It was almost a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it week of news for Trench Crusade, overshadowed as things were by the second round of its first-ever worldwide campaign, Operation Leviathan. But there were two news stories in particular that stood out to me this week as savvy moves that hint at the game’s ambition to build something enduring.

Since Trench Crusade splashed on the scene with its highly successful Kickstarter campaign in 2024, much of the focus has been on those elements that made it so attractive in the first place. Obviously there was the heady creative fusion of Mike Franchina’s visual palette and Tuomas Pirinen’s game design, which gave the initial push that resulted in USD $3.3m in funding from over 20,000 backers. That’s certainly impressive.

But funding a Kickstarter is only the first hurdle to clear, and the rogue’s gallery of games like Robotech Tactics, Myth, and GKR: Heavy Hitters serves as a cautionary tale of how short-term success can easily end in long-term failure. For this reason, I’ve been particularly intrigued at the business-side decisions that Trench Crusade has been navigating as it looks to build a solid foundation to build upon for the years ahead.

The decision earlier this year to hire Marc Gascoigne, for instance, had me really sit up and take notice. Gascoigne, alongside Rick Priestley and Andy Jones, helped build Warhammer’s Black Library, the most successful in-house, vertically integrated publishing arm for IP tie-in fiction1. In 2019, Gascoigne would look to run the playbook back with Aconyte Books, the publishing arm of Asmodee, and would serve there for five years overseeing properties like Arkham Horror and Legend of the Five Rings2.

With several Black Library veterans now writing lore and story for Trench Crusade, I’ll be very excited to see what Gascoigne helps to nurture.

That brings us to a couple moves that were announced this week that also pinged on my business-objective radar.

The Launch of Crusade Se7ens

First, Factory Fortress has teamed up with The Army Painter, one of the top three players in the hobby miniature painting space, to bring a Trench Crusade-branded line of paints to market. Launched under the name Crusade Se7ens, these boxes will feature seven paint colors tailored to one of the game’s factions, with the Free State of Prussia kicking things off.

This is one of those deals that has obvious value to both sides of the partnership beyond merely the pecuniary. For Trench Crusade, these products will help reinforce a standardized aesthetic identity of its factions while offering convenience to the consumer by putting it all in one convenient box. Not only that, but it gets their brand into the painting space without taking on the massive infrastructure and capital expenditures needed to offer their own line of paints.

Finally, while for the moment it appears that these are offered as online-only products, it’s not hard to see a point in time arrive where they might be carried in brick-and-mortal game stores, serving as additional points of impression on consumers like little, miniature billboards.

For The Army Painter, this is a clever way to repackage existing product and tap into a new market opportunity. These aren’t brand-new shades, but rather collections of products that have already been released as part of their John Blanche Masterclass and Historical paint lines. And by partnering with one of the hotter wargaming properties of the moment, it allows The Army Painter to benefit from some of the excitement and publicity currently surrounding the game.

Finally, this gives The Army Painter a leg up in the painting community, with the partnership extending into community events like The Arena Challenge (announced at AdeptiCon earlier this year). And with these now the official color schemes for the various factions, community content such as painting guides, tutorials, and battle reports also serve as a passive advertisement for the company.

The Partnership with Miniaturama

This deal is another one that reveals some interesting strategy at work in the meeting rooms of Factory Fortress. On the face of it, it seems fairly straightforward, right? “Okay, so Trench Crusade will be available in Spanish.” But there’s a couple of other things going on under the hood.

Miniaturama Publishing is an experienced player in the wargaming space, with previous work for Warlord Games and Studio Tomahawk. Not only that, but it’s more than just a translation/localization company, being instead a full-service publishing firm that has its own well-established logistical network. That means that Factory Fortress isn’t just sending off a PDF of its material in English and getting it returned in Spanish.

Rather, Miniaturama is not only translating, but handling the publishing and distribution side of things as well. Factory Fortress gains easy access to the massive Spanish-speaking market without having to juggle the complexities of freight and localized printing halfway across the world.

Latin America has long been an underserved market, and this gives Trench Crusade the opportunity to get established in it while it’s still in its relatively nascent stage. It’s also worth noting that Spain itself is a sophisticated player in the wargaming hobby, being home to Infinity’s publisher Corvus Belli. Factory Fortess will be well-equipped to compete directly in their backyard.

So in short, these two developments this week might not be as sexy as a new lore drop or the latest updates in Operation Leviathan. But those wanting to read the tea leaves for signs of the game’s long-term health may well find this in hindsight to be a significant week indeed.

ICYMI

Here’s what’s been going on this week for Trench Crusade content!

Trench Crusade Official

• The latest official lore drop is a feature on Blessed Bartolomeo, the Martyr of Leviathan. It’s written by Graham McNeill and illustrated by Mike Franchina!

• Each Friday during the worldwide campaign, the Trench Wire will be bringing reports from Decisive Battles from games all over the world. This week’s included conflicts from Peru to Sweden!

• Results from Operation Leviathan are also being reported by Andy Chambers and Sammie Dae. The latest dispatch saw the Faithful continue to push back against the Fallen, but the Fallen continue to hold their own giving only little ground. The games held in Central and South America (Leviathan Cove Landing) proved the most disastrous, with the Fallen making up 60% of the casualties. Most other tilts were much more close-run affairs.

• A new feature, Mentioned in Dispatches, kicked off Monday and will run every week throughout the duration of Operation Leviathan. Curated by Peter Hairston, MiD will bring you some of the most striking Trench Crusade miniatures, terrain, and tables that have been shared across social media.

• Don’t forget, the game’s first-ever worldwide campaign Operation Leviathan will run until 19 October, and will leave its mark on the world forever. Make sure to get your results in!

Wargame Content Sites

• Tabletop Battles has been running a series focusing on specific warbands one at a time, and this week it was The Red Brigade’s turn to shine!

Community Content

• Trench Crusade podcast Saints & Sevens was back this week, looking at more developments around the release of the Carcass Front set!

• For more audible content, The Pilgrimage Podcast devoted a ‘mailbag roundup’ episode to all sorts of Trench Crusade questions they’d been asked in Discord, as well as taking a look at Four Days Dead by Josh Reynolds!

• What’s that, you say? You want even more podcast content? Fair enough, make sure to check out the Trench Scribe Podcast this week for a discussion on playing Trench Ghosts!

• Now, if you’d rather a more visual treat, scannerbarkly posted a video this week diving into the lore around the Eternal Massacre at Baghras Fortress, and another about Blessed Bartolomeo!

Coming Attractions

Here’s a list of the known upcoming physical releases from Trench Crusade based on the available preorder information we have.

This section will be updated weekly in this column, with new or updated info presented in boldface.

• Trench Crusade Rulebook (hardcover, 11/30)

That’s it for this week, see you again in seven days’ time!

While there’s probably a reasonable case to be made for overextension of resources, the nice thing about Cubicle 7 Games having six1 different Warhammer game lines is that there’s always something new to talk about.

I sometimes like to put on my thinking cap and play, “If I Were Dom2 for a Day,” seeing what I might change up at the company. One of the things I would do would be to start a weekly Product Update article, let’s say on Wednesdays, which would ensure a steady drumbeat of anticipation on the website’s blog.

There’s content there currently, but it’s irregularly-paced. You can get two articles in a week, for instance, or only one piece in two weeks; it’s just whatever they feel like releasing. This way, fans of Warhammer RPG’s would know to check in each Wednesday to see something new or upcoming.

Games Workshop has a mixed handle on this. The Sunday Preview is the crown jewel, something many of us look forward to reading each week. That’s terrific for generating anticipation amongst the consumers, but it sort of tapers off a bit from there. Since I cover the Black Library beat very closely here, I’m always excited to see new book announcements- but they’re as random as anything else. And when things are random, it’s harder to build up much excitement for them.

Now, with my Dom for a Day hat still on, I’d then connect with each of the six product leads and ask them to provide a substantive, public-facing update on their line (at least) once every six weeks. This would form the core of the steady content, covering a fairly broad range from a preview of an upcoming product to a designer interview, or even, as we had this week, a new product announcement!

The Quality of One’s Enemies

With the 5th Edition of Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay still top of mind, we’ve got a new cover reveal for Imperium Maledictum! The Macharian Adversary Guide serves as a follow-up to last year’s Macharian Requisition Guide, and will greatly flesh out the GM’s stock of opponents to throw at the players as they try to uncover dark mysteries on behalf of their patron.

One common concern about the Imperium Maledictum’s base game you see expressed in the community is regarding the range of “starter enemies” included in the core ruleset. This is, admittedly, a fairly universal grievance; RPG’s with a robust bestiary good for fueling loads of early adventures has tended to be the exception more than the norm in my experience.

Not only that, but the new book promises also to bring ‘Champion Role’ enemies, allowing GM’s to bring Astartes of all sorts to the table.

No word yet on a release date, but it won’t be too much longer!

Breaking News from the Underhive

This afternoon saw the livestream of The Big Autumn Preview over on the mothership, and easily the biggest surprise for me was the announcement of Warhammer: Necromunda Roleplay!

With its tighter emphasis on narrative and character growth, Necromunda has always had something of a foot in two sides of the hobby, but this newest product promises to much deeper on the RPG aspect. More tactics-minded role-playing games like Pathfinder have long been popular options, and while it remains to be seen what the ultimate breakdown is between skirmish and role-playing components, its a very exciting reveal.

It’s also notable that this is an in-house design rather than something licensed, which tends to suggest it might not be a full RPG (though the Preview show mentioned the ability to create your own characters rather than being limited to pre-gens like a more traditional board game experience). If it is, that means that Games Workshop has produced its first inhouse RPG for the first time since it handed off the license to Fantasy Flight Games in 2008.

That said, it certainly sounds like it could be a full RPG:

Even though I don’t play the tabletop wargames, I still always make it a point to tune in to these Preview shows because you never know if you’re going to see something that grabs your attention. As noted earlier, Games Workshop is hit and miss when it comes to anticipation management, but here’s definitely one where they’re doing a solid job.

As a licensee, Cubicle 7 certainly benefits from the licensor company’s own efforts to raise brand awareness and engagement. In addition to the passive brand-building GW engages in as part of its core business model, but there’s also an annual “Relics” showcase of officially licensed merchandise that Cubicle 7 has featured in. That’s a fine start, but represents only the basest of groundwork operations. To truly thrive, any licensee needs to do the bulk of its heavy lifting itself.

To be clear, I don’t think Cubicle 7 is doing a bad job of that. But I’d love to see them elevate it to the next level, and begin actively cultivating a more regular audience for its updates and offerings.

More regular and steady product updates are a great place to start- and for relatively modest capital resource expenditure.

Right then, that’s enough MBA talk for one day, let’s see how those books are doing!

RPG Bestsellers

Warhammer RPG Titles in the Top 200:

• #1 (+1) Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay: Fifth Edition Core Rulebook

• #16 (+2). Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay: Sylvania: The Cursed County

• #99 ( - ). Warhammer The Old World: Player’s Guide (Polish)

• #117 (-14). Wrath & Glory: Core Rulebook

• #135 (-21). Wrath & Glory: Lex Imperialis

• #161 ( - ). Warhammer The Old World: Gamemaster’s Guide (Polish)

• #167 (-19). Imperium Maledictum: Core Rulebook

Total Books in Top 200: 7 (+2)

Just like a recent drop of Spanish-langue translations made a nice little splash on the Top 200, so this week our friends in Poland have warmly responded to the release of the two core The Old World books. Wspaniały!

5th Edition reclaimed the top spot after dropping one last week, while Sylvania even managed to claw a couple spaces back as well. The other books have shown a predictable decline, which is the typical pattern we’ve seen as books flare up for one reason or another and then slip back down the charts.

ICYMI

• We’ve begun moving from the ‘early impressions’ stage to the deep-dive reviews for Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay’s 5th Edition, and kicking things off here is Zekiel’s piece for Ill Met by Morrslieb. “At the end of the day I like the 5th Edition rulebook,” he notes. “It succeeds in retaining the strengths of the 4e rulebook while addressing many of its weaknesses.” It’s a terifically in-depth look, and well worth a read!

• Jason Volk of TTRPG Fanatics also dropped his just today. Calling it “a step in the right direction, even if it is a small one,” he ultimately awards it a respectable 17 out of 20.

• If you’re still on the fence and the early reviews haven’t quite sway you, here’s one more reason to pull the trigger on 5th Edition. Cubicle 7 is giving away two complete sets of The Enemy Within Collector's Edition for any who buy any core 5th Edition product before 30 September. And if, like me, you’d already picked up your preorder, you’re automatically in!

• Careless Conjuration’s running series The GM’s Guide to the Enemy Within dropped its latest this week, with Death on the Reik reaching its climax!

• Finally, It Always Rains in Nuln had an update on making their library of fan-made Warhammer RPG product publicly available.

Coming Attractions

Here’s a list of the known upcoming physical releases from Cubicle 7 based on the available preorder information we have. Note that Cubicle 7’s own delivery estimates appear to be just that- estimates- which is why many products have an upcoming delivery listed for Q1 while we’re already past that.

This section will be updated weekly in this column, with new or updated info presented in boldface.

Undated

• Necromunda Roleplay Core Set

Shipping Q3

• Limited Edition Warhammer Fantasy Map Bundle 1 (July 2026)

• Limited Edition Warhammer Fantasy Map Bundle 2 (July 2026)

Shipping Q4

• Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay: Temple of Spite (Q4)

Shipping Spring 2027

• Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay Fifth Edition: Core Rulebook (standard hardcover)

• Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay Fifth Edition: Core Rulebook (collector’s edition)

• Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay Fifth Edition: Character Sheets

• Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay Fifth Edition: Reikland Dice Set

• Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay Fifth Edition: Monsters & Adversaries Deck

• Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay Fifth Edition: Conditions & Injuries Deck

• Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay Fifth Edition: Reikland Map

Shipping 2027

• Sylvania: The Cursed County

Shipping Q4

• Warhammer: The Old World Roleplaying Game Starter Set (Q4)

• Warhammer: The Old World Roleplaying Game Gamemaster’s Screen (Q4)

Shipping 2027

• Talagaad Adventures

Shipping Q1

• Warhammer Age of Sigmar Soulbound, Champions of Chaos: Dark Gifts Card Pack (Q1)

• Warhammer Age of Sigmar Soulbound, Champions of Chaos: Spells Lore Card Pack (Q1)

• Warhammer Age of Sigmar Soulbound, Champions of Chaos: Artefacts & Wargear Card Pack (Q1)

• Warhammer Age of Sigmar Soulbound, Champions of Chaos: Core Rulebook (Standard and Collector’s Edition) (Q1)

• Warhammer Age of Sigmar Soulbound, Champions of Chaos: Bloodwind Spoil Map (Q1)

Shipping Q3

• Limited Edition Age of Sigmar Map Bundle (July 2026)

Shipping Q1 2027

• Warhammer Age of Sigmar Soulbound: Champions of Chaos: Carngrad Adventures

Shipping Q4

• Warhammer 40,000: Wrath & Glory, Adventures in Gilead

Shipping Q3

• Limited Edition Imperium Maledictum Macharian Sector Map (July 2026)

Shipping Q4

• Warhammer 40,000 Roleplay, Imperium Maledictum: Adeptus Mechanicus Collector’s Edition

• Warhammer 40,000 Roleplay, Imperium Maledictum: Adeptus Mechanicus Player’s Guide

• Warhammer 40,000 Roleplay, Imperium Maledictum: Adeptus Mechanicus Gamemaster’s Guide

• Warhammer 40,000 Roleplay, Imperium Maledictum: Adeptus Mechanicus Character Sheet Pad (Q4)

Undated

• (Nothing at this time)

Thanks for reading, and happy gaming!

