Tag: Fantasy

News

My Dungeons & Dragons story “Dame Beatrix J. Delacroix III’s Guide For Training Your New Beholder” is out now!

By Aidan Moher on May 31st, 2022

It’s out! The new Dungeons & Dragons Beholder figurine, including my story “Dame Beatrix J. Delacroix III’s Guide For Training Your New Beholder,” is available now! Creating two canon Dungeons & Dragons characters is a dream come true, and I hope you all enjoy meeting them.

Here’s a fun review on Comicon.com from Anton Kromoff:

This little friend comes packaged with a small book entitled “Guide For Training Your New Beholder” and is attributed to the author Dame Beatrice J. Delacroix the 3rd. This tiny tome expounds upon the ways to care for your Beholder, creating a domain for your Beholder and, of course, adventuring with and taming your Beholder.

The good Dame Delacroix the 3rd is also very clear in her information booklet that there are no refunds of any kind, and once you take possession of the Beholder it is very much your own problem.

Just look at it!

And here’s what I had to say in my original announcement:

“Dame Beatrice J. Delacroix III’s Guide for Training Your New Beholder” is an accompanying booklet for an officially licensed light-up Beholder figurine. It’s also quite possibly the most hilariously enjoyable project I’ve worked on.

Working with the Dungeons & Dragons team at Wizards of the Coast and my editor Brit Brooks-Perilli at Running Press, I was given a lot of freedom to have fun writing this guide about training your brand new (and very disgruntled) Beholder pet, and, well… it goes just about as well as you’d imagine.

This might be a relatively small story in the overall Dungeons & Dragons world, but it’s a thrill to get to introduce fans to Dame Beatrice J. Delacroix III, her granddaughter Pip, and their menagerie of dangerous creatures. “Dame Beatrice J. Delacroix III’s Guide for Training Your New Beholder” is a 32-page mini guidebook that walks you through your early days with your new Beholder, how to set up its new home, tips for feeding and care, and offers tons of advice for what to do when (not if!) things go awry.

Obviously, working in the Dungeons & Dragons world—which has been a huge part of my life since adolescence—has been an absolute treat. Dame Beatrice J. Delacroix III and Pip have already stolen my heart (along with a few… let’s call them unregulated living curiousities), and with any luck this won’t be the last you see of them.

This figurine (with a glowing eye!) and the guidebook is available now!

But, just remember: Dame Beatrice J. Delacroix III’s Menagerie of Unusual Kind does not offer refunds or returns on products.

Fiction

Announcing “Dame Beatrice J. Delacroix III’s Guide for Training Your New Beholder”

By Aidan Moher on October 18th, 2021

Y’alllllll.

I wrote a Dungeons & Dragons.

Me. I did this.

“Dame Beatrice J. Delacroix III’s Guide for Training Your New Beholder” is an accompanying booklet for an officially licensed light-up Beholder figurine. It’s also quite possibly the most hilariously enjoyable project I’ve worked on.

Working with the Dungeons & Dragons team at Wizards of the Coast and my editor Brit Brooks-Perilli at Running Press, I was given a lot of freedom to have fun writing this guide about training your brand new (and very disgruntled) Beholder pet, and, well… it goes just about as well as you’d imagine.

The blurb:

Beauty is in the eye of the Beholder with this officially licensed miniature figurine.

  • FIGURINE WITH LIGHT: A one-of-a-kind 3-inch figurine of the popular monster: the Beholder with a glowing eye 
  • BOOK INCLUDED: Learn more about this iconic monster in this fully illustrated 32-page miniature book
  • PERFECT GIFT FOR D&D FANS: Display on a shelf, desk, or bookcase and show off your love of Dungeons & Dragons
  • OFFICIALLY LICENSED: Authentic Dungeons & Dragons collectible

This might be a relatively small story in the overall Dungeons & Dragons world, but it’s a thrill to get to introduce fans to Dame Beatrice J. Delacroix III, her granddaughter Pip, and their menagerie of dangerous creatures. “Dame Beatrice J. Delacroix III’s Guide for Training Your New Beholder” is a 32-page mini guidebook that walks you through your early days with your new Beholder, how to set up its new home, tips for feeding and care, and offers tons of advice for what to do when (not if!) things go awry.

Obviously, working in the Dungeons & Dragons world—which has been a huge part of my life since adolescence—has been an absolute treat. Dame Beatrice J. Delacroix III and Pip have already stolen my heart (along with a few… let’s call them unregulated living curiousities), and with any luck this won’t be the last you see of them.

This figurine (with a glowing eye!) and the guidebook will be available in April, 2022, and is available for pre-order now!

But, just remember: Dame Beatrice J. Delacroix III’s Menagerie of Unusual Kind does not offer refunds or returns on products.

News

2020 Award Eligibility: Best Fan Writer

By Aidan Moher on December 1st, 2020

Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash

God. 2020.

WTF?

This was a very difficult year for all of us, and nothing will ever change that. While navigating all the challenges 2020 presented, however, it has also been one of the most successful years for me from a creative, professional, and fan writer stand point. I picked up an agent, continued pouring words into two books I’m super excited about, started TWO fanzines, and wrote some of my best-ever articles and essays.

This is also the first year in a long time that I have no eligible fiction. Which is weird. However, I’m eligible for some awards, and so is most of my work individually and collectively. I’m very proud of my work in 2020, and I hope you’ll find some value in it, and also hope you keep me in mind when filling out nomination ballots.

