Born to the Blade continues with “The Gauntlet”

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Born to the Blade episode 4 “The Gauntlet” is here!

Kris will face six warders in their challenge to win Rumika a seat in the Warders’ Circle.

Born to the Blade - Episode 4 - "The Gauntlet" by Michael R. Underwood. From Serial Box Publishing

But has Kris made the alliances needed to win? Will they try to power through on prowess alone?

“The Gauntlet” completes act one of the season. Relationships are put to the test, characters forced to choose between orders & their own desire.

This episode was an absolute delight to write, and here’s some of the why:

“The Gauntlet” was the first episode I’d written once I had already read other team member’s takes on the characters and world. We’d already developed the characters at the summit, but as a writer, it is a whole other thing to read how other writers depict characters.

This episode was where I really started to see what this project could do in terms of impacting my craft, the challenge of working back and forth with the team as well as putting my personal stamp on the world in prose and not just concept.

A big part of that stamp was The Gauntlet itself. I drew on my personal experience competing in martial arts tournaments, from TKD to SCA fencing, as well as non-physical tournaments, where mental will is perhaps even more prominent as a factor in determining success.

Putting Kris through six life-defining duels over a very short period of time, while trying to maneuver politically to garner support even when they might not win, meant drawing on my own experiences as a competitor. It meant remembering the bruises, the heartbreak, the elation.

The other part that was the most fun was getting to showcase the different warders and their fighting styles. I drew on my experience with historical European martial arts as well as East Asian styles.

And then I got to add wizard dueling on top.

The idea for the magic system in Born to the Blade came in part from a desire to have magic feel *embodied*. To push hard against the direction that D&D pointed, where Wizards have d4 hit dice and can’t swing a sword worth jack.

The duels I wrote in the gauntlet and throughout the series are my current best efforts to further the art of writing duels and combat scenes in the genre.

I wanted to write duels so emotionally compelling that my easily-fatigued-by-action-scenes wife would love them. I wanted to show readers and maybe some writers that action and fight scenes can reveal, test, and develop character just as much as any other type of scene. People show who they are in a million great and small ways when they take up arms or choose not to.

And through it all, there is Kris. This daring, ambitious, dynamo far more at home in a training gym than a court setting. They are the vessel of their nation’s hopes and dreams and they push themself and learn about themself in ways they didn’t expect.

So that’s “The Gauntlet.”

Read “The Gauntlet” by subscribing at Serial Box and get the best deal on the whole season in ebook + enhanced audio.

Or you can read one episode at a time:

Amazon * Barnes & Noble * Kobo

Born to the Blade S1 cover art - by Will Staehle

Born to the Blade is here!

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It’s launch day! Born to the Blade has arrived!

Born to the Blade is my new epic fantasy series from Serial Box Publishing. I’m the creator and lead writer, working in a TV writers-room-esque team with Marie Brennan, Malka Older, and Cassandra Khaw (whose work you should definitely be reading!)

Here’s the Hollywood pitch – Avatar: The Last Airbender meets Babylon 5 and The West Wing with magical sword duels. It’s got diplomacy and intrigue, magic and swordplay, and dynamic characters forced to choose between friendship and duty.

Serial Box is a cool, different publisher, so I’ll explain a bit more about what you need to know about the series. It’s a little more involved than some of my other series but in a cool way.

Instead of book one, book two, etc., Born to the Blade will be released in episodes and seasons. Today is the publication day of the first episode of season one. You can get that episode for free on all ebook stores (Amazon * Barnes & Noble * Google * Kobo) and the later episodes will be $1.99 each.

Born to the Blade arrivals - by Michael R. Underwood - read or listen for free now!

You can also subscribe and get both the ebook and audiobook edition (via the Serial Box app) for $1.99 per episode. Subscribing or buying the whole season outright will get you the best deal. You can do both of those here.

A new episode will launch each Wednesday for the next eleven weeks until season one is complete. Like a TV show, Serial Box will decide whether to renew the series based on how season one is doing.