With much of my contemporary reading in service to writing reviews, audiobooks are my chance to “play catch-up” on the older catalogue of Black Library books. What you will find in this occasional feature is neither a full, formal book review nor a simple blurb, but rather something comfortably in between: impressions.

You might be surprised to learn that today’s book, Daemonslayer, isn’t just the third novel in William King’s Gotrek & Felix series, but also the first original novel.

Wait, what?

In the publishing industry, a “fix-up” novel is one that is assembled from pre-existing short stories. When the Black Library editors offered Dan Abnett the opportunity to do a Gaunt’s Ghosts book following the positive reception his short stories had garnered, their suggestion was that make a fix-up from them. Abnett refused, writing First & Only as an original novel- but then returned to the fix-up idea for the second book, Ghostmaker.

Trollslayer- King’s first Gotrek & Felix novel- was similarly stitched together from previously-released short stories. For the second, Skavenslayer, he instead took a hybrid approach. Skaven’s Claw, a novella-length story that had been serialized in White Dwarf, and wrote an original novel around it.

When the time came to pen the third, however, King started from a clean slate. Daemonslayer is wholly original, and as a result it hits differently than the previous books. The first two had an episodic feel, while Daemonslayer’s narrative drives forward through the entire story.

The Story

The adventure begins when Gotrek is summoned to the abode of Borek Forkbeard. Forkbeard and Gotrek had been part of an ill-fated expedition to the Chaos Wastes many years before, seeking the legendary dwarf fortress city of Karag Dum.

That expedition had failed, but Forkbeard has a new card to play as he gets some of the original trek’s survivors back together. The frozen North has, if anything, only expanded in the intervening years, but rather than trek across it Forkbeard plans to go over it instead.

Enter Malakai Makaisson, a dwarf Slayer and mechanical genius. Sure his first invention, the ironclad ship Unsinkable, ended up beneath the waves with most of its crew. And his next project, a mighty airship named the Undestructible, exploded in mid-flight. But dwarfs are nothing if not persistent, and Makaisson’s sure that he’ll be third-time lucky with the fortified zeppelin Spirit of Grungni.

That’s good enough for Gotrek, with the ever-reluctant Felix finding himself unable to refuse. After a stock-up in Kislev, the expedition enters the Chaos Wastes- and what they find there is unlike anything they could have ever expected.

The Voice

I’m not sure what I could say about Jonathan Keeble that I haven’t already, but he continues to deliver here. His Gotrek and Felix are iconic performances, while Daemonslayer expands the cast of series regulars with new characters we’ll continue to see in subsequent stories. Of particular note is Gotrek’s fellow Slayer, Snorri Nosebiter, whose dimwittedness Keeble plays to comic perfection.

Keeble manages to make every voice different and distinct, showing tremendous range. From the various dwarfs to humans right through to our old friend Thanquol the Grey Seer (and Lurk, his hapless lackey), this feels less like narration and more like theatre.

Bits n’ Pieces (Spoilers)

• It’s not written as a comedy, but there’s plenty of levity and humor to be found in the intersection of King’s prose and Keeble’s voice. Audiobook just might be the format I’d recommend for anyone getting into Gotrek & Felix, it’s some of the very best entertainment the Black Library offers.

• The pacing of the book feels very different, due to the more continuous and less episodic nature of the story (as I’d discussed earlier). King’s pacing is superb here, building up a genuine sense of momentum and adventure that the format affords him rather than having to build around smaller buildups and payoffs. The airship portion of the adventure really gets going about halfway through, and I was on the edge of my seat as they entered the Wastes.

• King puts a surprising amount of care into the romances he builds for Felix, and he’s done this for three books now. “Warhammer Romance” as an imprint (like Crime and Horror) is sort of a running gag in the community, but I give King a lot of credit for weaving that in.

• King doesn’t leave this book on a cliffhanger, but he does leave it at a place where the next book (Dragonslayer) can pick right up and continue with. Daemonslayer doesn’t fully “reset” the narrative like his earlier stories do; clearly, King left some room to work with for the next installment. This gave the story a bit more of an epic feel at the end that I appreciated.

• Given the change in narrative format, I’m really looking forward to returning. I know eventually the formula wears thin, but for now King is just hitting his stride.

Sometimes you just hate to be right.

When this week’s Sunday Preview announced the release of Mike Vincent’s Helbrecht: Sin of Hope, I wasn’t the least bit surprised to see that- once again- the Special Edition will be available through a Wednesday preorder window.

Two weeks ago, after seeing both Steve Parker’s Deathwatch and Guy Haley’s Raldoron: Revenant get a new preorder window for their deluxe editions, I turned to Sir Ian Fleming for a very applicable bit of sage wisdom: “Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action.”

We’re now at that third time, so I think we can assume- at least for the foreseeable future- that deluxe Black Library offerings will be held during a Wednesday window. And that does appear to be exclusive to the Black Library, too; a Limited Edition of the Space Marines Codex also going up for preorder is still going to be offered at the usual Saturday time.

Why the Change?

For some gaming companies like Wizards of the Coast, transparency is something of a corporate value. While not every decision is explained to the buying public, they do a fairly consistent job of explaining why it is they do what they do when it comes to consequential or controversial issues faced by the fanbase.

For example, here’s a recent piece from designer Gavin Verhey explaining the company’s logic in reversing course on a decision involving a recent, online-only booster set. You may not agree with the decision (many didn’t), but at least you could appreciate that they took the time to lay it all out.

Alas, it’s our burden to have fallen in love with the property of a company for whom transparency is a bit further on down the list of virtues. On very rare occasion we’ll get a bit of damage control, such as when the plug was pulled om the Era of Ruin Limited Edition in June of last year:

But in general, for consumer-facing decisions like the preorder window we can only read the tea leaves and make educated guesses. Companies as a general rule don’t run on whim; if they take an action- especially one that will directly impact consumers- there’s usually a reason behind it. You may not like the reason, it may not be a particularly good reason, but there’s assuredly a motive of some kind.

For this new- and apparently permanent- Wednesday preorder change, the most likely candidates appear to be:

It’s a website performance issue. With demand for Black Library deluxe editions appearing to be on the wax, perhaps there was some core performance impacts that were adversely affecting other preorder customers. With Games Workshop, tabletop miniatures and models are the core business and it’s not hard to imagine that the surge of activity from the book segment could be problematic for site performance. Punt that window over a few days, and voila! A more balanced traffic load.

It’s an anti-scalper measure. This one’s a little tougher to get to, but it makes a certain amount of sense, right? After all, if they’re looking to tamp down speculative buying on Black Library deluxe offerings, it may be easier to do that when you’ve isolated their window of activity from the other lines of business. In other words, they’re easier to flag when you’re not awash in all the other traffic that the tabletop game generates.

Consider what we’ve seen in the last two preorder windows. The initial allotment goes up for offer, and quickly sells out. So far, so normal. But then in both cases (Raldoron and Deathwatch), folks have reported seeing ‘bubbles’ of restock popping up throughout the same day. These bubbles sell out pretty quick as word spreads around the community, but they tend to be more frequent than what we’ve seen in the past.

Could this be GW taking an active hand in canceling abusive orders and returning their purchases to inventory? It’s certainly possible. And while I’m hardly an expert on GW’s corporate practices, this seems like something that’s more likely to occur during normal business hours (Wednesdays at 3pm BST) as opposed to all day Saturday.

In policing, kettling refers to the (somewhat controversial) crowd control tactic whereby the police establish a cordon of officers around a protest or demonstration, thereby containing the civilian participants within a tight perimeter. By moving from an all-day, staggered regional-release model on Saturdays to one global window on Wednesdays, has GW adopted a kind of kettling tactic to counter scalpers? It seems quite possible.

That’s because…

Games Workshop hates us and drinks in our suffering isn’t really an option here. Successful companies don’t wantonly screw with their consumers. They make bad decisions, yes. They suffer the law of unintended consequences, yes. But they typically try to avoid just screwing people around if they can help it, because as any fisherman can tell you, it’s important to keep the fish on the hook if you want to reel in your dinner.

So maybe here’s a question we should be asking ourselves:

There’s no right answer here, nor is there a wrong one. One person’s upgrade is another’s downgrade. But I think it’s worth at least considering this in the frame of what GW has been doing to fight scalpers. Recall that in July’s Black Library Reader Satisfaction Survey (full results here), there was plenty of room for improvement in this area:

Canceled In Error

That brings me to this story that came out this week from u/PronouncedLikeJIF1 on the Black Library Subreddit.

Getting successful orders through is stressful enough as it is; it definitely feels bad when an order gets canceled. But here’s the really interesting part:

Review process, you say?

This is where GW’s corporate communications department could use a little nudge, because the goodwill that could come from a public acknowledgement of this would certainly help mitigate some of the frustrations felt by the community.

Imagine seeing something like this:

You might still be frustrated about the change to Wednesdays, but at least you’d understand why- and perhaps even appreciate that they’re trying something to help counter the scalpers.

This is also nicely anodyne; it doesn’t tip the hand of how GW is investigating orders for potential disqualification, so there’s no obvious ‘workaround’ for scalpers to counter-program into their bots.

Hello from the Trenches

Before we dive too much further into all things Black Library, I want to take a quick second to talk about the email that went out to Subscribers on Saturday. As you know I try to be sensitive to how much goes into your inbox from the Wordforge, because not every one is into every thing. Imbox clutter sucks, and I don’t want to contribute to it.

I debuted a new feature this past Saturday, Trench Crusade Weekly, and just as with my other content I made a new Category for it. On Substack, having different Categories lets readers subscribe to them individually. That means the RPG readers can just get the RPG content if they want, the Black Library folks can limit themselves to just the Black Library, and folks who want both can opt in to get them if they wish to.

When creating a new Category, Substack gives us authors the chance to import our existing subscribers into the feed for the new content. I intentionally did not select that, figuring that I’d be happy to start the Trench Crusade subscriber list at zero and let folks opt in as they wished to. After all, while there are a lot of thematic similarities (and a number of Black Library authors) involved in TC, it is an entirely separate property.

Imagine my dismay, then, when Substack shotgunned it out to everyone anyway.

I’m not sure why it did that, but I want to acknowledge that here so folks don’t think I’m cavalier with their subscription preferences.

For more information on how to customize the emails you get from the Wordforge, you can find that in the site’s intro/FAQ piece here (under “Managing your Notifications”). It’s super easy and takes just a second, and I appreciate your patience.

Now, back to the books!

September’s Giveaway Winner!

Last week was a tough one personally, dealing with the suddenness of my wife’s passing. I can earnestly say that reading everyone’s expressions of gratitude was a real comfort, as well as the personal outreach from Black Library writers and readers alike. When asked as I am on occasion, wait, you don’t charge for your Substack? What do you get out of it? my answer is always, ‘oh buddy, if you only knew.'

Our stories may be filled with the grimdark, but there is kindness and generosity everywhere you look. For that- and so many other things- I remain tremendously grateful.

But of course there can only be one winner, and I fired up the ol’ Tzeentch-o-mizer2 to determine one. Big congratulations to reader Willis, for winning this month’s book giveaway of a Special Edition copy of Bjorn, the Fell-Handed by Justin D. Hill.

Hachette Job

Hachette Book Group has had a long relationship with Games Workshop, offering a number of different subscription-based product offerings. Their Warhammer 40,000 Legends Collection is one of their best-known releases, reprinting a hundred different Black Library novels with terrific spine art that forms a diorama on your shelf3.

With their current Combat Patrol magazine run approaching its conclusion, they’re rolled out their next series to those of us here in the US. Spearhead will follow the same approach: a magazine full of guides and lore, accompanied by a number of miniatures to build and paint.

The obsessive completionist in me is drawn to these like I am any Warhammer printed matter, given that there’s no shortage of lore and even short stories inside. However, for those considering a subscription let me offer a word to the wise: do not let your credit card lapse if you’re a subscriber.

And by ‘lapse,’ I mean any and all interruptions, from simply being overdrawn to the more exotic situations like having your card expire or being canceled and reissued due to fraud. Most other subscription services will give you ample opportunity to remedy a failed billing attempt by updating your billing info, carrying on like it was nothing at all.

Not Hachette.

I can tell you from firsthand experience that by the time you receive an email advising of a billing issue, it’s already too late to restore your subscription (I had to cancel a card due to suspected fraud). Nor do they allow you to ‘restart’ your subscription where you left off, either. You’re just… out of luck, pal. Have fun buying single issues off the website if you want to try and see the collection through.

It is startlingly consumer-unfriendly, and gave me advantage on my saving throw against succumbing to temptation and going in on Spearhead. It looks like a terrific offering and I love to see the Age of Sigmar support, but as always… caveat emptor.

Arrivals & Departures

In this section I look at what’s coming up around the corner (Arrivals) and what’s landing on bookstore shelves (Departures).

Arrivals

Holy mackerel, what a week for us readers! First up was another Wednesday reveal, offering a look at two more upcoming Black Library novels.

Raptors: War and Shadow is the second offering from William Crowe, whose debut novel4 Veterans of the Fall (review) was released just this past May. This time instead of the Astra Militarum it’s the Raptors Space Marines he’s writing about, but this isn’t the first we’ve seen of him there either. Crowe’s first Black Library story, The Shot That Kills You, was part of 2024’s Space Marine Successors Week and featured a lone Raptor fending off a Drukhari raid. It was also a standout selection in the No Peace Among Stars anthology (review) earlier this year, so I’m delighted to see him returning to the Chapter.

Next we’ve got the debut of Tom R. Pike, Crucible of Fire. This one, too, features a return as it brings back a character we last saw in his short story Worm of Valhalla. Featured in the Death and Duty anthology (review), I also considered this one to be a standout story in its collection, and was excited to note when Analog Magazine foretold Pike’s upcoming Black Library novel back in July.

Happily, both books appear to be hardcovers, but no hint yet of whether or not deluxe editions will be offered.

Now on to the week’s preorders, we’ve got Mike Vincent’s second Black Library novel Helbrecht: Sin of Hope. Note that this is preordering Saturday for standard hardcover only, with the Special Edition being offered in the “Wednesday Window” on 9/23.

While we recently saw Rob Young making the rounds with Ghost of Cadia, the sequel to 2023’s Longshot, his previous novel is arriving in paperback. Master of Rites features Ferren Areios of the Ultramarines, and I’d previously reviewed it here.

