Promise of Blood: Book 1 in the Powder Mage trilogy

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Privileged are powerful sorcerers; being exceedingly rare, they are almost exclusively gathered into "Royal Cabals" in direct service to the Nine Kingdoms' various monarchs. 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: The Wings of Adom are certainly on my (very long) list of side characters/entities I want to explore more in the short fiction. …more Hey Marc! Thanks a ton! 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 ]

Ultimately some tried and trusted fantasy concepts make there way into the story; near immortal sorcerers who called down the original Gods. Which is not to say Promise of Blood is by any stretch anything less than an excellent first act to what has proven to be an exciting trilogy, filled with some of what I love most about fantasy. What makes it so? 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.Hi there! SFFBC is a welcoming place for readers to share their love of speculative fiction through 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. There is a certain charm to a book that throws you headlong into the deep end and lets you figure it out as you go along, and the author does this very well. We follow the stories of three main characters. Tamas himself, the leader of the coup and a Field Marshal in the army of Adro; Taniel, Tamas’ son; and Adamat, the investigator mentioned earlier, as they deal with the aftermath of the coup, including trying to identify traitors amongst the conspirators and stave off invasion from a neighboring nation. The dangers of powder addiction, which Taniel clearly has, are hinted at but we never see anyone suffering from it. I hope/expect we'll be seeing that in the second book but it seems like a missed opportunity.

There wasn’t much that gave me pause around the plot. It’s straightforward and doesn’t require much questioning. And most of all, I liked it. Most of my questions were answered and I didn’t feel like anything was missing once I finished the book. I haven’t read many books with miliary coups being the central plot point, so it was a nice change of pace for me. There’s still plenty to explore in the next books, so there isn’t much for me to expand on here. Crouching Moron, Hidden Badass: Adom basically just wants to cook food, but he is still a god. He defeats soldiers sent to kill him with contemptuous ease. Which makes the inclusion of the guns a non-issue – even more so considering the way that McClellan wove the introduction of guns and gunpowder into the world’s magic system. Some purists might wonder at the outset just why there are apparently three – and maybe more – types of magic. However, I’ve never been overly concerned about issues like that, given the inherent magic of … magic. Revolution, bloody revolution! That’s how Promise of Blood begins — with our trilogy’s main protagonist, Field Marshall Tamas slaughtering the Privileged Royal Cabal in their sleep with the help of his Powder mages, dethroning the rightful king Manhouch, rounding up the nobility and cutting that lot’s heads off while a million men, women and children watch the executions in Adopest, the capital of Adom’s public squares. Enough blood is spilt that the executioner could drown on it several times over.

I like that while we get a clear resolution to many of the plot lines for this book specifically there is just the foundation for the other arcs that will go through the entire series. At the end of this book I was ready to jump into the next one right away to find out how the people who made it through would fair. I’m pretty sure there are some bloody times coming soon and we are in for some hard deaths to come. Promise of Blood starts off tossing the reader right into the middle of a mystery. A former police investigator, who now does the same thing for private clients (not the only similarity to our modern world, more on those later) is called to the palace and discovers the aftermath of the coup. The leader of the coup, Tamas, asks the investigator to find the meaning of a phrase some of the victims of the coup uttered as they were dying. While the world wasn’t explored as much as I would have liked, I’m impressed with how fantastical the world still feels, even with muskets and early rifles. It doesn’t feel like a world about guns where magic is shoehorned in. It really does feel like guns were simply the natural development of industrialization and that those weapons have significantly affected the world of magic. Like the plot, there’s still plenty to explore in the next books, so there isn’t much for me to expand on here.