I’ve learned a ton about writing and collaboration with this series, and we’ve worked very hard to deliver a compelling story with twists and turns, cool magical sword fights, and characters to fall in love with. I’m very grateful to my collaborators Malka, Cassandra, and Marie, as well as the whole Serial Box team.

Join us for a new adventure today!

If you want to find out more, you can read about how Babylon 5 influenced Born to the Blade at Book Smugglers, you can read an interview about the series and listen to an audio excerpt at io9.com, or you can read a big excerpt at Tor.com.

 

Farewell, Robot Pals!

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Hi all,

Here’s some big professional news: I will be departing Angry Robot at the end of March. AR’s parent company Watkins Media has decided to consolidate the sales group and my position is going away.

Robot Retrospective

I’ve been the North American Sales & Marketing Manager for Angry Robot for about five and a half years. I interviewed for the job the weekend before my debut novel hit the digital shelves in July of 2012. The job saw my then-girlfriend and me moving to Queens so I could work in the main office. We shortly moved down to Maryland for her job, but thankfully, I was able to keep working for Angry Robot – it’s just as easy to hop on Skype from Maryland as NYC, and getting up to the Big Apple isn’t too hard from Baltimore. Since then, I’ve taken on more and more at AR and learned a lot about art direction, editorial, strategy, and more. I’m very grateful to Marc, Penny, Nick, Phil, and everyone I’ve worked with at Watkins/Osprey/Angry Robot.

But for a couple of years now, I’ve been running myself a bit ragged – trying to do right by Angry Robot and the company’s authors AND pursue my own writing career with writing, self-publishing, and promotion AND participate in two podcasts AND maintain a healthy home life AND pursue hobbies/interests outside of writing. It’s been hard to do everything, just like it’s hard for so many people to do everything they want.

 

Since before I sold Geekomancy (really, before I sold my first short story), my professional identity in publishing has been this Author/Professional two-in-one. I’ve gotten used to switching hats, to speaking from multiple positionalities. My view on the industry was always about using one perspective to inform the other.

And now my day job is going to be Author. I’ll be working primarily for myself. I’ve been looking at a variety of options moving forward – including some consulting work that might let me continue to apply my skills beyond working an author. But mostly, I want to write more.

What’s Next?

My wife makes pretty good money in her job and is very supportive of my writing career, so this isn’t at all a Panic Stations kind of situation. I’m focusing on the opportunities this presents – now I’ll be able to spend time working on new projects – comics, non-fiction writing, etc. I’ve been meaning to break ground on Genrenauts Season Two for some time, but I have been prioritizing the space opera novel since my agent and I want to find it a home with a good SF/F trade publisher.

Obligatory Plugs

We’re also less than a month (!) from the launch of Born to the Blade. Serial Box has been a great publishing partner and writing with Marie, Cassandra, and Malka is a dream come true. Be sure to subscribe to the first season or pre-order the pilot for free.

I just turned 35 last month, making this an even clearer delineation of “okay, new life chapter coming up.”

So come April, you should expect to see more and different things from me. I won’t be traveling nearly as much in the short term, but I am looking to find other ways of putting coolness out into the world while also getting more writing done. I’ll probably be more chatty on my blog and on social media, and maybe trying out some cool stuff like restarting my Twitch stream, launching a Patreon/Drip, that kind of cool stuff. I’m eager to see what life looks like when I can direct my full attention toward my own work with Born to the Blade, Genrenauts, and more.

Onward, to new awesomeness!

Born to the Blade cover reveal

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Book Smugglers has the reveal for the cover of Born to the Blade, art by Will Staehle.

 

I am absolutely delighted by the cover, and the whole process of developing the art was a delight. I hope we’ll be able to show off some of the alternative approaches since there’s some great other work in there.

The serial launches on April 18th with my series premiere “Arrivals”. You can subscribe to the serial here or pre-order for free on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, (other retailers to come).

Introducing Born to the Blade

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Hi folks! I’m very happy to bring you something I’ve been working on for a long time and had to keep under my hat until now.