Now this was unexpected- it’s a Dawn of Fire omnibus! Containing Avenging Son by Guy Haley, Andy Clark’s The Gate of Bones, and Gav Thorpe’s The Wolftime, this is a great way to dive into the nine-novel saga that tied into the game’s 9th Edition.

The series has remained something of an enigma in terms of availability. The hardest book to source has long been the fourth, Haley’s Throne of Light, but The Wolftime and Nick Kyme’s The Iron Kingdom have also proved elusive for some. As you’d expect in the secondary market, that scarcity has translated into a premium price- if you can even find one.

With this omnibus, The Wolftime will be seeing a print reissue, and one wonders if there will a second volume down the road which will finally get Throne of Light in front of more readers.

Another Warhammer Fantasy omnibus gets a snazzy new reissue under The Old World branding as Gav Thorpe’s Sundering series goes up for preorder. This contains Malerion (formerly Malekith), Shadow King, and Caledor, plus an extra novella and short story!

Departures

Just one hitting store shelves this week, with Guy Haley’s Raldoron: Revenant. It looks like both the Special Edition and standard hardcover landed at the same time, which answers a question I’d had about the new preorder window and books released in more than one edition at a time.

ICYMI

Here’s what’s been going on this week for Warhammer content!

Warhammer Wordforge

• This week’s Black Library feature was a review of the audiobook for Sandy Mitchell’s Death or Glory. Could a bit of Cain fatigue be setting in?

• In addition to the new Trench Crusade Weekly, the standard Warhammer RPG Weekly covered the bases for the role-playing folks. With Cubicle 7’s Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay’s 5th Edition now released5, community reactions are starting to trickle in.

Tabletop Battles

• Kevin Stillman offered up this week’s Lore Friday review, diving into the Illustrated and Annotated Edition of Nate Crowley’s Ghazghkull Thraka: Prophet of the Waaagh!.

Warhammer Community

• A new Age of Sigmar line release means a new mini-short for the Chronicles of Ruin series. For the Sons of Behemat, that means we get to hear about the King of the Bigs!

• The upcoming Space Marines Codex will be arriving in a stunning Limited Edition. These sorts of release make exquisite accents to any Black Library collection, and this one is clearly no exception.

• Finally, this week’s Pages from the Black Books download is all about the wars in the margins that happened during the Heresy. The big battles like Calth and Isstvan get a lot of attention, but in a galaxy at war the conflict played itself out in miniature in nearly every corner!

WarhammerTV (paywalled)

• Nothing for the Black Library this week.

Around the Webway

• Concilium Historica Imperialis posted a Book Club review this week of Dark Imperium, by Guy Haley. “Iomhar and Chamlan focus on the book’s mix of large-scale war, political cleanup, and character work, while also debating its title, cover, and place in the broader timeline.” Sounds like a deep dive indeed!

• Jen and Keri of the WH40K Book Club are back with their latest review, this time taking a look at Jude Reid’s Armageddon: Season of Fire. They found this one highly enjoyable, and you can check it out here.

• This one’s a little tangential, but I’ve written before about Andrew James Spooner and how he absolutely nails Malus Darkblade in the audiobook narrations. I came across this video clip from the new Blood of the Dawnwalker game, and stopped cold when I heard Brencis speak. Love to see my favorite narrators pop up in new things!

Cold Open Stories

• No featured story this week.

Quick Hits

• Wargamer had the opportunity to chat with Graham McNeill (False Gods, The Ambassador) about the lore design experience for Trench Crusade.

• Cavan Scott (Secrets of the Tau, Attack of the Necron) has a new comic coming up for preorder. “The Sopranos meets Lucifer in the supernatural horror crime drama, Godfather of Hell, where friends are close, enemies are closer, and revenge is a dish best served cold - or hot as Hell.” There are some neat preorder perks including acces to an exclusive livestream, so check it out if that sounds like it’s your jam!

• If you’re around London on Halloween night, Kim Newman’s (Drachenfels, Beasts in Velvet6) Sarah Minds the Dog and Mildew Manor (or The Italian Smile) are being performed at the Old Red Dog Theatre. Tickets are available here!

Coming Attractions

Here’s a list of the known upcoming releases from the Black Library based on the available preorder information we have. As always, take all of this with a grain of salt unless it’s Games Workshop-confirmed.

This section will be updated weekly in this column, and anything in bold has been added (or updated) this week.

Upcoming but Undated

• Cold Covenant, by Peter Fehervari

• Crucible of Fire, by Tom R. Pike

• Raptors: War and Shadow, by William Crowe

Current PODs in Production

• Hive, by Dan Abnett (Special Edition)

Upcoming in 2026

• Blackheart: Claws of the Maelstrom, by Marc Collins (hardcover, Special Edition, 9/19)

• Voice of Command, by Richard Swan (hardcover, 9/19)

• Dawn of Fire: Crusade of Vengeance (paperback, 10/3)

• Helbrecht: Sin of Hope, by Mike Vincent (hardcover, Special Edition, 10/3)

• Master of Rites, by Rob Young (paperback, 10/3)

• The Sundering, by Gav Thorpe (paperback, 10/3)

• Words of Waaagh!, by DK Books (hardcover, 10/6)

• The Sundering, by Gav Thorpe (paperback, 10/6)

• Auxilia, by Russell Zimmerman (paperback, 10/20)

• Dropsite Massacre, by John French (paperback, 10/20)

• Apostle, by David Annandale (paperback, 10/20)

• Death Rider, by Rhuairidh James (paperback, 11/19)

• Ghost Legion, by Mike Brooks (paperback, 11/19)

• Chem Dog, by Callum Davis (paperback, 12/17)

• Ghazghkull Thraka: Warlord of Warlords, by Denny Flowers (paperback, 12/17)

• Ashes of the Imperium, by Chris Wraight (paperback, 12/17)

Thanks again for joining me for all the going’s on in the Black Library, and see you next week!

1

That reminds me of a certain comic I’ve enjoyed from time to time…

I blame Graham McNeill. Or maybe it’s Gav Thorpe. No, no, wait, it’s definitely Josh Reynolds or Andy Chambers… heck, there’s plenty enough blame to go around, right?

Trench Crusade, bulls-eying that perfect overlap of history, theological mythology, and grimdark wargaming was always going to catch my eye, but it was the recent moves towards building up a storytelling cadre that made me really sit up and take notice.

For those new to the Warhammer Wordforge, this site started as the new home for my regular column, Black Library Weekly. Before long I added a second weekly roundup, the Warhammer RPG Weekly, and now we’re rolling out a similar, regular bulletin for the first non-Warhammer game on the site. Welcome to the debut of Trench Crusade Weekly!

Each week I’ll be rounding up what’s new and exciting in the TC community, from official content to interesting community-generated coverage. In keeping with the format of my other columns, I’ll also keep a running eye on products and releases that are known to be coming soon. That’s not a lot here at the relative infancy of the game, but I fully expect things to only grow from here.

That’s not least because Marc Gascoigne, one of the three founders of the Black Library as we know it, was brought aboard last April as the ‘Head of Special Ops’ in charge of developing in-house and licensed products for the property. Duplicating the success of the Black Library is a tall order, of course, but I’d be delighted to see a steady drumbeat of tie-in fiction as the game grows and progresses.

Now, welcome aboard and on to the week that was!

ICYMI

Here’s what’s been going on this week for Trench Crusade content!

Trench Crusade Official

• Graham McNeill has penned a new bit of lore, this time around War Priest Charon. A non-playable character, Charon is one of the War Patrons in the Carcass Front and is brought to life in a terrific art piece by Mike Franchina.

• The game’s first-ever worldwide campaign Operation Leviathan kicked off this week, as players were encouraged to get in some games of Trench Crusade and report their results! It will run until 19 October, and we’re told that the results will leave their mark on the world forever.

  • And for a much more thematic start-pistol crack, check out this piece on the Trench Wire, and here’s a bit more on how it’s going to actually function as a game event.

• Results from Operation Leviathan are also being reported by Andy Chambers and Sammie Dae. The latest dispatch saw the Faithful outperforming the Fallen, but only by the narrowest of margins. No resting on laurels here!

• Each Friday during the worldwide campaign, the Trench Wire will be bringing a quartet of battle reports from games all over the world. This week’s included a two-day narrative campaign run at the Ironweld Convention in Massachusetts.

Wargame Content Sites

• Tabletop Battles let Aaron “Lenoon” Bowen loose to dive into the lore of the Sacred Affliction in this week’s Trench Crusade article.

• Sticking with Graham McNeill a little longer, Timothy Linward of Wargamer had the opportunity to interview him about his work on the lore of the game. He’s breaking the interview into digestible bites, so here’s the first and second that dropped this week.

• Simon Berman dropped a get-started-playing primer on Bell of Lost Souls this week, for those who may be thinking of jumping in! “The last time I remember seeing a miniatures game take off in such a big way,” he notes, “was WARMACHINE in the mid-2000s.”

Community Content

• The Trench Scribe Podcast took a look at playing the Papal States this week. “he Papal warband in Trench Crusade is unique, in that it allows you to start with mercenaries and glory items; learn how to maximize this strength on this week's episode.”

• Not enough Charon for you on the official site? scannerbarkly’s heard you loud and clear, with a lore video about him as well as more insight around the Seven Heads of the Serpent and the Phantom Squadron of Rudolf’s Folly.

• For an perspective on the wargame itself, the fellas at Mountainside Gaming released a video battle report of their first tilt with the Carcass Front box.

• Rogue Hobbies did a full unboxing, miniature painting, and review in her terrific look at the Carcass Front box.

Coming Attractions

Here’s a list of the known upcoming physical releases from Trench Crusade based on the available preorder information we have.

This section will be updated weekly in this column, with new or updated info presented in boldface.

• Trench Crusade Rulebook (hardcover, 11/30)

That’s it for this week, see you again in seven days’ time!

Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay’s 5th Edition has landed on-scene, and a week in we’re beginning to see some early impressions and reviews start to percolate throughout the media ecosystem.

Cubicle 7 Games had promised from the jump that this wouldn’t be a complete reinvention of the system, but rather an iteration of it that would allow for backwards compatibility. With the rules now available in the wild, early impressions have naturally focused more on comparing the differences between the two rather than assessing it as an entirely separate entity.

Today we’ll take a look at a few excerpts from these first looks into the new game which, as we’ll see, continues to hold a strong position on the DriveThruRPG’s Top 200 sellers listings.

Careless Conjuration

Ill Met by Morrlieb

The Professional Casual

The Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay Subreddit

Finally, for those preferring a deep-dive video review Dungeons & Dyslexia has you covered this week.

Overall a lot of good first looks and impressions, with plenty more to coming in trhe days ahead as players both get a chance to examine it more closely- as well as put it into play at their table.

RPG Bestsellers

Warhammer RPG Titles in the Top 200:

• #2 (-1) Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay: Fifth Edition Core Rulebook

• #18 (-4). Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay: Sylvania: The Cursed County

• #103 (-10). Wrath & Glory: Core Rulebook

• #114 (-26). Wrath & Glory: Lex Imperialis

• #148 (+6). Imperium Maledictum: Core Rulebook

Total Books in Top 200: 5 (-1)

With the Cosmere RPG hitting PDF this week, their offerings dominated the top ten. Still, it was nice to see the Fifth Edition Core Rulebook holding steady, and indeed at time of writing it appears to have reclaimed the summit1.

Talagaad Adventures slipped from the Top 200 this week, but most of the others remained relatively steady.

ICYMI

• Careless Conjuration’s series, GM’s Guide to the Enemy Within, covered Chapters 4-5 of the campaign. This series aims to make running the campaign smoother for GM’s, pulling together disjointed parts of the adventure as well as drawing on their own experience at having done so, and makes for very interesting reading.

• Awesome Lies, meanwhile, posted some bonus content shared by Salzenmund: City of Salt and Silver author Simon Wileman: the plans for Salzenmund Castle!

• Miniature Realms took a dive into the worldbuilding side of things, asking “is the new lore working?”

• Finally, more broadly RPG related is this piece from Nerd Ogre I found interesting, which examines the cost of RPG PDF’s.

Coming Attractions

Here’s a list of the known upcoming physical releases from Cubicle 7 based on the available preorder information we have. Note that Cubicle 7’s own delivery estimates appear to be just that- estimates- which is why many products have an upcoming delivery listed for Q1 while we’re already past that.

This section will be updated weekly in this column, with new or updated info presented in boldface.

Shipping Q3

• Limited Edition Warhammer Fantasy Map Bundle 1 (July 2026)

• Limited Edition Warhammer Fantasy Map Bundle 2 (July 2026)

Shipping Q4

• Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay: Temple of Spite (Q4)

Shipping Spring 2027

• Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay Fifth Edition: Core Rulebook (standard hardcover)

• Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay Fifth Edition: Core Rulebook (collector’s edition)

• Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay Fifth Edition: Character Sheets

• Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay Fifth Edition: Reikland Dice Set

• Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay Fifth Edition: Monsters & Adversaries Deck

• Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay Fifth Edition: Conditions & Injuries Deck

• Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay Fifth Edition: Reikland Map

Shipping 2027

• Sylvania: The Cursed County

Shipping Q4

• Warhammer: The Old World Roleplaying Game Starter Set (Q4)

• Warhammer: The Old World Roleplaying Game Gamemaster’s Screen (Q4)

Shipping 2027

• Talagaad Adventures

Shipping Q1

• Warhammer Age of Sigmar Soulbound, Champions of Chaos: Dark Gifts Card Pack (Q1)

• Warhammer Age of Sigmar Soulbound, Champions of Chaos: Spells Lore Card Pack (Q1)

• Warhammer Age of Sigmar Soulbound, Champions of Chaos: Artefacts & Wargear Card Pack (Q1)

• Warhammer Age of Sigmar Soulbound, Champions of Chaos: Core Rulebook (Standard and Collector’s Edition) (Q1)

• Warhammer Age of Sigmar Soulbound, Champions of Chaos: Bloodwind Spoil Map (Q1)

Shipping Q3

• Limited Edition Age of Sigmar Map Bundle (July 2026)

Shipping Q1 2027

• Warhammer Age of Sigmar Soulbound: Champions of Chaos: Carngrad Adventures

Shipping Q4

• Warhammer 40,000: Wrath & Glory, Adventures in Gilead

Shipping Q3

• Limited Edition Imperium Maledictum Macharian Sector Map (July 2026)

Shipping Q4

• Warhammer 40,000 Roleplay, Imperium Maledictum: Adeptus Mechanicus Collector’s Edition

• Warhammer 40,000 Roleplay, Imperium Maledictum: Adeptus Mechanicus Player’s Guide

• Warhammer 40,000 Roleplay, Imperium Maledictum: Adeptus Mechanicus Gamemaster’s Guide

• Warhammer 40,000 Roleplay, Imperium Maledictum: Adeptus Mechanicus Character Sheet Pad (Q4)

Undated

• (Nothing at this time)

Thanks for reading, and happy gaming!

With much of my contemporary reading in service to writing reviews, audiobooks are my chance to “play catch-up” on the older catalogue of Black Library books. What you will find in this occasional feature is neither a full, formal book review nor a simple blurb, but rather something comfortably in between: impressions.

