Guest Post: The Ragnarök Prophecy Kickstarter By Matt Larkin

It’s my pleasure to welcome Matt Larkin, the author of the SPFBO finalist Darkness Forged, and the Escathon Cycle. He will talk about his Kickstarter campaign for The Ragnarök Prophecy Volume 1-3 which includes reimagined, deluxe, leatherbound & illustrated editions of his Ragnarok Era and Runeblade Saga novels.

Let’s go and see what this is all about, shall we?

Along with his wife and daughter, Matt Larkin lives as a digital nomad, traveling the world while researching for his novels. He reads approximately a bazillion books a year, loves video games, and relaxes by binge watching Netflix with his wife.

Matt writes retellings of mythology as dark, gritty fantasy. His passions of myths, philosophy, and history inform his series. He strives to combine gut-wrenching action with thought-provoking ideas and culturally resonant stories.

As a child, Matt read The Lord of the Rings with his parents. This sparked a lifelong obsession with fantasy and started him on a path of discovering the roots of fantasy through mythology. In exploration of these ideas, the Eschaton Cycle was born—a universe of dark fantasy where all myths and legends play out.

Connect with Matt Larkin

In early 2017 I published Darkness Forged, a retelling of Volundarkvida (a poem in Poetic Edda), which served as a prequel to my forthcoming series, Gods of the Ragnarok Era and its spinoff, Runeblade Saga. This blog was one of the first to really latch on and love the book, where Timy compared it to a Hungarian fairy tale. I’m not sure I ever told her how much that stuck with me or how much I loved the comparison.

Over the course of the next year and a half or so I finished publishing the three Ragnarok Era series I had been working on (including Darkness Forged), the most preeminent of which remained Gods of the Ragnarok Era. That one, which retells the stories of Æsir and their rise and fall, became the series most people know me from. It’s the one I most often get requests for more content from. But, like I said, I also published some other stories set in the Ragnarok Era.

Afterwards, years later, I had two things I wished I could do for the series. One was to present all those related tales as a single, cohesive narrative with a clear reading order. The second was to have a collector’s edition. You know those faux-leather copies of The Lord of the Rings or Shakespeare other classics? I had a bunch of those and always wished I could have something like that.

Then I found out my friend Zack Argyle had used Kickstarter to create exactly that, and I knew I could have both of my dreams. I could, with help from readers pre-purchasing copies, create definitive “director’s cut” of those stories, and I could have it be in the most stunning package possible.

So I started contacting my dream artists for this, lining up those who could paint the characters, the landscapes, the monsters. Over the years, I had received numerous requests for such illustrations, but I was never in a position to commission this sort of thing. Kickstarter allows me to do that. I already had a gorgeous map done by Francesca Baerald, but this would be the first time I could print it in color in a book.

And the end result? Well, head over to Kickstarter and check out how this is all coming together. Because I am unbelievably psyched about this.