Four Sword & Sorcery novellas by NESS magazine authors:
"What Rough Beast?" by Bryn Hammond,
"The Barbarian at Dream's End" by Steve Hugh Westenra,
"Suplex & Sorcery" by June Orchid Parker,
and
"The Hunt of a Thousand Leagues" by Dariel R.A. Quiogue
This campaign funds a set of four Sword & Sorcery novellas...
Cover art by Goran Gligović
Cover art by Matthew Spencer
Cover art by John Golden
Cover art by Artyom Trakhanov
These four traditionally printed books will each hold approx. 35,000 words of fiction, an introduction by the publisher, and one full page B&W illustration.
Available in…
Accessible Digital and
Portable Mass-MarketPaperback
The paperbacks will be perfect-bound, sized at 6.75 in x 4.12 in.
Stretch goals include spray color edging. Further details below.
When taken care of, our perfect-bound softcovers are beautiful objects which can be enjoyed for years to come!
And you'll want that, because these are tales of how...
Among the yak nomads, rowdy, restless young have thrown themselves into a cult of were-beasts ridden by unknown spirits, and they stalk Goatskin. They feel evil: evil by the lights of the intruder Temple, or by the banned old beliefs? And the shaman Goatskin searches for – a sad old man who set off on a quest his people call insane – what beast does he impossibly grapple? In the starry high meadows, what inhabits the night? Whose evil?
You can listen to the first chapter (actually first TWO chapters as our narrator got carried away!) here:
An amnesiac mercenary. His robot companions. A deadly fungus transmitted via centaur-like Knightspiders. As the warrior San risks the peril of the spiders’ realm to locate a cure, his visions of a world of technological wonder promise an answer to the infection and taunt him with a possible link to his lost past. But the tighter San's tether to the visions, the more tenuous his hold on the world he knows.
You can listen to the first chapter here:
Can’t a girl wrestle in peace? Not when she’s Varika, the most beloved barbarian in town. A masked heel called the Sorcerer arrives, yearning to send her crying back to her homeland. Now she must bury him and his minions in the ring—or lose everything she holds dear outside it.
You can listen to the first chapter here:
Betrayed, his followers massacred, hunted by a Murjen general and his command, two necromancer brothers and their foul creation, and even by the woman he loves, Orhan Timur must choose between revenge and survival in The Hunt of a Thousand Leagues!
Bryn is the creator of Goatskin, and author of What Rough Beast? Bryn Hammond (she/her) lives in a seaside town in Australia with an enormous number of books, half of them about the steppe. Goatskin sword & sorcery novellas from Brackenbury Books: Waste Flowers, What Rough Beast? Her historical fiction series Amgalant closely follows the Secret History of the Mongols, a 13th-century life of Chinggis Khan. Voices from the Twelfth-Century Steppe is her craft essay. Work in ergot., Queer Weird West Tales,New Edge Sword & Sorcery Magazine, Beating Hearts & Battle-Axes.
The creator of San, and author of The Barbarian at Dream's End,Steve is a trans author of fantasy, science fiction, and horror (basically, if it’s weird he writes it). His novels include The Erstwhile Tyler Kyle and The Wings of Ashtaroth. He is also the author of the novella, Breadcrumbs on a Forest Floor, with short fiction in New Edge Sword & Sorcery.
He grew up on the eldritch shores of Newfoundland, Canada, and currently lives and works in (the slightly less eldritch) Montreal. In his spare (?) time, he's an academic expert on monsters, and--Cthulhu-willing--by the time this novella releases, you'll be able to call him Dr. Monster!
JUNE ORCHID PARKER & DARIEL R.A. QUIOGUE
June is the creator of Varika, and author of Suplex & Sorcery. From Saskatchewan, Canada, weighing in at an undisclosed number of pounds, June Orchid Parker! She debuted in New Edge Sword & Sorcery Issue 2 with the sensational short story “How Many Deaths Till Vengeance?”, and has continued to write for NESS since. Suplex & Sorcery is her first-ever novella. Dariel is the creator of Orhan the Snow Leopard, and author of Walls of Shira Yulun. In 1977, Dariel R. A. Quiogue was exposed to Star Wars, Herodotus, Homer, Edgar Rice Burroughs, and Robert E. Howard, and his brain has never been the same since. He now writes F&SF, flavored by his special fascination with what he calls 'Forgotten Asia' - from Araby to Xinjiang, from Siberia to Ceylon and beyond, there's relatively little English-language fiction set here compared to Japan and China.
