Forming the Perfect Fantasy Heist Crew

March 20, 2021May 6, 2024torforge2 Comments

A Summoning of Demons is finally out in the world and while we’re so sad that the Chimera series is over, we are also SO ready to reenter Cate Glass’ world of forbidden sorcery and a ragtag magical crew of ready for whatever espionage, heisting, or skullduggery the Shadow Lord has in store for them.

To keep us going, we’re revisiting Cate Glass’ guide to forming the perfect fantasy heist crew! Join along and tell us in the comments which role you’d play in a heist.

Originally published June 2019.

By Cate Glass

I’ve always loved spy stories, from The Scarlet Pimpernel to Len Deighton’s cold war novels to Robert Ludlum’s Bourne novels. I also enjoy elaborate heist stories like Denzel Washington’s “Inside Man,” Robert Redford’s “Sneakers,” and two of my favorite binge-worthy TV series—“Burn Notice” and “White Collar.”

These tales center on groups of skilled operatives who pull off amazing, twisty ventures that look very much like magic. When noodling around with my own project a couple of years ago, I decided I wanted to pull this classic story into a world of my own devising, to create my own group of agents or thieves and set them on intriguing adventures where the “magic” in the caper was actual magic!

First, where and when?

I envisioned a great city just moving into an age of enlightenment and the rule of law, where feudal barons are being replaced by merchants and bankers and explorers. Magic, believed to be the dangerous residue of the wars of Creation, has almost been eradicated, though the authorities are ever on the alert for magical activity. Rather than conquest and empire-building conflicts, I wanted to focus on localized intrigue and political skullduggery, struggles between new governance and old ways. Rather than battlefields, significant conflicts take place in salons or dining rooms, secret societies, artisan workshops, catacombs, public marketplaces, and dark streets. Combat involves betrayals, kidnappings, poisonings, and assassinations. And crises arise that need to be dealt with in secret, without the overt complicity of authorities.

But, of course, before I could devise a first adventure for my little group, I needed to figure out who they were! Sorcerers certainly, and in my world, magical talents are unique and rare. And for truly complex missions, they would need more than magic.

So I looked back at those agents and thieves I so enjoyed and assessed the tools they used to get their jobs done. They used laser glass cutters or elaborate climbing harnesses to get them into inaccessible places. They impersonated their marks by using tools that bypass retinal, voice, or fingerprint scanners. Communications were on earwig devices. Their weapons were things like laser–aimed dart guns or focused explosives. I also considered the classic TV show Mission Impossible, where the team was not composed of experienced spies with super electronics, but actors, mechanics, electronics experts, linguists, and the like—who brought their own particular set of talents and more mundane tools, like makeup, latex masks, and trucks, winches, power supplies, and common screwdrivers to do similar tasks. Though I wanted to put my adventure in an era more like the sixteenth century, the skills they would need were much the same.

Time for a casting call!

WANTED, for four possible positions in or near the independency of Cantagna, applicants possessing one or more of the following job skills:

ability to breach secured facilities without detection
ability to replicate documents…and signatures…and artworks or other artifacts.
knowledge of history, art, law, government, important personages, and political and interfamily rivalries throughout the nine independencies of the Costa Drago.
high-level skills in weaponry and offensive and defensive combat.
impersonation.
costuming.
retrieval.
communications specialists.
improvise structural and mechanical devices in close quarters.

Applicants must be able to work in a variety of stressful environments in tasks which have no visible support from any official entity. Decent pay, but no benefits, no public acknowledgment of service, and most definitely no life, health, accident, or disability insurance.

After sorting through a variety of applicants with a variety of skills and background, I found my four. Like my favorite literary operatives, they should be able to create enough magic and mayhem to ensure the good guys – or mostly good guys – win the day.

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Author Features / Magic X Mayhem

Consensual Mayhem In a Chaotic World

August 22, 2019April 8, 2024torforge

Our summer of Magic X Mayhem continues with a post from S.L. Huang, author of Zero Sum Game and Null Set, exploring how we use mayhem to survive in an often terrible world.

By S. L. Huang

“May you live in interesting times” is often said to be an old Chinese curse.

