have with a skeleton. We’re excited to share the first chapter with you below—what are you waiting for?!

Brought up by unfriendly, ossifying nuns, ancient retainers, and countless skeletons, Gideon is ready to abandon a life of servitude and an afterlife as a reanimated corpse. She packs up her sword, her shoes, and her dirty magazines, and prepares to launch her daring escape. But her childhood nemesis won’t set her free without a service.

Harrowhark Nonagesimus, Reverend Daughter of the Ninth House and bone witch extraordinaire, has been summoned into action. The Emperor has invited the heirs to each of his loyal Houses to a deadly trial of wits and skill. If Harrowhark succeeds she will be become an immortal, all-powerful servant of the Resurrection, but no necromancer can ascend without their cavalier. Without Gideon’s sword, Harrow will fail, and the Ninth House will die.

Of course, some things are better left dead.


 

 

Chapter 1

In the myriadic year of our Lord—the ten thousandth year of the King Undying, the kindly Prince of Death!— Gideon Nav packed her sword, her shoes, and her dirty magazines, and she escaped from the House of the Ninth.

She didn’t run. Gideon never ran unless she had to. In the absolute darkness before dawn she brushed her teeth without concern and splashed her face with water, and even went so far as to sweep the dust off the floor of her cell. She shook out her big black church robe and hung it from the hook. Having done this every day for over a decade, she no longer needed light to do it by. This late in the equinox no light would make it here for months, in any case; you could tell the season by how hard the heating vents were creaking. She dressed herself from head to toe in polymer and synthetic weave. She combed her hair. Then Gideon whistled through her teeth as she unlocked her security cuff, and arranged it and its stolen key considerately on her pillow, like a chocolate in a fancy hotel.

Leaving her cell and swinging her pack over one shoulder, she took the time to walk down five flights to her mother’s nameless catacomb niche. This was pure sentiment, as her mother hadn’t been there since Gideon was little and would never go back in it now. Then came the long hike up twenty-two flights the back way, not one light relieving the greasy dark, heading to the splitoff shaft and the pit where her ride would arrive: the shuttle was due in two hours.

Out here, you had an unimpeded view up to a pocket of Ninth sky. It was soupy white where the atmosphere was pumped in thickest, and thin and navy where it wasn’t. The bright bead of Dominicus winked benignly down from the mouth of the long vertical tunnel. In the dark, she made an opening amble of the field’s perimeter, and she pressed her hands up hard against the cold and oily rock of the cave walls. Once this was done, she spent a long time methodically kicking apart every single innocuous drift and hummock of dirt and rock that had been left on the worn floor of the landing field. She dug the shabby steel toe of her boot into the hard-packed floor, but satisfied with the sheer improbability of anyone digging through it, left it alone. Not an inch of that huge, empty space did Gideon leave unchecked, and as the generator lights grumbled to half-hearted life, she checked it twice by sight. She climbed up the wire-meshed frames of the floodlights and checked them too, blinded by the glare, feeling blindly behind the metal housing, grimly comforted by what she didn’t find.

She parked herself on one of the destroyed humps of rubble in the dead centre. The lamps made lacklustre any real light. They explosively birthed malform shadow all around. The shades of the Ninth were deep and shifty; they were bruise-coloured and cold. In these surrounds, Gideon rewarded herself with a little plastic bag of porridge. It tasted gorgeously grey and horrible.

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The morning started as every other morning had started in the Ninth since the Ninth began. She took a turn around the vast landing site just for a change of pace, kicking absently at an untidy drift of grit as she went. She moved out to the balcony tier and looked down at the central cavern for signs of movement, worrying porridge from her molars with the tip of her tongue. After a while, there was the faraway upward clatter of the skeletons going to pick mindlessly at the snow leeks in the planter fields. Gideon saw them in her mind’s eye: mucky ivory in the sulfurous dim, picks clattering over the ground, eyes a multitude of wavering red pinpricks.

The First Bell clanged its uncanorous, complaining call for beginning prayers, sounding as always like it was getting kicked down some stairs; a sort of BLA-BLANG… BLA-BLANG… BLA-BLANG that had woken her up every morning that she could recall. Move-ment resulted. Gideon peered down at the bottom where shadows gathered over the cold white doors of Castle Drearburh, stately in the dirt, set into the rock three bodies wide and six bodies tall. Two braziers stood on either side of the door and perpetually burned fatty, crappy smoke. Over the doors were tiny white figures in a multitude of poses, hundreds to thousands of them, carved using some weird trick where their eyes seemed to look right at you. Whenever Gideon had been made to go through those doors as a kid, she’d screamed like she was dying.

More activity in the lowest tiers now. The light had settled into visibility. The Ninth would be coming out of their cells after morning contemplation, getting ready to head for orison, and the Drear-burh retainers would be preparing for the day ahead. They would perform many a solemn and inane ritual in the lower recesses. Gideon tossed her empty porridge bag over the side of the tier and sat down with her sword over her knees, cleaning it with a bit of rag: forty minutes to go.

Suddenly, the unchanging tedium of a Ninth morning changed. The First Bell sounded again: BLANG… BLA-BLANG… BLA-BLANG… Gideon cocked her head to listen, finding her hands had stilled on her sword. It rang fully twenty times before stopping. Huh; muster call. After a while came the clatter of the skeletons again, having obediently tossed down pick and hoe to meet their summons. They streamed down the tiers in an angular current, broken up every so often by some limping figure in vestments of rusting black. Gideon picked up her sword and cloth again: it was a cute try, but she wasn’t buying.

She didn’t look up when heavy, stumping footsteps sounded on her tier, or for the rattle of rusting armour and the rusty rattle of breath.

“Thirty whole minutes since I took it off, Crux,” she said, hands busy. “It’s almost like you want me to leave here forever. Ohhhh shit, you absolutely do though.”

“You ordered a shuttle through deception,” bubbled the marshal of Drearburh, whose main claim to fame was that he was more decrepit alive than some of the legitimately dead. He stood before her on the landing field and gurgled with indignation. “You falsified documents. You stole a key. You removed your cuff. You wrong this house, you misuse its goods, you steal its stock.”

“Come on, Crux, we can come to some arrangement,” Gideon coaxed, flipping her sword over and looking at it critically for nicks. “You hate me, I hate you. Just let me go without a fight and you can retire in peace. Take up a hobby. Write your memoirs.”

“You wrong this house. You misuse its goods. You steal its stock.” Crux loved verbs.

“Say my shuttle exploded. I died, and it was such a shame. Give me a break, Crux, I’m begging you here—I’ll trade you a skin mag. Frontline Titties of the Fifth.” This rendered the marshal momentarily too aghast to respond. “Okay, okay. I take it back. Frontline Titties isn’t a real publication.”

Crux advanced like a glacier with an agenda. Gideon rolled backward off her seat as his antique fist came down, skidding out of his way with a shower of dust and gravel. Her sword she swiftly locked within its scabbard, and the scabbard she clutched in her arms like a child. She propelled herself backward, out of the way of his boot and his huge, hoary hands. Crux might have been very nearly dead, but he was built like gristle with what seemed like thirty knuckles to each fist. He was old, but he was goddamn ghastly.

“Easy, marshal,” she said, though she was the one floundering in the dirt. “Take this much further and you’re in danger of enjoying yourself.”

“You talk so loudly for chattel, Nav,” said the marshal. “You chatter so much for a debt. I hate you, and yet you are my wares and inventory. I have written up your lungs as lungs for the Ninth. I have measured your gall as gall for the Ninth. Your brain is a base and shrivelled sponge, but it too is for the Ninth. Come here, and I’ll black your eyes for you and knock you dead.”

Gideon slid backward, keeping her distance. “Crux,” she said, “a threat’s meant to be ‘Come here, or…’”

“Come here and I’ll black your eyes for you and knock you dead,” croaked the advancing old man, “and then the Lady has said that you will come to her.”

Only then did Gideon’s palms prickle. She looked up at the scarecrow towering before her and he stared back, one-eyed, horrible, baleful. The antiquated armour seemed to be rotting right off his body. Even though the livid, over-stretched skin on his skull looked in danger of peeling right off, he gave the impression that he simply wouldn’t care. Gideon suspected that—even though he had not a whit of necromancy in him—the day he died, Crux would keep going anyway out of sheer malice.

“Black my eyes and knock me dead,” she said slowly, “but your Lady can go right to hell.”

Crux spat on her. That was disgusting, but whatever. His hand went to the long knife kept over one shoulder in a mould-splattered sheath, which he twitched to show a thin slice of blade: but at that, Gideon was on her feet with her scabbard held before her like a shield. One hand was on the grip, the other on the locket of the sheath. They both faced each other in impasse, her very still, the old man’s breath loud and wet.

Gideon said, “Don’t make the mistake of drawing on me, Crux.”

“You are not half as good with that sword as you think you are, Gideon Nav,” said the marshal of Drearburh, “and one day I’ll flay you for disrespect. One day we will use your parts for paper. One day the sisters of the Locked Tomb will brush the oss with your bristles. One day your obedient bones will dust all places you disdain, and make the stones there shine with your fat. There is a muster, Nav, and I command you now to go.”

Gideon lost her temper. “You go, you dead old dog, and you damn well tell her I’m already gone.”

To her enormous surprise he wheeled around and stumped back to the dark and slippery tier. He rattled and cursed all the way, and she told herself that she had won before she even woke up that morning; that Crux was an impotent symbol of control, one last attempt to test if she was stupid enough or cowed enough to walk back behind the cold bars of her prison. The grey and putrid heart of Drearburh. The greyer and more putrid heart of its lady.

She pulled her watch out of her pocket and checked it: twenty minutes to go, a quarter hour and change. Gideon was home free. Gideon was gone. Nothing and nobody could change that now.

 

“Crux is abusing you to anyone who will listen,” said a voice from the entryway, with fifteen minutes to go. “He said you made your blade naked to him. He said you offered him sick pornographies.”

Gideon’s palms prickled again. She’d sat back down on her awkward throne of rocks and balanced her watch between her knees, staring at the tiny mechanical hand that counted the minutes. “I’m not that dumb, Aiglamene,” she said. “Threaten a house official and I wouldn’t make toilet-wiper in the Cohort.”

“And the pornography?”

“I did offer him stupendous work of a titty nature, and he got offended,” said Gideon. “It was a very perfect moment. The Cohort’s not going to care about that though. Have I mentioned the Cohort? You do know the Cohort, right? The Cohort I’ve left to enlist in… thirty-three times?”