“I was both surprised and flattered to be asked to curate an annotated edition of For the Emperor,” notes Sandy Mitchell in the foreword to the newly-released edition, “a book which will always have a special place in my heart. Of course, if I’d known back then what all this was going to lead to, I’d probably have been too intimidated to write a single word!”

It’s a great wink and a nod to those who have already enjoyed Cain over the years, the “if I’d known [X], then I would’ve [Y]” construction. It’s peak Ciaphas, a motif he returns to again and again through his adventures- often multiple times within the same book.

Touches like this helped make Cain one of the universe’s most distinctive personalities- though as we’ll discuss today it was not without downside.

Highway to Hell

The fourth installment of the Ciaphas Cain series, Mitchell took the opportunity here to go back in time rather than forwards. “Like C3PO and R2D2,” I summarized in my recent Heroes of the Black Library piece on Commissar Cain for Tabletop Battles, “an ork attack on their voidship sees the pair unwittingly cast down to the surface of desert planet Perlia in an escape pod. There, they must make their way back to civilization, picking up scattered reinforcements in the form of PDF remnants along the way.”

The story is terrific stuff, with Cain and Jurgen having to rely on their own wits to survive a harsh planet and surrounded by a relentless enemy: orks.

“Lots and lots of orks.”

That’s Keri of the terrific WH40K Book Club Podcast, who as a fellow member of the Hall of Fame Committee wrote up the book for its induction in the Black Library Readers’ Hall of Fame.

“Cain survives the only way Cain can,” she continues, “with his wit, charm, luck, and tinkering abilities that would make MacGuyver beyond jealous. Death or Glory is one of my personal favorites in the series just for its use of pop culture references. When you read them, you’ll know1. And you’ll probably laugh as hard as I did.”

Cain and Jurgen make their way across the desert, collecting the dribs and drabs of Planetary Defense Force survivors and reclaiming transportation from various salvaged Ork conveyances. Mile by mile as their supplies dwindle, their hope begins to grow- a hope that will spread throughout all Perlia by the end of the tale.

You Can Say That, Again

Death or Glory obviously worked- it is, after all, in the Readers’ Hall of Fame alongside For the Emperor, Caves of Ice, and The Emperor’s Finest. But conventional wisdom on the series holds that the best way to read through the Ciaphas series is with breaks in between.

In his writeup for Caves of Ice, Hall of Fame Committee member Michael Dodd (of Track of Words) called the Cain series the “AC/DC of the Black Library.”

“The whole point of the series is to hit the same beats and play the same jokes, because those beats and those jokes are just so damn good! There’s nothing wrong with wanting more of the same,” though he does go on to admit that “some of the later books suffer a little for that.”

By the time we get to Death or Glory, Mitchell’s reliance on that formulaic element has become increasingly apparent and indeed it tamped down my enjoyment of the otherwise terrific audiobook production. It’s not so much that the Cain’s core conceit is wearing thin- our hero’s career of perpetually failing upwards is still quite amusing- but rather that Cain and Jurgen have become almost “Flanderized.”

I talked a bit about that concept in my review for The Relentless Dead by Steve Lyons, noting that the community had exaggerated the most identifiable characteristics of the Death Korps- the gas masks, the shovels, the fatalism- to the point where they’d become the stuff of memes.

There’s a similar quality at play here, one especially noticeable with Cain’s aide-de-camp, Ferik Jurgen. Were we to hold a public reading of the book where everyone had to take a shot whenever Jurgen’s body odor was referenced, for instance, it would be a short (if memorable) evening indeed. Inquisitor Amberley Vail’s frequent asides- used so well in earlier stories to provide the kind of contextual information that’s not always easy to deliver in a first-person POV book- also suffered from overuse at points.

An Ensemble Cast

Stephen Perring

While I’d certainly caution against a binge-listen for all the reasons stated above, Mitchell’s Cain series easily makes the list of essential 40K audiobooks in no small part due to its casting. Stephen Perring is extraordinary as the good Commissar, pitch-perfect in both voice and personality. He embodies the role to such an extent that I would imagine any other narrator would suffer for the comparison, similar to Andrew James Spooner’s Malus Darkblade or John Banks’s Roboute Guilliman.

Like some of the other voice actors we’ve profiled here, Perring has a theatre background that he’s parlayed into small roles in television (a lawyer in EastEnders here, a police officer in Manhunt or The Bill there) while seeing a much larger body of work in voice acting for books, podcast dramas, and video games.

While best known for Cain, he’s also popped up in other Games Workshop productions. He was Sergeant Zachariah in the 2017-18 Elysia trilogy of audio dramas, as well as Hamilcar in the audio drams The Beasts of Cartha, written by David Guymer and published in 2016.

I’ve spoken before about a voice actor’s range, the number of different characters they can embody, and if you do nothing else take a moment to appreciate Perring’s demo reel here.

Penelope Rawlins

While the cast list for the Cain books can vary from book to book, Perring and Penelope Rawlins are the two that anchor the production. Rawlins plays Inquisitor Vail, who Cain meets for the first time in-story in For the Emperor, but whose contributions are far more prominent in serving as a sort of editor and curator of the “Ciaphas Cain archives2.”

Rawlins’ acting resume is extensive, with long-running roles in television animation shows including Inazuma Eleven Go, Smighties, Yukee, and Rainbow Rangers. For video games, she’s lent her talents to Horizon Forbidden West, Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire, a couple entries in the Leisure Suit Larry franchise, and Baldur’s Gate III, amongst many others.

Not only that, but she was part of the cast for the WarhammerTV series Angels of Death, as well as the follow-up Angels of Death: Origins.

Having narrated over 300 audiobooks, she was even nominated in 2013 for Audible’s Narrator of the Year.

Bits n’ Pieces

Overall it took me longer than I’d expect to get into this one, though in fairness once I did (about halfway through) I genuinely enjoyed it. I do worry, though, that as I continue down the Cain path things will become more and more Flanderized. It’s been remarked that around book seven Mitchell seemed to course correct, apparently in reaction to this sort of criticism. I don’t know to what degree that’s accurate, but regardless Cain is one of the great characters of 40K and even legends like Gotrek & Felix began to overstay their welcome.

When Robert Rath’s The Wicked and the Warped was recently announced, one of the first thoughts I had was to wonder how much stress Rath put himself under by following in the footsteps of a breakout hit. The Infinite and the Divine has been a tremendous success; what does it feel like to try and capture that lightning in a bottle twice? I can understand the thought process behind wanting to repeat the elements that made a story successful, but like making copies of copies sometimes you risk diminishing returns.

These are the things that will be top of mind when I pick up Duty Calls, book five in the series.

But I’ll be giving a little time to cleanse the palate first.

We’ve got a lot to talk about today, from the Raldoron preorder to a new Old World book, the month’s new promotions on the Black Library App to a very special September book giveaway… but first, I have a little bit of personal news to share.

Longtime readers will know that everything I’ve done that’s Warhammer related, from my first articles on Tabletop Battles (then Goonhammer) to this Substack and everything on it, all came as a result of my wife Jimi’s breast cancer diagnosis in 2024. Needing a little distraction brought me back to the books; the magic of the books soon rekindled my love of writing1.

Last week, Jimi lost her battle.

All cancers are bastards, but hers was particularly ruthless. Triple-negative inflammatory breast cancer (IBC), because of course my wife never did anything by halves. Notoriously aggressive, maddeningly hard to treat. It endured waves of chemotherapy and radiation, eluded a double mastectomy and lymph node removal, and outwitted the extraordinarily talented medical staff first at the Mayo Clinic in Jacksonville, then MD Anderson in Houston- to say nothing of the very caring and dedicated team here in Louisville.

My wife was no stranger to pain. Our first child was born at home, the twins were an emergency caesarian and two that followed were delivered naturally. As a birth doula, she helped bring over two hundred souls into this world, an observer to the pain of birth when not herself a participant. But by the end, the debilitating agony of her disease spreading first into her lungs and then her bones proved too great to bear.

Getting Through It

If this all sounds like a tragedy, that’s because it is. She never saw her fiftieth birthday, and our children range in age from fifteen to eight2. The hole she leaves behind is massive. But what’s gotten us through every step of this journey has been a spirit of gratitude, and it’s that which I’d most like to share today.

Because while I am certainly sad, I am so incredibly grateful.

If you went back to right after I moved to Kentucky and offered me a deal: that I would meet the love of my life, get twenty amazing years and build an incredible family together, but that they would leave this earth far too soon… would I still take it? I think anyone would.

We’ve been beset by misfortune for the past two years. On the day we closed on our house, my wife lost her job. Three months later came her diagnosis. This past May I learned I was being laid off myself. Any one of these alone is a major blow to any family; all three in short order feels like cruelty.

And yet… losing her job allowed her to grieve its loss and be emotionally ready for the fight to come. Losing mine allowed me to focus entirely on being a caretaker at a time when she most needed it, traveling back and forth from Houston during her clinical trial every week or so.

And while it might sound absurd to see cancer as a blessing, the long battle gave all of us a long time to come to terms with it and what it meant for our family. I can only imagine the shock and devastation of a sudden loss such as a car accident, where so much of your life is ripped away in an instant. Our journey has been full of things that looked bad when they were in front of us, but then quite different in the rearview.

A week on and there are plenty of tears here. But there are far more smiles and laughter. When one of us threatens to be overtaken by sorrow, the comfort of a hug and sharing a fond memory are but an armlength away.

Sometimes that one of us is me.

I am grateful too for what Warhammer has given us throughout all this. It wasn’t just my place of refuge, but something we enjoyed together. She’d read and loved the Eisenhorn trilogy, and enjoyed listening to the audiobooks on our many road trips to Houston. It’s crazy to think that a little over a week ago, we visited the Warhammer Store & Cafe. And if not for all this we’ve had to endure, you wouldn’t be reading this today and I certainly wouldn’t be writing it.

I’ve also been blown away by the outpouring of love and support from the announcement on Facebook. Jimi touched so many lives in her time here, and seeing the deluge of tributes was a welcome reminder of what a hero she was to me, not just to me and our children but to so many more I (and probably she!) didn’t even know about. Were there in fact a Bell of Lost Souls, it surely would be tolling.

So there’s my takeaway for today: count your blessings, folks. All of them. Even the ones that don’t necessarily look like blessings.

Especially those.

September’s Giveaway

One thing that’s really nice about the Grapevine store is that they carry deluxe edition Black Library books as part of their active stock. When we visited they had three Special Editions of Justin D. Hill’s Bjorn, the Fell-Handed in stock, and when we left they had one less. Since I already had an ordered copy waiting for me at home this was a curious impulse buy, but one that makes perfect sense now.

So that’s this month’s giveaway, a Special Edition of ol’ Bjorn.

To enter, you just need to be a Wordforge subscriber (it’s free!) and leave a comment on this post answering the following question:

It can be anything from the superficial to the serious, this isn’t a test and there aren’t any grades being handed out. Instead, I’ll pick one random entrant next week!

Raldawrong or Raldaright?

Raldoron’s preorder got weird.

We knew it was going to be bad, right? I mean, there’s certainly plenty of cause to expect the worst going into an odd preorder window that opens at the same moment for the entire world. But weird? That I didn’t expect.

My first clue of how things were going to go came at about three hours before the window’s opening, when I went to buy myself a voucher. As I detail in my guide to collecting the Black Library, I always like to use vouchers to pay for my preorders in an effort to minimize the number of click-throughs. Typically the voucher arrives in my inbox in about fifteen minutes, but this one appeared to get lost in the warp (it would eventually arrive on its own the next day3).

Then there was the drop time. Games Workshop always gives its preorder window times at the hour, but veterans know that you should start expecting to see it up to five minutes early- a perfect example of the axiom, “early is on time, and on time is late.”

Eleven minutes before the hour as I was doing a bit of Wordforge writing, I clicked over to the preorder tab and hit refresh. This was part out of making sure I stayed logged in for the upcoming window, and partly just mindless habit. Imagine my surprise when the Raldoron Special Edition appeared.

After adding it to my basket and making a beeline for checkout, I ran into the usual pink-box errors that seem to be common these days. I usually get through it with a quick refresh; this time it took two, but soon the Omnissiah blessed me with the Order Complete window.

My next stop was to zip over to the Black Library subreddit and Black Library Nutters Facebook Group (my usual haunts), giving them all a snap head’s up that the window had opened up far earlier than anyone not employed by Games Workshop’s IT department was expecting.

I seemed to be one of the lucky ones, as reports started rolling in of website issues for many trying to check out. When a friend of mine reported experiencing an internet outage, I figured I’d wade back in to try and secure her a copy. This time I had to refresh the pink box of doom around three dozen times4, but eventually I managed to successfully check out at a quarter past the hour.

But that wasn’t the end of it. After reportedly selling out soon after, I kept seeing reports of purchases made throughout the day. It was almost as if smaller windows of availability kept opening up for those lucky few still rolling the dice. Was this reflective of website problems clearing up? GW IT working overtime to catch and cancel scalper-bot orders? Something else? It’s impossible to discern from the outside looking in, but all in all it made for a very unusual day at the office.

So who won here?

Well, I certainly did through the dumbest of luck, securing mine unusually early. But for each one snapped up before the starter pistol, that’s one person less who was able to get theirs when they showed up at the “correct” preorder time.

Those who managed to slip past the snafus did, though in many cases it necessitated no small amount of stubborn perseverance (as with my second purchase). And of course, those who managed to stumble upon one of the inventory refreshes throughout the day, well, they’re winners too.

But if your idea of winners are the lucky and the stubborn rather than the mass and press of your ordinary punters at the door, well, I’m not sure that’s a desirable end state. And with the Special Edition of Blackheart: Claws of the Maelstrom by Marc Collins seeing a possible repeat of the special preorder window process this Wednesday, buckle in, folks.

Things might get weird.

A Wiki Situation

Jacques Corby-Tuech in the Black Library Nutters group has gotten the ball rolling on creating a Black Library wiki site, and things are already moving! While there are other Warhammer-based wikis out there (such as the excellent Lexicanum, which I’ve frequently appreciated!), this one will take a notably book-centric approach.

For instance, its page on Dan Abnett’s Horus Rising has a full publication history, including release dates and ISBN’s. While some of this information is admittedly somewhat niche, it can be incredibly useful for some. It’s still in its infancy, with most pages being skeletal placeholders, but like all wikis the aim is to eventually get out even more than what you put in. And best of all, says Jacques,, there will be “absolutely no tracking or advertising ever, and all the data is collected in handy tables that can then easily be extracted out of the site again for your own purposes.”

I’ll be very keen to see how this grows and develops!

Arrivals & Departures

In this section I look at what’s coming up around the corner (Arrivals) and what’s landing on bookstore shelves (Departures).

Arrivals

The big news this week was the announcement of the next Warhammer: The Old World novel, Blood of the Bastion by Evan Dicken (Shade of Khaine, First Marshal). For those less familiar with the fantasy side of things, the Old World setting reflects the original Warhammer Fantasy world before it was blown up in 2014-15 and replaced with Age of Sigmar.