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Opinion

Monsterful: Ikoria: Lair of Behemoths – Sundered Bond by Django Wexler

By Aidan Moher on May 20th, 2020

A couple of years ago, Wizards of the Coast made a gamble by bringing on popular fantasy authors like Brandon Sanderson, Kate Elliott, and Martha Wells to pen tie-in fiction for their mega-popular trading card game Magic: The Gathering. For years before that, Magic’s fiction was handled by in-house writers and the results were dubious at best. While there has been some disappointment among fans for the major novel releases from Gargoyles-creator Greg Weisman, by and large these efforts have produced some of the best tie-in fiction the franchise has ever seen.

Among those brought on board was Django Wexler, whose military fantasy series The Shadow Campaigns earned critical acclaim for its masterful battles, political intrigue, and its genre-defying prominence of nuanced and well-written women. The Shadow Campaigns is “a masterclass on how writing a sexist culture – and sexist men, even – doesn’t have to restrict the significance and range of your female characters,” said reviewer Foz Meadows. For all its faults and hiccups from a storytelling perspective, Magic has made a valiant effort to increase its number of female characters over the years, and in addition to bringing on women like Elliott, Wells, and Cassandra Khaw to handle the story, Wexler is another excellent fit to help Magic transition into a better and more inclusive storytelling style.

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Opinion

Thoughts on the 2020 Hugo Award Ballot

By Aidan Moher on April 8th, 2020

Photo by SpaceX on Unsplash

Hugo time!

The nominations for the 2020 Hugo Awards were announced yesterday, and, as tradition dictates, I have some thoughts.

But, they’re good thoughts! I’ve left my hot takes at home this year. (They were mainly about raisins in cookies, and, well, seemed off topic…)

I gained a reputation in past years for fiery hot takes about the Hugo ballots, but, to be honest, over recent years, I think we’ve seen a push toward an incredibly deep and diverse ballot full of varied creators and works. This list feels like it represents the tone and tenor of SFF in 2019. And that’s the highest compliment I can pay a ballot.

I’m going to skip around the ballot this year and comment on the categories that I have strong opinions about. I didn’t read much short fiction this year, for instance, so I’ll move past those. I always enjoy this time of year, however, when I get to go back and enjoy the best short fiction from the year before, and I’ll be doing that again this year.

The major trend I see here (and one I accept with open arms) is that there are a lot of new names on the ballot, and the first signs of change in the fan categories as we see fan writers and publications from new mediums (like BookTube) begin to appear on the ballot. It’s a wonderful sign of health for the awards. Sometimes it’s hard for me to believe how much the Hugos have changed and evolved over the past decade as more and more fans from online SFF fandom have become involved.

So, let’s get started.

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Opinion

Shine Bright: The Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern

By Aidan Moher on February 18th, 2020

As 2019 tipped into 2020, readers started compiling their lists of the best books of the decade. I thought long and hard, but the only book I had any certainty about was the decade’s best: a debut novel from Erin Morgenstern called The Night Circus. With a tenacity matched by few other books, The Night Circus has not left me since I first read it years ago.

I had big words for The Night Circus when I reviewed it for A Dribble of Ink in 2012:

The Night Circus is a classic novel that will sit on the highest shelf of my bookshelf, right next to The Hobbit and The Shadow of the Wind. … There’s magic in this novel and it deserves to be read by anyone wanting to be reminded that there is more to life than meets the eye.

Usually when I liken a book to two all-time classic, the comparison begins to show its age as the days, weeks, and years pass?—but not so with The Night Circus. If anything, the comparison seems more fair to me now than it did then, especially after having read Morgenstern’s much awaited follow-up, The Starless Sea. Like Tolkien and Zafon’s novels, The Night Circus is a book for the ages.

The Starless Sea is better.

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Opinion

2019 Award Eligibility & Recommendations

By Aidan Moher on December 12th, 2019

Photo by SpaceX on Unsplash

*grabs megaphone*

*clears throat*

Excuse me! You there. Yes! You in the back.

I’ve got some stuff I want to talk to you about.

My Eligible Work

This was a lighter year of fiction for me as I focus on completing the first draft of my novel project, The Thousand Shattered Gods, with just one piece eligible for “Best Short Story.” I am also personally eligible for “Best Fan Writer” for the reviews, essays, commentary, news coverage, and other non-fiction work I produced for Tor.com, Barnes & Noble SFF Blog, Uncanny Magazine, here on my blog, and via Twitter. I also had notable (but ineligible for “Best Fan Writer”) work in Kotaku and EGMNOW.

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Opinion

Necromantic: Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir

By Aidan Moher on September 12th, 2019

It feels like hype for Tamsyn Muir’s debut novel about necromantic lesbians, bone citadels, rockin’ adventures, tantalizing mysteries, wicked sword fights, and many, many reanimated corpses has been building for YEARS. It was earlier this year, however, when it really started to catch my attention. Isabel Yap, who’s been championing the book since its earliest days, popped onto Twitter and blew my socks off by calling Gideon the Ninth “the closest thing to a JRPG in novel form.”

I was so enamoured by this description that I went out of my way to write an in-depth examination of how Golden Age of JRPGs (from Final Fantasy to Suikoden) influenced many of today’s best and brightest SF writers. And then I got my hands on Gideon the Ninth, and, despite mile high expectations, walked away knowing I’d read something special. Muir’s novel isn’t just the best debut of the year, it might be the year’s best novel. Period.

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Opinion

Thoughts on the 2019 Hugo Award Finalists

By Aidan Moher on April 2nd, 2019

Photo by SpaceX on Unsplash
Photo by SpaceX on Unsplash

*gasp*

The Hugo Awards weren’t announced on a Friday afternoon, Easter Weekend, or at some other incredibly inconvenient time—I’m still reeling from this act of decency.

Oh, and the incredible short list this year.

Tor.com’s got the run down, as usual. So, head on over there (in a new tab, obvs), and then come back here for some thoughts.

Back? Okay. Let’s go.

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