It is not, it seems, either old, Chinese, or a curse. It’s more likely someone labeled it that way to make it sound woo-woo and exotic (which is tremendously exhausting).

But I kind of wish it weren’t an apocryphal story.

Because I want interesting times. Many of us do. But I want to choose my own.

When I was a kid, I was the ultimate in tree-climbing, fence-walking fearlessness. The type of kid who would often court “scrapes,” as Anne of Green Gables would have put it. I was constantly scolded and called down from trees, walls, or standing on the monkey bars of swingsets.

(I indignantly chafed under these regulations. Now that I occasionally watch friends’ kids, I can only imagine the panic my non-parental-units must have experienced when they caught sight of my antics with the sure horror that they were about to return a tiny corpse to my family.)

My mother, grasping at some safety rein, once begged me to at least wear a bike helmet when I climbed on things. A few hours later, she exited the back door to see me fifty feet up at the top of the sycamore tree. “What?” I said, when she had recovered from her near-heart attack. “I wore a bike helmet!”

Happily, I never fell three stories out of a sycamore tree.

But when I was eleven, I started getting sick. Just after I turned twelve, I was diagnosed with cancer.

Like many children, I used to imagine I was a book character. I’d have fabulous adventures. I’d get hurt. My life would be in terrible danger! And then I would emerge victorious.

Cancer treatment, however, was never the right kind of life-threatening to be fun. I’d never dreamed of being the hero of someone’s contemporary YA disease romp.

Instead, I used to imagine I was being experimented on by aliens. That helped.

I’ve paraglided, wakeboarded, rappelled down buildings, galloped horses, swum with sperm whales, jumped off thirty-foot platforms, and been lit on fire. I’ve backpacked through rainforest and gotten lost at high altitudes. Skydiving, hang gliding, and getting my pilot’s license are all on the list.

I choose to take risks to my health and safety. For fun. I’d be pretty ticked if anyone ever told me I couldn’t.

A decade and a half after the first time, I got cancer again.

This story doesn’t have a moral.

I’m also a martial artist and fighter. I willingly put myself in positions where I’m getting hurt and where I’m inviting people to do violence against me, albeit in a controlled way.

I’ve gotten deep bruises and cut lips, sprained joints, been elbowed in the face. Once I got kicked in the chest so hard I couldn’t breathe for about sixty seconds.

I keep going back for more.

I like to think that if we had a perfect world where we’d eradicated all nonconsensual violence, we could still enjoy competitive sparring. Matches we enter into with the power to walk out. Places where we voluntarily give up our control and release our civilized expectations that we won’t be hit in the face.

I wonder at the psychology of it, though. Do we hunger for this only because of our fears?

I don’t think being a fighter makes me less afraid of being assaulted in real life than many other people are. The very real fear of villainous people, of being held powerless, trying to fight back and failing . . .

No secret part of me desires to be that type of protagonist.

On a meta-level, I sometimes step back and consider how much I enjoy violence. Not only in my hobbies, but also in my entertainment. I’ve been an action movie junkie all my life, long before I ever started making them. I watch every cop and forensic show on TV. My own books are intensely violent, stirring through worlds of mercenaries, criminals, and serial killers with extreme delight.

And I’m not talking meaningful, historical types of violence, but instead madcap, rousing R ratings only for entertainment’s sake.

Perhaps it’s a power fantasy fueled by my own adult fears. Perhaps violence taps into something primal in my brain, an excitement about humans facing off against each other.

Or maybe there’s no reason. Maybe I just think gunfights and explosions and stunt choreography are deliciously cool.

Or maybe … maybe it comes back to this idea of consent.

I’m allowing the story space in my brain. I’m drawing out the welcome mat for the creators and popping my popcorn, and I’m inviting them to take me on this journey with me, one of pain and danger, telling them it’s okay if they emotionally punch me in the face and trusting the thrills and emotional catharsis will make up for it. And on a more abstract level, I’m aware the actors and writers and stuntpeople and everyone else who contributed to this piece of media—they, too, stepped into this shared reality of their own will, and can step out if they so choose.

We’re all choosing to experience this story of electrifying violence together.