In the hearts of fans, though, it never really went away. The End Times transition was far from universally beloved, and a confluence of factors managed to bring The Old World setting back to life, including:

• Persistent, unmet fan demand, which saw a noticeable exodus for other game systems like Kings of War rather than just ‘funneling in’ to Age of Sigmar

• Video games like Total War and Vermintide kept the setting feeling active and contemporary

• The success of 2012’s Horus Heresy tabletop game showed that parallel properties and systems were viable

• New executive leadership in 2015 took a broader approach to the hobby and was open to a return in some form

These ingredients simmered and cooked, leading to this in 2024:

The same year saw Graham McNeill’s Lords of the Lance, which even received a Special Edition release. “Middle-Earth got to me first,” noted McNeill in the Special Edition’s introduction, “but it was the black humour and grim fatalism of Warhammer that really tickled the inside of my brain. The Old World has always felt dangerous to me in a way most fantasy universes seldom did (at least until Game of Thrones).

“When news reached me on America’s far shores that the return of Warhammer had been heralded by a twin-tailed comet in the skies over Nottingham, it wasn’t even a question if I’d want to write a novel set in the reborn Old World.”

In an interview at the time on the mothership, McNeill was effusive in his desire to keep writing for the setting, but alas nothing more seemed to materialize.

Until now, that is.

The announcement of Dicken’s upcoming tale was exciting not only for Old World fans, but also for those of the Cathay setting.

As per usual with the teaser pieces there’s no hint of a timeline, but I’m delighted to see that this, too, will be offered in a deluxe edition.

Aside from the reveal, all was quiet in the Sunday Preview yesterday. Enjoy the Wallet Appreciation Week (unless you’re a fan of Ogors).

Departures

Another week with a nice stream of releases into the physical world as the Deathwatch Special Editions have dropped. Steve Parker’s novel got a wonderful deluxe treatment here, and reports have even come in that a few have found their way back to the website for ordering by a lucky few.

Nate Crowley’s Illustrated and Annotated Edition of Prophet of the Waaagh! also arrived, as well as the standard hardcover edition of Bjorn, the Fell-Handed by Justin D. Hill and Andy Clark’s Demolisher in paperback.

Black Library App Sales for September

You know what else turning of the month means? A new slate of sales on the Black Library app! As a reminder, this is a new (and welcome) approach; previously there was only one eBook offered on sale each month. With the introduction of the new app, each month appears to be bringing with it a much larger number of eBook and audiobook releases at a discounted price (typically 50% off the eBook, 66% off the audio).

For September, the following are on sale:

• Anvils of the Heldenhammer, by Dale Lucas (audio, ebook)

• Blood of Asaheim, by Chris Wraight (audio, ebook)

• Brutal Kunnin, by Mike Brooks (audio, ebook)

• Callis and Toll, by David Annandale (audio, ebook)

• Dante, by Guy Haley (audio, ebook)

• Dead Men Walking, by Steve Lyons (audio, ebook)

• Soul Hunter, by Aaron Dembski-Bowden (audio, ebook)

• Yndrasta: The Celestial Spear, by Noah Van Nguyen (audio, ebook)

ICYMI

Here’s what’s been going on this week for Warhammer content!

Warhammer Wordforge

• As a Black Library Readers’ Hall of Fame weekend, in addition to the main feature on Tabletop Battles there was also the regular companion piece, The Hall Monitor. This week I talked about the glut of books we’re seeing in the Black Library istarting in 2016, and how that reflected a change in Games Workshop’s corporate priorities.

• For Wednesday’s article, we rolled out a new companion feature to the Scribes & Scriveners show on WarhammerTV. The Writer Files will not only recap their interview on that show, but look at their body of work overall. We kicked things off with Marc Collins (Krakenblood, Grim Repast).

• Finally, Friday’s Warhammer RPG Weekly looked at the exciting debut of Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay’s 5th Edition from Cubicle 7 Games!

Tabletop Battles

• Four books were inducted into the Black Library Readers’ Hall of Fame this week from the Class of 2016! The Heresy came up big, but Age of Sigmar got some love as well!

Warhammer Community

• The Pages from the Black Books series dove into the Sisters of Silence this week with the free download from 2014’s The Horus Heresy Book Three: Extermination.

• For those who (like me) enjoy decorating their libraries with coins and miniatures, you won’t want to miss seeing what September’s monthly offerings are.

WarhammerTV (paywalled)

• No Black Library content this week, but it’s likely no coincidence with this week’s book reveal that Loremasters will be dropping an episode on Grand Cathay this week!

Around the Webway

• The Oldhammer Fiction Podcast was looking at Games Workshop’s tie-in novels for their Dark Future property, which has at least a kind of tangential overlap to the worlds of 40K in spirit if not in actual lore.

• Mira Manga sat down for a terrific hour with Dan Abnett, chatting about all things Hive5! Not only that, but the book was also the subject this week of her Warhammer Book Club review with Arbitor Ian!

• Wargaming site Miniature Realms covers a lot of The Old World tabletop content, but was very pleased to see the announcement of the upcoming Cathay novel this week!

• I often spotlight It Always Rains in Nuln for my Warhammer RPG Weekly column (like this one, but on Fridays), but this week they posted a take on The End Times that talks about the whole narrative event, including touching on the Black Library books of the time. It’s highly editorial, but I certainly enjoyed the read (and understand the frustration!).

• Finally, while it’s not directly Black Library related, there was a terrific piece on Substack this week by Mark Newheiser about whether it’s better to read books in publication order or in-story “chronological” order. The writer makes a strong case for the former for reasons I’ve myself long held, and with Horus Heresy reading order discussions being a frequent topic it’s well worth considering.

Cold Open Stories

• This week’s featured story is New Moon, by Daniel Summerbell. “With the New Moon comes the sound of sirens, the harbinger of dread. The radio may have gone silent, but Joshua stands ready, together with the people of his village, his battered old rifle, and his faith in the Emperor, to face whatever it is that is coming their way.”

Quick Hits

• Speaking of Justin D. Hill (Hell’s Last, Bjorn the Fell-Handed), he’ll also be contributing to an anthology marking the Battle of Stamford Bridge in 1066 coming out later this month. It also will feature work by Matthew Harffy (The Whispering Blade).

• Tim Waggoner (Skin Man) appeared on the Methods of Fiction podcast this week, discussing how to write effective horror fiction. As a Bram Stoker Award winner, Wagoner certainly has a few things to share on that front.

• Gav Thorpe (The Wolftime, 13th Legion) shared that he’d found a box of Warhammer audio drama CD’s in his storage and has put them up on eBay to find them new homes. If you’re missing a few from your collection, make sure ot check it out!

• James Swallow (The Flight of the Eisenstein, Deus Encarmine) appeared on The Randomizer podcast this week, discussing the upcoming Thunderbirds anthology International Rescues that he’s a contributor on.

• Finally, it was the most recent Black Library royalties day this past week. Josh Reynolds (Shadespire: The Mirrored City, Lukas the Trickster) once again posted a small summary of how he did. Since this isn’t the kind of thing you can ever expect to get transparency on, it’s great that he’s continued to do this.

Coming Attractions

Here’s a list of the known upcoming releases from the Black Library based on the available preorder information we have. As always, take all of this with a grain of salt unless it’s Games Workshop-confirmed.

This section will be updated weekly in this column, and anything in bold has been added (or updated) this week.

Upcoming but Undated

• Helbrecht: Sin of Hope, by Mike Vincent

• Cold Covenant, by Peter Fehervari

Current PODs in Production

• Hive, by Dan Abnett (Special Edition)

Upcoming in 2026

• Raldoron: Revenant, by Guy Haley (hardcover, Special Edition, 9/12)

• Blackheart: Claws of the Maelstrom, by Marc Collins (hardcover, Special Edition, 9/19)

• Voice of Command, by Richard Swan (hardcover, 9/19)

• Words of Waaagh!, by DK Books (hardcover, 10/6)

• The Sundering, by Gav Thorpe (paperback, 10/6)

• Auxilia, by Russell Zimmerman (paperback, 10/206)

• Dropsite Massacre, by John French (paperback, 10/20)

• Apostle, by David Annandale (paperback, 10/20)

• Master of Rites, by Rob Young (paperback, 10/20)

• Death Rider, by Rhuairidh James (paperback, 11/19)

• Ghost Legion, by Mike Brooks (paperback, 11/19)

• Chem Dog, by Callum Davis (paperback, 12/17)

• Ghazghkull Thraka: Warlord of Warlords, by Denny Flowers (paperback, 12/17)

• Ashes of the Imperium, by Chris Wraight (paperback, 12/17)

Thanks again for joining me for all the going’s on in the Black Library, and see you next week!

The Hall Monitor is published every other week, the same day as the latest installment of the Black Library Readers’ Hall of Fame drops on Tabletop Battles. A cross between a director’s cut and a backstage pass, it’s a look behind the scenes at the Hall of Fame project.

Today we announced the inductees of the Class of 2017. It was a massive class- almost forty books were considered, which is particularly remarkable when you consider that just the year before there were less than half that many. The size of the class was not the only remarkable thing about this cohort; it’s also noteworthy how few of them managed to make it into the Hall. You may recall that the Class of 2016- again, half the size of 2017- managed to get the same number of books in.

What gives?

A big part of this, I think, is reflective of the corporate realities of Games Workshop at the time. Tom Kirby had stepped down as CEO of Games Workshop in 2015, and under his reign the company had been squarely focused on the tabletop lines. When they found they had a massive hit on their hands with the Horus Heresy, they didn’t quite know how to react.

This is illustrated by this from Black Library series editor Ellie Goulding, writing in the afterword of Ben Counter’s Battle for the Abyss:

Here today we have the benefit of hindsight, but imagine trying to navigate this terrain back in 2006. While a runaway success is in many ways a nice problem to have, that doesn’t mean that forging the road ahead was easy.

The Black Library’s response was simple: give the people more of what they want. That meant forging ahead by commissioning more and more novels and stories. Rolling out a line of novellas and audio dramas. And since the readers seemed to like the primarchs so much, why not an entire new line of novels- one for each?

And if all that wasn’t enough, then you have the Beast Arises series. This was the Black Library’s answer to two questions. First, since readers clearly liked going back to an earlier time period in the universe, would they like to see another, not quite so early- also get a grand narrative? And second, what if they released a series that modeled itself after episodic television, with an entire 12-book cycle played out on a monthly cadence?

Where perhaps the reach exceeded the grasp was not in trying to do these things, but rather trying to do them all at the same time. There was only so much talent the Black Library could draw upon in its stable, and it should come as little shock that the results have been historically seen as a bit uneven. The Beast Arises in particular has been drawn criticism for being, as one reader succinctly put it, “too many cooks and too many books.”

As a result, we have a Class that- when compared to previous ones- seems very underperforming when it comes to inductees to the Hall of Fame. These were worthy winners, of course, and as with any Hall of Fame there’s always going to be a couple on the cusp that will spark good-natured debate. But while I haven’t run the numbers on this metric directly, an induction rate of around 10% seems like a verdict. A slice of cake for dessert is great, but it doesn’t an entree make.

Now enough about food, let’s get to the books!

The Vox Populi Top Twenties

So here are the updated Top Twenties for both halves of the Black Library, but first a look at the updated Leaderboard:

Hall Winners Leaderboard

No new names this time around, but interestingly what I see as the “middle tier” increased their totals this week. It’s important to note that “middle tier” is not a qualifying descriptor- these authors certainly aren’t “mid,” but rather just a representation of quantity at this particular time. John French, for example, has only recently entered the scene and while I don’t like to get into the prediction business1 I would be very surprised if this is the last time we see his tally increase.

Fantasy

30K/40K

As you’d expect, it’s become much harder over time to crack into the Top Twenty, but Aaron Dembski-Bowden managed it this time around with The Master of Mankind. With 82% of the voting public’s support, he now has eight books on the list- behind only Dan Abnett with thirteen. Of course, four of Abnett’s sit tied at 20th, so all it will take is one more book charting to knock out the lot.

Fantasy, meanwhile, sits static again this week despite its lower barrier to entry. It will be interesting to see which Age of Sigmar book will be the first to make the list.

That’s all for this time, thanks for reading!

With just a few weeks to spare, Cubicle 7 Games has kept its promise for the release of Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay’s 5th Edition, and the PDF versions are now in the wild!

The appetite for the release is certainly there- as we’ll see in a moment the title shot to the top of the DriveThruRPG’s Top 200 sellers. How many of these were PDF orders versus preorders of the physical product is impossible for us to know, but the pricing model hews fairly close to the x → 2x → 4x formula for digital, standard hardcover, and collector’s edition.

The collector’s edition (pictured above) is beautiful. You can say what you want about their level of editing (and many do1), but the design department holds to a consistent standard of excellence. It’s surely not chance that C7’s ENNIE Award this year was won in the Best Layout and Design category.

In my occasional series here, Black Library Bibliophiles, I’ve looked at different ways to decorate your library with things from Warhammer coins to JOYTOY helmets, and attractively-designed RPG books certainly can add flair to any library.

As for what’s inside the book, we’re already just starting to see community comparisons and dialogue with more features, videos, and articles sure to come!

A Bundle of Fun

C7 is once again putting together bundle deals for the game’s launch, as it has done with past titles. The “Karl Franz” is the top tier, a “give me one of everything” collection that knocks 10% off the price of buying everything individually. Then there’s the “Reikland” bundle (the collector’s edition only and all the extras), and the “Free Company” which does the same but with the standard edition, not collector’s.

It’s worth noting that based on past performance, maps (such as the Reikland one offered here) tend to be fulfilled and shipped separately from the other physical goods. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, since they are rolled and shipped in tubes- much preferable than folded for those that like to frame and display their maps.

Fulfillment for all physical items is expected to be Spring of next year.

RPG Bestsellers

Warhammer RPG Titles in the Top 200:

• #1 ( - ) Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay: Fifth Edition Core Rulebook

• #14 ( +0 ). Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay: Sylvania: The Cursed County

• #88 (-21). Wrath & Glory: Lex Imperialis

• #93 (+6). Wrath & Glory: Core Rulebook

• #142 (+17). Imperium Maledictum: Core Rulebook

• #178 (-47). Warhammer The Old World: Talagaad Adventures

Total Books in Top 200: 6 (-1)

As noted earlier, this week saw the Fifth Edition rocket to the top of the charts. That’s thrilling news, though absent any actual data beyond relative chart position it’s impossible to know the degree of good. Sylvania: The Cursed County held strong at #14, and we even saw a couple of chart improvements in the Warhammer 40K Core Rulebooks. The Emperor provides!

ICYMI

• Careless Conjuration’s series, GM’s Guide to the Enemy Within, kept apace with an under-the-hood look at running Chapter 3 of the Enemy Within campaign.

• With WFRP’s Fifth Edition now available, here’s Ill Met by Morrslieb with a first impressions piece for the new book!

Coming Attractions

Here’s a list of the known upcoming physical releases from Cubicle 7 based on the available preorder information we have. Note that Cubicle 7’s own delivery estimates appear to be just that- estimates- which is why many products have an upcoming delivery listed for Q1 while we’re already past that.