“Save the drama, you baby,” said her sword-master. “I know of your desires.”

Aiglamene dragged herself into the small light of the landing field. The captain of the House guard had a head of melty scars and a missing leg which an indifferently talented bone adept had replaced for her. It bowed horribly and gave her the appearance of a building with the foundations hastily shored up. She was younger than Crux, which was to say, old as balls: but she had a quickness to her, a liveliness, that was clean. The marshal was classic Ninth and he was filthy rotten all the way through.

“Thirty-three times,” repeated Gideon, somewhat wearily. She checked back on her clockwork: fourteen minutes to go. “The last time, she jammed me in the lift. The time before that she turned off the heating and I got frostbite in three toes. Time before that: she poisoned my food and had me crapping blood for a month. Need I go on.”

Her teacher was unmoved. “There was no disservice done. You didn’t get her permission.”

“I’m allowed to apply for the military, Captain. I’m indentured, not a slave. I’m no fiscal use to her here.”

“Beside the point. You chose a bad day to fly the coop.” Aiglamene jerked her head downward. “There’s House business, and you’re wanted downstairs.”

“This is her being sad and desperate,” said Gideon. “This is her obsession… this is her need for control. There’s nothing she can do. I’ll keep my nose clean. Keep my mouth shut. I’ll even—you can write this down, you can quote me here—do my duty to the Ninth House. But don’t pretend at me, Aiglamene, that the moment I go down there a sack won’t come down over my head and I won’t spend the next five weeks concussed in an oss.”

“You egotistical foetus, you think our Lady rang the muster call just for you?”

“So, here’s the thing, your Lady would set the Locked Tomb on fire if it meant I’d never see another sky,” Gideon said, looking up. “Your Lady would stone cold eat a baby if it meant she got to lock me up infinitely. Your Lady would slather burning turds on the great-aunts if she thought it would ruin my day. Your Lady is the nastiest b—”

When Aiglamene slapped her, it had none of the trembling affrontedness Crux might have slapped her with. She simply back-handed Gideon the way you might hit a barking animal. Gideon’s head was starry with pain.

“You forget yourself, Gideon Nav,” her teacher said shortly. “You’re no slave, but you’ll serve the House of the Ninth until the day you die and then thereafter, and you’ll commit no sin of perfidy in my air. The bell was real. Will you come to muster of your own accord, or will you disgrace me?”

There was a time when she had done many things to avoid disgracing Aiglamene. It was easy to be a disgrace in a vacuum, but she had a soft spot for the old soldier. Nobody had ever loved her in the House of the Ninth, and certainly Aiglamene did not love her and would have laughed herself to her overdue death at the idea: but in her had been a measure of tolerance, a willingness to loosen the leash and see what Gideon could do with free rein. Gideon loved free rein. Aiglamene had convinced the House to put a sword in Gideon’s hands, not to waste her on serving altar or drudging in the oss. Aiglamene wasn’t faithless. Gideon looked down and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, and saw the blood in her saliva and saw her sword; and she loved her sword so much she could frigging marry it.

But she also saw her clock’s minute hand ticking, ticking down. Twelve minutes to go. You didn’t cut loose by getting soft. For all its mouldering brittleness, the Ninth was hard as iron.

“I guess I’ll disgrace you,” Gideon admitted easily. “I feel like I was born to it. I’m naturally demeaning.”

Her sword-master held her gaze with her aged hawk’s face and her pouchy socket of an eye, and it was grim, but Gideon didn’t look away. It would have made it somewhat easier if Aiglamene had made a Crux out of it and cursed her lavishly, but all she said was: “Such a quick study, and you still don’t understand. That’s on my head, I suppose. The more you struggle against the Ninth, Nav, the deeper it takes you; the louder you curse it, the louder they’ll have you scream.”

Back straight as a poker, Aiglamene walked away with her funny seesawing walk, and Gideon felt as though she’d failed a test. It didn’t matter, she told herself. Two down, none to go. Eleven minutes until landing, her clockwork told her, eleven minutes and she was out. That was the only thing that mattered. That was the only thing that had mattered since a much younger Gideon had realised that, unless she did something drastic, she was going to die here down in the dark.

And—worst of all—that would only be the beginning.

 

Nav was a Niner name, but Gideon didn’t know where she’d been born. The remote, insensate planet where she lived was home to both the stronghold of the House and a tiny prison, used only for those criminals whose crimes were too repugnant for their own Houses to rehabilitate them on home turf. She’d never seen the place. The Ninth House was an enormous hole cracked vertically into the planet’s core, and the prison a bubble installation set halfway up into the atmosphere where the living conditions were probably a hell of a lot more clement.

One day eighteen years ago, Gideon’s mother had tumbled down the middle of the shaft in a dragchute and a battered hazard suit, like some moth drifting slowly down into the dark. The suit had been out of power for a couple of minutes. The woman landed brain-dead. All the battery power had been sucked away by a bio-container plugged into the suit, the kind you’d carry a transplant limb in, and inside that container was Gideon, only a day old.

This was obviously mysterious as hell. Gideon had spent her life poring over the facts. The woman must have run out of juice an hour before landing; it was impossible that she would have cleared gravity from a drop above the planet, as her simple haz would have exploded. The prison, which recorded every coming and going obsessively, denied her as an escapee. Some of the nun-adepts of the Locked Tomb were sent for, those who knew the secrets for caging ghosts. Even they—old in their power then, seasoned necromancers of the dark and powerful House of the Ninth—couldn’t rip the woman’s shade back to explain herself. She would not be tempted back for fresh blood or old. She was too far gone by the time the exhausted nuns had tethered her by force, as though death had been a catalyst for the woman to hit the ground running, and they only got one word out of her: she had screamed Gideon! Gideon! Gideon! three times, and fled.

If the Ninth—enigmatic, uncanny Ninth, the House of the Sewn Tongue, the Anchorite’s House, the House of Heretical Secrets—was nonplussed at having an infant on their hands, they moved fast anyway. The Ninth had historically filled its halls with penitents from other houses, mystics and pilgrims who found the call of this dreary order more attractive than their own birthrights. In the antiquated rules of those supplicants who moved between the eight great households, she was taken as a very small bondswoman, not of the Ninth but beholden to it: what greater debt could be accrued than that of being brought up? What position more honourable than vassal to Drearburh? Let the baby grow up postulant. Push the child to be an oblate. They chipped her, surnamed her, and put her in the nursery. At that time, the tiny Ninth House boasted two hundred children between infancy and nineteen years of age, and Gideon was numbered two hundred and first.

Less than two years later, Gideon Nav would be one of only three children left: herself, a much older boy, and the infant heir of the Ninth House, daughter of its lord and lady. They knew by age five that she was not a necromancer, and suspected by eight that she would never be a nun. Certainly, they would have known by ten that she knew too much, and that she could never be allowed to go.

Gideon’s appeals to better natures, financial rewards, moral obligations, outlined plans, and simple attempts to run away numbered eighty-six by the time she was eighteen. She’d started when she was four.

 

Excerpted from Gideon the Ninth, copyright © 2019 by Tamsyn Muir.

02 Mar 22:47

Guildmasters' Guide to Waterdeep: The Yawning Portal.

by mordicai


I've never been a Magic: the Gathering player, since I'd rather dive into a roleplaying game if I can get a bunch of nerds together, but I have always admired the background worldbuilding. I picked up A Planeswalker's Guide to Alara once upon a time & enjoy dipping into the game's meta-narrative when I stumble upon it. When Guildmasters' Guide to Ravnica came out, I was instantly charmed by it. Cool new species, some new background abilities, but above all it's the factions that sold me. Some of the most iconic intellectual property in Dungeons & Dragons comes from combining the game mechanics with the logic of the cosmology, like the Outer Planes. A Blood War between the devils of a Lawful Evil Hell & the demons of the Chaotic Evil Abyss, Sigil, that sort of thing. The Guilds of Ravnica work the same way, but on the Magic: the Gathering coloured mana paradigm. It lends a "same but different" feel to the Guilds' design, & I starting thinking of a lot of various ways to work them in to D&D, most notable as pan-dimensional franchises. The ur-magical Guildpact prevents largescale conflicts from breaking out on the city-world of Ravnica, so I've decided that if all ten Guilds are able to get established somewhere (whatever that might mean mechanically) a similar protective ward, what the people of Forgotten Realms might call a mythal, would come into effect there, as well. Not to mention that the last time there was shenanigans with the Guildpact, the winning Champion ended up bestowed with the power of the Living Guildpact, whose rulings are magically binding across the plane of Ravnica, so there is probably a supernatural incentive to compete, & while each Guild has to be included for the Pact to take effect, there is no need for all ten to be equal...

Another sourcebook I'd had my eye on was Waterdeep: Dragon Heist. Running Out of the Abyss has given me a newfound appreciation for published modules. I think I'll always be a homebrew guy at heart, but there is a lot of appeal in both being able to share in a part of the collective gamer zeitgeist, of having taken part of a "classic module" like The Temple of Elemental Evil & in having someone else do a big part of the game prep for you in advance. I've never had a story relationship with the metropolis Waterdeep, & this module is meant to go from level one to five, which is, I think, a modest & reasonable length considering the way most game scheduling goes these days. I've been playing in a Ravenloft game at lunch at work & I started to think that maybe the "scene at a time" restrictions might work for my vignette-heavy style...plus it reminded me of how much Middle-earth Role Playing I did during study hall in junior high. Major flashbacks to Morlókë the Noldo Sorcerer chilling at the Grey Havens. Dragon Heist also has a structure ripe for both faction quests & for sandbox-style "guild-building," & is cosmopolitan enough to be a worthwhile target for expansion (privately, I joke that the higher level Guild diplomats were sent to Kai Shan to negotiate with the Spelljammer sphere-spanning Shou Lung). So I rallied up some of my work crew & this is who they've chosen to play:

    Jellywinks Stumbleduck of the Flayed Monkey Clan, Gnome Barbarian & secretly the envoy from the (Blue & Black) spies of House Dimir, played by Ruoxi. A failed academic freelancing on the courtiers beat for the Deep Times, delivering tabloid gossip about the aristocracy while a deep & abiding rage stirs in her soul, waiting eagerly for blood & axes. She has a creepy talking doll.

