The first time I met Richard Knaak was many years ago at one Gen Con or another. They tend to blur together over the years into one long convention that spans months in your sleep-deprived mind. He was a Dragonlance author back then, one of the best, although he’s added several feathers to his cap since. He’s written several novels for Warcraft and Diablo – burnishing his reputation as one of the finest tie-in fantasy novelists around – plus a long list of others. His latest World of Warcraft novel, Stormrage, just released this month and rocketed straight up USA Today‘s bestsellers’ list.

I had the pleasure of editing three novels Richard wrote for the Age of Conan series published by Ace. Besides the excellent writing, the best part about each book was its ending. Every one of them made me want to stand up and cheer the hero while also making me wonder what new adventures life might have in store for him. As both a writer and an editor, I can tell you that’s a damned hard thing to do, but Richard made it seem easy and natural, even when the trilogy came to a thundering end.

Ever the professional, he agreed to read Amortals and give me a blurb. He wrote:

“With Amortals, Matt Forbeck takes the hard-boiled detective story and the SF genre and forges a fascinating, gritty saga like none other!”

– Richard Knaak

If you’ve played many MMOs over the past few years, you’ve probably played a game that Jack Emmert helped create. As the chief creative officer of Cryptic Studios, he led the design for City of Heroes/City of Villains, Champions Online, and Star Trek Online. Every one of them offers sharp combination of engaging gameplay and clever storylines designed to keep you coming back for more.

I first met Jack back in the ’90s when I was the president of Pinnacle Entertainment Group. He was a huge tabletop roleplaying gamer in those days, and we had many beers at Origins, Gen Con, and other conventions. He contributed to our Deadlands and Hell on Earth game lines, and his writing was always sharp and inventive, a pleasure to publish. He was working on his post-graduate degrees at the time, and you could see how he jammed every bit of his brilliance into the game writing as he must have been putting into his school work.

After Jack moved on to the computer game industry and City of Heroes became a smash hit, he wound up hiring many members of my old Pinnacle crew – Shane Hensley, Zeke Sparkes, John Hopler, and more – some of whom still work with him at Cryptic today. I’ve managed to avoid that fate by stubbornly refusing to move, but he was still kind enough to forgive me for that and read Amortals. Here’s what he had to say about it:

“A near-future detective story that asks a fundamental question: what is it to be human when you never really die? A taut existential action thriller and a must read!”

– Jack Emmert

Ken Hite was once talking with someone who had started to slag Rich Dansky. Ken put a hand up to stop the man and said, “Before you continue, do you remember the bit in Grosse Pointe Blank, when John Cusack asks the friend he’s not seen for ten years to help him get rid of a body? And the guy just does it without asking a thing? That’s how Rich Dansky is for me.”

I can only agree. Rich is a mensch’s mensch and a fantastic friend. The fact that he’s also a hell of a writer helps explain how we came to hang in the same circles.

Rich started out at White Wolf countless years ago, where he was best known for his excellent work on Wraith: The Oblivion and outstanding books like Charnel Houses of Europe. That’s also where he was when I first met him, back when I made most of my living off creating roleplaying games too. He wisely managed to segue from that into a long-term career with Red Storm Entertainment, where he’s now the manager of design and also serves as the Head Clancy Writer for all of Ubisoft‘s Tom Clancy-related titles. This is a man who knows his technothrillers.

On top of that, Rich is a firecracker of a novelist. His Firefly Rain – originally published in hardcover by Wizards of the Coast‘s now-shuttered Discoveries line – is a as great a Southern gothic ghost story as you’re bound to find. The paperback edition is due out from Simon & Shuster on April 6, so those unfortunate enough to miss it the first time around can finally get to enjoy it too.

It’s no surprise then that when I asked Rich for a blurb that he kicked out a doozy:

“Amortals fuses cutting-edge technothrillers with old-school action and storytelling. Matt Forbeck tells a wickedly cool, scarily plausible story that hits the ground running and then picks up speed.”

