Friendship is wonderful. It’s great to have people you can count on . . . people who will be there to encourage you when you’re down, pat you on the back when you do a good job, or shake some sense in to you when you’re messing up. But friendship can also be difficult.

One of the hardest things about friendship is expectations. Oftentimes we expect people to behave in a certain way. That could mean answering our text or email right away, whether that person is busy or not. Sending us a card or buying us a gift on our birthday (and it better be expensive, right?). Or reading our facial expressions or body language without us having to say a word. We can hold people to impossible standards, and when that happens it creates friction. Sometimes it ruins friendships.

Broken friendship is what The Relic Hunters is all about. Sure, there’s a lot of action, faeries, zombies, clockworks, and an evil scientist, but even the best action stories are focused on personal struggles as much as explosions and special effects.

Something terrible happened at the end of The Brimstone Key, and after it happened, Ernie felt betrayed by his friends. He thought that the Grey Griffins should have done more to save Robert Hernandez, and now he’s decided to spend Christmas break with the other changelings from Iron Bridge Academy instead of Max, Harley and Natalia.

If that’s not difficult enough to deal with, Natalia has been spending most of her free time with Brooke. Then there’s the fact that Brooke isn’t talking to Max, and now Harley isn’t around much either. Harley has been vying for an apprenticeship at Monti’s workshop in New Victoria, and for the first time in a long time, Max feels alone. He’s starting to wonder if the Grey Griffins are drifting apart, and in a sense they are. But that’s the thing about friendship. It changes, and that change can be difficult.

When school starts back up, changelings begin to disappear and it looks like Otto Von Strife may be behind it. After what happened with Robert, Ernie feels like he can’t rely on the Grey Griffins, so he rallies the changelings to form a superhero team called the Agents of Justice. They go after Von Strife’s slavers, but it doesn’t take long before things go sideways and the Agents of Justice are in over their head.

Will Ernie and Max be able to work through their differences, or will there be an all out war between the Grey Griffins and the changelings? You’ll have to read the book to find out, but we can promise that it will be a non-stop adventure that will keep you guessing!

You can order The Relic Hunters hardcover or the Kindle version.

When we were growing up, we used to play something called Middle Earth Roleplaying Game or MERP. It was basically Dungeons & Dragons, but set in Tolkien’s Middle Earth. We loved creating characters, writing scenarios and playing for hours as we sat around a dining room table eating taco pizza from Casey’s General Store (don’t knock it until you’ve tried it) and drinking Dr. Pepper.

MERP is part of the reason we became writers. When we created characters we had to come up with backgrounds, what kind of languages they spoke, what their talents were, what they looked like, and more. It taught us how to make multi-faceted characters that went beyond stereotypes, and it was the part of the game that we loved the most. Our love for MERP is why we introduced gaming into the Grey Griffins series, but tabletop roleplaying games had gone out of style when we started writing, so we created Round Table, a hybrid that mixes a traditional tabletop roleplaying game or RPG (complete with D10 dice) with a Trading Card Game or TCG (similar to Magic: The Gathering and Yu-Gi-Oh).

But Round Table became more than a game. It afforded our characters an opportunity to learn how to fight monsters and dark faeries without getting hurt.

We had no idea that the Grey Griffins would end up selling nearly a million copies in the initial trilogy, nor were we ready for the popularity of Round Table. Five years after its inception, we still get a lot of requests from people wondering when Round Table will be available for purchase. Unfortunately, we’re not sure.

It was in development at an incredible gaming company called WizKids. They created something called Heroclix, a kind of chess meets RPG with miniature superhero action figures. Unfortunately WizKids folded in the middle of Round Table’s devlopment cycle, and though the company was later sold to NECA, HeroClix was the only property that survived the transition.

At one point it looked like someone was going to create an online version, but that fell through as well. So for now, we’re concentrating on wrapping up the Clockwork Chronicles trilogy with The Paragon Prison. Once that’s done, we’ll sit down and decide what comes next.

We want you to know how much we appreciate all of your support over the years. And we hope that one day we’ll be able to provide you with an opportunity to play Round Table!

Art by Travis Hanson.

People often ask what inspired us to create the Grey Griffins series, and the truth is that we had quite a few influences . . . J.R.R. Tolkien (Lord of the Rings), C.S. Lewis (Chronicles of Narnia), Maurice Sendak (Where the Wild Things Are), and George Lucas (Star Wars) are at the top of the list. But we’d be remiss if we didn’t add Stan Lee and Jack Kirby.

Stan and Jack co-created many of the superheroes who have become household names (The Incredible Hulk, the Fantastic Four, The Avengers and many more). Derek and I spent a lot of weekends hanging out at a comic shop called the Comiclogue, reading stories that featured many of Stan and Jack’s creations. In fact, I bought my copy of Fantastic Four #112 there when I was thirteen, and I still have it today.

Derek’s favorite comic book was the Uncanny X-Men, which centered around Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters, where a telepath named Charles Xavier (Professor X) gathered powerful teen mutants to teach them how to use their powers for the good of mankind. We decided that would be Ernie Tweeny’s motto as well.

Ernie is a huge comic book fan, just like we were. Not only does he spend most of his time hanging out at a comic book shop (The Spider’s Web), but he writes and draws his own comic (The Amazing Adventures of Agent Thunderbolt). The stories center around . . . well, Ernie. You see, he’s become a real life superhero.

** SPOILER ALERT ** At the end of Rise of the Black Wolf, Ernie nearly dies. In order to save him, Max Sumner injected him with faerie blood that not only carried a healing property, but it turned Ernie into a changeling. ** END SPOILER **

So what is a changeling? It’s a lot like a mutant from the world of Marvel Comics, but instead of carrying an X-gene, changelings get their powers from faerie DNA. The faerie whose blood courses through Ernie’s veins not only had an ability to heal quickly, but it was fast and had enhanced hearing and eyesight. Now Ernie does, too. But there’s a catch. The more a changeling uses his or her abilities, the more he or she will turn into that faerie. Eventually, that person could lose his or her humanity completely.

The good news for Ernie, is that he found out a way to block that transformation. The secret? He drinks dragon dung tea (no, that isn’t a typo).

For nearly a year, Ernie thought that he was the only changeling on Earth, but when he transferred to Iron Bridge Academy he found out that there were other kids just like him. And they all had different powers:

* Denton: super strength and agility
* Smoke: teleportation
* Raven: can talk to inanimate objects
* Tejan: can wipe memories
* Laini: flight
* Hale: shapeshifting
* Robert: transmutation

Eventually Ernie (aka Agent Thunderbolt) formed his own superhero team called The Agents of Justice, and they’ve made it their mission to rid the world of slavers. You can find out how they did in Grey Griffins: The Clockwork Chronicles #2: The Relic Hunters.