    Serous of the Nine Currents, Water Genasi Monk, devotee of Istishia, & Faerûnian convert to the (Green & White) sylvan Selesnya Conclave, played by Jeff. Graceful & with a solemn playfulness, Serous is the survivor of planar catastrophe & kaiju menace, nursed back to health in the glades of the Selesnya, where street & forest, house & stream all coexist in harmony. He has a candle that burns under water.

    Soom Splintertusk, Loxodon Warlock of the Undying, the elephantine shaman sent by the necro-fungal (Green & Black) Golgari Swarm, played by Carl. She is the only one openly wearing her Guild insignia, & she is exceedingly friendly...which what makes her periodic indifference to death & decay all the more uncanny. One of her tusks was shattered & repaired with gold, Kintsugi-style. She wears skullpaint that shifts with her moods.

    Vanri "Toad" Todeshi, Air Genasi Rogue, a pale little thing, the childlike representative from the demonic (Red & Black) Cult of Rakdos, played by Caro. Sure, an archfiend runs the Guild, but there are plenty of people who join because they like circuses, crime, or in the case of Vanri, chaos. Her slight frame can lend her a false innocence, & it is your fault if you fall for it. She has a magical pipe that blows smoke into shapes.

The adventure begins in the legendary inn The Yawning Portal, built over the ruined foundations of a crazed wizard's tower, the open well of which is the only known entrance to the infamous dungeons of Undermountain. The bartender is Durnan, an immortal adventurer, retired; a collector of knick-knacks & trophies who pours a steady pint with a thousand yard stare. Each player gets to choose an NPC from a pre-generated selection of contacts, & they each independently decide on Yagra Stonefist. Okay, that makes my life easier; herding Player Characters can be difficult but at least I've got a half-orc to corral them to one table. & so she did, convincing the massive but relatively weak Loxodon spellcaster to arm wrestle the deceptively tiny Gnome warrior. Jellywinks ("Jelly, Winks, Stumble, Duck, you can call me whatever.") wins but the ice is broken & soon they are chatting & admiring the mummified corpse leaned up against Durnan's bar in a coffin ("He's waiting for someone.") & an unopenable bottle of fizzy liquid.



Yagra gets up to get them all a round of drinks so that we can do some character descriptions & introductions, leaving them to talk amongst themselves, but that is cut short by slurs & violence. “Ya pig! Like killin’ me mates, does ya?” is what they hear, & by the time they push through the crowd, Yagra has a human with an eye tattooed on his forehead pinned & about to get knocked out for the count, but four of his friends with similar eyeball marks & brands ("The Xanathar Gang!" realize those in the know) are about to jump her from behind. Oh no, not on their watch: they get right into the thick of it. At first it's fists & non-lethal attacks, as Waterdeep is a city of laws & police, but Vanri palms a blade & tries to shiv the thug on the ground, & while no one else notices, he decides it's blades out...just in time for Jellywinks to rage & remove his head with a battleaxe. Thunk. Soom throws the body towards the chasm into the deadly dungeon in the center of the bar, but she falls short & only the head goes in. Plunk, plunk, plunk plunk. There is more bloody scuffling but soon Soom & Yagra facedown the rest, tusks & sneers, intimidating them into fleeing...except the one Serous kicks in the pants on the way out. That one decides to get a little vengeance, or at least, that was his plan before Jellywinks & Serous pinned him to the floor.

Just in time for the warty, green fingers & grotesque, carroty nose of a desiccated troll to crest the lip of the well, climbing up out of Undermountain! A cloud of sluggish, possum-sized mosquito-things surrounds it, bloated on it's blood & bile: effing stirges. "Troll!" shouts Durnan, unsheathing Grimvault, of the moonlit glimmer, of the shining edge, from beneath the bar. "Take care of the bugs & get ready to douse this thing in oil!" he barks, leaping to battle. Most of the stirges, seeing stiff resistance, sink heavy & lethargic back down into the dungeon, but three are still hungry for the sweet red kroovy. Serous & Jellywinks drag the Xanathar Gangster toward the troll, throwing him towards it as a distraction, & as stirges attack him & Soom, she calls upon black magic to envelop her mammoth form in tentacles of darkness, crushing the bandit & two of the bloodsuckers. Durnan is picked up & gored by the troll, mauled by rows of teeth, but preservers, chopping off some of the thing's fingers & a hand, massive blade ringing like a chime. Vanri uses the wind magic of her djinn bloodline to pick up a barrel of lamp fuel from the second story of the Yawning Portal, dropping it from a height onto the troll, coating it & Durnan thoroughly in oil. Yagra is behind the bar throwing bottles of liquor at the thing, & the others squash the remaining stirge & help distract the troll so Durnan can really whale on it. He does so with gusto, as Vanri picks up a torch & chucks it squarely at the troll the instant Durnan is clear. Whoosh!

Cleaning up, collecting a wriggling troll finger under glass cake lid for display on the bar, Durnan says they can't solve everything like murderhobos, but he saw the crook draw first; he’s not willing to lie for them but he is willing to tell the police that...either now or later if there is an investigation. Yagra, who they have now figured out is part of the Zhentarim black market syndicate, says she'd love to stick around & talk with "the big one with the nose & the little one with the temper," but she has to go tell someone named "Davil" that the "Eyefuckers" are out looking for trouble on their turf. As she leaves, Soom dips into a pouch with her trunk for some spell components & touches the badly injured Xanathar member, casting spare the dying to make sure he is stable, & gathers up the headless corpse of the other for disposal back in her room. She's been eyeing the mummy at the bar all night & Durnan says "his" tab is up at last call; Soom can keep ‘em after that, since that troll— or the stirges!— probably took care of his friends, so they won't be be getting back in time either. Similarly, he tells Serous that he can keep the fizzy bottle & says the others can have one of the many, many oddities stashed around the inn, but it's not a flea market: don’t go poking around, just grab something. Jellywinks takes a break from chopping the burning troll corpse & finds...a lost heirloom from her family, a necklace belonging to her stillborn sibling, while Vanri picks up a black book labeled "Nocturne" that seems to have recorded her most recent dream in some detail.



Which brings us to Volothamp Geddarm, preposterous author of such volumes as Volo's Guide to Baldur's Gate, Volo's Guide to the Sword Coast, Volo's Guide to the Sword Coast Number II, Volo's Guide to Monsters, the forthcoming Volo's Waterdeep Enchiridion, & the soon-to-be-written ...Guide to Spirits & Specters. A human wizard in at least four contradictory styles of fashion, if even a fraction of his stories are true he has lived a cursed & charmed existence. If any of them are true, but for now that's besides the point. He's single-mindedly focused on his friend Floon, which hey, sounds like Soom, & also, does Jellywinks think that the Deep Times would like to run a book review column? He's has a galley copy of his Enchiridion with him, as I hand over the printed out pages to Ruoxi as a prop. Did we accidentally create a publishing mini-game in our publishing lunch hour game? Signs point to yes. But for as pompous as he seems, his concern (& gold) seems genuine, though Vanri Todeshi turns the conversation dark & the haranguing & bargaining of the other members makes him start to think he might have read the room wrong & accidentally approached a party of evil adventurers instead of a greedy party of heroes. They assure him they'll take the job, as he flees, throwing four pouches of ten golden dragons each, having promised at least ten times that on completion.

12 Feb 18:35

Download a Free Ebook of Witchmark by C.L. Polk Before February 16, 2019!

by Tor.com

Each month, the Tor.com eBook Club gives away a free sci-fi/fantasy ebook to club subscribers.

We’re excited to announce that Witchmark by C. L. Polk is the Ebook Club pick for February 2019!

In an original world reminiscent of Edwardian England in the shadow of a World War, cabals of noble families use their unique magical gifts to control the fates of nations, while one young man seeks only to live a life of his own.

Magic marked Miles Singer for suffering the day he was born, doomed either to be enslaved to his family’s interest or to be committed to a witches’ asylum. He went to war to escape his destiny and came home a different man, but he couldn’t leave his past behind. The war between Aeland and Laneer leaves men changed, strangers to their friends and family, but even after faking his own death and reinventing himself as a doctor at a cash-strapped veterans’ hospital, Miles can’t hide what he truly is.

When a fatally poisoned patient exposes Miles’ healing gift and his witchmark, he must put his anonymity and freedom at risk to investigate his patient’s murder. To find the truth he’ll need to rely on the family he despises, and on the kindness of the most gorgeous man he’s ever seen.

Witchmark by C.L. Polk

Named in:

NPR Best Books of the Year

Buzzfeed Best Romances of 2018

Publishers Weekly Best Books of 2018

The Chicago Review of Books Best of 2018

Witchmark is available from Feb. 12, 12:01 AM ET to Feb. 15, 11:59 PM ET

Download before 11:59 PM ET Feb. 15, 2018.

Note: If you’re having issues with the sign-up or download process, please email ebookclub@tor.com.


If you’re experiencing technical difficulties, email “ebookclub@tor.com”.

06 Feb 01:29

Out of the Abyss: Farewell to the Whorlstone Tunnels.

by mordicai


Looking out at the game table from behind the Dungeon Master's screen can be such an interesting & singular perspective. You know what's behind Door Number One & Door Number Two, but somehow the any path that adventurers choose to take is always going to surprise you. How could any DM have prepared for Lilly befriending the rocs in our Temple of Elemental Evil campaign, or the "Thieves Three" hacking the throne first thing? In my Out of the Abyss campaign, they have been mucking about down in the bowels of the dungeon for a while now: there has been time for factions & monsters of Whorlstone Tunnels to notice & start responding to them. Having discovered a red dragon egg & continuing the explore the chamber of a large black monolith after a thrilling battle with a derro savant, a many-eyed horror, & their minions, the players were ambushed by reinforcements including more of the gigantic, stitched together pickled punk pigs, a derro riding one of the duergar spider mounts called "steeders," & a huge kuo-toa alchemically mutated into a briny & bubonic berserker.

Thanks to the size-altering mushrooms of the faerzress-infused caverns, Serafin, Pritpaul's part-time cannibal halfling, ate a bigwig & grew brobdingnagian; then the ranger tossed the person-sized dragon egg into one of the rickety circus carts the derro had used to house a frankenboar, & pulled the carriage to a hasty retreat. Exit, stage left...but not before smashing down the doorframe, collapsing the tunnel behind them to buy a little time. They dodn't waste any, themselves: time, that is. Ellen's elf cleric in identity crisis, Norin, heals everyone up & dabbles in a little reconnaissance along the route ahead, sleuthing out some traps & shrieking mushrooms. Pook'cha, the thri-kreen bard Sam plays, was the only one not to "eat me" themselves up to size category Large, & so the cricketman clambers into the driver's seat, trying to steer them through the corridors. Imica, drow warlock & recent only child, is not very strong, but Strength is this party's dump stat, so he takes the back, trying to both push or lift the back wheels to help turn steep corners, as the situation demands. A silence spell centered on the egg & an illusion of a sealed passage further obscures their harried departure.