WHAT ROUGH BEAST? by Bryn Hammond
LEFT - WHAT ROUGH BEAST? by Goran Gligović, RIGHT - Sample by Linnea Sterte (NOT FINAL ART).
THE BARBARIAN AT DREAM'S END by Steve Hugh Westenra
LEFT - THE BARBARIAN AT DREAM'S END by Matthew Spencer, RIGHT - Sample by Luis Melo (NOT FINAL ART).
SUPLEX & SORCERY by June Orchid Parker
LEFT - SUPLEX & SORCERY by John Golden, RIGHT - Sample by Sam J. Royale (NOT FINAL ART).
THE HUNT OF A THOUSAND LEAGUES by Dariel R.A. Quiogue
LEFT - THE HUNT OF A THOUSAND LEAGUES by Artyom Trakhanov, RIGHT - Sample by Simon Underwood (NOT FINAL ART).
The pledges are pretty straightforward, however there's one question we'd like to address:
"Can I just get some, or one, of the books?"
Yes! But not as part of the crowdfund, which is to cover all four books' printing & labour costs. In short, it would greatly complicate things for us to offer anything other then full sets of all four novellas.
We encourage folk to take advantage of this opportunity to try out some authors which may be new to them, stories which may be a little different from classic S&S, and to get all four books ahead of everyone else, who will see them be released one at a time over the course of 2026 while our backers will get all four at once, at the very beginning of the release schedule.
Backing the crowdfund is also the only way to get the exclusives & stretch goal bonuses such as...
Clocking in at 17,000 words this bonus story is a novelette that will be printed & bound in classic paper n' staple 'zine style! It will feature a fifth Sword & Sorcery protagonist, author, and cover artist - all revealed when it's unlocked...
ALL BACKERS will get a copy - digital if pledging digitally, physical otherwise.
2) INTERNATIONAL SHIPPING DISCOUNT ($18,300) - UNLOCKED
This stretch goal covers reducing shipping costs for all backers outside the United States: $5 USD off for Canadian backers, and $10 USD off for anyone outside of North America.
3) FANTASY MAPS ($19,250) - UNLOCKED
Illustrator Darian Jones will create B&W maps for the interior of each novella, in a style matching their stories!
Darian's map for LORD OF A SHATTERED LAND by Howard Andrew Jones
4) SPRAY COLOR EDGES ($31,700)
In the classic S&S paperback style, each book will have its pages edges' painted in their own vibrant color!
Backers will get to choose to color for each book in a series of four polls.
ALL PHYSICAL TIER BACKERS will receive 4x6 inch postcards of the cover art for What Rough Beast? and The Barbarian of Dream's End.
The back is formatted to comply with USPS standards. You can actually mail these suckers!
RETURNING BACKERS will receive a 4x6 inch postcard of the cover art for Suplex & Sorcery.
FIRST 48 HOUR BACKERS will receive a 4x6 inch postcard of the cover art for The Hunt of a Thousand Leagues.
ADD-ONS
NEW EDGE SWORD & SORCERY: Sold at a crowdfund-exclusive discount, issues 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and 7 of New Edge Sword & Sorcery are available in digital and softcover formats.
Stories by all four of our novella authors can be found in these issues, including tales of Bryn Hammond's Goatskin and Dariel R.A. Quiogue's Orhan Timur the Snow Leopard!
DOUBLE-EDGE SWORD & SORCERY: Two S&S novellas paired in one paperback! The physical formats feature gorgeous purple spray edges, and the paperback-sized hardcover has a white bookmark ribbon.
Featuring cover & interior illustrations by the same teams found in WHAT ROUGH BEAST? and THE HUNT OF A THOUSAND LEAGUES.
There's also a paperback-sized hardcover with white bookmark
Waste Flowers by Bryn Hammond takes place before What Rough Beast? and Walls of Shira Yulun takes place before The Hunt of a Thousand Leagues. Though they may enhance your enjoyment of the new novellas, they do not have to be read to understand them.
