April, 1925 finds ace pilot Jack McGraw fleeing hostile fighter planes and a mysterious zeppelin over the skies of New Jersey. Then a woman from his past invites him to dinner at Thomas Edison's home and drafts him into the A.E.G.I.S. foundation.
And that's just Monday.
Jack's mission is to fly an experimental aircraft and lead a crew consisting of his comrades from the Great War against a well-funded secret society bent on pillaging history's great treasures and amassing dangerous power.
Together with their crewmates, Jack McGraw and Dorothy "Doc" Starr encounter sky pirates, Haitian voodoo, terrifying creatures of the deep, an Amazon tree-city, rocket zombies, and an ancient temple where Aleister Crowley attempts to open a dimensional portal and summon a bloodthirsty demon!
Based on the Airship Daedalus comic strip by Todd Downing and Brian Beardsley, A Shield Against the Darkness is the origin story of the Daedalus crew, and a prequel to Assassins of the Lost Kingdom by E.J. Blaine.
It's a retro-pulp action yarn in which mages, mad science, secret societies, occult threats, and lost worlds meet globe-trotting, sky-high aerial action and two-fisted heroism, like the pulp novels of old!
Author Biography:
Todd Downing's love affair with genre fiction dates back to his consumption of classic radio dramas and comic books as a child in the 1970s, which broadened into a general appreciation for scifi and fantasy media of all kinds.He grew up in the greater San Francisco Bay Area, writing and drawing from a young age, his works ever-present in school literary journals and newspapers, and eventually on film. He married his high school sweetheart and moved to Seattle in 1991 where he began to write professionally, and worked as an artist in the videogame industry until his publishing company became a full time operation, while raising two children amid the chaos. As the co-founder and creative director of Deep7 Press, Downing is the primary author and designer of over fifty roleplaying titles, including Arrowflight, Grimmworld, Airship Daedalus, and the official Red Dwarf RPG. He continues to write genre fiction for stage, film, comics, audio, and adventure gaming products.Widowed to cancer in 2005, Downing remarried in 2009 and currently lives in a three-generation home in Port Orchard, Washington, with his wife, her mother, their daughter, four cats, and a flock of unruly chickens. Thankfully, he has an office with a door that closes. www.todddowning.com
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