fantasy – hopepunk

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Summary:   Ian McDonald is trying very hard not to think about how the world might be going to hell in a handbag. After all, what’s he going to be able to do about it? He’s just this guy, stuck in a small town, pinned there by a load of student debt and a stalled writing career. Oh, and a wicked case of writer’s block. Or at least he was, until a dragon showed up in his bedroom. At midnight. Quoting Freud and muttering about the space-time continuum. So of course, Ian must Make a Choice and decide whether he wants to follow the dragon back into the Connectome and find his muse again, or stay in a house that surely wants to kill him, one repair bill at a time. And maybe, just maybe, he might find out that some things are worth fighting for. Even if all you have is a can opener.

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Summary: Eclectic, imaginative, and unexpected, Community of Magic Pens features forty genre-spanning flash and short stories--including fantasy, humor, science fiction, romance, historical fiction, satire, and mystery--bringing together a rich group of diverse voices from a wide range of backgrounds and intersections. Fountain pens, markers and ink, charcoals, spy pens, a braille writer, a printing press, virtual reality, and a supernatural pizza: whether revealing unspoken truths, fighting injustice, or finding friendship and love, our pens have power. Join us as a recent graduate of superhero school struggles to understand her gift, a disabled android interviews for a job, a queen’s conscripted artist must pull reality from illustrations on parchment, and a grandmother’s secret room is…better kept a secret. Tales of struggle and triumph, compassion and hope: Community of Magic Pens is a celebration of our shared story.

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Summary: For six lifelong friends, it was supposed to just be a simple game night. But when they break out a new, classic high-fantasy style game—half tabletop RPG, half dungeon-crawling board game, simultaneously familiar and unexplored—for a test run, they find themselves transported into the game’s setting, living the lives of their made-up characters, where the dangers, and the monsters, are deadly serious. Left with little choice but to jump headlong into their roles, Cordelia, Morgan, Jack, Eriko, Tamsin, and Tobias will have to become the heroes they were just pretending to be to stop a nightmare creature’s reign of terror… or find out if life and death in this fictional setting is as real as it seems. Ranger and cleric, barbarian and thief, bard and magician: they'll have to combine all of their new-found abilities to stop a creeping evil and to survive in this strange new world.

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Summary: After a few weeks trapped inside a cursed tabletop role-playing game, the players--Eriko the rogue, Morgan the cleric, Tamsin the mage, Cordelia the barbarian, Jack the ranger, and Tobias the bard--have become fixtures in the fictional town of Moderate Expectations, doing things adventures do. Whether it's slaying ogres or saving children from actual bogeymen, the adventurers are learning their roles and becoming weirdly comfortable with the concept of being heroes locked in a game world. But when a terrifying threat bubbles up out of a broken mine shaft and threatens their starting zone and adopted home, the gang will need to go on a real dungeon crawl into the subterranean world below, where they'll learn just how dangerous this imaginary world is to them and how high the stakes can be for the people who live here. It's time for the Dungeon Crawlers to level up, face down their greatest challenge yet, and find out just how big the world they've found themselves trapped in really is... and how long it's been holding players like them prisoners. So grab your gear, check your spell list, and make sure you've got plenty of torches--it's time to go spelunking, RPG-style.

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Summary: The first rule of adventuring: don't split the party. The Dungeon Crawlers should know better. While they've only been trapped in the cursed role playing game they now call home for a short time, most of the party are well-versed in tabletop gaming. Whether in the real world or trapped in a fantasy one, you just don't split the party. Which is why, when Eriko, the group's rogue, decides to let curiosity get the better of her and run off on her own, everyone knows nothing good will come of it. And "no good will come of it" means a pack of feral cannibalistic undead, led by an ancient evil, who takes a special interest in the group's talented, if ridiculous, bard, Tobias. Joined by a shadowy creature whose goals coincide with their own, the rest of the group--Morgan the cleric, Jack the ranger, Cordelia the barbarian, and Tamsin the mage--find that to survive, and rescue their friends, they're going to have to split the party even further. Are they clever enough to get away from a pack of ravenous ghouls alive, or will this be the Total Party Kill they've dreaded since they first arrived in this game world? The Ghoul Slayer's Guide is the third novella in the The Dungeon Crawlers series. Find their earlier adventures in the Players Guide to Dungeon Crawling and the Dungeoneer's Bestiary.

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Summary: The Dungeon Crawlers have done the unthinkable: they’ve split the party. After defeating another adventuring party from the “real” world—fellow players long trapped in the game world who treat Revery as their own private hunting ground to be conquered and abused—the Dungeon Crawlers emerged victorious but broken, with one of their number fallen and lost in battle. Some want to seek out revenge for their lost friend, while others believe somewhere in Revery there is magic to bring someone back from the dead, and want to find it. Both quests for revenge and resurrection will reveal new enemies, new allies, and dark secrets about the nature of Revery itself. They will learn how it draws players into a world where an RPG has become real, and whether or not anyone can ever go home again. But to do so, they need to break the party in two. Can they survive apart, or will the oldest rule in RPGs prove to be true in a world where games are deadly real?