SOMETIME LOFTY TOWERS: A full length Sword & Sorcery novel by a veteran of the genre, David C. Smith.
A handsome mass-market paperback featuring crimson red spray edges, two interior illustrations, and custom calligraphy, SOMETIME LOFTY TOWERS tells a tale of raging against frontier injustice, of struggling with the bondage of bone-deep grudges...
...of seeking peace while swinging gore-soaked steel.
Crowdfunded earlier this year, the novel will be released in plenty of time to be shipped with your set of New Edge Sword & Sorcery novellas.
RAINBOW METAL BATTLE-AXE PIN: These 1.5 inch pins of the New Edge Sword & sorcery battle-axe are made with soft enamel using anodized rainbow plating on a zinc alloy base metal.
The rainbow effect is randomized, making each pin unique!
Please take note of the estimated shipping charges, and understand shipping charges may change between the crowdfund and fulfillment.
During the fulfillment process, BackerKit will calculate any shipping that may be required when you fill out your delivery address.
Shipping costs will not be assessed and billed until then! You are only being charged for your pledge amount at this time. We hope this helps to keep the cost of shipping down due to current fluctuations in domestic and international shipping costs.
Brackenbury Books, BackerKit, and our fulfillment partners are not responsible for any VAT, duty, or customs charges any packages may incur.
Don't forget: We made our International Shipping Discount stretch goal, so all orders from Canada will get $5 USD off their shipping, and all orders outside North America (”International”) will get $10 USD off their shipping!
TIMELINE
Our goal is to ship some time in April 2026. Given that our printer for these books is located in the same state as our fulfillment center, we feel very confident about achieving this goal.
Thanks to everything we learned publishing our past books and magazine issues, we're confident about producing New Edge Sword & Sorcery Novellas in a timely manner, and at the high level of quality our readers have come to expect.
We've successfully funded five campaigns across two crowdfunding platforms, with three fulfilled and the other two on track to be fulfilled later this year. Our editor & publisher has also successfully crowdfunded a webseries in the past, another project which requires collaboration between a large team of creatives while keeping within budget and on schedule.
To further mitigate risk we’ve brought on a crowdfunding & fulfillment professional, Sara McHenry (https://www.saramchenry.com), who did excellent work for us with our previous issues. Since 2013, she’s helped her clients raise over $3.5 million in crowdfunding money for their creative projects. Her specialties include setting budgets and timelines, structuring reward tiers, working with vendors, shipping logistics, and motivating the unmotivated creator.
Should any challenges arise with things we have no control over, such as supply chain issues, our backers will receive timely, detailed updates on the situation.
This project is participating in the BackerKit event Printopia 2025 📚 A celebration of books, comics, and graphic novels featuring an all-star lineup of creators crowdfunding together from September 9–30, 2025.
🧭 Explore the 4 Printopia Groups — Every project belongs to one of four unique groups helping you discover stories you’ll love and creators to follow:
Dawnrise | Uplifting, imaginative tales for all ages.
Suncrest | Bold, hopeful adventures for middle grade readers.
Duskmelt| Emotionally rich stories for teens & adults.
Nightfall | Complex, mature narratives for older teens & adults.
⚔️ Introducing Crowd Quest — a backer-powered community game running during Printopia! Every project belongs to a group, and when you interact, you earn points that help unlock group-wide rewards. Learn more about it in our freebies section below!
🎁 Printopia Freebies Overview — Check out all the different ways you can get freebies in addition to your pledge rewards!
Cross-Collab Freebies — Back both projects in a Cross-Collab pair and get 1 freebie from each creator (see individual project pages for unlock requirements).
Crowd Quest Digital Zine Freebie — Help each of the 4 groups unlock their achievement to earn their digital zine freebie, filled with art, stories, and bonus content from that group’s participants. Collect up to 4 digital zines — one from each group.
Printopia Bookmark Freebie — Back 10+ projects across any group to get the Limited Edition Printopia 2025 bookmark (fulfilled by BackerKit).
*Only pledges to physical reward tiers or main digital offerings (if no physical items are offered) qualify towards earning the limited Printopia 2025 Bookmark.
