More Endless Quest Books!

Today is the US debut for two more books in my Dungeons & Dragons: Endless Quest series. These are pick-a-path books for readers ages 10 and up, and they take place in some of the most famous settings for the world’s most popular tabletop roleplaying game.

The new ones are Escape from Castle Ravenloft and The Mad Mage’s Academy. In Escape from Castle Ravenloft, you are a cleric who’s been captured by the immortal Baron Strahd von Zarovich, and you have to escape his castle before the vampire lord makes you one of his minions. This is much easier said than done.

In The Mad Mage’s Academy, you’re a rogue who’s been hired to steal a spell book from the Mad Mage Halaster himself. To do so, you pose as a young wizard who wants to study under Halaster at his academy, located deep in the heart of the massive dungeon known as Undermountain. Unfortunately, you don’t know any actual magic, so you have to act fast before you’re found out.

You can purchase both books in the US, starting today. I understand they’ll be available in the UK starting on September 19.

In other wild news, all six books will be available as audiobooks early next year. I’m not sure how they’re going to handle the branching paths in the books, but I’m eager to find out!

Hello, Halo Outpost!

This weekend, I’m heading off to Halo Outpost Discovery in Anaheim, California. HOD is a multi-media traveling celebration of all things related to Halo, and Anaheim is the last stop of this summer’s inaugural tour. They’ve called in a bunch of special guests to help them cap everything off, including loads of Halo writers and actors like Steve Downes and Jen Taylor, who give voice to Master Chief and Cortana, respectively.

I’ll be there for a signing on Saturday at 5 PM, along with Kelly Gay and my old pal Troy Denning. On Sunday, I’m on a panel about Halo novels with Troy, Kelly, and Jeff Easterling at 12:15 PM. After that, Kelly, Troy and I will be signing again from 2—3 PM.

Beyond all that, I’ll be wandering around, enjoying the exhibits and fun myself. I’m a Halo fan from back before the game was even announced, and I’m looking forward to being dazzled all weekend long. If you’re in the area, come out and join me!

See You at Gen Con!

This is my favorite show of the year. I never miss it. I started going when I was a kid, and this will be my 38th in a row. Better yet, it falls across my birthday once again, so there’s double reason to celebrate.

If you’re a tabletop gamer of any stripe and have the time and means to make it to Indianapolis this week, you should be at Gen Con. Here’s my schedule for this year’s show. I hope to see you there!

Wednesday, July 31

  • 9 PM: The Diana Jones Award party. I host this private event for industry professionals every year to help kick off the show on Gen Con Eve.

Thursday, August 1

  • 11 AM: Fireside with Peter Adkison. I’ll be one of the guests chatting with Peter Adkison, founder of Wizards of the Coast and co-owner of Gen Con, about the convention’s history.

Friday, August 2

Saturday, August 3

  • 10 AM:I Want to Be a Writer. Where Do I Start? What are the qualifications you need to be a writer? Or do you really just need a pen, a chair, and a prayer? Robyn Bennis, Aaron Rosenberg, Karen Bovenmyer, and I discuss it.
  • 11 AM: Passing Story Time Without Losing Readers. The pace of your story is as important as the plot and the characters. Tee Morris, Melissa Olson, and Elizabeth Vaughan, and I discuss the passage of time in fiction.
  • 12 PM: Can Playing Games Help You Write?Many authors in the science fiction and fantasy genre are also gamers, but does it make them better writers? Bruce Cordell, Gregory A. Wilson, Kirk Dougal, and I discuss our experiences.
  • 4 PM: Signing with Matt Forbeck. The one official signing slot I have at the show. Come say hi!

See You at Comic-Con!

Next week, I’m off to San Diego for Comic-Con International. I’ve been going to San Diego Comic-Con on and off since the mid-’90s, when Jim Lee used to bring me out to demo the games I helped design with WildStorm (his part of Image Comics at the time). It’s something like quintupled in size since then, but I still always enjoy it when I can make it. Sure, it’s massive, overcrowded, and crazy, but it’s also packed with people geeking out about all sorts of wonderful things that I love too.