– Richard Dansky

The next blurb for Amortals came from my longtime friend Monte Cook. He’s probably best known for his work as one of the co-designers of Dungeons & Dragons 3rd Edition, but his career has spanned much more than that. He started out in the gaming industry back in 1988, working for Iron Crown Enterprises. In 1990, he became the Hero System/Champions line developer and edited the first book I ever wrote entirely on my own: Western Hero. Even back then, it was clear that Monte knew what he was doing. He treated me well and always encouraged me to push harder and give the job my best.

Monte later moved on to TSR, the original publishers of Dungeons & Dragons, where he worked on projects like Planescape, Dark Matter, and The Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil. When Wizards of the Coast bought TSR, he moved out to Seattle and became part of the core team for 3rd Edition. He and his wife Sue left Wizards in 2001 to launch Malhavoc Press, which published standouts like Ptolus and Arcana Evolved. A few years ago, he and Sue moved back to Wisconsin, and Monte joined my writers’ group, the Alliterates, which means I get the bonus of seeing him a lot more often. Since then, he’s also written the excellent The Skeptic’s Guide to Conspiracies and launched the ambitious and entertaining DungeonADay.com.

About Amortals, Monte said:

“With Amortals, Matt’s whipped up an action-packed thrill-ride with the occasional sucker punch to the brain you won’t see coming.”

– Monte Cook

For some reason, the book seems to inspire blurbs with boxing metaphors. That can only be a good thing.

As I’ve mentioned, I hit up a lot of great people for blurbs. One of the early replies came from Ben Templesmith, one of my favorite comic-book artists of the last decade. I met him through our mutual friends at IDW a few years back. About Amortals, he wrote:

“It kicks like a mule & whispers sweet nothings in your ear like Mike Tyson in a boxing match.”

– Ben Templesmith

Ben is one of those amazing talents that stuns everyone upon arrival. He’s most famous for his work as the co-creator of 30 Days of Night, a vampire story in which a band of bloodsuckers rolls into the northernmost town in the US to party just as the sun sets for 30 days. The high concept sets the story up, but it’s Ben’s artwork (along with Steve Niles‘s writing) that pile-drivers it down. Ben’s also rightfully well known for his work on Fell with Warren Ellis, and he’s proved his own chops as a writer with Welcome to Hoxford, Wormwood: Gentlemen Corpse, and Singularity 7.

Ben’s illustrations are the antithesis of the standard line art you see in most comics. When you first look at his work, you wonder how such energetic and seemingly rough-hewn pictures could tell stories so well. It’s because Ben does an amazing job of infusing his creations with such human expressions and poignancy that they form a fresh and sometimes disturbing storytelling style. Plus, the work’s just beautiful.

Ben’s also as hardworking and level-headed a guy as you’re likely to find, especially rare in someone with a sharp a sense of fun. He’s relentless in finding new things to do and then doing them well, even while maintaining a grueling calendar of promotional events. Speaking of which, be sure to check out his latest comic book, Choker, written by Ben McCool. It’s on stands now, and it rocks.

In my quest for gathering blurbs, I turned to Mike Stackpole too. I’ve known Mike for maybe 20 years, and when I was fresh out of college, Mike was already chasing down the kind of career I wanted for myself. He’d started out as a crackerjack game designer, both for tabletop and video games, and he parlayed that into a stellar run as a New York Times bestselling novelist. He started with the first Battletech novels and later moved on to writing some of the early Star Wars novels and from there into his own original material.

As I followed in Mike’s wake, I often cornered him at conventions and drilled him with all sorts of questions. This was long before he set himself up as a writing teacher with his author’s newsletter, The Secrets, but even back then he was always happy to share everything he’d learned along the way. The summer my first mass-market novel – Secret of the Spiritkeeper – came out, I had the honor of being on a panel at Gen Con with Mike and another bestselling gaming author, Tracy Hickman. One of the reasons I do so many panels myself at shows is because Mike long ago showed me how important it is to share what you know with others – if only so that they don’t make the same mistakes as you.

In his continuing efforts to lend me a hand, Mike gave me a fantastic blurb:

In Amortals, Matt Forbeck does what all great science fiction authors do: weave thought-provoking concepts through a cracking good story. The morality of immortality is a fascinating idea with which Matt Forbeck deals deftly. If you are looking for a great story with action, politics, great characters and an eye toward what might well be our future, Matt Forbeck’s Amortals is not to be missed!

– Mike Stackpole