This section will be updated weekly in this column, with new or updated info presented in boldface.

Shipping Q3

• Limited Edition Warhammer Fantasy Map Bundle 1 (July 2026)

• Limited Edition Warhammer Fantasy Map Bundle 2 (July 2026)

Shipping Q4

• Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay: Temple of Spite (Q4)

Shipping Spring 2027

• Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay Fifth Edition: Core Rulebook (standard hardcover)

• Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay Fifth Edition: Core Rulebook (collector’s edition)

• Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay Fifth Edition: Character Sheets

• Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay Fifth Edition: Reikland Dice Set

• Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay Fifth Edition: Monsters & Adversaries Deck

• Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay Fifth Edition: Conditions & Injuries Deck

• Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay Fifth Edition: Reikland Map

Shipping 2027

• Sylvania: The Cursed Country

Shipping Q4

• Warhammer: The Old World Roleplaying Game Starter Set (Q4)

• Warhammer: The Old World Roleplaying Game Gamemaster’s Screen (Q4)

Shipping 2027

• Talagaad Adventures

Shipping Q1

• Warhammer Age of Sigmar Soulbound, Champions of Chaos: Dark Gifts Card Pack (Q1)

• Warhammer Age of Sigmar Soulbound, Champions of Chaos: Spells Lore Card Pack (Q1)

• Warhammer Age of Sigmar Soulbound, Champions of Chaos: Artefacts & Wargear Card Pack (Q1)

• Warhammer Age of Sigmar Soulbound, Champions of Chaos: Core Rulebook (Standard and Collector’s Edition) (Q1)

• Warhammer Age of Sigmar Soulbound, Champions of Chaos: Bloodwind Spoil Map (Q1)

Shipping Q3

• Limited Edition Age of Sigmar Map Bundle (July 2026)

Shipping Q1 2027

• Warhammer Age of Sigmar Soulbound: Champions of Chaos: Carngrad Adventures

Shipping Q4

• Warhammer 40,000: Wrath & Glory, Adventures in Gilead

Shipping Q3

• Limited Edition Imperium Maledictum Macharian Sector Map (July 2026)

Shipping Q4

• Warhammer 40,000 Roleplay, Imperium Maledictum: Adeptus Mechanicus Collector’s Edition

• Warhammer 40,000 Roleplay, Imperium Maledictum: Adeptus Mechanicus Player’s Guide

• Warhammer 40,000 Roleplay, Imperium Maledictum: Adeptus Mechanicus Gamemaster’s Guide

• Warhammer 40,000 Roleplay, Imperium Maledictum: Adeptus Mechanicus Character Sheet Pad (Q4)

Undated

• (Nothing at this time)

Thanks for reading! If you found this week’s Warhammer RPG Weekly useful or interesting, might I ask that you kindly consider sharing it with others who may as well?

Welcome to the newest occasional series here on the Warhammer Wordforge, The Writer Files. This will be a companion piece to WarhammerTV’s Scribes & Scriveners show, sharing highlights from that interview as well as looking at the writer and their Black Library history.

We’re kicking things off with Glasgow-based NHS Biomedical Scientist Marc Collins, whose latest Warhammer offering Blackheart: Claws of the Maelstrom will be going up for preorder this week1.

The “Black Library’s Latest Prodigy”

Collins’s history of writing Warhammer is well-documented, and back in 2021 Warhammer Community ran a short interview with him in advance of his debut novel, Grim Repast. Collins had come up through the open submissions call, a process they called “as exacting as Astartes selection.” It was a terrific break for Collins, who had been trying his hand at it “for years2” before meeting success. That led to his debut short story, Ghosts of Iron, the following year.

Here’s his reflection on this time from a guest article he penned for Track of Words.

Since that humble start, Collins has had an impressive six novels published for the Black Library, and on a rather wide variety of subjects. Whereas some writers enjoy going deep on a particular segment of the lore- think Steve Lyons here, for example, with the Death Korps of Krieg, no two of Collins’s works have bore much resemblance to one another.

Here’s a quick walk through his novel portfolio.

Grim Repast

Collins’s novel debut came with 2021’s Grim Repast, a story set in the world of Warhammer Crime. “After Warhammer Horror I think that the crime imprint was inevitable in a lot of ways,” he shared in a 2020 interview on Track of Words. “People kept asking for ‘domestic 40k’ and this delivers in spades. Building on the much earlier foundations of stories like Eisenhorn, but also on stories like Chris Wraight’s Vaults of Terra novels.”

With a terrific blend of bleak noir and body horror, Grim Repast is frequently mentioned amongst the better offerings in the Warhammer Crime range, both a statement of purpose from Collins as well as a taste of what kind of storytelling he’s capable of if given the opportunity.

Helbrecht: Knight of the Throne

The first of Collins’s forays into the “Character” series, this short novel sees its titular character crossing the Rubicon Primaris and adjusting to Imperial life under Roboute Guilliman. The contrast between Helbrecht’s faith and Guilliman’s more secular approach sends him on a religious pilgrimage.

In an interview that year with At Boundary’s Edge, Collins noted that the predominant theme of his work to date had been “faith and duty.”

“Whether that’s the Ad Mech, Genestealer Cults, Black Templars or Sisters of Battle,” he went on, “or whether it’s the personal sense of responsibility of men like Drask. With my own little corner of Varangantua and the setting of Helbrecht I also try to drive home just how terrible a place the Imperium can be. Whether in casual or monumental cruelty, both are themes I hope to carry forward and develop in my work.”

Void King

For a tabletop wargame that started life as Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader, the bearers of the Warrant of Trade have seen relatively modest representation in the pages of the Black Library. Here Collins took them on full-tilt, introducing us to no less than three such dynasties. He’d introduced the Fenrisian Helvintr dynasty in an earlier short story, 2020’s The Shaper of Scars, and mined that vein again for the full-length tale.

The Martyr’s Tomb

This was a new step for Collins, and a sure sign of his increasing stature within the Black Library. The Dawn of Fire was a major series launched in the game’s 9th Edition, designed to tie together all the varying strands of lore and move the narrative arc of the grim, dark future forward. Collins would be the most junior member of a writing team comprised of veterans Guy Haley, Andy Clark, Gav Thorpe, Nick Kyme, and Chris Wraight.

The Martyr’s Tomb was the sixth book in the nine-book series, featuring the Black Templars and Sisters of Our Martyred Lady defending a shrine world from the predacious attentions of the Death Guard. For a man that once remarked, “I have a terrible weakness for zealots3,” this was clearly a passion project.

Reception to this one was notably mixed, though how much of that is down to a particular book versus general series fatigue is hard to say. I give a lot of credit to the Black Library editing teams, but ‘long-running series planning’ hasn’t necessarily been one of their stronger suits over the years.

Eidolon: The Auric Hammer

In many ways, this is probably Collins’s most acclaimed work, the star of his portfolio-to-date. Another Character series entry, the book’s shorter length allowed him to tightly focus in on Eidolon and his Emperor’s Children cohort. Authors able to take some of the universe’s more two-dimensional characters and expand their range of depth tend to draw the acclaim of the community (hello, Aaron Dembski-Bowden!), and his Eidolon here emerged a more nuanced character for the effort.

“It’s his arrogance, the sheer unbridled hubris, that makes him so compelling to write,” shared Collins in a 2024 interview for Warhammer Community. “Eidolon is a character that so many start out hating, but by The Path of Heaven by Chris Wraight I found him quite deviously likeable. The work that writers like Chris do with him paint Eidolon very much as a ‘villain’s villain,’ but finding the core of humanity in that – the flaws and vulnerabilities that make him that way – and toying with them made it a truly enjoyable process.”

Eidolon is my talisman tale for the axiom, “not every book is for every person4.” I went into the book with high hopes, but it failed to really land with me. I was delighted to note that it went on to claim runner-up for the official 2024 Black Library Book of the Year, losing out only to Siege of Vraks by Steve Lyons.

Krakenblood

While breaking new ground in his portfolio with the Space Wolves, Krakenblood wasn’t entirely divorced from his past works either. In the story, Ivar Krakenblood’s expedition is expedited by a Rogue Trader of the same Fenrisian dynasty we’d met in Void King. This story was a sort of anti-Eidolon, a book that was somewhat mixed in its reception that I thought very highly of.

"More than anything else," he wrote in the Special Edition introduction, "I wanted to ground this novel in the heart and the soul of the World of Winter and War... This is a novel written as a love letter to all those who have gone before, carrying the torch for the Space Wolves. I have only got here by reading and enjoying what has been written by countless other authors."

Getting Inside his Head

Thanks to his engagement with the reading community, we get a pretty good sense of the things he considers part of his essence as a writer. The importance of faith and duty in a universe that outwardly appears to care very little for either- and what happens when those things are taken beyond the realm of reason and into the irrational or fanatic.

From the outside looking at his body of work, you see other themes emerge as well. The burden of legacy, for instance, and what it means to labor under a destiny that you did not choose, but rather inherited. What it means to operate on the fringes of a dogmatic Imperium, carving out a path that uneasily straddles the line of society’s norms. And finally, the concept of atmosphere as character, a reflection or foil to the inner essence of one’s heroes (or villains) as seen in the works, say, of Jack London or Cormac McCarthy.

This is renegade poet territory, and perhaps it is little coincidence that I found Krakenblood to be some of the Black Library’s most poetic work yet.

It’s been said that if you want to see what makes a writer tick, look no further than the well-worn copies on their bookshelf. Collins was kind enough as well to share with me six of his book recommendations for Black Library Weekly (back when I wrote the column for Goonhammer, later Tabletop Battles) last October, and I’ve excerpted that here:

Collins on Scribes & Scriveners

Finally, last month Collins was hosted by Alex Doddy on the WarhammerTV program Scribes & Scriveners, the occasional author interview series that’s generally timed in advance of an imminent book release. With Blackheart: Claws of the Maelstrom around the corner, here’s a brief summary of their conversation.

Alex: What got you into Warhammer?

In high school, one of his friends gave him some Codexes in an effort to get him into the game. Collins was intimidated by the miniatures and paint jobs in them, but immediately attracted to the lore and the stories.

Of course, it didn’t take long for him to begin “slowly working my way towards building my own pile of shame.”

Alex: And then from those early hobby years, how did you get into writing?

Collins notes it' sounds cliche, but he always felt like he wanted to write. The more he got into the Black Library, the more he felt drawn towards wanting to do it himself. He started writing down his ideas, and soon developing them into his own “homebrew” fiction.

Alex: And then the Black Library?

His first Black Library book was the Eisenhorn Omnibus, by Dan Abnett. He ws immediately drawn in by “the scale, the grandeur, this terminal gothic collapse… and there’s still people scrabbling through it trying to do their best fighting for what they believe in. Seeing the cosmic tumult at the heart of it, and where the line is between heroism and villainy, sanity and madness always appealed to me.”

He was heavily getting into reading the Black Library at the time the Horus Heresy series was beginning. “Seeing the stories from the Codexes come to life was amazing.”

Alex: It’s the ultimate journey. We know where it starts. We know where it ends. But we never truly explored everything that lies in between. It’s such a compelling journey despite knowing how it ends.

Collins notes the importance of having “key lodestars” in the Heresy, places like Isstvan, Signus, Calth, Prospero. “Seeing all the minutiae in between, the factions standing off to the sidelines,” is a big part of that journey.

Alex: You’ve written both shorts and novels. What's the difference in process?

Here he notes that with a short story, it’s a self-contained idea. “You have about 10,000 words to play with, you need to be short, sharp, concise, you need to know what you’re wanting to do.”

Novels are very different. “With a novel, I like to have an overall plan, but then plant seeds throughout the novel. Characters may end up places I didn’t expect them to, or meet a fate I didn’t intend when I set out. You almost surprise yourself. You can still get that in a short, but in a novel its more prevalent, you can find yourself more surprised in the planning and execution.”

Alex: And how has your process changed from those early Inferno! stories to Krakenblood?

Collins gets very candid here, citing the “trepidation” that was there at the beginning for him as a writer in his earlier days, in taking an idea from pitch to full story. “You’re not sure of what’s happening, what you’re doing yet.”

He notes that with a first novel, it’s even more pronounced due to the much larger scale of the undertaking. “When you’re dealing with 80-90,000 words you’re staring down the barrel, and you’re like ‘how do I do this?’”

Collins gives a lot of credit to the Black Library editorial staff for helping him navigate the process. “When you’re developing an idea from the ground up for a novel, working it through the pitching into a more developed synopsis, character bios, sometimes a chapter by chapter… it really helps crystallize it in your head and you know you have someone in your corner you can always ask for advice, for support, for their input and feedback.”

Alex: In the 41st millennium we’ve got a wide range of characters... when you’re writing, say, a rogue trader, who is very much a human being versus, say, Eidolon or Ivar [in Krakenblood], how does your process differ when approaching those characters?

For Collins, “everyone regardless of their humanity or their inhumanity is in some way vulnerable.” That vulnerability can take many forms, it’s not just how well the hold up in a fight.

“It’s difficult to kill a rogue trader due to their power, their prestige, the tech they may have around them, but it can happen perhaps easier than for an Eidolon or Helbrecht. But Eidolon or Helbrecht, they are more susceptible to a spiritual malaise, or a challenge to their pride.”

It’s also useful to contrast them against characters who wield even greater power still.

“For Helbrecht, that grew from the core of him getting humbled by Guilliman. Perhaps it’s in a more gingerly way than it might have otherwise went, but he still feels that barb to his pride. He’s been challenged; he’s shown to be making a mistake by someone who is the object of his veneration.”

You have to find the things that will challenge a character, stripping away some of their advantages and putting them on the back foot. “Find how that dovetails into the novel, then tell a compelling story about that character.”

Alex: When you’ve got these massive, storied characters like Helbrecht and Eidolon, what goes into writing them versus, say, a rogue trader where there’s not a huge amount of backstory?

Collins says the key is research. When he’s given a character like them, he goes straight to his bookshelves and starts building a pile of books that have background and insight on them.

For Eidolon, he noted, that meant going from his first appearance in Abnett’s Horus Rising through to Graham McNeill’s Fulgrim and The Reflection Crack’d. He also commends the Horus Heresy Black Books series as being richly detailed for lore and background5.

For Helbrecht, he mentions Aaron Dembski-Bowden’s Helsreach as being particularly significant, and also the works of Guy Haley6.

“It’s finding all these appearances of the character and keeping it stable across them- but at the same time telling it in your own way.”

Collins turns to Eidolon: The Auric Hammer here. “A lot of his whereabouts are detailed and have been covered before, so it was finding a part in his story where he could have his moment to shine. That’s why we settled on the road to Terra. After Slaves to Darkness7, before the Siege.” Eidolon is a strong character- strong in his pride and desire to prove himself, but “facing a humbling.” It was important to balance honoring where the character had bene before, but also “casting forward something else into the future.”

Alex: With Eidolon, it’s difficult to think of a character who has been humbled this much but is still not humble. Everything about him is almost a mimicry of what happens with Fulgrim. How did you address that almost paternal aspect, the father and son element?

Collins notes the '“horribly abusive element” at play here, “even without the killing of him. You’ll never be able to please Fulgrim because he’s so lost in his own sense of grandeur. Everything is just a game to him. He’s getting more and more lost in his patron, giving himself over to his base wants and desires.”

He highlights a parallel here with Eidolon, who was giving himself over to Fabius Bile’s experimentation well before Fulgrim went off the deep end. “There’s this desperation in him, this need to be the best. seem the best, prove he’s earned his position. By the time we see him in The Path of Heaven8 he’s a force of nature.”

With Fulgrim lost in his own decadence, Eidolon is “leading in Fulgrim’s stead, a vision of how the legion can be- and perhaps should be. You contrast that with the absentee father that Fulgrim becomes, except when he’s laying down the law.

“And we see the same thing in the 41st millennium, with The Perfect Son9. He’s still toying with them, they’re still baubles on his perfection. And they’ll only ever be adornments. Eidolon doesn’t want that for himself. He doesn’t want to be a slave to Fulgrim or the Warp. He wants to put himself forward and be the man.”

Alex: There’s an element there of Slaanesh. The pride, the journey, the struggle... but if they actually ever achieve it, it would go against what Slaanesh wants and so they can never be allowed to achieve it. Fulgrim will never be the ‘perfect king,’ as it were, and when he’s left this void that Eidolon tries to fill, he can never fill it. How does that work with a legion that demands perfection and always sees itself as inching towards it?

“The fundamental lie they’ve told themselves,” says Collins, “is that they can achieve it. There are so many that struggle and strive, walk the path to glory, and they’ll end up as a daemon prince with a whole new set of restrictions and shackles, or they’ll overindulge and just collapse into spawn.”

Alex: There’s a self-delusion aspect. Many of them have seen daemons, they understand where this going if they achieve it, but they almost can’t believe they’re not gonna be the ones to succeed.

Collins notes the arrogance and pride of the Emperor’s Children here, with each feeling like failure is something that happens to others, not them. “Everyone thinks they’re better than their fellows.”

Alex: Jumping from the Emperor’s Children to the Space Wolves now, with Krakenblood. We’ve had a lot of Fenrisian novels. How did you separate your novel from those previous works?

The difference Collins identifies here is that there hasn’t really been a story that closely focused on Wolf Priests, they’ve always been portrayed as supporting characters in the stories.

“We’ve never seen the role itself explored, and the dichotomy of the role absolutely fascinates me. The fact that you’re a chaplain and an apothecary, tending to their souls and their flesh. I wanted to make sure novel felt truly grounded in what Fenris is and what it does to its sons. How it shapes them and how it contributes to the overall style of war and the ethos.”

He goes on to talk about the pile of research he built up prior to writing Krakenblood:

“I was looking at the Bill King books10, Dan Abnett’s turn in Prospero Burns, and how those torches were carried forward by Chris Wraight’s Járnhamar trilogy11. I wanted to feel in character with those, to have that sense of history and vitality and language. I looked at a lot of Norse myths and background on Scandinavian culture and worked that in there [for] a broader color palette. There’s so many different Space Marine chapters, and so few of them truly take their homeworlds to heart, they truly live the passion of where they come from. The Space Wolves are always carrying that in their souls and on their armor. You can’t represent the Space Wolves without understanding Fenris”

Alex: Because of the nature of their creation, they must be Fenrisian. And so it anchors them in a way that others don’t necessarily have. Fenris is also a spiritual anchor, with the Wolf Priests and the Iron Priests. How did you balance those cultural elements within the Chapter? Because we’ve got the Iron priests... and there’s a point partway through [Krakenblood] where they are attempting to destroy a ship and the Iron Priest says, “you can’t do this, that is out of the question.” Their belief systems simultaneously work together as part of the culture but are in many ways in opposition.

Collins speaks at length here about the contrast between his characters Ivar Krakenblood (the Wolf Priest) and Brynjar Drakefang (the Iron Priest), how they are both one another’s worst enemies and yet also push each other to be better.

“Brynjar remains solid and dependable, grounded in reality and in the ship… whereas for Ivar, it’s almost as though he’s letting his identity down. He believes he’s succeeding as a Wolf Priest. but he’s failing himself and he’s failing his role and if he’s not careful he’ll fail those under his command.”

Both are caught between their duty to the Chapter and their duty to the Imperium, representing a “microcosm” of the Space Wolves in general.

Alex: You’ve got Ulrik in this book as well, how did you balance bringing in a really storied character like that in a mentoring aspect, bringing him in but keeping him to the side?

“Quite naturally,” notes Collins. “A lot of more storied members of Chapter almost feel like forces of nature. You can’t really pin down someone like Ulrik, Njall Stormcaller, or The Great Wolf himself because they are these larger-than-life figures.”

Colins speaks here about Ulrik’s role in the novel as a mentor, one that drives Ivar to try and prove himself as a Wolf Priest in the story. “It’s a culmination of [Ulrik] as a force of nature, and Ivar as a man who is uncertain of his own destiny and how those two play against each other.”

Alex: Ulrik is still doing this duty, the basics of the Chapter like recruiting mortals to become Space Marines. It’s incredibly grounding.

“I wanted him to feel as though he is part of the world,” Collins replies, “that he is still fundamentally of Fenris and will always have a purpose there.”

Collins speaks further about “a sense of eternity” with a lot of these characters with deep histories in the lore and in miniature, and how it’s not always glory and battle. “Sometimes it’s the onerous duty of a Wolf Priest that means looking death in the face, and sometimes snatching one back.”

Alex: I remember awhile ago you said the book you really wanted to write was about Space Wolves. How did you feel when you got that possibility?

“I felt as if I’d been dancing around it quite a bit,” he replies. Collins shares that when he was planning Void King, his 2022 novel, he collaborated with his editor to brainstorm a number of ideas. That’s how the idea for House Helvintr came about, a rogue trader dynasty with origins on Fenris.

As a result of that experience, Collins had wanted to take on the Space Wolves properly. “Space Wolves are one of the Chapters that changed so much with the Primaris and the opening of the Great Rift, so you have to see the contrast between old ideas of identity and a new place in the galaxy. That was something I definitely wanted to look at.”

Alex: You’d mentioned in your other works there is an element too of being humbled. That Fenris was this unassailable world and then Magnus shows up. They are under threat more than ever. How does a Chapter deal with that kind of trauma?

It’s always a struggle to walk back from the apocalypse,” says Collins, “not only being humbled by your enemy but also being hobbled by your allies.”

This wasn’t unique to the Wolves either, he notes, citing the the Rock of the Dark Angels had also faced similar threats. “Being weak where you’re supposed to be strongest. How do you push back, how do you reassure yourselves and your people that everything is still okay?”

Alex: Space Wolves, Black Templars, Emperor’s Children…is there an aspect of 40k that you would like to explore next? Or some other element of Warhammer?

“My weakness is aberrant religion,” replies Collins, “anyone whose got an off the wall, crazy religion. I’d love to go back to Genestealer Cults, I wrote about them specifically as POV characters in a short story very early on. I’d love to do more with Adeptus Mechanicus, or with the Dark Mechanicum. The Word Bearers. Things where there’s a bit of madness in the mysteries.”

Alex: Madness and zealotry.

“Absolutely.”

Alex: If a writer was looking to get into writing for the Black Library, or even just to start writing, do you have any advice?

“I would say never give up,” he notes. “When I was starting out I was mostly writing as a hobby, for myself. I think I went through about ten years of the open submissions. It’s hard not to feel disheartened, when you’re sort of working at something for that long. But I tried to take each one as a lesson, and to try to just continue to develop my skill, to work on my writing.”

Specific to Warhammer, he recommends finding the things that appeal to you most about the universe and focusing on those. “Find the little things, the gems that shine for you amongst this vast sea of stars. If you can find something there, something that really speaks to you, then work at it, polish it, and hopefully it will get you where you want to be12.”

Thanks for reading today’s profile of Marc Collins. At 5600+ words13, it’s a long one, but I’ve always enjoyed seeing other coverage of the Black Library authors on sites like ToW and Reddit, so hopefully it’s something folks will enjoy referring back to long after it’s been shared. There are plenty of Scribes & Scriveners both ahead and behind, so look for the next installment in the near future!

And finally, don’t forget to set your alarms for next week’s preorder of the Special Edition of Blackheart. As I type this I’ve just survived the Raldoron window, and it was… really something. Look for that full story this Monday in the next Black Library Weekly.

Hey folks! You might have noticed this week’s column has dropped significantly later in the day than usual. Between the drive back and an all-day hockey tournament for three of my kids yesterday, writing time was unusually scarce. Normal broadcast service is expected to resume next week, thanks for your patience!

This past Thursday, my wife and I bid a farewell to Texas. We’d been in Houston the better part of two weeks this time around, just the two of us. With our five kids back home in school, my mother kindly came down from Connecticut to quarterback things there. We hadn’t intended to be there so long; initially it was just for the third round of chemotherapy in her clinical trial, but when they noticed the cancer was spreading to her bones they recommended we start another round of radiation therapy immediately1.

The final rug-pull came at the tail end of our stay, when we were advised that she was being removed from MD Anderson’s clinical trial. The results weren’t what we were all hoping for, and their recommendation was that she seek hospice care and prepare for end of life surrounded by family and loved ones.

Knowing it was the last time we’d be in Texas, we took a small detour on the way home and checked out the Warhammer Store & Cafe in Grapevine.

Heard it Through the Grapevine

The store is Games Workshop’s flagship location in North America, closer in many ways to Warhammer World in Nottingham than the small Warhammer stores most of us are more familiar with2.

Here are a few of the things I noticed from my long-awaited visit.

It’s Smaller on the Inside

The first thing that really surprised me is how much smaller it was than I expected. I’m not sure what I’d built up in my head, but in terms of square footage its only about the equivalent of four or five of the standard retail stores. That sounds like a lot- and it is- but about half of it is taken up by playing space.

They Have (Almost) Everything

That said, they have a ton of product. It felt like they had at least one of everything currently available for retail, as well as lots of things that are typically website-only such as the resin Primarch kits, Forge World goodies, and Limited/Special Editions of Black Library books.

One of the things I was delighted to pick up was the 30th anniversary reprinting of the original Warhammer 40,000 Rogue Trader rulebook. I’d understood that these were exclusive to Warhammer World (and a wide-release print on demand in 2023), so finding them here in the wild was an unexpected treat.

It’s a Museum!

Under ordinary circumstances I could have spent the day there taking it all in. Multiple glass cases containing so much of the history and lore of the game. Dioramas, replica displays, statuary… and on the walls throughout the store were mounted some of the different model boxes throughout the years, labeled to indicate when it was released.

Here, too, the feeling lingered that this should be bigger. More shelves! More displays! More history! I know that retail realities mean that square footage needs to be earning its own keep, but a fella can dream, right?

Note in that first picture the Limited Edition of Robert Rath’s Fall of Cadia, too. You love to see it!

Books Need More Love

In the above photos is the entirely of the Black Library stock. Considering that about half of each bookshelf is taken up with non-Black Library product, this is about the same amount of available product as my local Warhammer store. That seems a touch light, but again retail realities rule the roost. There are only so many books that are in print at a given time, and if they have most or all of them available what more could I ask?

Don’t be fooled by the seemingly impressive stock of deluxe editions- almost all of these were copies of just one book, Danie Ware’s Aestred Thurga: Pyre of Faith.

The third picture is a display that showcased the Black Library books. Thus far when I’ve noted how the store fell short of my hopes, they’ve been relatively fanciful things (more square footage, more museum displays, more books). This, however, is the one thing in an otherwise wonderful experience that I took issue with. These books deserve more love than they’re being shown here. For starters:

• Center the books attractively. This looks disordered.

• Print out the back-of-book summary for each book in the display. Use a simple laminate or thicker stock for rigidity, then cut cleanly and display next to each book like they do in museums.

• Stick a couple miniatures in there next to the relevant books. Put an Orikan, the Diviner box next to The Wicked and the Warped, for example (a box of five Praetorians might be a little too large for Tomb World here). Tie the paper to the plastic for the consumer.

There’s a Cafe

It’s a long drive back to Kentucky, so while we were tempted to enjoy some delights from the Cafe in the interests of expediency we took a raincheck. Still, I love the theming here and it’s too awesome not to share. Huge kudos to the chalk artist(s) who made this signage look amazing. Pity the pastries got lost in the Warp.

And finally, in answer to the question everyone wants to know but is afraid to ask…

Yes, Even the Bathroom is Themed

Stand at the men’s urinal and look slightly up, and this life-sized happy chappy is greeting you with an exhortation from the Litany of… ahem… Accuracy3.

Thanks to the staff at the store for making us feel welcome and right at home. It was a wonderful detour to break up the long trek, and a much-needed bit of joy to carry with us.

Commemorative Modeling

I’ve often talked about how I like to visit Warhammer or gaming stores in my travels and pick up a miniature as a little souvenir of my trip. Throughout my home office and Museum are a number of such displays, small figures of plastic that carry an extra bit of sentimental resonance. Most of them sweet, such as the Clan Rats my youngest daughter has loved building with me… others significant in a different way, like the Catachan Colonel I picked up on the day I found out I’d been laid off of my 20-year career last May.

I recall too the first time I was inspired to make a model diorama, after I’d read Jude Reid’s Morvenn Vahl: Spear of Faith. Vahl on the one side, the kickass two-headed Heldrake on the other. Of course, it’s a reach that well exceeds my kitbashing grasp, but my wife quietly held onto that (for almost a year!) and last Christmas I found two Heldrake kits under the tree.

Warhammer has been in so many ways my own place of refuge during my wife’s cancer battle over the last couple of years. I can get lost in a book or building a mini at my desk for a few minutes here and there when I need a little distraction or time to re-center, and she’s always been very supportive.

As I walked the Grapevine store’s huge inventory on Friday, I didn’t know what I wanted to get to commemorate my visit. I just knew that I felt moved to pick up one model, one I wouldn’t build right away. Perhaps, God willing, one I’d never have to build at all. But one that- if that awful day arrived as it may well do soon- I’d allow myself to get lost in some evening after the kids were all in bed and my heart was especially heavy.

With the little energy she had expended and her resting in the car, I soon found it.

For now, may the dust it gathers be abundant.

The Raldoron Reschedule

Some interesting news this week on the books front, with Games Workshop springing a surprise change on us for the Special Edition release of Guy Haley’s Raldoron: Revenant.

Rather than being offered as originally scheduled this past Saturday with the other preorders, the preorder window for the Special Edition only was moved to this coming Wednesday at 3pm BST (that’s 10am EST for me). This is a global window, so wherever you are in the world that’s when you’ll hear the crack of the starter’s pistol.

While this isn’t entirely unprecedented- you may recall that Era of Ruin had a similar, special preorder window in June of 2025, it’s certainly curious for a couple of reasons.

First, with no slight intended to Mr. Haley, Raldoron: Revenant is merely part of the Horus Heresy’s Character series rather than the mainline Siege of Terra book that Era of Ruin is. Special Editions of Character series books have generally seen demand somewhat lower than the absolute frenzy mainline Horus Heresy/Siege of Terra books have commanded.