The group still has the elusive derro Droki, one of their main objectives, captured. Shrunken extra-Tiny with a pygmywort mushroom, they've put the mumbling courier in a jar & poked holes in the lid. In the cone of silence no one can hear any of his gibberish, but they try to gauge his excitement levels as they approach forks in the path...so they can go the opposite direction. Between the advanced scouting, interpreting Droki's body language, lucky guesses, good rolls & the absence of those guards who were already conscripted into the enemy cavalry, the players have a miraculously smooth journey, caravanning along the scintillating lights of the tunnel to the fetid pool they found near the entrance. Of course, back then they just elected to take another passage, but the players are, for the moment, found, & they worry that if they try to go around, they'll end up lost again. & so into the pool of warm toilet water they go, doing their damndest to keep the carnival wagon afloat. They get the whole contraption across with some swimming & some rope work, the whole gang is wet, gross & bedraggled, with a couple of looming Constitution save failures left to incubate. But that's the last hurdle; they are out of the Whorlstone Tunnels, plus one dragon egg & a Droki! With Norin proudly positioned to display the belt of dwarvenkind she's wearing, borrowed from Clan Blackskull, & Pook'cha in the red dragonscale armor of the dragon Themerchaud's Flamekeepers, the PCs go full Intimidation on their way to leave the derro ghettos. In a state of constant semi-riot, the PCs are able to strong-arm their way to the barred gates, & out.



They head back to The Ghohlbrorn's Lair, infamously "...the Only Establishment Legally Allowed to Serve Non-Dwarves," to meet up with their NPC companions & plot their next move. Who exactly were they on quests for? What did they want, anyhow? & who do they actually want to help? Some of the crew have stayed in hiding, up in their room— the myconid Stool with its helpful telepathic spores, a beastly quaggoth who thinks of himself as the elf prince Derendil, & Topsy, the former wererat who is also a former twin— but the flashy gnome gambler Jimjar has set up a little impromptu casino down in the main room of the tavern, with curtains drawn & the orc Ront as his "pit boss." Being as haggling is illegal in Gracklstugh & that Jimjar has already been arrested for owning a deck of cards, the players are less than enthusiastic about this, but Jimjar tells them he's got it all figured out. He's going to be staying behind when they move on; he's found a niche for himself here. As a thank you he wants to deal the players in on a very special hand of cards; Norin is asleep & no one wants to wake her from her elf trance, & Serafin is too cautious, but Pook'cha & Imica both agree to draw a single card as Jimjar deals. I'm being a little coy but it is clearly a deck of many things; this is my first time breaking it out as a DM, & I was a little worried how much it might destabilize things. The thri-kreen chooses The Talon, loosing all his magic items instantly...most notably the dragon scale mail on loan from the Wyrmsmith Themerchaud, the red dragon himself, which should prove interesting for Pook'cha. The drow is more lucky: Imica pulls The Moon, which grants him two (1d4) wishes!
15 Jan 21:09

Download a Free Ebook of The Only Harmless Great Thing by Brooke Bolander Before January 19, 2019!

by Tor.com

The Only Harmless Great Thing Brooke Bolander

Each month, the Tor.com eBook Club gives away a free sci-fi/fantasy ebook to club subscribers.

We’re excited to announce that the first pick for 2019 is Brooke Bolander’s devastating novelette The Only Harmless Great Thing.

This heart-wrenching alternative history by Brooke Bolander imagines an intersection between the Radium Girls and noble, sentient elephants.

In the early years of the 20th century, a group of female factory workers in Newark, New Jersey slowly died of radiation poisoning. Around the same time, Topsy, an Indian elephant was deliberately put to death by electricity in Coney Island.

These are the facts.

Now these two tragedies are intertwined in a dark alternate history of rage, radioactivity, and injustice crying out to be righted. Prepare yourself for a wrenching journey that crosses eras, chronicling histories of cruelty both grand and petty in search of meaning and justice.

The Only Harmless Great Thing Brooke Bolander

The Only Harmless Great Thing is available from Jan. 15, 12:01 AM ET to Jan. 18, 11:59 PM ET

Download before 11:59 PM ET Jan. 18, 2018.

Note: If you’re having issues with the sign-up or download process, please email ebookclub@tor.com.


If you’re experiencing technical difficulties, email “ebookclub@tor.com”.

15 Jan 00:51

Star Wars: End of Empire: The Gargoyle.

by mordicai


After tonight's End of Empire session I feel pretty good about my ability to make roleplaying choices have cosmological consequences: honestly I think it is something I've always been good at as a storyteller, whether or not my players have consciously noticed it, but especially in Star Wars. Darkness rises, &...dark, to meet it. At the end of the last episode I had interrupted the colossal coliseum battle on Corellia Prime by dropping a Star Destroyer on them, rather literally; then I had the hatches & airlocks pop open & disgorge a horde of armed maniacs, Reavers-style. I think between the race, the battle royale & this session we managed to have a pretty action packed sequence of events with a wide variety of set pieces & shifting stakes. I'm proud of the pacing; adopting a hard "cinematic tone" has been teaching me a slew of new tricks.

The fallen Star Destroyer, The Gargoyle, was deliberately crash landed into the palace moon. It spews fumes & gouts of flame & radiation as coaxium reactors im-, then ex-plode, but the human beings, the human bodies deranged by the Dark Side of the Force still come horribly tumbling forth. A full ship's panoply: stormtroopers in disarray, malevolent deckhands & gunners, a wobbly, coltish AT-ST...& well, as Rachel's former Imperial officer Para Totool can tell you, the ship's complement of this class of Star Destroyer is just under forty thousand, so if even a tenth of the people inside have survived, that's more of a slavering horde than the dozen blasters of the gladiators can hope to defeat. With that dawning understanding, with poison & the Dark Side heavy in the air, each round the players have to roll versus Fear, accumulating Stress. I've not been using the Stress mechanics as much as I'd like, & it added a nice sense of menace to the encounter.

Thrown back together after being separated during the fray, Jolit, the replicant droid played by Joey, has to dodge massive chunks of falling debris, trusting his programmed instincts. Meanwhile, the Farghul Force-sensitive played by Burke, Theynur Kötturinn, hides amidst the rubble, as some of the turbolaser turrets on The Gargoyle are still armed & operational! One takes fire & with a dusty shockwave blast, a speeder-sized crater divots into being nearby: too close for comfort. Seeing the lay of the land, Jolit is shouting in slow motion over the oncoming bombardment for everyone to make a break for it— despite his protestations, he's he ends up in leadership roles, including back in the Droid Uprising on Ord Mantell— while Raj's character keeps his eyes on the horizon. The gunslinging Jax Cadderly is watching for Rao Kast, Black Sun gang boss, sleemo & twin lightsaber wielding Mandalorian assassin with a vendetta against him, currently lurking, hidden by a personal stealth field.

Oh but the laundry list of problems keeps growing: besides Dark Side zombies & maniacal gangsters, there is a Krayt dragon on the loose! With the Baron's contest now abandoned, the cat-like Theynur reaches out with the Force, continuing to draw on her spite & frustration to control the now murderous & irrevocably Tainted beast, directing it into the oncoming swarm. She's able to do so, tapping into a deep, deep well of Darkness, a bottomless void; a bleeding hole in reality that as she touches draws her in, & draws into her, as well. The taste for slaughter spreads outward from Theynur like invisible lightning, a conduit for all the malice & evil in the galaxy as a family of nerf herders in the stands begins to wail vile epithets at each other, turning to slaps, then fists & worse. Pek, one of the muscular Twi'leks sidekicks of the CEC team, eyes rolling bad in his head, points his blaster & fires...at Para?! She takes a bolt to the shoulder as the armored up spacetrooper, Zed, muscles his way to Theynur's side...

...& a small black figure with a tiny blade of red light in its hand steps out of the collapsing Star Destroyer. Limned by burning durasteel beams in a visual callback to the Girders on Ord Mantell, it's the "Frankensith" from The ISD Rubicon, a small Vigil-class corvette, which that seems to have rammed itself into the much larger Gargoyle at some point. Para feels the black veins on her throat & neck from where it sucked the life from her growing & throbbing as it draws closer, but that's nothing compared to what the out of control Farghul scout is feeling, seeing. The Jedi will be reborn only to be betrayed from within to birth a greater evil than anything the Sith accomplished. Old Zed drops his shield & takes off his mask— revealing a sort of winged sword that no one recognizes & a surprisingly young face that is familiar to the audience but somehow unknown to our friends— taking her by the shoulders. When did the mutilated, seams & stitches Sith appear? When Theynur used the Dark Side for the first time.



Jolit sees Baron Monstro's repulsorpod descending into the chaos, rallying the others towards where it's descending. The original architect of the completely unsafe & utterly unfair competition, the mercurial fancies & moods by which he'd planned the occasion have been ruined, simply ruined by this turn of events. Hopper Rose, the juiced-up lieutenant of Rao Kast, is back up after huffing himself full of medspray & stimulants, but another heavy blaster bolt from Jax drops him right back down again, as Para shoots dead the Twi'lek joyboy who shot her. Luke Skywalker will betray his apprentice. Luke Skywalker will abandon the galaxy. Zed is looking into the yellow eyes of Theynur. "Be calm. Focus. Don't give into the Dark Side. You are one with the Force." When did the Star Destroyer crash into the moon? After Theynur used the Dark Side to win the race through the Labyri— as with a wrenching of all her willpower, marshaling every last ounce of luck & the final Destiny Point token, the felinoid finds the moment of peace within herself...enough, anyway, to snap out of it & sag into her friends' arms just as the Baron hits the ground. He's jumped out of the pod, relying on his golden power armor to absorb the fall, bounding over to them through the fray, grinning, blood splattering on his gilded armor.

