Brandon Sanderson achieves another Kickstarter success

Brandon Sanderson has, once again, achieved a towering success on Kickstarter.

The latest campaign was for a tabletop roleplaying game based on his Cosmere universe, which is the setting for many of his most popular book series, including Mistborn and The Stormlight Archive. The roleplaying game includes core rulebooks and setting guides to the worlds of Scadrial (Mistborn) and Roshar (Stormlight). Later material will focus on other worlds, including those of Elantris and the White Sand graphic novel. The setting guides will also include new canonical material provided by Sanderson. There are also add-ons featuring GM screens, miniatures, dice, maps, tokens and cards. The game system uses a d20-driven system inspired by Dungeons & Dragons and will be published by Dragonsteel Entertainment.

The campaign closed this week having raised an astonishing $14,821,921 (£11,288,890) from 53,787 backers. This makes it the most successful tabletop and game-based Kickstarter campaign in the platform's history, eclipsing the $13 million raised by board game Frosthaven in 2020. In 2022 Sanderson raised $42 million in a campaign for four new novels, which remains the most successful Kickstarter campaign of all time, and then an additional $4 million for Stormlight-themed miniatures. Earlier this year he ran a $24 million campaign for leather-bound special editions of his books on Backerkit.

The Stormlight branch of the game, including the Stormlight World Guide, Stormlight Handbook and the Stonewalkers adventure, will launch in 2025. The Mistborn branch will launch in 2026.

Sanderson's next published novel will be the fifth novel in The Stormlight Archive, which will be published on 6 December this year. After that he will be writing a new Mistborn trilogy.

New Guy Gavriel Kay novel confirmed for 2025

Guy Gavriel Kay's latest novel will be published on 25 May 2025.

Written on the Dark will be Kay's sixteenth novel and sounds like it will continue his traditional vein of fantastical fiction inspired by real history and places, in this case "the drama and turbulence of medieval France."

Kay's previous novels were The Fionavar Tapestry trilogy (The Summer Tree, The Wandering Fire, The Darkest Road), Tigana, A Song for Arbonne, The Lions of Al-Rassan, The Sarantine Mosaic duology (Sailing to Sarantium and Lord of Emperors), The Last Light of the Sun, Ysabel, Under Heaven, River of Stars, Children of Earth and Sky, A Brighteness Long Ago and All the Seas of the World.

Grave Expectations by Alice Bell

Claire Hendricks is a freelance medium whose skills are put to use putting on seances for the rich and easily-impressed. However, Claire's secret is that she really can see and speak to the dead, including her friend Sophie who has stuck to Claire's side since her own passing years earlier. What seems to be a simple gig, running a seance for the spoilt members of the Wellington-Forge family, takes a turn when a murder takes place, and Claire and Sophie find themselves investigating.

Grave Expectations is the debut novel by British writer Alice Bell, who has spent over a decade in the British video gaming press (most recently as an editor at Rock Paper Shotgun). As novels go this is not a heavyweight tome, but instead a somewhat light-hearted murder mystery romp with some unexpected bite to it.

The novel opens by establishing Claire as a thirtysomething who hasn't quite got her life together, who is constantly weighed down by flashbacks to her youth, her time at university and so forth. This isn't just pointless nostalgia but due to the very real constant presence of her best friend Sophie, who died at 17. Unlike Claire, Sophie has not been able to grow up or move on, and still reacts to everything the way a 17-year-old would, which creates an interesting dichotomy between the characters (who see in each other what the other was, or could have been). This character relationship is fascinating, but not overindulged in this first book: it's clear that what really happened to Sophia (who has no memory of the events leading to her presumed murder) is a series-long mystery that will be better explored in later novels.

The book itself focuses on the Wellington-Forge family, a largely annoying bunch of well-to-dos with some serious dysfunction going on. There's some good comedy to be mined from this, but with some real menace layered in as Claire starts uncovering their secrets.