Consensual mayhem.

Interesting times.

We live in interesting times now. I never would have chosen them. A nightmare march of bigotry, a climate rising to kill us, real-life children dying at my country’s borders . . . I wake in the night strangled with anxiety, and I yearn for my era to be one of boredom.

In interesting times, emotional escape is more important than ever. I don’t know how much sense it makes, that I flee the real-life horror of human suffering to replace it with fake blood and fictional fields littered with bodies invented only to be broken.

Maybe it doesn’t make any sense.

But something in me thinks it’s made of the same fabric as slamming the door to the hospital and running hard away so I can climb to the top of a sycamore tree or leap out of an airplane.

I’m fleeing the mayhem I’m cursed with, and taking a huddled breath from it to make my own.

The mayhem we choose. The mayhem we create.

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Stay tuned for more #magicXmayhem all summer long!

Author Features / Behind the Scenes / Magic X Mayhem

How to Procrastinate #MagicXMayhem Style

August 2, 2019May 2, 2024torforge

Writers of the world RELATE because we’re talking procrastination. There’s no end to the distractions from writing, but everyone needs a break sometimes. All work no play does something that is undesirable (we’ve heard). So we sat down our Magic X Mayhem authors (Actually we sent them emails–they may have been sitting?) and asked about their favorite distractions from writing and editing the work we love so much.

What’s your favorite way to procrastinate when you should be writing?

(We promise not to tell your editor)

Andrew Bannister, author of Iron Gods

I am a world-class procrastinator. I’m so good that I don’t actually have to do anything active. I can procrastinate while sitting still. I can procrastinate while simply breathing. But that said, listening to records is a favourite, as anyone who seeks me out on Instagram, Facebook or Twitter will quickly discover.

Sarah Gailey, author of Magic for Liars

Right now, as I’m writing this, I’m on book tour, so the way I’m procrastinating is by collapsing onto my hotel bed, watching old episodes of Chopped, and eating as many Chees-Its as I can fit into my face. When I’m at home, I like to procrastinate by cleaning and coming up with elaborate recipes to try out. You know I’m on a tight deadline if I’m scrubbing the baseboards or googling ‘where to buy lamb tongue’.

Max Gladstone, author of Empress of Forever

Category error! Writing is a way to procrastinate from the rest of life.

Cate Glass, author of An Illusion of Thieves

Small scale? Spider solitaire is excellent for clearing the mind of the modern and mundane before diving into a difficult scene. Or large scale? Binge-watching four seasons of Lucifer in three nights is necessary in order to study the story and character arcs and experience the rising tension to remember what I’m striving for, even if it means staying up far too late…

Duncan Hamilton, author of Dragonslayer

It’s not procrastinating, it’s ideating!

Saad Z. Hossain, author of The Gurkha and the Lord of Tuesday

I game for hours at night, often with a crew of three or four friends. We live in different countries, so gaming together, talking shit is a priceless way of keeping touch. Right now we are playing Red Dead Redemption 2 online. It’s a cowboy game, we spend a lot of time hunting, fishing, and hogtying random people. Not sure this is procrastination though. My view is that during downtime, your brain is still trying to process the story. Whenever you actually put down something on paper, I don’t know it’s like a quantum event almost, all those other possibilities just seem to die and you can’t get them back even if you go for rewrites or edits or whatever. So sometimes procrastination is good, it’s healthy. I look like I’m not doing anything but in reality… ok fine I’m not doing anything.

S.L. Huang, author of Null Set

Beating people up on the mat! (Or getting beaten up.) It’s okay, you can tell my editor—she does it too!

Tamsyn Muir, author of Gideon the Ninth

I play Donkey Kong Country on the SNES, because I am so unbelievably bad at Donkey Kong Country that after ten minutes I am more than ready to switch to something that I am more competent at than playing Donkey Kong Country, which is anything else.

Brian Naslund, author of Blood of an Exile:

I have a low-key addiction to reading “Today I Learned” facts on Reddit and going down Wikipedia rabbit holes about obscure animal behavior that could potentially be applied to dragons down the road.
I also have a bird feeder right outside the window by my desk, so I am definitely guilty of getting stuck with a scene, and spending 20 minutes looking at chickadees, which rarely helps solve the problem.