Baron Monstro announces to the party, quite theatrically, that he is, in fact...a man of his word: he’s going to make sure they find out everything they need to know about STARKILLER, just as his promised; mysteriously, he says Zed knows where to take them. Releasing his master of arms, he tells Zed to go with them back to their ships— "I know you're leaving with her no matter what I say, old friend!"— & to make sure they get where they are going, wink; he then calls his personal droid Oh-One on his commstick, ordering him to make sure that "the gifts he got for them" are conveyed to the False Profit. "I've spent a great deal of time thinking of just the perfect presents for my new friends & I would be extremely displeased if they weren’t delivered just because of a little spaceship accident!" Monstro apologizes, saying he’s afraid he can’t be there to give the gifts to them personally, but he never could pass up a challenge, or so he claims before taking one giant leap into the slavering melee, toward the giggling, shambling "Frankensith," just as Eris & Sshushath finish bringing the observation pod down for everyone to load into.

Shushath the Trandoshan has his slowly regrowing arm in sling with blaster out, wary for cloaked Rao, hissing to Jax & covering his back; he owe's the scoundrel a life-debt, through somewhat crooked means, but the two of them have really started hitting it off & developing a rapport, even if Jax is partially responsible for the execution of Wuukar the Wookiee, who Shushath also owed a life-debt to. He's also an ex-gladiator who did a long stint in here on Corellia Prime, which is how he knows Zed & the group's sort-of mentor, Eris Berserk. A cyborg pirate, Eris is a blue-skinned Chiss with a heavy duty black cyberarm as well as some kind of extensive internal apparatus with a blinking control box on her chest. She fusses over the group, healing a little Strain, but spits out her deathstick & curses after a few ticks.

Annoyed, angry, & a little scared, she tells the party that she’ll catch up with them, but she’s got to drag "this idiot"— jerking her thumb exaggeratedly in the direction of the Baron's suicidal jaunt— off this moon alive. He’s practically her father, or anyhow, he mostly raised her, at least. She's got no plans on dying here: Eris tells them that Oh-One won't countermand the Baron, but after they get their "gifts," whatever those are, they should tell it to get the Plume & come pick up her & Monstro— scratch that, say The Baron & her— they'll rendezvous with the party wherever Zed is taking them. That said she leans over, her code cylinder & clavicle necklace clattering, & grabs the person nearest to her, Jax Cadderly, giving him a kiss "for luck," & slipping a cloaked binary beacon onto his wrist so she can find them later. She yells to the Baron’s Herglic guards— "you scuvy mob!”— to follow her & with a shout, chases after Monstro.

Para's well acquainted with controls to these floating palanquins at this point, so it's just a moment till the rest of them are ascending into the sky, toward the dangling antennae & landing pads of Sub-Palace Besh. Below, the two surviving CEC contestants, the bubblegum & ivory Duros known as the Sugar Sisters, still chasing their dream of getting the Baron to grant them a megawealth "wish," have noticed Eris & the Herglics pursing the Baron & triangulate to meet them, flash grenades banging & blasters finally set to lethal while the wood-wise & cautious Tantal rangers from Nubia beat a strategic retreat back into the precarious black glass columns of the Labyrinth. Hopper Rose, screaming obscenities— I need to figure out what the most "Star Wars" bowdlerization of "fuck" is— couldn't stand up but was still alive when they rose out of sight, as the Krayt dragon, berserk & invincible, ran amok amidst it all.



Oh-One, the Baron's majordomo, is an antique super tactical battle droid: Clone Wars era contraband with a nice patina of age. The robot explains the logic behind their gifts: after the Eclipse Day party, the Baron went shopping based on his first impressions of them. That's part of the reason Theynur doesn't have a gift, but in a way the Baron's real gift is letting Zed go, whatever that means. Also, pointedly, she got a lightsaber. Jolit, for all that parlor talk of being stabbed by lightsabers & shot at by walkers, gets a set of very old plasteel Centurion shock trooper armor. Because of his Mandalorian rivalry, the Baron got Jax Cadderly a jet pack, figuring that he might end up needing it. Last but certainly not least, for Para Totool, the finest gift of all: a glass vivarium with a beautiful, pedigree, glittering mynock, after her interest in the Mynock Fancier's Society.

Their staryacht finally back in space, Zed muses that he thinks "that thing" must be a Wound in the Force, "like Darth Nihilus was."

“But we’ll have plenty of time to talk about on the trip; once we are past the Rishi Maze it’s still a couple more jumps to Kamino.”
09 Jan 01:39

Get Deeply Comfortable With the Cover to Tamsyn Muir’s Gideon the Ninth

by Tor.com

Gideon the Ninth cover reveal header

You’re going to have so much unmentionable fun with skeletons in 2019.

Tor.com Publishing is thrumming with excitement to reveal the cover to Tamsyn Muir’s debut novel Gideon the Ninth, which arrives on shelves on September 10, 2019.

The Emperor needs necromancers.

The Ninth Necromancer needs a swordswoman.

Gideon has a sword, some dirty magazines, and no more time for undead bullshit.

Creating the perfect cover to visualize such noncompliant serenity was risky. The character of Gideon is so well-realized that the Tor.com office often mistakenly writes emails to Gideon instead of about Gideon, so how could there possibly be a single visual that everyone would…

Oh.

OH.

Gideon the Ninth Tamsyn Muir cover

Art: Tommy Arnold. Design: Jamie Stafford-Hill

“It’s stunning,” says author Tamsyn Muir. “Tommy Arnold has captured Gideon Nav more completely than I ever thought possible: courageous, ready and intimidating, with top notes of being a galactic dirtbag.”

Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir arrives on September 10, 2019.

If you feel compelled to pre-order it now? We understand.

Buy Gideon the Ninth from:

Or at your preferred independent bookstore.

Please sanctify these first three paragraphs of Gideon the Ninth and join us in its propulsive thrall:

In the myriadic year of our Lord – the ten thousandth year of the King Undying, the kindly Prince of Death! – Gideon Nav packed her sword, her shoes, and her dirty magazines, and she escaped from the House of the Ninth.

She didn’t run. Gideon never ran unless she had to. In the absolute darkness before dawn she brushed her teeth without concern and splashed her face with water, and even went so far as to sweep the dust off the floor of her cell. She shook out her big black church robe and hung it from the hook. Having done this every day for over a decade, she no longer needed light to do it by. This late in the equinox no light would make it to her for months, in any case; you could tell the season by how hard the heating vents were creaking it out. She dressed herself from head to toe in polymer and synthetic weave, even if they were bad and scratchy. She combed her hair. Then Gideon whistled through her teeth as she unlocked her security cuff, and arranged it and its stolen key considerately on her pillow, like a chocolate in a fancy hotel.

Leaving her cell and swinging her pack over one shoulder, she took the time to walk down five flights to her mother’s nameless catacomb niche. This was pure sentiment, as her mother hadn’t been there since Gideon was little and would never go back in it now. Then came the long hike up twenty-two flights the back way, not one light relieving the greasy dark, heading to the splitoff shaft and the pit where her ride would arrive: the shuttle was due in two hours.

Brought up by unfriendly, ossifying nuns, ancient retainers, and countless skeletons, Gideon is ready to abandon a life of servitude and an afterlife as a reanimated corpse. She packs up her sword, her shoes, and her dirty magazines, and prepares to launch her daring escape. But her childhood nemesis won’t set her free without a service.

Harrowhark Nonagesimus, Reverend Daughter of the Ninth House and bone witch extraordinaire, has been summoned into action. The Emperor has invited the heirs to each of his loyal Houses to a deadly trial of wits and skill. If Harrowhark succeeds she will be become an immortal, all-powerful servant of the Resurrection, but no necromancer can ascend without their cavalier. Without Gideon’s sword, Harrow will fail, and the Ninth House will die.

Of course, some things are better left dead.

Here’s a quick glimpse at how artist Tommy Arnold brought Gideon to life further life.

Gideon the Ninth cover process Tommy Arnold

Applicable AO3 (Archive Of Our Own) tags include:

  • Swordswoman/Necromancer
  • Angst With Jokes
  • UST (Unresolved Skeletal Tension)
  • Lots of Queer Characters
  • Hurt/Comfort
  • Childhood Enemies
  • Bone Friends
  • Bone Prom
  • BonesBonesBones
  • Dad Jokes
  • Crying
12 Dec 01:09

Honey Heist: "You are what you eat. Even if that's Elon Musk."

by mordicai


24 Nov 17:14

Star Wars: End of Empire: Battle Royale!

by mordicai
The prior session of our Star Wars campaign was the obligatory race sequence that George Lucas baked into the setting's foundations; this chapter of Star Wars: End of Empire flowed right into the equally mandatory coliseum scene, chockfull of creatures & monsters, & ending with a bang. Like my D&D campaign, this episode was mostly in "initiative order," which slows down the pacing but makes for dynamic action sequences. The custom dice of Fantasy Flight serve well, but the actual nuts & bolts of the rules seem, well, confusing & over-wrought. I admit that the homebrew guy in me has been turning over a few house rules for a stripped down version of Genesys, their generic system...but for this session I continued my general agenda of handwaving away too much mechanical granularity & relying on interpreting the symbols on the dice with ad libbing & imagination.

The players are here competing at the whim of Baron Monstro, the fabulously wealthy & erratic noble who trained Eris Berserk, the party's friendly neighborhood Chiss cyborg privateer. Monstro has promised to reward them with the answers they seek about the STARKILLER project as a "favour" for their participation in his little deathrace, & while Eris, the Trandoshan ex-gladiator Sshushath the Zode & the droids look on. The rest of the competitors have their own favours to deal with, but the winners get a "wish," which the Baron has said includes anything up to half his financial holdings, & as he is the controlling shareholder of Kuat Driveyards, that means something quite substantial. "Winners" in this case meaning our protagonists, for winning the race through the Solar Labyrinth against all odds, as well as "whomever brings me the kyber pearl from the heart of the Krayt dragon that I'm about to let loose in the bone-strewn crater where the surviving maze-races have gathered," or such is the jist of it.



Here's the situation: Rao Kast is a retired assassin, a Mandalorian who dual wields two lightsabers: he's no Jedi but the laser sword is a power symbol for his people, as well. Since then, he's become a Black Sun Vigo who still likes to get his hands dirty from time to time, especially over personal grudges...like the one he has for Raj's Jax Cadderly. Somehow the gang boss got the idea that the fast-talking, gun-slinging scoundrel Jax cheated him in a game of chance, & Cadderly has had to look over his shoulder ever since. He's joined the royal rumble with his surviving gangsters, as has Old Zed, the spacetrooper armor-clad man-at-arms who has been sitting at the Baron's right hand through most of the preceding events. Add to that the CEC sponsored team of candy-coloured Duros & Twi'leks & the Tantal Rangers from Nubia that made it in time, & it is quite the full ticket.