This year, Candlewick Press is bringing me out again to help promote my Dungeons & Dragons Endless Quest books. My public schedule includes: 

Thursday, July 18

  • 1:30 PM: Care and Nurturing of Someone Else’s Universe. (Horton Grand Theatre) What are the responsibilities and opportunities writers embrace when writing about iconic characters in universes created by someone else, whether an individual or a corporation? Talk comics, cartoons, games, and television universes with F. C. Yee (Avatar: The Last Airbender: The Rise of Kyoshi), Matt Forbeck(Dungeons & Dragons: Escape the Underdark: An Endless Quest Book), Brenna Yovanoff (Stranger Things: Runaway Max), Adam Christopher (Stranger Things: Darkness on the Edge of Town), Kiersten White(Slayer), and Gary Phillips (Batman: The Killing Joke), and Fictitious podcast host, Adron Buske.
  • 3 PM: Post-panel autographing session in the Sails Pavilion, AA09. 

Friday, July 19

  • 2 PM:  International Association of Media Tie-In Writers: Scribe Awards. (Room 32AB) Jonathan Maberry (X-Files) hosts this year’s Scribe Awards for excellence in tie-in writing, including honoring this year’s Grandmaster Award “Faust” winner, Nancy Holder. Other panelists include Matt Forbeck (The Marvel Encyclopedia, Halo: Bad Blood), Michael Kogge (The Last Jedi: A Junior Novel), Chris Ryall (comic book writer, publisher at IDW), Max Allan Collins (Road to Perdition, Mike Hammer), Christie Golden (Star Wars, World of Warcraft), and David Boop (Predator, Veronica Mars).
  • 3:30 PM: Post-panel autographing session in the Sails Pavilion, AA04. 

Saturday, July 20

  • 11:30 AM: Signing at the Candlewick Press booth (#5532). We should have copies of Dungeons & Dragons Endless Quest: To Catch a Thief available for my illegible scribbling. 

I’ll also be wandering around the show with a couple of my kids, catching up with friends, and generally goggling at all the cool stuff, which should make for a wonderful week. Hope to see you there!

New Endless Quest Books on the Way!

The folks at Studio Press/Candlewick Press have revealed some more information about my next two Dungeons & Dragons Endless Quest books. For those not in the know, these are pick-a-path books set in the worlds of the most popular roleplaying game in the world, Dungeons & Dragons. I had four of them come out last September, and there are another two on the horizon.

As you can tell from the images above, these are Escape From Castle Ravenloft and The Mad Mage’s Academy.

Escape From Castle Ravenloft features a cleric trying to escape from the clutches of Count Strahd von Zarovich, the vampire lord of Castle Ravenloft himself. Let’s just say that he’s not eager to let you leave.

The Mad Mage’s Academy is set on the 9th level of Undermountain, the legendary dungeon that riddles the mountain beneath the great fantasy metropolis of Waterdeep. You’re a rogue who’s been hired to steal a spellbook from the legendary mage Halaster, and well, that’s probably not the smartest decision you ever made – but it’s too late to back out now.

They’ll both be available in paperback and hardcover editions and should be out wherever excellent books are sold. Look for them on September 3rd!

Endless Quest Live!

On Saturday, the folks at Candlewick Press – the US publishers of my Dungeons & Dragons Endless Quest books – hosted a playthrough of one of my upcoming books, The Mad Mage’s Academy. We recorded the entire thing live for YouTube, and we’ll have a trimmed-down highlights reel available later this summer.

I read through the book, and every time we got to a decision moment, my panel of players debates which path to take. The panel included Whitney “Strix” Beltrán (an amazing writer, and the co-designer of Bluebeard’s Bride, among other stellar things), Stephanie Pando (marketing maven at Candlewick), and my eldest son, Marty Forbeck (writer for The Daily Cardinal, and a stunningly great kid). We all had a ball, and now you can watch along and enjoy too.

Rage 2 Released!

I’m a bit slow on the draw on this, but the video game Rage 2 released last week, which means I can finally talk about my involvement with it.

Rage 2

I worked on this game for a bit back in the fall of 2017, with my friends at Avalanche Studios, along with Id Software and Bethesda Softworks. I helped out with the basic storyline, the nature of the characters, and many of the cutscenes, which the rest of the team used to formulate the game’s full narrative after my work was done. I’m sure a great deal of what I contributed was improved upon in the months following that, but you can still see bits of it in the final product, for which I’m credited as “Script Writer.”

I worked with Avalanche several years ago on a game that was never even announced, much less released. This is one of the sadder aspects of the video game industry. A large number of games are shelved before the public ever hears about them, and no one ever gets to see the work that went into them. In most cases, everyone still gets paid, but few people get into game development solely for the paycheck. That’s why it’s a true thrill to finally have something I worked on with the Avalanche team be enjoyed by players worldwide.

