Relentless Ones Series Write-Up
The Relentless Ones series has its origins in the games of Dungeons & Dragons and other RPGs I played in my youth and the friends I made playing them. The Relentless Ones are a group of five friends who form a sort of dysfunctional family, and like family, they don’t always get along with each other, but they know that they can rely on each other when it’s them against the world.
The world of the Relentless Ones has more in common with Howard’s Hyboria or Lieber’s Newhon than Tolkien’s Middle Earth. The setting has a Mediterranean feel with the city-states of the classical era. The gods are present with an active hand in the world, bestowing favor and wrath in equal measure like the Greek gods of Olympus.
Humans are the predominant race, with the Faerie folk largely removed from the world, while rare individuals and small pockets of the lesser fae can still be found there. Monsters exist in dark forests, underground caves, distant mountain peaks, and more sinister, cosmic horrors lie buried deep in the earth, beneath the sea, or across the gulf of space.
Magic is rare, the study of which is carried out from master to apprentice or in secret abbeys. And there are darker paths to sorcery using forbidden knowledge gleaned from unspeakable entities. Sorcerers are inevitably dangerous, deranged, and horribly ancient.
The Relentless Ones books are not tales of epic, world-saving adventures or continent-spanning, decades long wars. They are tales of opportunistic professionals hoping to make a big score and spend their time in luxury…until the money runs out, and it’s on to the next job!
The books are self-contained and it’s not necessary to read them in order, although the characters do grow and develop over the course of the series. The plots between books are, for the most part, unrelated. The characters are down-to-earth, vulgar, and flawed. They have sex, they get drunk, they swear, they make mistakes. They are sometimes not nice people. But they are never sanitized fantasy tropes without any real substance.
If you enjoy fast-paced, fantasy stories with scheming, sword fights, magic, and monsters then you’ve come to the right place.