"You should have stayed & faced the music, Jax. But instead you made me chase you, so now I'm going to make you watch me kill your friends before I turn you into bantha fodder & take your head home for my collection— I'll put it in a place of honor, right next to the crystal skull of Xim the Despot!"

Rao Kast, in his Rinzler-black armor, descends in a repulsorpod, riling up his troops— the howling, huffing Hopper Rose & the sniveling Skeeter— while failing to intimidate Jax, who knows he's just a middle manager with a sad soul patch at heart, even if he is a Crossfit ripped sociopath who sits on a literal throne of bones. Instead, the Corellian troublemaker runs over to the Sisters Sugar, the pale & pink Duros with their muscular blue Twi'lek sidekicks, & offers them the "wish" if they help the players stay alive. It's a heck of a deal & a great Negotiation check, & so they agree; the bug-eyed alien sisters clicking their heels together to activate jet boots while the tentacle-headed adonises hunker in behind cover, laying down close range cover with long-barreled blasters set on stun. (They are professional competitors on a circuit full of shifting loyalties, & are conspicuously non-fatal but pro-spectacle in their approach.)

While Jax Cadderly is making his play, the force field drops & the vast, slithering monstrosity of the Krayt dragon hoots & howls its way in— only to be captivated by the power of the Force of Others, as the felinoid alien Theynur Kötturinn, Burke's Farghul fringer, opens herself up to the connection between all living things, pacifying the creature in an eternal instant of supernatural emotional vulnerability, a Moment passing between them. While this is going on, the crowd is roaring, struggling to shout in unison. When the chants synch up, the Baron, playing histronic ringleader in his golden power armor, effects change in the coliseum. "DARK! DARK!" they scream, & with an over-dramatic flip of a switch he makes the skydome opaque, shutting out the magnetic aurora caused by the planetary eclipse.

Unable to hold tight to her tranquil center of inner peace, feeling her control of the Force & the Krayt dragon slipping, Theynur taps into her rage & frustration; the snakecharming of the beast becomes a iron fist of oppression & she brands the Black Sun gangsters in it's mind as hated foes as it breaks from her psychic grasp. The blue zaps of the CEC team's stunblasters don't seem to be doing much but keeping the creature berserk, though they do manage to channel it's frenzy of violence away from the themselves & their allies. The crowd's chants change to a call for "FIRE! FIRE!" & the Baron causes the stadium to respond in kind, pressing buttons & spewing gouts of flame from secret nozzles & sprayers.

Cut to space. What looks like a cosmic storm coalescing, complete with eerie blue flashes of lightning & condensing clouds of stellar gas, alerts the orbital watch stations as klaxons blare to life.

Gunners in glossy white backwards-pointed helmets at
Subpalace Esk: “We’ve got an unidentified hyperspace signature coming out too close to the gravity well. It’s big & the transponder says its one of ours, but we’re spooling up the defense grid, just in case.”

Both Para Totool & the human replica droid Jolit are caught in the inferno! Para, Rachel's former Imperial tech officer, makes a run for the hoverpod that Rao Kast came down in, sprinting right through the blaze & making a jump...just barely grabbing on as it resumes its ascent. "Wrench," the ID9 mini-probe droid, is off from his usual perch on Jolit's back, hovering up to go assist Para just as a geyser of napalm forces Jolit back, engulfing him in fire & separating him from the rest of the group. While he's reeling, the Black Sun gangster Skeeter, with a mohawk & a tattooed Mandalorian "T" on his face, keeps pelting him with old skulls & bones from the battleground floor before running over to tackle him, as the spice-huffing, nonsensical obscenity screaming Hopper Rose, high out of his mind & ready-deadly starts peppering them with a hail of two-fisted blaster bolts. Elsewhere, the rangers from the Nubian team have moved in aggressively on the Krayt dragon with armor piercing force pikes: they must have had inside information, because they clearly came prepared for this hunt.

Jolit, played by Joey, is a replicant whose replacement parts have him passing as a cyborg, & luckily he's stuffed into heavy enough armor that the fire safely burns itself out, as they do with Para's heavy-duty armored mechanics coveralls...though she continues to plummet skyward as the autopilot on the pod continues to gain altitude. She clambers inside & rips open the control panel, frantically pulling out components in the hopes of rigging up something, anything...& rolls uh, less than good. So instead she successfully removes...the calibrator on the repulsor drive, causing the pod to, well; drop. Things are going better for the human replica droid; throwing the thug Skeeter off of him, he lifts his vibroaxe & with a vicious roundabout embeds it straight in the punk's skull. I figure this is Star Wars, so the action is on-screen but the point of impact isn't shown: the fatal cut is mostly communicated in foley work, a gruesome sound effect for the wet thunk of finality.



Rao Kast starts off the fight with a flurry of crimson blows & feints; gaining a little space & leaving the felinoid Force user with a notch burnt in her ear, Rao brings both his dual red lightsabers to bear on Theynur...only to be foiled by the imposition of a cortosis riot shield, belonging one Old Zed! The white armored man-at-arms tosses a little cylinder to the cat-like alien, who pulls it to her with a tug of the Force, igniting it with a hissing whoosh: a blue lightsaber? Followed by the ignition of another blade of light in Zed's hand! Jax, seizing the moment, shoots the Black Sun Vigo in the back, & Rao Kast disengages, hitting a button on his suit & initiating optical camouflage, cloaking him in near-invisibility as Hopper Rose takes another hit off his aerosol mask & screams incoherent filth into the mouthpiece. "I'll send you a love letter straight from my heart, you sleemo!" Meanwhile, up in the skies above, Para's sinking hoverpod is saved thanks to the little droid ID9-WR3-H, as Wrench plugs a port in & throws on the emergency inertial dampeners. & then, just as things are getting good...

The ISD Gargoyle is an old, Imperial I-class ship, but storied; the fearsome beast painted on its hull mark it as part of the old Outer Rim fleet that the Thrawn’s Chimera once belonged to. A vicious black wound vents plasma & atmo into space; the wreckage of the Vigil-class Rubicon, flung like an javelin into the hull of the Gargoyle, which now plummets planetward.

The orbital sub-palaces start firing wild, as screams come over the comm channels, & laughter; like a clip from
Event Horizon. "Ytik, what are you doing? Why do you have your sidearm out? Oh N—" The platforms even start catching each other in friendly fire as static sputters. "...Brezel...come out come out..." The Gargoyle takes turbolaser blast after turbolaster blast, guts hollowed out & greebles blown off, but not enough to stop its momentum; the Star Destroyer keeps hull integrity & blows past the blockade, hurtling towards the surface.

Piloted, somehow still, barely holding together though slowly sheering in twain during entry, nose up, eventually crashing, plowing through the Solar Labyrinth like a white knife through black silk…sliding to a stop...right in the middle of the Coliseum, the nose of the triangle shattering ancient archeology & cutting edge technology alike, an arrow cracked in half & pointed at Theynur, as if her song to the Dark Side had beckoned it. A pause, & then the airlocks & hanger bays fall open, as a hoard of slavering, mindless stormtroopers & non-comms, engineers, pilots, officers, even a shaky-legged AT-ST all come pouring out…followed by the spontaneous violent rioting of the people in the stands.


02 Nov 19:49

Vote for Murderbot, Scalzi, and More in the 2018 Goodreads Choice Awards!

by Stubby the Rocket

Goodreads Choice Awards 2018 nominees John Scalzi Murderbot Tor

Goodreads has opened voting for the annual Goodreads Choice Awards! Since 2009, “the only major book award decided by readers” has celebrated the year’s best books in categories including Science Fiction, Fantasy, Horror, and Graphic Novels & Comics. This year, many titles from both Tor and Tor.com have been honored with nominations, including the latest installments from Seanan McGuire, Nnedi Okorafor, V.E. Schwab, and Martha Wells’ series—and even a classic Wheel of Time novel in the brand-new Best of the Best category.

Best Science Fiction

  • Iron Gold (Red Rising #4) by Pierce Brown
  • Revenant Gun (The Machineries of Empire #3) by Yoon Ha Lee
  • Record of a Spaceborn Few (Wayfarers #3) by Becky Chambers
  • The Oracle Year by Charles Soule
  • Head On (Lock In #2) by John Scalzi
  • Persepolis Rising (The Expanse #7) by James S.A. Corey
  • Vox by Christina Dalcher
  • Artificial Condition (The Murderbot Diaries #2) by Martha Wells
  • Red Clocks by Leni Zumas
  • Only Human (Themis Files #3) by Sylvain Neuvel
  • Severance by Ling Ma
  • Vengeful (Villains #2) by V.E. Schwab
  • Rosewater by Tade Thompson
  • Ball Lightning by Cixin Liu
  • Binti: The Night Masquerade (Binti #3) by Nnedi Okorafor

Best Fantasy

  • The Book of M by Peng Shepherd
  • Circe by Madeline Miller
  • Year One (Chronicles of the One, #1) by Nora Roberts
  • Wrath of Empire (Gods of Blood and Powder #2) by Brian McClellan
  • The Poppy War (The Poppy War #1) by R.F. Kuang
  • Beneath the Sugar Sky (Wayward Children #3) by Seanan McGuire
  • The Shape of Water by Guillermo del Toro and Daniel Kraus
  • Spinning Silver by Naomi Novik
  • Senlin Ascends (The Books of Babel #1) by Josiah Bancroft
  • Grey Sister (Book of the Ancestor #2) by Mark Lawrence
  • Burn Bright (Alpha & Omega #5) by Patricia Briggs
  • Age of War (The Legends of the First Empire #3) by Michael J. Sullivan
  • The Land: Predators (Chaos Seeds #7) by Aleron Kong
  • High Voltage (Fever #10) by Karen Marie Moning
  • Iron and Magic (The Iron Covenant #1) by Ilona Andrews

Best Horror

  • The Hunger by Alma Katsu
  • We Sold Our Souls by Grady Hendrix
  • The Siren and the Specter by Jonathan Janz
  • Dracul by Dacre Stoker and J.D. Barker
  • Foe by Iain Reed
  • The Devil and the Deep: Horror Stories of the Sea edited by Ellen Datlow
  • The Woman in the Woods by John Connolly
  • Craven Manor by Darcy Coates
  • The Carrow Haunt by Darcy Coates
  • Flight or Fright edited by Stephen King and Bev Vincent
  • Zero Day by Ezekiel Boone
  • The Anomaly by Michael Rutger
  • Baby Teeth by Zoje Stage
  • Ramses the Damned: The Passion of Cleopatra by Anne Rice and Christopher Rice
  • Elevation by Stephen King