I had a wonderful time working with so many different people on the game, but I should give a special shout-out to Christofer Sundberg, John Fuller, and Rebecca Deans for bringing me onto the project. Also to Jason Bergman at Bethesda and Tim Willits at Id for their deft guidance. Best of all, I got to work with the Avalanche design team headed up by my pals Odd Ahlgren, Magnus Nedfors, and Loke Wallmo.

If you like first-person shooters slammed full of eye-bursting colors and action – and wow, I certainly do – check out Rage 2. It’s fantastic fun.

Heading North for Arctic Game Week!

I love getting out of the house and meeting fans and friends. I spend a lot of time at my desk in my house, and seeing the rest of the world makes for a good break from that.

This May 29—June 2, I’m heading to northern Sweden for Arctic Game Week, which includes a number of different festivals in SkellefteÃ¥, a city that sits just shy of the Arctic Circle. Now, I live in Wisconsin, so I know how to handle cold, but I’m grateful that I’m going up that far in the late spring rather than the dead of winter.

On May 29 I’ll be at guest at the Arctic Game Conference, along with luminaries like Fred Malmberg, Magnus Nedfors, and Mike Elliott. I’m speaking at 10:40 AM as part of the Analog Games & Storytelling track. The topic includes two things on which I’ve built a lot of my career:

Mechanics and Metaphor

There’s a long standing debate among game designers about whether you should start with a game’s mechanics or its setting, the crunch or the fluff. This is a false dichotomy. The best game designers work hard to dovetail the two efforts together into a seamless whole in which the mechanics and the setting work together in a seamless metaphor. This helps to make the game intuitive not only for the designer but the players, who can then figure out how the rules are supposed to work by the way in which the setting is presented.

After that, I’ll also be at Nordsken from May 30—June 2, along with lots of other guests, including Marvel’s editor-in-chief, C. B. Cebulski. I’m not sure what my schedule will be there, other than playing lots of games. If you can make it up there, though, be sure to say hi!

For the rest of 2019, I’m planning on being at:

More details on those bits as I have them. Hope to see you on the road!

Exalted: Circle of Protection Out Today!

Today marks the debut of Exalted: Circle of Protection, a brand-new original novel set in the world of the third edition of the Exalted tabletop roleplaying game. It’s the tale of a young woman named Palym, who leaves her village to travel to the big city – and promptly wanders into a magical disaster that nearly gets her killed. She finds herself in Heaven as a newly minted Exalted (hero) of Mercury, charged with investigating the death of the hero who saved her life.

I wrote this novel for the backers of the Kickstarter for the Exalted RPG. It’s the sequel to the short story “The Circle Will Be Broken,” which appeared in the anthology Exalted: Tales from the Age of Sorrows. 

You might notice that I have a co-author on this book, something that’s relatively rare for me. The last time was when I wrote Guild Wars: Ghosts of Ascalon with my pal Jeff Grubb, and the reasons for this are almost identical.

The latest edition of the Exalted roleplaying game was being developed as I wrote the book, which made for a bit of a challenge, as things in the setting evolved separately while I was writing my story. Because of that, one of the developers of the game – James Huggins – offered to come in and make sure that the novel matched up well with what he was helping create for the game. In the end, he contributed so much that I asked the publisher to credit James as my co-author on the book.

The plot and characters in the story are mostly mine, but James did phenomenal work to make sure that it wasn’t just a great story but a great Exalted story. For that, he deserves cover credit for sure.

Anyhow, I hope you enjoy the story. It’s full of twists and turns and deals with things like family and friendship and love – and magically gifted heroes battling gigantic, brain-bending monsters capable of leveling entire cities. Just the way we like it.

Blood Bowl Anthology Out Today!

Death on the Pitch, an anthology that collects a series of recently published Blood Bowl stories, debuts today in both paperback and ebook formats. This collection features my short story “The Hack Attack,” which centers on a sort of “Where Are They Now” show about the characters in my Blood Bowl novels, many years later. It also features stories by Josh Reynolds, Robbie MacNiven, Andy Hall, Graeme Lyon, Alec Worley, David Annandale, Gav Thorpe, David Guymer, and Guy Haley. 

Each of the stories normally costs something like $4.99 each as an ebook, so getting them packed together like this offers a comparatively amazing deal. On top of that, this is the first time they’ve been in print, to my knowledge, so if you prefer your reading in dead-tree-based formats, now’s your chance.