JY Yang, author of The Ascent to Godhood

I’m pretty sure he [my editor] knows anyway, he sees me posting about it on Twitter. My favourite way to procrastinate is some kind of eldritch combination between Tumblr, Instagram, and making art.

Stay tuned for more #magicXmayhem all summer long!

Author Features / Magic X Mayhem

Enter the World of the Spin

July 22, 2019May 16, 2019torforge

A brilliantly conceived artificially created solar system, the Spin came into existence through the efforts of unknown engineers and their mysterious, sentient devices of creation. We asked author Andrew Bannister to introduce us to this world, the setting of his interconnected series that begins with Creation Machine, and continues with this summer’s Iron Gods, which puts some of the mayhem in our Magic X Mayhem campaign.

By Andrew Bannister

If you haven’t encountered it before, the Spin can be a confusing place. You are not alone. Eighty-eight planets and twenty-one suns in a patently artificial cluster? Even people who live there are confused.

I wanted the Spin to be ancient and fundamentally mysterious – a place created, not arrived at by accident. A place whose creators are long forgotten. A place that runs on rules which are opaque. Hence, nothing is quite right. The suns should collide with each other, but they don’t. One of the planets has a figure-of-eight orbit. There’s an abandoned monastery on Obel Moon with a tower which floats off to one side of the main structure and inverts itself regularly like an hourglass. It’s physically ridiculous. At the very best, it suggests that the creators – whoever they were – had a good sense of humor.

But, like anywhere else, the Spin is inhabited by people, and as we know people (in whatever form) are the greatest adaptors in the universe. Some authors write about places which are apparently Utopian, but where people somehow manage to be unhappy and unfulfilled. The Spin is the opposite – a dystopic mess, cruel and dangerous and unforgiving, but where some people manage, against all the odds, to be happy.

Some people, I said. Not all people!

So the peoples of the Spin have naturally formed themselves into some familiar socio-economic structures.

Think of the Spin as a misshapen globe of stars and planets. Within it, think of three roughly concentric shells – Outer Spin, Inner Spin and Cordern – with each of them having a story to tell. As with anything else in the Spin it’s not quite that simple, but stay with me.

The Inner Spin is the home of the Hegemony, the industrial-commercial combine run by Viklun Haas. It is efficient and amoral, the natural home of bankers and hungry corporations, and it uses economic hard power ruthlessly to protect its interests.

The Outer Spin, where the planets are thinly distributed and the pickings are poorer, has become the natural base for Society Otherwise, or Soc O, a loose leftist group of the disaffected, the young and the washed-up. It has no formal leadership, but its informal leader is Fleare Haas, estranged daughter of Viklun. Soon after joining up, she has met a young soldier called Muz. Things happen. Read the book.

The Inner and Outer Spin wrap around the Cordern, a small isolated area right in the middle. Here is where you will find the Fortunate Protectorate (if you’re not careful). This is under the de facto leadership of second-in-command Alameche Ur-Hive, administrator, politician and thoroughly creative psychopath, who has managed to build it up to a brutal, medievalist five-planet empire which is kept at arms-length by the Inner Spin – but the arms are not so long as to stop them from talking, trading and manipulating. At this point I should mention the spiky little floating Artificial Intelligence, Ambassador Eskjog, but again, you have to read the book to find out more about that entity.

While rampaging around the Cordern, the Fortunate Protectorate have found something. They don’t know exactly what it is, but Alameche is sure that it must be worth something to someone, somewhere, and he is determined to extract the maximum value. In other words, money and power are still at the heart of things, even if you are millions of years in the future on the other side of the Universe.

For the moment, Alamech is trying to keep the discovery secret, but unknown to him there was a witness both to the discovery and to the genocide that went with it. The witness happens to be dead, but people have ways of dealing with that. And that’s as much of the story as I can tell you without major spoilers.