Best Graphic Novels & Comics

  • Bingo Love by Tee Franklin (writer), Jenn St-Onge (artist), Joy San (colorist), and Cardinal Rae (letterer)
  • Paper Girls, Vol. 4 by Brian K. Vaughan (writer), Cliff Chiang (artist), and Matt Wilson (artist)
  • Ms. Marvel, Vol. 8: Mecca by G. Willow Wilson (writer), Marco Failla (artist), and Diego Olortegui (artist)
  • Fence, Vol. 1 by C.S. Pacat (writer/artist), Johanna the Mad (artist), and Joana Lafuente (colorist)
  • Brazen: Rebel Ladies Who Rocked the World by Pénélope Bagieu (writer/artist)
  • The Wicked + The Divine, Vol. 6: Imperial Phase, Part 2 by Kieron Gillen (writer), Jamie McKelvie (artist), and Matt Wilson (artist)
  • Be Prepared by Vera Brosgol (writer/artist)
  • The Adventure Zone: Here There Be Gerblins by Clint McElroy (writer), Griffin McElroy (writer), Justin McElroy (writer), Travis McElroy (writer), and Carey Pietsch (artist)
  • Black Hammer, Vol. 2: The Event by Jeff Lemire (writer), Dean Ormston (artist), and Dave Stewart (artist)
  • Am I There Yet? The Loop-de-Loop, Zigzagging Journey to Adulthood by Mari Andrew (writer/artist)
  • Black Bolt, Vol. 1: Hard Time by Saladin Ahmed (writer) and Christian Ward (artist)
  • Little Moments of Love by Catana Chetwynd (writer/artist)
  • Sabrina by Nick Drnaso (writer/artist)
  • Herding Cats by Sarah Andersen (writer/artist)
  • Saga, Vol. 8 by Brian K. Vaughan (writer) and Fiona Staples (artist)

Best Young Adult Fantasy & Science Fiction

  • Obsidio (The Illuminae Files #3) by Amie Kaufman and Jay Kristoff
  • Reaper at the Gates (An Ember in the Ashes #3) by Sabaa Tahir
  • The Fates Divide (Carve the Mark #2) by Veronica Roth
  • Children of Blood and Bone (Legacy of Orïsha #1) by Tomi Adeyemi
  • Restore Me (Shatter Me #4) by Tahereh Mafi
  • War Storm (Red Queen #4) by Victoria Aveyard
  • A Court of Frost and Starlight (A Court of Thorns and Roses #3.1) by Sarah J. Maas
  • Kingdom of Ash (Throne of Glass #7) by Sarah J. Maas
  • Sky in the Deep by Adrienne Young
  • Dread Nation by Justina Ireland
  • Thunder Head (Arc of a Scythe #2) by Neal Shusterman
  • Wildcard (Warcross #2) by Marie Lu
  • Lifel1k3 (Lifelike #1) by Jay Kristoff
  • The Belles (The Belles #1) by Dhonielle Clayton
  • The Cruel Prince (The Folk of the Air #1) by Holly Black

Best Debut Author

  • The Woman in the Window by A.J. Finn
  • Girls Burn Brighter by Shobha Rao
  • Everything Here is Beautiful by Mira T. Lee
  • The Kiss Quotient by Helen Hoang
  • Fruit of the Drunken Tree by Ingrid Rojas Contreras
  • The Tattooist of Auschwitz by Heather Morris
  • The Map of Salt and Stars by Jennifer Zeynab Joukhadar
  • To Kill a Kingdom by Alexandra Christo
  • Children of Blood and Bone (Legacy of Orïsha #1) by Tomi Adeyemi
  • There There by Tommy Orange
  • The Chalk Man by C.J. Tudor
  • The Poppy War (The Poppy War #1) by R.F. Kuang
  • Something in the Water by Catherine Steadman
  • A Place for Us by Fatima Farheen Mirza
  • The Astonishing Color of After by Emily X.R. Pan

The new Best of the Best category puts forward past Goodreads Choice Awards winners; below is a selected list of the SFF/horror nominees in the opening round.

Best of the Best

  • Catching Fire (The Hunger Games #2) by Suzanne Collins (All-Time Favorite of 2009)
  • Leviathan (Leviathan #1) by Scott Westerfeld (Best Science Fiction of 2009)
  • Batman: Whatever Happened to the Caped Crusader? by Neil Gaiman (writer) and Andy Kubert (artist) (Best Graphic Novel of 2009)
  • Dead and Gone (Sookie Stackhouse #9) by Charlaine Harris (Best Fantasy of 2009)
  • Towers of Midnight (The Wheel of Time #13) by Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson (Best Fantasy of 2010)
  • Feed (Newsflesh #1) by Mira Grant (Best Science Fiction of 2010)
  • Twilight: The Graphic Novel, Vol. 1 by Stephenie Meyer (writer) and Young Kim (writer/artist) (Best Graphic Novel & Comic of 2010)
  • Mockingjay (The Hunger Games #3) by Suzanne Collins (Favorite Book of 2010)
  • Dead in the Family (Sookie Stackhouse #10) by Charlaine Harris (Best Paranormal Fantasy of 2010)
  • A Dance with Dragons (A Song of Ice and Fire #5) by George R.R. Martin (Best Fantasy of 2011)
  • 11/22/63 by Stephen King (Best Science Fiction of 2011)
  • Shadowfever (Fever #5) by Karen Marie Moning (Best Paranormal Fantasy of 2011)
  • Graveminder (Graveminder #1) by Melissa Marr (Best Horror of 2011)
  • Vampire Academy: The Graphic Novel by Richelle Mead (writer), Leigh Dragoon (writer), and Emma Vieceli (artist) (Best Graphic Novel & Comic of 2011)
  • Divergent (Divergent #1) by Veronica Roth (Favorite Book of 2011)
  • The Long Earth by Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter (Best Science Fiction of 2012)
  • The Wind Through the Keyhole by Stephen King (Best Fantasy of 2012)
  • Shadow of Night (All Souls Trilogy #2) by Deborah Harkness (Best Paranormal Fantasy of 2012)
  • The Twelve (The Passage #2) by Justin Cronin (Best Horror of 2012)
  • Insurgent (Divergent #2) by Veronica Roth (Best Goodreads Author of 2012)
  • The Walking Dead, Vol. 16 by Robert Kirkman (writer), Charlie Adlard (artist), and Cliff Rathburn (artist) (Best Graphic Novel & Comic of 2012)
  • The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman (Best Fantasy of 2013)
  • Allegiant (Divergent #3) by Veronica Roth (Best Young Adult Fantasy & Science Fiction of 2013)
  • Cold Days (The Dresden Files #14) by Jim Butcher (Best Paranormal Fantasy of 2013)
  • Doctor Sleep (The Shining #2) by Stephen King (Best Horror of 2013)
  • Beautiful Creatures: The Manga by Kami Garcia (writer), Margaret Stohl (writer), and Cassandra Jean (artist) (Best Graphic Novel & Comic of 2013)
  • The Fall of Arthur by J.R.R. Tolkien (Best Poetry of 2013)
  • MaddAddam (MaddAddam #3) by Margaret Atwood (Best Science Fiction of 2013)
  • The Martian by Andy Weir (Best Science Fiction of 2014)
  • Red Rising (Red Rising #1) by Pierce Brown (Best Debut Goodreads Author of 2014)
  • Prince Lestat (The Vampire Chronicles #11) by Anne Rice (Best Horror of 2014)
  • The Book of Life (All Souls Trilogy #3) by Deborah Harkness (Best Fantasy of 2014)
  • Leaves on the Wind (Serenity #4) by Zack Whedon (writer), Fábio Moon (artist), Dan Dos Santos (artist), and Georges Jeanty (artist) (Best Graphic Novel & Comic of 2014)
  • City of Heavenly Fire (The Mortal Instruments #6) by Cassandra Clare (Best Young Adult Fantasy & Science Fiction of 2014)
  • Trigger Warning by Neil Gaiman (Best Fantasy of 2015)
  • Golden Son (Red Rising #2) by Pierce Brown (Best Science Fiction of 2015)
  • Red Queen (Red Queen #1) by Victoria Aveyard (Best Debut Goodreads Author of 2015)
  • Queen of Shadows (Throne of Glass #4) by Sarah J. Maas (Best Young Adult Fantasy & Science Fiction of 2015)
  • Saint Odd (Odd Thomas #7) by Dean Koontz (Best Horror of 2015)
  • Saga, Vol. 4 by Brian K. Vaughan (writer) and Fiona Staples (artist) (Best Graphic Novel & Comic of 2015)
  • Harry Potter and the Cursed Child by J.K. Rowling (writer), John Tiffany (writer), and Jack Thorne (writer) (Best Fantasy of 2016)
  • The Fireman by Joe Hill (Best Horror of 2016)
  • A Court of Mist and Fury (A Court of Thorns and Roses #2) by Sarah J. Maas (Best Young Adult Fantasy & Science Fiction of 2016)
  • Adulthood is a Myth by Sarah Andersen (writer/artist) (Best Graphic Novel & Comic of 2016)
  • Rebel of the Sands (Rebel of the Sands #1) by Alwyn Hamilton (Best Debut Goodreads Author of 2016)
  • Morning Star (Red Rising #3) by Pierce Brown (Best Science Fiction of 2016)
  • A Court of Wings and Ruin (A Court of Thorns and Roses #3) by Sarah J. Maas (Best Young Adult Fantasy & Science Fiction of 2017)
  • Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them: The Original Screenplay by J.K. Rowling (Best Fantasy of 2017)
  • Sleeping Beauties by Stephen King and Owen King (Best Horror of 2017)
  • Big Mushy Happy Lump by Sarah Andersen (writer/artist) (Best Graphic Novel & Comic of 2017)
  • Artemis by Andy Weir (Best Science Fiction of 2017)

Click here for the complete list of categories and nominees. Opening Round voting ends on November 4; then you can vote in the Semifinal Round from November 6-11, and the Final Round from November 13-26. The winners will be announced December 4.

29 Oct 23:41

Get A Look at Tor.com Publishing’s Early 2019 Titles!

