In this week’s episode, I take a look at the characters of Rhamnousia and Zelos Pendragon in BLADE OF VISIONS, and what they say about bad leadership.
This coupon code will get you 50% off the audiobook of Ghost in the Forge, Book #6 in The Ghosts series, (as excellently narrated by Hollis McCarthy) at my Payhip store:
FALLFORGE
The coupon code is valid through October 12, 2026. So if you need a new audiobook this fall, we’ve got you covered!
TRANSCRIPT
00:00:00 Introduction and Writing Updates
Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 322 of The Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is September the 25th, 2026 and today we are discussing my new book, Blade of Visions, and how it portrays bad leadership in the character of Rhamnousia Pendragon. Before we get to that, we will have Coupon of the Week and a progress update on my current writing, publishing, and audiobook projects.
So let’s start off with Coupon of the Week. This week’s coupon code will get you 50% off the audiobook of Ghost in the Forge, Book #6 in The Ghosts Series (as excellently narrated by Hollis McCarthy) at my Payhip store. That coupon code is FALLFORGE. As always, you can get the coupon code and the links to my Payhip store in the episode notes for this episode. This coupon code will be valid through October the 12th, 2026, so if you are in need of a new audiobook for this fall, we have got you covered.
Now let’s have an update on my current writing, publishing, and audiobook projects. As you might guess from the episode title, Blade of Visions is now out and you get it at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Google Play, Apple Books, Smashwords, bookshop.org, and my own Payhip store. Initial response to it has been very strong and people seem to be enjoying it. As I mention later in the episode, I even had someone email me and say it was one of my top 10 books, which is pretty impressive out of 176 books. So thank you all for that.
Now that Blade of Visions is out, my next main project is Elven-Warlock, which will be the seventh book in the Half-Elven Thief series. I’m currently 36,000 words into it, hoping to get to 40,000 by the end of the day, if all goes well. I’m hoping this will be out towards the end of October, if all goes well.
My secondary project will be the follow-up to Blade of Visions, which will be the seventh book in the Blades of Ruin series, specifically Blade of Rifts. I am 3,000 words into that. So that’s my secondary project right now. Once Elven-Warlock is finished, it’ll be full speed ahead on Blade of Rifts.
In audiobook news, we are very nearly done with Cloak of Summoning, which is narrated by Hollis McCarthy. So hopefully we will have that available to you all to listen to sometime in October along with Ghost Armor Omnibus Two, which I’m going to start setting up before too much longer and if all goes well, Brad Wills will start recording Blade of Visions as an audiobook next week. So that is where I’m at with my current writing, audiobook, and publishing projects.
00:02:34 Main Topic: Rhamnousia Pendragon and Bad Leadership
Now let’s move on to our main topic this week, which is Blade of Visions, Rhamnousia Pendragon, and Bad Leadership. As I mentioned earlier in the episode, a surprising number of people have written in to say nice things about Blade of Visions, for which I’m grateful. As I mentioned, a few have even said someone my best books, which is also very nice. And I think the character of Rhamnousia Pendragon helped a great deal to inspire that reaction along with the fundamental problem many people, organizations, and indeed societies face: where do we find good leaders? As I’ve mentioned before, I based Rhamnousia and Zelos Pendragon off two historical bad leaders, specifically Empress Maude and King Stephen from the English civil war of 1138 AD through 1153 AD. I say “loosely based” because Rhamnousia and Zelos are half siblings while Maude and Steven were cousins. For that matter, as the Blade of Ruin series has gone on, Rhamnousia’s and Zelos’ respective characterizations have taken on a life of their own that increasingly diverges from the source material.
To be fair to Maud and Stephen, unlike Rhamnousia and Zelos, they did not have disguised evil sorcerers actively giving them deliberately bad advice. For Rhamnousia, I basically thought of all the worst traits from the incompetent female managers and leaders I’ve encountered over the years, combined them into one character, made her both extremely intelligent and highly vindictive, and we ended up with Rhamnousia Pendragon. This isn’t to say that women cannot be effective leaders.
Many thousands of years ago (or so it feels) when I worked in big box retail, I devised a metric that turned out to be highly effective for gauging whether a new manager, whether male or female, would be competent or not. The metric: the more boring the manager is in the first meeting, the better he or she will be at the job. The boring ones who introduced themselves and immediately got down to business without a lot of chit-chat were invariably the best ones at their jobs. The ones who spent a lot of time talking about their feelings, their kids, their visions, their ex-spouses or whatever tended to be really bad or the ones who were really jokey, wanted to be liked or worse, insistent that you like them.