I’m working with Serial Box on Born to the Blade, an epic fantasy serial with co-writers Malka Older, Cassandra Khaw, and Marie Brennan. I’m the creator and lead-writer on the team, and the series is releasing in April.

Born to the Blade is like Avatar the Last Airbender meets The West Wing–with magic sword duels. 

In Born to the Blade, a desperate ambassador, a conflicted loyalist, and a brash duelist will help determine the fate of nations with spell and steel.

You can subscribe to the series here: https://www.serialbox.com/serials/borntotheblade.

Here’s how Serial Box works. If you’re a subscriber, you get both the ebook and audio edition of each episode automatically every week as they release for one discounted price. Serial Box also has a specialized app where you can seamlessly switch between reading and listening.

We just have a placeholder page for Born to the Blade right now, but there’s more information coming. You can go ahead and subscribe to the series now if you’re interested.

I’ll have more information on the series soon, along with the Promonado (TM) that will accompany the release.

Confusion 2018

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This weekend I will be returning to Confusion, which is a great con to kick off the year. Here’s my programming schedule!
Friday
1pm – Isle Royale
Co-Writing For Fun and Profit
4pm – Isle Royale
Collaborating With Your Copyeditor
5pm – Interlochen
World-building Culture Beyond Aesthetics
Saturday
12pm – Keweenaw
Reading: Merrie Haskell, Michael R. Underwood, Mishell Baker
4pm – St. Clair
Autograph Session (4 PM)
Come meet your favorite authors, artists and musicians and have them sign things! (Please limit your signing requests to 3 items per person.)
5pm – Keweenaw
Disney Rules Genre Film
If you’ll be at the con, please feel free to say hello! When I’m not on programming, I’ll be hanging around in the common areas.

Wherin I Heap Love Upon Blades in the Dark

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After reading Austin Walker‘s comments over the weekend (read the whole thread), I dipped back into the tabletop RPG Blades in the Dark. Reading the game, I was struck again at what a fabulous accomplishment it is. Every page and section makes me want to play the game.

As Walker indicates, each chapter has Questions to Consider, and the entire text of the game does a great job of drawing back the curtain regarding how the game fits together. The creator John Harper invites the reader to step up to become a co-designer of Blades in the Dark as they’ll play it. Everyone’s version of a given game is different, and Harper doesn’t shy away from that reality.

You might have heard me talk about Blades before, as I got in on the game early in the Kickstarter and have been a vocal fan ever since even though I haven’t gotten to play the game yet.

Blades in the Dark is set in an industrial fantasy city called Duskvol, a trade city in a world that suffered a magical apocalypse a thousand years ago. That event shattered the veil between the worlds of the living and the dead and now the known world is ruled by an immortal emperor and cities are protected from hungry spirits roaming free across the world by giant magitek electrical fences. The tone and flavor of the setting are conveyed throughout the core book, with hooks abounding and a clear manifestation of the default grim tone of the setting in the writing. The game is designed not just for telling the tales of daring scoundrels, it’s designed for telling tales of daring scoundrels *in this particular world*. It’s very much gothic dark fantasy ala the Dishonored and Thief video games (both specifically invoked as inspirations for Blades).

I prefer more optimistic worlds and games, especially these days (*waves to 2017*), so I’m also excited for the Broken Crown, a playset about trying to take down the Immortal Emperor, and other alternate setting playsets. Especially Null Vector, the cyberpunk playset. Blades is an amazing game for Cyberpunk because Blades is designed to drastically reduce the amount of planning a group has to do for heists. I have a sad memory of spending over two hours arguing with a game group about how to pull off a kidnapping in Shadowrun, and in Blades that conversation would have been five minutes deciding which general approach to take and then we’d have gotten right into the action.

Thinking back to the way tone informs the design, I’m hoping to see these playsets to adjust the mechanics in order to convey the setting’s tone. If they don’t, I’ll need to do it myself, but I’m hoping that the transparency of how the tone is built into the design means that a change in setting comes with an adjustment in the design tone.

I have spent more than a little time thinking about how I’d hack Blades in the Dark to make a Shield and Crocus RPG. I even have a working title: War in the Bones.