The weather is finally cooling down at Tor.com’s home base in New York, and we’re itching to curl up under our blankets with a good book or two, or maybe even eleven… Below, check out the cover designs and descriptions for all the novellas and novels that Tor.com Publishing will be bring out in Winter 2019, from January through April. Plus, we’ve got 5 new ebook bundles—each compiled by one of our editors—featuring some of our favorite previously published titles!

It’s an exciting new season for us—we’re visiting goblin markets, navigating a magical Milan, and solving a paranormal mystery or two!

 

In an Absent Dream (Wayward Children #4)

Written by Seanan McGuire
Cover art by Robert Hunt
Cover design by Fort
Available January 8th, 2019

What’s it about?

A stand-alone fantasy tale from Seanan McGuire’s Alex award-winning Wayward Children series, which began with Every Heart a Doorway. This fourth entry and prequel tells the story of Lundy, a very serious young girl who would rather study and dream than become a respectable housewife and live up to the expectations of the world around her. As well she should.

When she finds a doorway to a world founded on logic and reason, riddles and lies, she thinks she’s found her paradise. Alas, everything costs at the goblin market, and when her time there is drawing to a close, she makes the kind of bargain that never plays out well.

Buy In An Absent Dream from:


 

All Systems Red (The Murderbot Diaries #1 — Hardcover)

Written by Martha Wells
Cover art by Jamie Jones
Cover design by Christine Foltzer
Available January 22rd, 2019

What’s it about?

In a corporate-dominated spacefaring future, planetary missions must be approved and supplied by the Company. Exploratory teams are accompanied by Company-supplied security androids, for their own safety.

But in a society where contracts are awarded to the lowest bidder, safety isn’t a primary concern.

On a distant planet, a team of scientists are conducting surface tests, shadowed by their Company-supplied ‘droid—a self-aware SecUnit that has hacked its own governor module, and refers to itself (though never out loud) as “Murderbot.” Scornful of humans, all it really wants is to be left alone long enough to figure out who it is.

But when a neighboring mission goes dark, it’s up to the scientists and their Murderbot to get to the truth.

Buy All Systems Red: The Murderbot Diaries from:


 

Vigilance

Written by Robert Jackson Bennett
Cover art by Brian Stauffer
Cover design by Christine Foltzer
Available January 29th, 2019

What’s it about?

The United States. 2030. John McDean executive produces “Vigilance,” a reality game show designed to make sure American citizens stay alert to foreign and domestic threats. Shooters are introduced into a “game environment,” and the survivors get a cash prize.

The TV audience is not the only one that’s watching though, and McDean soon finds out what it’s like to be on the other side of the camera.

Buy Vigilance from:


 

Your Favorite Band Cannot Save You

Written by Scotto Moore
Cover photo © Shutterstock
Available February 5th, 2019

What’s it about?

I was home alone on a Saturday night when I experienced the most beautiful piece of music I had ever heard in my life.

Beautiful Remorse is the hot new band on the scene, releasing one track a day for ten days straight. Each track has a mysterious name and a strangely powerful effect on the band’s fans.

A curious music blogger decides to investigate the phenomenon up close by following Beautiful Remorse on tour across Texas and Kansas, realizing along the way that the band’s lead singer, is hiding an incredible, impossible secret.

Buy Your Favorite Band Cannot Save You from:


 

The Test

Written by Sylvain Neuvel
Cover design by Jonathan Gray
Available February 12th, 2019

What’s it about?

Britain, the not-too-distant future.

Idir is sitting the British Citizenship Test. He wants his family to belong.

Twenty-five questions to determine their fate. Twenty-five chances to impress. When the test takes an unexpected and tragic turn, Idir is handed the power of life and death.

How do you value a life when all you have is multiple choice?

Buy The Test from:


 

The Haunting of Tram Car 015

Written by P. Djéli Clark
Cover art by Stephan Martinere
Cover design by Christine Foltzer
Available February 19, 2018

What’s it about?

Cairo, 1912: The case started as a simple one for the Ministry of Alchemy, Enchantments and Supernatural Entities—handling a possessed tram car.

Soon, however, Agent Hamed Nasr and his new partner Agent Onsi Youssef are exposed to a new side of Cairo stirring with suffragettes, secret societies, and sentient automatons in a race against time to protect the city from an encroaching danger that crosses the line between the magical and the mundane.

Buy The Haunting of Tram Car 015 from:


 

Alice Payne Rides (Alice Payne #2)

Written by Kate Heartfield
Cover art by Cliff Nielsen
Cover Design by Christine Foltzer
Available March 5th, 2019

What’s it about?

After abducting Arthur of Brittany from his own time in 1203, thereby creating the mystery that partly prompted the visit in the first place, Alice and her team discover that they have inadvertently brought the smallpox virus back to 1780 with them.

Searching for a future vaccine, Prudence finds that the various factions in the future time war intend to use the crisis to their own advantage.

Can the team prevent an international pandemic across time, and put history back on its tracks? At least until the next battle in the time war…

Buy Alice Payne Rides from:


 

Permafrost

Written by Alastair Reynolds
Cover design by Jamie Stafford-Hill
Photographs by Tim Robinson/Arcangel Images and mahos/Shutterstock
Available March 19th, 2019

What’s it about?

2080: at a remote site on the edge of the Arctic Circle, a group of scientists, engineers and physicians gather to gamble humanity’s future on one last-ditch experiment. Their goal: to make a tiny alteration to the past, averting a global catastrophe while at the same time leaving recorded history intact. To make the experiment work, they just need one last recruit: an ageing schoolteacher whose late mother was the foremost expert on the mathematics of paradox.

2028: a young woman goes into surgery for routine brain surgery. In the days following her operation, she begins to hear another voice in her head… an unwanted presence which seems to have a will, and a purpose, all of its own – one that will disrupt her life entirely. The only choice left to her is a simple one.

Does she resist… or become a collaborator?

Buy Permafrost from:


 

Miranda in Milan

Written by Katharine Duckett
Cover art and design by David Wardle
Available March 26th, 2019

What’s it about?

After the tempest, after the reunion, after her father drowned his books, Miranda was meant to enter a brave new world. Naples awaited her, and Ferdinand, and a throne. Instead she finds herself in Milan, in her father’s castle, surrounded by hostile servants who treat her like a ghost. Whispers cling to her like spiderwebs, whispers that carry her dead mother’s name. And though he promised to give away his power, Milan is once again contorting around Prospero’s dark arts.

With only Dorothea, her sole companion and confidant to aid her, Miranda must cut through the mystery and find the truth about her father, her mother, and herself.

Buy Miranda in Milan from:


 

Perihelion Summer

Written by Greg Egan
Cover art and design by Drive Communication
Available April 16th, 2019

What’s it about?

Taraxippus is coming: a black hole one tenth the mass of the sun is about to enter the solar system.

Matt and his friends are taking no chances. They board a mobile aquaculture rig, the Mandjet, self-sustaining in food, power and fresh water, and decide to sit out the encounter off-shore. As Taraxippus draws nearer, new observations throw the original predictions for its trajectory into doubt, and by the time it leaves the solar system, the conditions of life across the globe will be changed forever.

Buy Perihilion Summer from:


 

Ragged Alice

Written by Gareth L. Powell
Cover design by Fort
Cover photo © Andrew Davis/Trevillion Images
Available April 23rd, 2019

What’s it about?

A small Welsh town. A string of murders. And a detective who can literally see the evil in people’s souls.

Orphaned at an early age, DCI Holly Craig grew up in the small Welsh coastal town of Pontyrhudd. As soon as she was old enough, she ran away to London and joined the police. Now, fifteen years later, she’s back in her old hometown to investigate what seems at first to be a simple hit-and-run, but which soon escalates into something far deadlier and unexpectedly personal—something that will take all of her peculiar talents to solve.

Buy Ragged Alice from:


 

Tor.com Publishing Editorial Spotlight #1: A Selection of Novellas

Edited by Carl Engle-Laird
Cover design by Esther Kim
Available January 22, 2019

A curated selection of novellas by Tor.com Publishing editor Carl Engle-Laird, featuring:

  • The Black Tides of Heaven by JY Yang
  • Runtime by S.B. Divya
  • The Sorcerer of the Wildeeps by Kai Ashante Wilson
  • Killing Gravity by Corey J. White
  • The Murders of Molly Southbourne by Tade Thompson

Buy Tor.com Publishing Editorial Spotlight #1 from:


 

Tor.com Publishing Editorial Spotlight #2: A Selection of Novellas

Edited by Lee Harris
Cover design by Esther Kim
Available February 26, 2019

A curated selection of novellas by Tor.com Publishing editor Lee Harris, featuring:

  • Binti by Nnedi Okorafor
  • Witches of Lychford by Paul Cornell
  • Dusk or Dark or Dawn or Day by Seanan McGuire
  • All Systems Red by Martha Wells
  • The Atrocities by Jeremy C. Shipp

Buy Tor.com Publishing Editorial Spotlight #2 from:


 

Tor.com Publishing Editorial Spotlight #3: A Selection of Novellas

Edited by Ellen Datlow
Cover design by Esther Kim
Available March 12, 2019

A curated selection of novellas by Tor.com Publishing editor Ellen Datlow, featuring:

  • The Ballad of Black Tom by Victor LaValle
  • The Twilight Pariah by Jeffrey Ford
  • Mapping the Interior by Stephen Graham Jones
  • Gods, Monsters, and the Lucky Peach by Kelly Robson

Buy Tor.com Publishing Editorial Spotlight #3 from:


 

Tor.com Publishing Editorial Spotlight #4: A Selection of Novellas

Edited by Ann VanderMeer
Cover design by Esther Kim
Available April 9, 2019

A curated selection of novellas by Tor.com Publishing editor Ann VanderMeer, featuring:

  • Mandelbrot the Magnificent by Liz Ziemska
  • The Warren by Brian Evenson

Buy Tor.com Publishing Editorial Spotlight #4 from:


 

Tor.com Publishing Editorial Spotlight #5: A Selection of Novellas

Edited by Jonathan Strahan
Cover design by Esther Kim
Available April 30, 2019

A curated selection of novellas by Tor.com Publishing editor Jonathan Strahan, featuring:

  • The Dream-Quest of Vellitt Boe by Kij Johnson
  • Passing Strange by Ellen Klages
  • Agents of Dreamland by Caitlin R. Kiernan
  • Proof of Concept of Gwyneth Jones
  • Time Was by Ian McDonald

Buy Tor.com Publishing Editorial Spotlight #5 from: