In this episode of Richardson’s Rubicon, I’m joined by Mike Oppenheim, author of The Curse of Cortez. We start with the book, but we end up in that interesting territory where worldbuilding, character pressure, and human behaviour all collide. There’s craft here, yes, but also a running question underneath it all: what happens to trust when people think you’re holding something valuable, dangerous, or both?
Mike’s story centres on Emma, a young woman whose life flips the moment she inherits a plain-looking talisman that feels “magical” to anyone who sees it. The catch is brutal. It can protect Emma, but the people around her can still be harmed. It pushes her towards secrecy, makes her relationships wobble, and draws bad actors like moths to a porch light. She can’t just toss it in a river and be done. The thing has rules, and those rules turn everyday decisions into loaded choices.
We talk about those constraints, because this is where the worldbuilding becomes the engine. A rule-based object is not just a plot device. It’s a pressure system. It shapes behaviour. It makes people lie. It makes them second-guess kindness. It makes “normal life” impossible.
Emma’s journey is told across three parts, alternating between her viewpoint and Mark, the man who gives her the talisman. That shifting perspective does something useful: it lets the reader feel the lived experience first, then learn the deeper history and consequences later. Emma starts out insecure, working a supermarket job, and carrying a quietly cruel internal story about herself. Then she’s thrown into pursuit, danger, and moral stress tests she never asked for. Over time she stops just enduring the chaos and starts trying to end it.
At one point I asked Mike if the talisman has a “ring-like” effect, thinking of The Lord of the Rings and the way Frodo’s burden distorts everything around him. Mike didn’t see it as a direct parallel, but we did land on something close: the talisman warps relationships and pushes Emma into a life where motives are never clean. Are people being kind because they’re kind, or because they want what you’ve got? That question takes you straight into trust, and into what Mike calls a kind of sycophant culture, where loyalty can be conditional and affection can be transactional.
We also spend time on the “antagonist” in the story, or more accurately the thing that relentlessly pursues Emma. Mike makes a deliberate choice not to over-explain or fully describe it. Instead he leaves space for the reader’s imagination to do the frightening work. If you’re interested in worldbuilding without exposition, this is one of the strongest craft threads in our conversation: knowing what to withhold, and how to withhold it without the story feeling vague or evasive.
There’s a practical side too. Emma’s route takes her from Louisiana to Mexico, and Mike had to make geography, culture, borders, and logistics feel real without turning the book into a travelogue. He also talks about how real-world events can collide with fiction while you’re drafting, including how COVID-era travel restrictions suddenly made certain assumptions harder to sell, and how he adjusted to keep the story feeling believable.
The novel draws on the legacy of Hernán Cortés, and Mike weaves that historical shadow into the talisman’s mythos, tying the curse to conquest, consequence, and the long tail of harm that follows certain kinds of power. We end, fittingly, in ethics. Not abstract ethics, but the uncomfortable kind, the kind that shows up when you’re under pressure and the “right” choice costs you.
If you’re writing speculative fiction, this episode is a case study in how a world can be built through constraints, character decisions, and selective restraint. If you’re a reader, it’s a look behind the curtain at how dread, tension, and escalation get engineered without pages of explanation.