What else should I tell you? Well, if you don’t appreciate sex, violence, sarcasm, social commentary, politics, heroism, treachery, space battles, forest fires, naked ambition and generally being a bit confused – please don’t read Creation Machine. And definitely don’t read Iron Gods or Stone Clock, books two and three…

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Author Features / Behind the Scenes / Magic X Mayhem

I’ve Been Lit on Fire Four Times. Three of Them Were on Purpose.

July 15, 2019June 12, 2019torforge

Is there anything that says mayhem more than being on fire? Magic X Mayhem author S.L. Huang, the mad genius behind Zero Sum Game and Null Set, tells us about her mayhem-filled days stabbing batteries, chasing storms, and setting accidental fires.

I’ve Been Lit on Fire Four Times. Three of Them Were on Purpose: The Story of My Partner In Mayhem.

By S. L. Huang

This is a story about one of my best friends.

He’s exactly the type of person you imagine when you picture someone from MIT. When I met him in college, his dorm room had computers racked ten high and he’d replaced the lock on his door with a fingerprint scanner. Now he builds bartending robots and flies helicopters as a hobby, both RC ones and real ones.

We are the exact worst friends for each other. Because every time one of us has a terrible idea, the other one does not say, “Hey, no, maybe we should think about that”, but instead, “HECK YEAH WE SHOULD TOTALLY DO THAT.”

Case study #1. When my friend was first getting into RC stuff, he visited me, and he was cautious in setting aside the drones’ lithium-ion batteries. “Careful, because if these get damaged or smashed, there’s a small chance they could explode,” he told me.

My eyes got wide. “Can we do that??!!”

No, he did not say to me. What are you talking about, that’s an awful plan, we should not purposely try to explode batteries. Instead, he cocked his head thoughtfully and said, “You know, I think I have a few extra!”

We figured out containment and I went and got my very big knife, because naturally I had a very big knife. And that was how my roommate came home to find us stabbing batteries in my apartment in LA.

She, being a sensible person, asked us what the hell we were doing.

“Stabbing batteries!” we answered cheerfully.

“Why?”

“To see if we can make them explode!”

(They did not explode, sadly. Only smoked a little.)

My roommate did not think this was an acceptable explanation. We were thenceforth banished to doing all experiments outside the apartment. My roommate did stand lookout for us while we set things on fire in the alleyway, though.

(I said she was sensible, not unexciting.)

I’m often asked about a tidbit I have on my website about having been lit on fire four times, three of which were on purpose. The intentional times were all in the course of doing professional stuntwork—I love fire gags—but it will surprise nobody that the accidental combustion was in the company of this same friend.

Case study #2! One year I decided to have a birthday party, and my friend came to LA to help me throw the celebration. We were standing in Costco, and one of us said, “Oh my god, there should be flaming shots!”

The other of us, naturally: “YES THAT’S BRILLIANT WE SHOULD TOTALLY DO THAT.”

Right there in the frozen aisle, we pulled out our phones and looked up how to make flaming shots on the Internet.

Fast forward to midnight. I was . . . no longer sober. My friend, who had remained sober (fortunately, as we’ll see in a moment), was bartending. He made me another flaming shot, perhaps my fourth one of the night.

Which I promptly spilled on myself.

Being very much not sober, I looked down at my hands—which were very definitely, very obviously covered in flames—and giggled. “I’m on fire!” I announced, completely tickled by this fact. The fire was still only burning the alcohol, so it didn’t hurt at all. It was just very pretty!

My friend smiled, took me to the sink, and put me out before the flames got started on my skin. We may be terrible influences on each other, but he’s eminently competent in a crisis.

We’re a little older now, but not very much wiser. Just this month we were talking about a tornado warning in my area, and we happened across some great storm-chasing footage that had been captured via RC drone.

Me: “You should totally do that. I’d go with you.”

Him, fifteen minutes later: “I just looked up storm chasing. We have to plan this in advance. When are you free between next April and June?”

Me: “I’ll have to check with my publicists.”

That weekend I asked a mutual friend of ours if she wanted to come with us. She disassembles bombs for a living and rides motorcycles. “Uh . . . NO THANKS,” she said. “You guys have fun.”

I have many excellent friends. It’s either very good or very bad for me that one of them is also an excellent partner in mayhem!