A secondary metric is whether or not they were willing to get their hands dirty. Like the best store manager I ever encountered in my big box retail career helped unload trucks, stock shelves, run registers, and even cleaned the bathrooms himself a few times. They say one of the best guiding principles for effective leadership is to never ask someone to do something that you would not be willing to do yourself, and he followed that guideline quite well. Granted, he had excellent motivations for doing this. I believe one year the store did well enough that he got a $90,000 bonus, which was in pre-9/11 money, which would be around about $175,000 in 2026 money. However, his level of competence was definitely the exception and absolutely not the rule.
One of his predecessors as big box store manager was fired and later prosecuted for a variety of excellent reasons, including giving away lots of merchandise to local restaurants in exchange for free meals for himself and what gossip called “getting handsy” with some of the female employees in the office, but what the police more accurately called assault. Apparently he forgot that every single inch of big box store was covered in cameras which kept recordings. Another predecessor was a very friendly and affable man, but utterly unable to assert himself without having an emotional breakdown and consequently let people walk all over him to the detriment of his job. He eventually quit due to the stress.
Based on these and many other examples I’ve encountered, I think Rhamnousia and Zelos are very realistic characters. I’m afraid that in real life leaders like Rhamnousia Pendragon and Zelos Pendragon are very common and bad leaders, whether men or women, are more normal than good or even competent ones. In 2023, I knew an entire cluster of people who quit healthcare and education, not because they disliked the admittedly difficult work, but because their managers were so inept and malicious that they made the working environment unendurable. No doubt you can think of numerous examples from your own life.
Anyway, Zelos Pendragon is a much different mode of leadership failure than Rhamnousia. He’s a bit more like the store manager I mentioned earlier who wanted to be liked. Zelos is a much more amiable person than Rhamnousia and much less arrogant. However, he really wants to be liked, isn’t terribly clever, and he’s not firm in his decisions and changes his mind frequently. Despite being more likable than Rhamnousia, he is nonetheless a terrible leader, just for different reasons.
By contrast, Rhamnousia Pendragon doesn’t want to be liked. She demands to be respected and obeyed. She’s far more interested in enforcing the rights and prerogatives of her royal dignity. Admittedly, these qualities are actually necessary to be an effective monarch, but Rhamnousia also has a fatal talent for alienating her allies through arrogance and enjoys humiliating people in public. This is all the worse because she’s very intelligent, which means in practice she finds better ways at shooting herself in the foot since she doesn’t have anyone to moderate her bad decisions.
If you’ve read the rest of my books, you know that good leadership versus bad leadership is an ongoing interest of mine. I think it’s tied to my interest in history. That would be a recurring theme in Frostborn and Sevenfold Sword and Dragontiarna and The Shield War, obviously now in Blades of Ruin, in Ghost Night and Ghost Armor, and increasingly in the Cloak Mage series where I think about the questions of good leadership versus bad leadership.
It’s strange how someone can be an absolutely terrible person yet somehow be a good leader, but yet that’s not an infallible metric because very often terrible people often turn out to be terrible leaders. For that matter, good people likewise fail at leadership a great deal. To get things done, you often have to crack some heads together, stomp on people’s personal petty fiefdoms, or employ outright coercion to get people to act, do this or you’re fired and a lot of people just don’t like doing that. There seems to be some sort of very narrow and very elusive overlap between the attributes of personal ruthlessness, ambition, and willingness to act in the greater good that creates an effective leader, and that combination is very rare.
To be fair, however, from the other side of it, leadership is an unpleasant gig. If something goes wrong, it’s the leader’s fault. If something goes right, your employees and workers take the credit (or perhaps your superiors), and you just happened to be there for it and had nothing to do with it. People constantly try to undermine you and sabotage you, and even well-meaning workers, employees will sometimes interpret your instructions in baffling and inexplicable ways. The sloth, ineptitude, entitlement, and overall bungling and competence of your subordinates will be constant challenge and headache. This is true in leadership positions ranging from Fortune 500 CEOs all the way to the directors of charity thrift shops who only work with volunteers. Given all that, it’s not the least surprising that many leaders default to an attitude of “screw you guys” and try to extract maximum enrichment and advancement from the situation regardless of the damage that it does.
But no less of an authority than Jesus Christ said that to whom much is given, much will be expected. (Luke 12:48 is the specific quote if you’re interested.) I suppose in the end, bad leadership is not a problem that has a solution or even a question that has an answer. It’s just one of those unsolvable aspects of human nature that we think about and that we simply have to live with. But on the plus side, I can get some pretty good novel plots out of it. I’ve often said that history is an excellent source of inspiration for fantasy writers, and I think this provides yet another example of what I mean.
So that’s it for this week. Thank you for listening to The Pulp Writer Show. I hope you found the show useful. A reminder that you can listen to all the back episodes on https://thepulpwritershow.com. If you enjoyed the podcast, please leave a review on your podcasting platform of choice. Stay safe and stay healthy and we’ll see you all next week.
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