The book displays some symptoms of debut novel-itis. The pacing is a bit off, with a lot of plot and character development packed into the first 200-odd pages but the novel then meanders a bit (with an extended trip to Brighton) for the next 150 pages or so before everything comes back together for the denouncement. It feels like experience would help smooth over the pacing issues and deliver a punchier narrative. We also get a few moments of over-exposition where it's perhaps not fully necessary.

Ranged against that is some solid character work (especially the Claire-Sophie relationship) and the novel's secret sauce, which is a real sense of acerbic bite to some of the dialogue and some fleeting, but sharp moments verging on horror. The situation Claire and Sophie are in can be played for laughs and even "cosy fantasy" (some sequences recalled the crumpets-and-blood cosiness of Kim Watt's "murder mystery but the detective is a dragon!" sequence, starting with Baking Bad) but Bell will sometimes just unleash a real sense of danger and darkness lurking behind events. These moments are relatively fleeting, but help jolt the reader that this isn't just going to be a sunshine and rainbows story with a high concept.

Grave Expectations (***½) is something of a slight  murder mystery novel, but some good character work and moments of sharp wit and grit make it more memorable than you'd expect. Certainly there's enough of interest here to make pressing on with the rest of the series worthwhile. The novel is available now, and the sequel, Displeasure Island, was recently released.

Thank you for reading The Wertzone. To help me provide better content, please consider contributing to my Patreon page and other funding methods.

Warner Brothers releases trailer for LORD OF THE RINGS: WAR OF THE ROHIRRM

Warner Brothers have released the trailer for their animated film, The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim, set in the same continuity as Peter Jackson's live-action movie trilogy.

The film takes place about 250 years before the events of The Lord of the Rings and is the story of Helm Hammerhand, the ninth King of Rohan, at a time when his kingdom faced serious threats from within and without.

The film is directed by Kenji Kamiyama (Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex), from a script by Phoebe Gittins and Arty Papageorgiou. Philippa Boyens, who was a writer-producer on the Lord of the Rings live-action trilogy, is a producer on this project. Peter Jackson is loosely affiliated as a producer/consultant.

The film stars Brian Cox as Helm Hammerhand, Gaia Wise as Hèra, Luke Pasqualino as Wulf, Laurence Ubong Williams as Fréaláf Hildeson and Shaun Dooley as Freca. Miranda Otto reprises her film role as Éowyn, serving as the film's narrator.

The film will hit cinemas on 11 December this year.

BLAKE'S 7 to get Blu-Ray release with new model vfx

Blake's 7, the seminal dystopian British space opera series, is getting a re-release on Blu-Ray. The first season will launch on the format on 11 November this year.

Blake's 7, created by Terry Nation, ran for four seasons from 1978 to 1981, chalking up 52 episodes. The show, set roughly a thousand years in the future, saw an ideological revolutionary, engineer Roj Blake, framed for crimes he didn't commit by the despotic Terran Federation and sent to a remote penal colony. Blake escaped with the help of a group of hardened criminals, salvaging an advanced alien starship along the way. Blake wanted to use the ship, dubbed the Liberator, to strike back at the Federation and eventually help destroy it; his criminal comrades had other, more lucrative ideas for what to do with the vessel. The series became infamous for its bleakness, its high cast turnover and remarkable body count amongst the regular cast. The show was also noteworthy for its endlessly quotable dialogue, its dark sense of humour, and sometimes mind-bogglingly bad special effects.

This new release uses the impressive technology used previously on Doctor Who and Red Dwarf to dramatically improve the quality of the video-shot interior scenes, whilst exterior film footage has been rescanned in HD. There is also the option to replace all of the vfx with new material, including newly-recreated model shots, occasional CG sequences and new teleport effects. The release includes a documentary that was shot over a decade ago for the DVD re-release but had to be held back for copyright issues, as well as newly-shot interview footage with surviving crew and castmembers.

Blake's 7 was tremendously influential on J. Michael Straczynski's Babylon 5 (JMS is an avowed Blake's 7 fan), due to its serialised storytelling. Echoes of the show can also be seen in the likes of Firefly (Joss Whedon was studying in the UK when Blake's 7 was airing), with its band of dysfunctional characters forced to work together by circumstance.