Fun Side Notes

  • The game’s publisher, Evil Hat Productions, has given an open invitation to designers who intend to make hacks of Blades in the Dark (new games using the system/design) to submit to them. This is likely to help foster a new family of RPGs the way that Apocalypse World became a games lineage with games like Dungeon World, Monsterhearts, Monster of the Week, etc. Blades is heavily informed by Apocalypse World but is, IMO, a full iteration forward compared to the above hacks.
  • I love that hacks of Blades in the Dark are called “Forged in the Dark” like Apocalypse World hacks are “Powered by the Apocalypse.”

I don’t get to play nearly as many RPGs as I want or even as much as I did before I started working at Angry Robot, but I still love delving into new games to see where the discipline of RPG design is headed. Anyone similarly interested needs to be following Blades in the Dark.

UBI: Work, Purpose, and the Worth of Human Life

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A big thing that I think can get lost in discussions of Universal Basic Income (UBI) is the way that UBI allows for a re-definition of how we think about work, purpose, and the worth of human life. Especially UBI combined with a universal healthcare system uncoupled from full-time work.

  • UBI allows the homemaker that raises children to be valued for their contributions for more than the money you save on daycare. It lets the caretaker parent be more involved in their children’s lives.
  • UBI allows the twenty-year-old that has to drop out of college or trade school to take care of an elderly or sick family member or other loved one and can’t work regular hours to be able to get by and do that critical labor.
  • UBI allows the aspirant creator to dedicate themselves to improving their craft without needing a menial job to make ends meet. How much faster could a new musician become experienced and skilled enough to play professionally if they don’t have to work 40 hours a week in an office job to get buy?
  • UBI means that if you’re a writer, you wouldn’t necessarily need to have a “real” job to get by. You could be a writer that also teaches storytelling to kids. Or a writer that helps out at their church or local school. Or a writer that provides for their family by cooking wonderful home-cooked meals? Those are all ways of contributing, and in a functional UBI system, they can all be supported and valued.

UBI means that we can continue the trend of letting people spend more of their time on hobbies, civic engagement, caretaking, enjoying life, and being fulfilled. There’s a strong cultural dictate that says that life has worth because of work and “contribution to society.” Thanks, Protestant Work Ethic and/or Capitalism. In the US/Developed nations, we were trending toward people having more and more leisure time, because productivity was increasing due to improved tools, better systems, etc. But wages didn’t keep pace with productivity.

In a UBI system, everyone benefits from increased productivity and efficiency. The office administrator can work 20 hours a week and still keep everything flowing. They can use the other 20 hours a week to spend more time with their family and friends and to develop their passion for painting or volunteer at a local community center. And so on.

I think it’s very important to consider and get excited about the ways self-fulfillment and ideation are a contribution to society. Why do we value work at a job you don’t care about as being more important to societal well-being than taking care of family and/or playing music at a faith center or teaching kids how to draw with crayons or running an after-school program and on and on? Capitalism is the thing that values selling your labor for the good of people that own systems of production. Capitalism is not inevitable. It is not intrinsic to humanity.

What is intrinsic is our community orientation. We’re social animals. We need physical touch and shelter and the chance to continually discover who we are as people more than we need to labor for someone else’s profit. We need sunlight and physical activity and love far more than we need a job title and quarterly reports.

If you’re a happier, more whole, more fulfilled person, you’ll be a better friend, neighbor, partner, etc. A better citizen.

This, for me, is one of the biggest, most important things about UBI. It allows us to move humanity forward past a scarcity mindset into an abundance mindset. It can strengthen civic society. Family ties. Political engagement. And on and on.

This is the future I am fighting for. A future where living a fulfilling life is the priority more than selling your time to survive. We don’t have to live in a subsistence, scraping-by paradigm anymore. We can all live better.

Disclaimers and answers to expected questions:

  • Of course no system is perfect. UBI would have to be very carefully implemented to not just re-create or enhance various systems of inequality.
  • Yes, I am a hippie utopianist. That’s my whole deal. That’s what being a speculative fiction writer means to me: imagining better possibilities.
  • No, this won’t lead to a huge % of the population just being leeches on society. See the resources below.

