Carey Pietsch – författare

When a desperate call for help interrupts the holiday celebrations at the Bureau of Balance, Taako, Magnus and Merlea are sent out after their fourth target for deadly relic Reclaiming: a powerful transmutation stone, hidden somewhere in the depths of a floating arcane laboratory that’s home to the Doctors Maureen and Lucas Miller. An unknown menace has control of the stone and is using it to turn the lab into a virulent pink crystal that spreads to everything it touches. It’s only a matter of time before this sparkling disaster crash-lands, but in order to find the stone and save the whole planet from being King Midased, our heroes will have to fight their way through a gauntlet of rowdy robots and crystal golems, figure out if they can trust the evasive Lucas Miller, and solve the mystery of what -- or who -- has put them in peril, all before there’s no world left to save.Based on the blockbuster podcast where the McElroy brothers and their dad play a tabletop RPG and illustrated by cartooning powerhouse Carey Pietsch, The Adventure Zone: Crystal Kingdom takes this #1 New York Times Bestselling series to glittering new heights.

In the second Adventure Zone graphic novel (adapted from the McElroy family's wildly popular D&D podcast), we rejoin hero-adjacent sort-of-comrades-in-arms Taako, Magnus, and Merle on a wild careen through a D&D railroad murder mystery. This installment has a little of everything: a genius child detective, an axe-wielding professional wrestler, a surly wizard, cursed magical artifacts, and a pair of meat monsters.You know, the usual things you find on a train.Hot on the heels of The Adventure Zone: Here There Be Gerblins, the smash hit graphic novel that launched the series, Murder on the Rockport Limited picks up the saga where volume 1 left off. Both books are based on The Adventure Zone, a tabletop RPG comedy podcast with downloads numbering in the tens of millions and an army of passionately devoted fans. With art and co-adaptation from Carey Pietsch, the McElroys are once again turning their raucous freewheeling D&D campaign into some damn fine comics.

Okay. Harken to my tale. Once upon a time (a couple of years ago) there were these brothers who had a bunch of really successful podcasts, and they decided to do a new podcast with their dad, where they all played D&D together as a family, and lo, this new podcast was called The Adventure Zone, and verily did it get downloaded over 10 million times, and wow did it totally eat the brains of all who listened, because: It was just. That. Rad.AND THEN did these guys team up with artist Carey Pietsch, and make a graphic novel where the weirdly sweet and brilliant but also super SUPER vulgar and honestly kind of bizarre story of The Adventure Zone got adapted into a goofy, innovative, and compelling graphic novel! Let no man deny that it was the best idea ever, right?Reader, we're publishing it.

With two dangerous magical artifacts already recovered, our heroes Taako, Magnus and Merle are feeling confident as they’re sent out after their latest target: a notorious thief known as The Raven. She’s gotten her hands on another Grand Relic, and she’s using it to terrorise the city of Goldcliff with killer vines, poisonous thorns, and one tree monster named Trent.The assignment takes some white-knuckle wild turns, and the boys soon find themselves entangled in the weeds of underground battle wagon racing, which is both fast and furious if you catch the drift. Allied with a Lieutenant Hurley, who knows an awful lot about illegal racing circuits for a cop, our heroes are gonna have to gear up and burn some fantasy rubber if they want to stop The Raven from destroying the city . . . and herself with it.

The Bureau of Balance has located yet another Grand Relic, and this time it’s . . . time? A small mining town called Refuge has been locked away behind an arcane bubble, and somewhere inside it the Temporal Chalice is causing unknown mayhem. Taako, Magnus, and Merle are launched into their investigation, but they’ve barely had a chance to get their feet under them before the situation literally falls apart. When the town clock strikes noon, Refuge and its citizens are destroyed in a sudden chaos of flame and ruin, and our heroes’ relic hunting - along with their lives - comes to an abrupt end.But whoa, what’s this? It’s 11:00 AM, our heroes are alive again, and Refuge definitely hasn’t just been exploded. Looks like a classic time loop, friends.