Promise of Blood: Book 1 in the Powder Mage trilogy

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Written by Brian McClellan, Promise of Blood introduces guns into my fantasy. To be fair, it’s a lot of musket and one-shot pistols, canon balls, and whatever else can be fired using copious amounts of gunpowder, but it’s still a technology I’m not normally fond of in my fantasy. Sometime after the failed negotiation, a Warden (a human mutated by magic and used by the Kez as bodyguards for their Privileged) unsuccessfully attempts to assassinate Tamas in the secret lair beneath the Skyline Palace where he and his co-conspirators had planned the coup. As only he and the members of the council knew where he would be, Tamas hires Adamat again to discover which one of the Councilors is a Kez agent.

As for Adamat, his storyline is a great way to get a bit of distance, a little break from all the Army and politics and it reads like an atypical Victorian detective story in all the best ways. Love, betrayal, swords, magic, muskets and Kresimir returned, there is trouble on the horizon for Tamas in book two. I will say this now, Tamas will die; he is going to sacrifice himself to the Kresimir to save the world or his son or both. I just can’t see another out outcome for him. Thankfully we are a while away from that, maybe I should say hopefully… A couple weeks ago I announced the sale of Promise of Blood and two untitled sequels to Orbit Books. The Publisher's Marketplace announcement is thus: It wouldn’t be high on my recommendation list, but I’d recommend it to readers who cared more about plot, the magic system, and action than the characters themselves. Olem grimaced. “Officially, sir, I was pushing him out of the way of a runaway carriage. Saved his life. Half my company saw it.”Field Marshal Tamas, commander of the Adran Army, has just committed a brutal coup against Adro's monarchy. When he kills every single member of the Royal Cabal, they all utter the same mysterious phrase: "You can't break Kresimir's Promise".

It's bloody good, I promise you that! (I don't know how to stop with all the awful title jokes that come to mind!) In January 2021, Joseph Mallozzi announced that he would be writing and producing a television series based on the books with No Equal Entertainment and Frantic Films. [4] Plot and setting [ edit ] The real issue I have with the female characters was that they were just bland. Rozalia Julene, and Ka-Poel are these really powerful women but they were just boring to me. It felt like they were only there to move the plot along and weren’t developed themselves or didn’t lead to significant development of other characters. Field Marshal Tamas has staged a coup against the king of Adro. His powder mages have slaughtered the king's Privileged cabal of sorcerers and the nobility has been rounded up to face the guillotine with their king. Tamas has brought revolution to his country in one bloody night to save his people and right the wrongs caused by the old regime. Yet his actions have far-reaching consequences of which no reasonable man could have conceived, and the king will prove the easiest obstacle to overcome in his quest to free Adro. TVTropes is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.Shortly after the confrontation, the group find the Kez army marching on South Pike, its Royal Cabal coming to assist Julene in reaching its peak where they will summon Kresimir. Alongside Adro's Mountain Watch, Taniel, Borbador and Ka-Poel fight for months to hold off the Kez forces. At the climax of the summoning ritual, Taniel uses his mage abilities to shoot the resurrected Kresimir directly in the eye, apparently killing him. Adamat, a former police inspector who is now a private investigator, is asked by Tamas to help solve the mystery. Meanwhile, Tamas is busy with purging the country's nobility and struggling to maintain peace during the inevitable civil war. A thoroughly satisfying yarn that should keep readers waiting impatiently for further installments. In our eReader you can find the full English version of the book. Read Promise of Blood Online - link to read the book on full screen. Sanderson himself has praised it as a good magical system and I thought it read great. There’s plenty of depth as well, as the novel progresses — and the next two books in the trilogy add a lot to make the magic systems feel even more distinct.

Field Marshal Tamas, powder mage and favored soldier of the Iron King Manhouch, stages a coup to kill Manhouch, slaughter the nobles, and free the country of Adro from their oppression. Despite centuries of corruption, Tamas still has an uphill climb ahead of him, between royalist holdouts, priests who believe in the Divine Right of Kings, and ordinary people who are caught up in the violence of the times.Lady Winceslav, an Adran noblewoman who leads a powerful mercenary company known as the Wings of Adom; Powder Mages are wizards with the ability to metabolize gunpowder and use it as fuel for various magical powers, including telekinesis; they can also manipulate gunpowder, such as causing it to explode spontaneously. Tamas and Taniel are both powder mages. As the city reacts to the coup – the royal family and supporting lords and their families put to the guillotine, the Royalist military’s last stand, the new council in charge – Tamas sends Adamant on a mission to find out what Kresimir’s Promise is, apart from the final words on a dying Privileged’s lips. Adamant gets knee-deep in Adro’s underworld to find out what danger comes the realm’s way. Taniel chases the mystery Privileged through the city, before being retasked with taking out the last Royal Cabal member, his best friend Bo. All the while, Tamas tries to keep his new city and council in one piece, and the mighty Kez nation have smelled blood in the water and are on the way with their immense army.

I like my fantasy medieval. I always have, and I suspect I always will. It’s a hard habit to break, to be honest, and I much prefer my characters swinging swords, drawing bows, and charging an enemy line atop a horse. Put a car or a machine gun in your story, and you’re one step towards driving me away. The Revolution Will Not Be Civilized: While there is no question that Manhouch was a corrupt hedonist and most of the government was just as bad, the books don't shy away from the fact that killing him requires fighting through a lot of innocent people who are just trying to defend the government that they have been raised to believe is sacred and they're not exactly wrong either. The day of executions is an absolute bloodbath, and the common people have no problem tearing apart royal soldiers when given the chance. Tamas is also perfectly willing to kill noble children to keep the monarchy from resurfacing.

The main character Tamas is initially comes across as a hard and chiselled personality but as you progress through the story you get that he is a committed man who is trying his best to do the right thing, which sometimes includes hard choices with hard outcomes. There is a realism and quality that I found appealing in Tamas. I like badass characters. Tamas and Taniel definitely fit the description as well as Ka-Poel later on. But it felt like the characters were just badass for the sake of badassery. There weren’t many consequences to their actions or it seemed like everyone just forgets their actions—specifically Taniel’s and even Tamas’ at times. The Privileged are this setting’s elemental sorcerers, men and women capable of touching the Else with their hands, each finger connecting to one of the four elements and the thumb for the aether (which, I’m told, some of the Ancient Greeks were crazy about!). The Powder Mage trilogy is a series of epic fantasy novels written by American author Brian McClellan. It consists of the novels Promise of Blood (2013), The Crimson Campaign (2014) and The Autumn Republic (2015). [1] In 2014, Promise of Blood received the Morningstar Award for Best Fantasy Newcomer. [2] Several short stories and novellas set in the world of The Powder Mage trilogy have been published, as well as an additional trilogy called Gods of Blood and Powder. [3] The next day, Manhouch, his queen and many of the arrested nobles are executed by guillotine, ending the monarchy in Adro and leading the country on the path to civil war.