Autarch’s Annals of the Auran Empire, a nine-story fantasy anthology led by John C. Wright, passed its $10,000 goal on its first day on BackerKit. As of Wednesday morning the campaign stands at $11,233 from 246 backers, with 29 days left. The 208-page book is estimated to ship March 15, 2027.
Wright is one of the greatest living science fiction and fantasy writers. He was a Nebula Award finalist for Orphans of Chaos in 2005 and won the first Dragon Award for Best Science Fiction Novel in 2016 for Somewhither. He wrote the Golden Age trilogy and the Chaos trilogy, and he was received into the Catholic Church in 2008.
His story, “Shadowblade,” is the longest in the book and the one Mike Perry’s cover painting illustrates. Valdred, heir to a ruined house on the edge of barbarian Jutland, sets out to rescue a captive prince with an ancestral sword that calls up the spirits of his forefathers. Treacherous knights and a southern necromancer stand in his way. Wright has said the mountain-pass battle took its cue from the film El Cid. Alexander Macris of Autarch, a former editor of Wright’s, asked him for the story and suggested he build it around the Sword of the Manes, a magic item from the ACKS II Treasure Tome.
Macris designed the Adventurer Conqueror King System, a great alternative to Dungeons & Dragons, and its second edition ran to three volumes and about 1,500 pages. Through Ascendant Comics he has moved into graphic novels as well: Ascendant: Star-Spangled Squadron was crowdfunded in 2022, and a 64-page second volume is out now.
Autarch has published fiction before. It released Jonathan Oldenburg’s fantasy novel Tears From Iron in 2018, the first book of the Memories of the Cataclysm series, and a sequel is due in 2027. Oldenburg returns here with “Falling from Oblivion.” What Autarch says is new is a book of stories set in the Auran Empire, the default world of ACKS and Macris’s personal campaign setting. Its earliest files date to January 2006, and Autarch announced the anthology on the setting’s 20th anniversary.
Eight other writers fill out the table of contents. Zane Voss, the managing editor, holds engineering degrees from Missouri University of Science & Technology and is a partner in a steel-industry engineering consulting firm. His story, “By Axe and Blade,” pairs a Jutlandic exile with an Auran adventurer to free healers captured by orcs.
B. K. Gibson is the pen name of Ben and Karen Gibson of Huntsville, Alabama. Their debut novel, Freedom’s Vow, opens the Shepherd trilogy from Selene Press, and Ben has published tabletop adventures for about ten years. Their story, “Shieldbearer,” sends a young torchbearer into a dwarven vault. Sam Robb of Pittsburgh writes urban fantasy, including the flash fiction collection One October Night, and co-edited the Stories in the Key of Tull anthologies. His story, “Expendable,” follows a scholar who guides mercenaries to a lost desert city.
Nathaniel McIntyre sends a legate to hold a border fort in “Siege on the Borderlands.” A. Kristina Casasent writes of an imperial marriage between feuding houses in “Family Honor.” Brian Renninger’s “The Seat of Contemplation” follows a grieving mystic in a mountain monastery, and Ruth Clara’s “Debts on the Long Road” follows a fugitive Shebatean prince. Casasent, Gibson, McIntyre, Robb and Voss belong to a writing circle called the Alpha Mercs.
Pledges start at $10 for the e-book. The $25 level adds the trade paperback, the $50 level pairs the collectible hardcover with the e-book, and the $500 level includes every edition plus a commissioned black-and-white image of a favorite scene. Early backers receive a Tears From Iron e-book.
The stretch goals begin with a map of the Empire at $15,000. At $20,000 the book gains a foreword by Michael Capps, an Autarch co-owner who designed the Marvel d616 system and once served as president of Epic Games. Author afterwords unlock at $30,000, a bonus ACKS II PDF at $40,000, and a hardcover upgrade with premium endpapers and a ribbon marker at $50,000. At $75,000 and $100,000 backers choose additional stories from submissions by the author pool.
Readers are paying for these stories up front, and the goal fell inside a day. Will other tabletop publishers follow Autarch into crowdfunded fiction, and does a name like Wright’s make that model repeatable?