Further reading on UBI, including a variety of perspectives:

Studies on UBI
UBI pilot program in Kenya
UBI in Ontario, Canada
The Alaska Permanent Fund
“The Conservative Case for UBI”
UBI in Finland
“The Wrong Kind of UBI”
Universal Basic Assets
“UBI: The Answer to Automation?”

Gratitude

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Today I am grateful to every person that rose to the challenge this year. Mostly in the US because that’s where most of my friends live, but everywhere, really. Here I’m going to mostly speak about the USA, but I know that what happens here impacts people everywhere.

I’m grateful for people that called/wrote/faxed their elected representatives. For people that protested at airports or in the streets or at the capital. That marched or filled a town hall to demand action. To the people that donated to candidates they believe in, who energized, encouraged, and educated their fellow citizens.

I am grateful for the fact that when a thoroughly unworthy corrupt bigot took the office of the presidency he was met not just by his adoring public, but by a loud chorus of patriotic opposition, by marches around the world filled with people that made their voices heard and found one another.

I’m grateful for civil servants that refused to follow unjust orders. For people that stepped up to run for office, wanting to make the system work better, to fight for their neighbors and the future.

I’m grateful for the fact that even in this year that has been so long, so hard, and so dispiriting, there is still hope. And that hope is you all. I have hope because I know we are not alone.

It may get worse before it gets better, but we can do this.

Giant Spiders, the Action Economy, and Your Game

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Last session, my D&D party had a great RP-driven evening, having just survived a huge throwdown with a fiend-controlled Arch-druid, a humongo spider, and a zillion spiderlings.

That fight is what I wanted to talk about today. I really like 5e’s Legendary action system. I think it’s a great way to address the primacy of action economy in the game.

What’s an action economy?

It’s the idea that in a tactical combat game, having more actions is a huge advantage. In earlier versions of D&D, a 5-person party vs. a dragon instantly had the advantage if the dragon only got one action per round, even if they got claw/claw/bite.

In the recent X-Com games, you want to get the upgrade that lets you bring a fifth squad member into missions as soon as possible, as it gives you more actions per turn. Having a fifth person is an advantage aside from that, but what I want to focus on right now is the actions. Who has them, how many, and when?

In this case, the spider got a Legendary Action (mostly webbing and biting) and the Lair Actions involved birthing new spiders to throw at us (ala spawning mobs/adds in a raid).

The Legendary/Lair Actions made the combat feel much less in our control, systematized the rate of new monsters coming in, and made the boss feel like a Boss.

The last boss we fought before the spider was a powerful necromancer who had been built up over several sessions as A Big Deal. But then, our party totally overwhelmed him, esp. thanks to our Smite-tastic vengeance Paladin and having several spell-casters who could counter-spell and use Dispel Magic. Even with undead minions around, the necromancer just didn’t have the opportunity to really put the pressure on us or keep away from our DPS. Legendary Actions would have changed that a lot. They become less special if every notable enemy has them, but maybe that’s okay?

The Ruler Reactions in the X-Com 2 expansion are a similar system, whereby the Ruler characters (special unique bosses) get a Ruler Reaction after every one of your characters acts. This means they can move around, punish characters that move out into the open, etc. Being able to interrupt and/or act out of turn is a *huge* tactical asset in turn-based games. The Chosen characters in the War of the Chosen expansion don’t get Ruler Reactions, but they do have a large # of actions per turn, allowing them to move in, attack, and then retreat to cover, etc. Some of your characters get similar bonus actions, especially the Skirmisher. Having all of those active at once could get tricky, but it re-shapes the flow of play, making it far less a game of big chunks of “my turn, their turn” and much more of a fast-paced thrust/parry/riposte kind of game.

Anyone else been playing D&D with Legendary/Lair Actions or have stories of Rulers/Chosen from X-Com to share? Or other games that use the same kind of systems?