Forgotten Ruin is Here!

Today Forgotten Ruin is available on Amazon and Audible. I’m pretty excited to see where this series goes, both because I find it a lot of fun, and also because the authors are trying to build up their independence and ensure that they control their own IP as much as possible. If you are so inclined, you can get the ebook straight from the authors on their own website.

But enough talk of business, let’s instead talk about how Forgotten Ruin instills a sense of wonder. What is wonder? Let me refer you to JD Cowan, who instructed me:

Wonder is a trait from adventure fiction and its subgenres fantasy and horror. It is the adventure of exploring new lands, peoples, and possibilities.

Cowan expands on this, quoting Sam J. Lundwall in Fandom: An Illustrated History:

"Its strong connections with the Medieval chansons de geste and other tales of chivalry with their unbearable noble heroes, incredible, constantly swooning ladies and unbelievable villains, gives the genre life and gusto and guarantees new, staggering thrills on every page. It is very dramatic, alternating between the pathetic and the grotesque and characterized by mighty heroics, swords, blood and hideous slithering things in the darkness of convenient crypts."

That last line by Lundwall is just about perfect to describe what is going on Forgotten Ruin. This story is a continuation of a very old tradition, of men gathering around a fire to tell one another exciting stories full of fantastical events and derring-do, because it is an important part of who we are.

The other thing that Forgotten Ruin offers us is hope. Hope, the theological virtue, is quite different from optimism. The situations in Forgotten Ruin are often quite bleak, and horrible things still happen in the Ruin. Hope is the assurance that while evil may have its day, it will not ultimately prevail.

“Hope is the power of being cheerful in circumstances that we know to be desperate.”

― G.K. Chesterton

With Rangers, hope is typically expressed via a rather black sense of humor, but it is there nonetheless. Hope is what drives men to go on, when it seems impossible to do so, yet they persist nonetheless. J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, the most popular fiction of the twentieth century, evoked hope powerfully. This is just one of many things that set it apart from the rest, as even the best of other well-known works were often powerfully crafted counsels of despair.

Forgotten Ruin is brimming with the sense that rough men can hold the darkness at bay, and have fun doing it. And for expressing that so beautifully, I want to see Forgotten Ruin succeed. Evil will not prevail, and the stories that we tell one another can be the thing that enables us to take just one more step, and then another, and another, until our task is done.