There has been several attempts over the years to reboot Blake's 7, with the UK's Sky One getting close over a decade ago, although their take was altogether more cliched (with Blake as a disgruntled ex-soldier driven to revenge by the murder of his wife) and less interesting, but the idea seems on the backburner for now.

Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter to star onstage in WAITING FOR GODOT

Only very tangentially genre-related, but this seems like an outstanding bit of casting. Bill & Ted co-stars Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter are reuniting, this time onstage in a new production of Samuel Beckett's classic play Waiting for Godot. Reeves will play Estragon whilst Winter will play Vladimir.

The production will be directed by Jamie Lloyd and will hit Broadway in autumn 2025.

Reeves and Winter previously starred together in the three films of the Bill & Ted franchise: Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure (1989), Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey (1991) and Bill & Ted Face the Music (2020). They reprised the roles in the animated series Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventures (1990-91).

NBC and Peacock drop BATTLESTAR GALACTICA reboot reboot plans

After several years in development hell, NBC and Peacock have abandoned their plans to reboot the Battlestar Galactica reboot.

Back in September 2019, NBC tapped Sam Esmail, the creative force behind Mr. Robot, to develop a fresh take on the Battlestar Galactica franchise for their Peacock streaming service. The franchise had been created by Glen A. Larson and aired a single, huge-budgeted season on ABC in 1978, opening to enormous ratings but shedding them by season's end to be cancelled. A spin-off show, Galactica 1980, aired a single, critically-derided half-season in 1980 before being likewise cancelled.

Ronald D. Moore and David Eick resurrected the show with a grittier reboot in 2003, informed by the War on Terror and the Iraq War. The show ran for four seasons and two spin-off TV movies, concluding in 2010. A further straight-to-DVD movie followed in 2013, and a spin-off show, Caprica, aired a single season in 2010-11. This reboot, produced by NBC for the Sci-Fi Channel (later SyFy), was vastly more acclaimed, winning a Peabody and a Hugo Award.

Despite Esmail's high profile, the project struggled to get off the ground, possibly because Esmail only wanted to write and produce, leaving day-to-day showrunning duties to another producer. Michael Lesslie initially took on the project, only to later depart. Derek Simonds came on board in January 2024 in what appears now to have been a last-ditch effort to save the project.

Confusingly, Lesslie and Esmail made competing statements, the former stating the new show would be a fresh reboot of the premise and Esmail saying the new show would exist within the 2003 show's continuity. In January 2022, Universal announced that the new show would exist alongside a fresh feature film take on the franchise, to be written by X-Men screenwriter Simon Kinberg.

Now NBC have confirmed they are terminating their involvement in the project. No reason was given, but it was likely the long gestation time and expense (albeit minor so far) spent on going nowhere, Esmail not having the same profile and clout that he did back in 2019 when the project was getting off the ground, and the considerably more hostile streaming climate, with Peacock not performing as well as it could have done.

Universal are now shopping the project to other potentially interested parties

Further allegations against Neil Gaiman emerge

Tortoise Media has published further allegations against fantasy author Neil Gaiman. Last month, they detailed claims by two women who alleged that Gaiman took advantage of his fame and profile to coerce them into intimate acts they were uncomfortable with. Gaiman has denied the allegations.

One of the new allegations is of Gaiman apparently misreading a situation in the 1980s when he was in his twenties, which he claims was minor. The other allegation is more recent and more serious, suggesting a long-running campaign of coercion in a situation with a serious power differential (Gaiman was allowing a woman and her children to stay in one of his properties rent-free). Gaiman also denies the new allegations.

So far there has been little comment on the allegations by the numerous companies that Gaiman works alongside, such as Netflix (who are airing the Sandman TV series, produced by Warner Brothers) and Amazon (who are producing the final season of Good Omens). UNHCR, the UN refugee agency which Gaiman works for as a goodwill ambassador, has said the allegations are serious but they are still assessing the situation.

Gaiman has also so far only commented on the allegations in responses to the Tortoise Media articles, some handled through his legal team.