Fantasy - Hopepunk Genre

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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?

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Summary: A bond she didn’t choose. A love she can’t escape. A creature so powerful it bends the limits of time… Smart, sassy, and sanguine, Des Mildue is a traveling sellsword in Rescalin, a dry and dusty kingdom full of rogues, opportunists, and thieves. She keeps her nose clean, brazens it out with a blade when she can’t, and keeps others at arm’s length where they can’t mess up her plans. That is, until a sword fight gone wrong leaves her tied by blood to the first dragon hatched in centuries. Suddenly, Des has to contend with a new voice in her head: haughty, willful Esquidamelion. Des wants to leave Squid by the roadside, but the blood bond has other ideas. With half the world on their tail - including Liv, her beautiful, faithless ex who Des is definitely over - Des must search for answers for why so many are willing to kill, maim and torture to get their hands on Squid. But she’s beginning to suspect her blood bond has tied her not only to a dragon, but to a fight for Rescalin’s future… …and no one else even knows it’s at risk. If you like the kind of story that grabs you by the shirtfront and hauls you through mystery, magic, adventure and betrayal, with a side of sapphic romance, pick up The Blood-Born Dragon, first in a new trilogy from debut author J.C. Rycroft.

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Summary: Raven's a thief who just swallowed a dragon. A small one, sure, but now his arms are growing scales, the local wildlife is acting up, and his snarky AI familiar is no help whatsoever. Raven's best friend Aik is a guardsman carrying a torch for the thief. A pickpocket and a guard? Never going to happen. And Aik’s ex-fiancé Silya, an initiate priestess in a magical crisis, hates Raven with the heat of a thousand suns. This unlikely team must work together to face strange beasts, alien artifacts, and a world-altering threat. If they don’t figure out what to do soon, it might just be the end of everything. Things are about to get messy.

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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: From all the good things provided by advanced AI to the innocence of discovering new worlds, join our authors as they present uplifting stories of science fiction and fantasy.

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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 Height of Land follows the quest of a young man torn between spiritual longing and commitment to his community’s survival in a harsh landscape. Red sacrifices everything to study the long-lost words of the gods. He does not know that he is reading the poetry of Lucille Clifton, Ḥáfiẓ, and Walt Whitman, as well as the Bhagavad Gita, the Bible, and the Tao Te Ching. In a world reborn from catastrophe, these ancient texts take on new meanings. To seek such things is to court peril. Belief in the gods is forbidden. But Red is desperate to know the gods. And he is not searching alone. Forsaking all that is familiar, Red pledges himself to a clandestine church in the city and falls in love with the charismatic priest. But Red may lose both love and faith in defying the church for the sake of a friend. Have the gods truly abandoned the earth, or just Red? What kind of answer can he receive when he has lost the words to ask?

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Summary: Silya comes into her own, but will she be enough? Silya finally has everything she always wanted: She's the Hencha Queen, head of the Temple, and is mastering her newfound talents. So why does the world pick now to fall apart? Her once-nemesis Raven is off riding dragons, and their mutual friend (and her ex) Aik is nowhere to be found. Meanwhile, a new threat menaces the Heartland from the East. If she can't convince a reluctant city council to prepare for the worst, she may lose everything—and everyone—she's ever cared about. As Silya wields her abilities, dry wit, and sheer determination to save her city, she's joined by Raven and his new friends, just as a dark storm threatens to sweep them all away. Will their aid help tip the scales? And will she and Raven finally find out what happened to Aik? Forget messy. Things just got apocalyptic.

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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: I couldn't settle like a tree. I needed to find insight, some passionate cause or grand discovery. A moment worth heartbreak. Rowena & her friends rely on their expanding mage abilities to survive in an unknown, wilder world. THE WILDER WORLD is Volume 2 in the completed trilogy, TALES OF ARDONNA: WOODSPELL SERIES, a fairy tale for adults.  

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Summary: A young half-elf hermit with forgotten magic. An army officer with ambitions as grand as his moustache. Decades after it began, war still rages between humans and elves. For some, war is a proving ground, a chance to win glory and prestige. For others, they must avoid the horrors of war at all costs. The Elixir of Power could make guns and cannons—and elves—a thing of the past. All Slee wants is to remain hidden from the world, but the fighting is never far. With the mass-produced gears of war devouring the land, how could a reclusive half-elf like her ever hope to find peace? All Fentor wants is … everything. To make a name for himself. To be remembered. To win. With the Elixir of Power in his hands, victory is at last within reach. When these two meet, their worlds begin to change—in the most unexpected of ways.

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Summary: Humanity's time has run out She'll never be a victim again, but Rowena's new power could destroy her country. WOODSPELL is Volume 1 in the completed trilogy TALES OF ARDONNA: WOODSPELL SERIES, a fairy tale for adults.