Swashbuckler

About the Book

Swashbuckler picks up after the wreckage of Chaos Protocols. The crew is intact, only just, and the System has registered Rivers as a problem it would prefer to manage. The book carries the same Firefly-on-a-stat-sheet rhythm as Book 1, with the crew dynamics tighter and the stakes pushing into territory the first book only sketched.

Co-authored with Troy Osgood, published by Aethon Books. The space-western LitRPG continues to behave like a heist film that occasionally remembers it’s also a war.

The Story

Andrew Rivers has come a long way since he crash-landed in an alien galaxy. He has a Legendary class now, a one-of-a-kind Arcaneship, and a Captain skill that levels every time his crew does something monumentally reckless, which is often. The trouble with being the Galaxy’s Most Wanted is that everyone with a gun and a death wish is after the bounty, so Rivers does the only sensible thing and starts hunting them back. One thing leads to something worse, and the crew ends up in the crosshairs of a Dwarf crime lord and his daughter, who happens to be a chaos-goblin gunner piloting a pink killer war-mech. The cons are bigger, the bounties are higher, and the progression has never been messier.

Fair warning on tone: this one leans harder into the banter than Chaos Protocols did. If the jokes were why you stayed, there is more of that here; if you were there for the heist mechanics and the ship, those are here too, with the System pushing back harder than before.

Details

375 pages. Published 29 July 2026 by Aethon Books, in Kindle, paperback and audiobook, read by Daniel Wisniewski. Book 2 of Arcane Galaxy, co-written with Troy Osgood, author of The Connected System. Start with Chaos Protocols; this one assumes you know the crew.

Published by Aethon Books. Audiobook narration by Daniel Wisniewski.