Second, the Black Library turned right around and announced it would be doing the same for Blackheart: Claws of the Maelstrom. Same day of the week, same start time, just one week later. Whether this is a temporary measure or the sign of things to come, I can only turn to the late, great Sir Ian Fleming:

As you’d expect, the change hasn’t been universally embraced by the Black Library community, with concerns raised including:

• Dismay around the inconvenient timing of the window.

• The need for some purchasers to have to go through two preorders in a week to get everything they want, rather than just the one.

• The standard edition being offered before the Special Edition. For those who have been in the habit of buying a standard hardcover only if they weren’t able to secure a deluxe edition, now they may have to spend more to ensure they at least get one copy of the novel.

These are valid concerns, though there were some opinions in the other direction as well including:

• The new preorder window actually being more convenient for some than before.

• The hope that this will help ensure greater platform stability for the many Warhammer fans not always interested in the deluxe edition Black Library offerings.

• The appreciation that Games Workshop is at least taking some action to help the public’s buying experience, rather than just adopting that ‘classic definition of insanity’ of doing the same thing every week and hoping for different results.

While I’m not personally adversely affected by the change4, I do have two concerns about this apparent new policy.

First, it’s only treating the symptom. This isn’t a product scheduling issue, it’s an ecommerce architectural one. Despite having a revenue and customer base other companies would kill for, Games Workshop has a longstanding habit of adopting fairly miserly technological solutions. One need only look at the transition to the Black Library app for evidence that robust, full-featured enterprise solutions aren’t the ones that appear to be getting greenlit by the C-suite in Nottingham.

Second, it’s another messaging fail. This one really boggles the mind sometimes, because corporate messaging is not only vital but generally easier to get right than to screw up. Repeated, last-moment changes in product release strategies suggest a lack of competence and/or coordination on the part of the planning team, and while the community would never be fully happy with their cheese being moved when it comes to preordering, a longer lead time to adjust and shape the messaging was likely there.

People wouldn’t automatically celebrate a message that noted, “starting in 2027 we will be having special preorder windows for deluxe Warhammer goods in order to balance demand,” but they’d certainly appreciate having time to adjust. And c’mon, being realistic you could squeeze some additional goodwill even out of that by adding, “…as well as address community concerns around multi-ordering and ‘scalper bot’ behaviors, ensuring everyone has a better chance of getting the products they want on the day of offer.”

There you go, James Workshop, the fruit of my MBA degree offered to you, free of change. Messaging is an opportunity to shape consumer expectation, and a failure to do so suggests- whether with a basis in truth or otherwise- that consumer expectation is not a priority.

I know the more cynical and jaded amongst us will disagree, but I genuinely believe that it is. Game companies have traditionally been a bit more susceptible to being steered by product experts rather than businesspeople. This is occasionally useful, such as in the case (I would argue) of pre-HASBRO Wizards of the Coast. More often, though, it’s closer to the late, great (pre-Wizards of the Coast) Tactical Studies Rules (TSR).

So it’s not that I think that Games Workshop holds its customers in contempt. Rather, I think it’s more the case that they just don’t always know how to effectively show us the opposite.

Good messaging, James, is a fantastic place to start5.

Turning Over a New Leak (Redux)

Last week you might recall we highlighted a listing on Vinted for an apparent leaked copy of James Swallow’s Flight of the Eisenstein, as part of the Horus Heresy Saga reissues. We’ve had a second such sighting in the wild, this time a completed eBay auction. Full credit to eagle-eyed Calum Mills in the Black Library Nutters Facebook Group for the catch, it’s uncertain if this represents a second, unrelated listing or simply the Vinted purchaser (who paid just £3 for it) flipping it for immediate profit.

Arrivals & Departures

In this section I look at what’s coming up around the corner (Arrivals) and what’s landing on bookstore shelves (Departures).

Arrivals

There’s plenty to talk about here this week, with another trio of new novels teased on Warhammer Community! I’d just gotten used to these dropping on Wednesdays when last week the piece came on a Thursday. Guess it’s not as predictable as I’d thought, but new book teasers are always welcome! First, let’s see what’s going up for preorder this Saturday.

We’d had a little warning in the community about this one coming, but thrilled to see it drop so soon. Richard Swan has penned a number of short stories for the Black Library, including Ash and Steel and Tears of Raphaela, and now makes his novel debut. Interestingly, this one appears to be in hardcover despite the Astra Militarum Novel series being first-release in softcover, and goes up for preorder this Saturday.

Blackheart: Claws of the Maelstrom by Marc Collins has arrived, hot on the heels of his recent appearance on Scribes & Scriveners on WarhammerTV. This arrives in standard hardcover, and will preorder as normal this coming Saturday.

On the other hand, as noted earlier the Special Edition of the book- and my word they’ve outdone themselves on the design of this one- will be offered in a special preorder window the following Wednesday, 09 September at 3pm BST.

Next, here are the two from Warhammer Community’s article on Thursday (the third one was Voice of Command, but that went straight from teaser to preorder in nearly the same breath.)

First up is the newest from Dark Coil author and Black Library Readers’ Hall-of-Famer Peter Fehervari (Fire Caste, Genestealer Cults), Cold Covenant!

Finally, we see another novel debut coming this time from Russell Zimmerman, with Auxilia. Zimmerman was a two-time winner in 2025’s Goonhammer Book Awards, for Best Black Library Debutant6 (for his Death Guard story Seven Ships) as well as Best IP Tie-In Novel (non-GW)7 for BattleTech’s Violent Inception.

Finally for those abroad (or who just like to practice their language skills), The Relentless Dead by Steve Lyons will be available in both German and French, and Apostle by David Annandale will be released in French as well.

Departures

Plenty of stuff now available to buy in the bookstores this week! The latest in the Horus Heresy Saga, Ben Counter’s Galaxy In Flames, released in both Special Edition and regular hardcover, while False Gods by Graham McNeill came out in Saga paperback.

For the fantasy side of things, Blood of the Godeater by Noah Van Nguyen dropped in standard hardcover, while the newest collection, Witch Hunters: The Omnibus, by Nick Horth and Richard Strachan will keep readers busy for some time to come!

ICYMI

Here’s what’s been going on this week for Warhammer content!

Warhammer Wordforge

• So this isn’t the first time I’ve written about last week’s visit to the Grapevine store. I had a few more observations from a role-playing game perspective in last week’s Warhammer RPG Weekly.

• For the Wednesday feature, Audio Impressions was revisiting the world that was, taking on the second book in the Malus Darkblade series, Dan Abnett and Mike Lee’s Bloodstorm.

Tabletop Battles

• No Lore Friday this week- I’m still playing catch-up on my reading- but Lynn had a fantastic BattleTech introductory lore primer I’d definitely recommend to anyone curious about the setting or (like me) looking to catch up after years away.

Warhammer Community

• The Pages from the Black Books series was a big one last week, with a “bumper-size” treatise on the ‘Hidden War’ between the Imperium and daemonic manifestations of the Warp. Fascinating!

• In case you missed it when it was announced, there was also a reminder piece this week about the changes to the Warhammer+ subscription, including getting two miniatures as well as a yearbook.

WarhammerTV (paywalled)

• Scribes & Scriveners is back! Following the recent interview with Marc Collins (Krakenblood, Eidolon: The Auric Hammer), they’re sitting down with Mike Vincent (The Remnant Blade, Helbrecht: Sin of Hope) in tomorrow’s episode.

Around the Webway

• Arbitor Ian and Mira Manga are back with the latest episode of their Book Club! This time around, they’re taking a look at Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Day of Ascension.

• Meanwhile, Jen and Keri of the WH40K Book Club checked out Justin Woolley’s Da Freebooterz Code, with a special nod of appreciation to Harry Myers for his audiobook narration. “No one brings voice to the orks like this guy.”

• The Fluffenhammer gang tried something a little different this week. They regularly do deep dives into Warhammer Monthly, but this time it’s a look at Marvel’s Marneus Calgar comic!

• Hachette has launched its newest subscription Warhammer magazine, this one for the Age of Sigmar. Spearhead follows in the footsteps of Warhammer 40K’s Combat Patrol, offering four issues a month with loads of miniatures, lore, and even stories at a not inconsiderable discount from the usual retail price for the models.

• Finally, over at my local watering hole r/BlackLibrary, u/Own_SD conducted a reader poll pulse-check to see what the top frustration was for the subreddit’s many residents regarding the Black Library. Would you be surprised to learn it was scalpers? Anyone?

Cold Open Stories

• This week’s featured story is The Last of Vireshan, by Alexander Hamilton. “Ashur is the last of his line, clinging on by a thread to the life he once has, and the Imperium he once served. But the Heresy has blurred the boundaries between alliances and factions, and in its ragged aftermath, dogma burns away whatever mercy might have existed before. Clarity is now found in the barrel of a gun.”

Quick Hits

• Here’s this week’s feelgood story from around the Black Library world. David Annandale (The Pyres of Armageddon, Apostle) attended the store anniversary celebration at the Warhammer store in Winnipeg, and in appreciation for all his support over the years the store made a special Commissar Yarrick desk display for him. This checks all my boxes, from the blending of plastic miniatures with the metal coins for display, right down to celebrating a Black Library author. Bravo, Winnipeg!

• Pour one out for BlackLibrary.com; the often frustrating but always indispensable website goes forever dark tomorrow, having been replaced by the Black Library App. Farewell, sweet prince, so long and thanks for all the fish!

• The subject of whether or not a writer is well-served by reading the reviews of their books is one that comes up regularly. Here’s a wonderfully candid take from Justin D. Hill (Hell’s Last, Storm of Damocles) on what he’s seeing come back for his latest, Bjorn, the Fell-Handed.

• Anna Stephens (Gothgull Hollow, Trisethni the Unseen) has a new fantasy romance novel releasing this October, The Sport of Wings. “Ogawa Ryota, disgraced son of the famous Scarlet Triple dragon-racing stable, has one year to prove he can make it on his own. Keaton Merriwether, petty criminal and illegal night-race jockey, has only ever wanted to race dragons, any way she can. Together, they make up the sport’s newest, smallest stable, determined to take on the competition’s greatest dragons and wealthiest owners.” Check out her latest piece for the cover reveal as well as the book’s opening chapter!

• Andi Ewington (Da Red Gobbo’s Last Stand, Fire and Fungi) was delighted to share that his story, Amok, will be the cover story for the next issue of 2000AD magazine. Congrats, Andi!

• Carrie Harris (A Forbidden Meal, The Strength of Symbols) has written a short story for the Zeo Genesis game, Hound of Fortune. A futuristic, sci-fi skirmish game, Zeo Genesis counts Warhammer notables such as Andy Law (Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 4th Edition Rulebook, Ubersreik Adventures) and Black Library Readers’ Hall-of-Famer Gav Thorpe (Kill Team, Luther: First of the Fallen) amongst its editorial team.

• Humble Bundle has a massive drop of Warmachine fiction on offer, called “Tales from the Iron Kingdoms.” There are some familiar names amongst the long list of authors, including Richard Lee Byers (The Enemy Within), Matt Forbeck (Sudden Death, Blood Bowl), Hall-of-Famer C. L. Werner (Grey Seer, Blood Money), and Dave Gross (Mourning in Rainhollow). Benefiting the charity Child’s Play, it’s available for one more week!

Coming Attractions

Here’s a list of the known upcoming releases from the Black Library based on the available preorder information we have. As always, take all of this with a grain of salt unless it’s Games Workshop-confirmed.

This section will be updated weekly in this column, and anything in bold has been added (or updated) this week.

Upcoming but Undated

• Helbrecht: Sin of Hope, by Mike Vincent

• Cold Covenant, by Peter Fehervari

• Auxilia, by Russell Zimmerman

Current PODs in Production

• Hive, by Dan Abnett (Special Edition)

Upcoming in 2026

• Deathwatch, by Steve Parker (Special Edition, 9/5)

• Ghazghkull Thraka: Prophet of the Waaagh! (Illustrated and Annotated Edition), by Nate Crowley (9/5)

• Bjorn, the Fell-handed, by Justin D. Hill (hardcover, 9/5)

• Demolisher, by Andy Clark (paperback, 9/5)

• Raldoron: Revenant, by Guy Haley (hardcover, Special Edition, 9/12)

• Blackheart: Claws of the Maelstrom, by Marc Collins (hardcover, Special Edition, 9/198)

• Voice of Command, by Richard Swan (hardcover, 9/19)

• Words of Waaagh!, by DK Books (hardcover, 10/6)

• The Sundering, by Gav Thorpe (paperback, 10/6)

• Dropsite Massacre, by John French (paperback, 10/20)

• Apostle, by David Annandale (paperback, 10/20)

• Master of Rites, by Rob Young (paperback, 10/20)

• Death Rider, by Rhuairidh James (paperback, 11/19)

• Ghost Legion, by Mike Brooks (paperback, 11/19)

• Chem Dog, by Callum Davis (paperback, 12/17)

• Ghazghkull Thraka: Warlord of Warlords, by Denny Flowers (paperback, 12/17)

• Ashes of the Imperium, by Chris Wraight (paperback, 12/17)

Thanks again for joining me for all the going’s on in the Black Library, and see you next week!

One of my favorite things to do when traveling is to visit the local Warhammer store wherever I go. I do a fair amount of roving, mostly on account of my kids being hockey players in Kentucky. If you happen to be in Massachusetts or Minnesota, Michigan or New York you likely enjoy a fairly robust density of youth hockey teams in your area.

In Kentucky, your ass is hittin’ the road.

I always try to pick up a little something for myself on each of these visits. Whether it’s a Scribbus Wretch, The Tallyman mini in Cleveland or a massive Black Library shopping spree in Cincinnati (YottaQuest FTW), it’s fun to have my Black Library Museum decorated with little keepsakes and mementos from different parts of the country.

As some of you may know (especially those that also enjoy the Black Library content here), we’ve been spending a lot of time in Houston recently as a result of my wife being accepted for a clinical trial at MD Anderson. With the trial now concluded, we bid farewell to Texas by stopping in at the Warhammer Store & Cafe in Grapevine. North America’s flagship Warhammer store, it was definitely on my list of things to do here in Texas and this was the last chance I’d get.

I could easily have lost a few hours inside, but of course with the long drive to Louisville ahead of me I had to be economical with time. But it was a delight to see a store that so richly wore its heart and history on its sleeve. Boxes on the walls from different product releases from the game’s early days, museum-quality display shelves of miniatures and dioramas, and even some replica items housed away in an Inquisitorial display. With the gaming table area done up like an Astra Militarum base it was a LARPer’s dream.

I was saddened to see, though, that despite being the top store in North America, it’s role-playing stock was little better than my standard-issue-size store back in Louisville. I’d have taken a picture but there wasn’t much to see- three copies of the Soulbound Starter Set and a copy of the Elector Counts card game, stuck on a rack with the officially licensed hats and dress ties.

It was completely uninspired, and if that what you based your judgment and expectation of Warhammer role-playing on, you’d likely conclude that our part of the hobby was- at best- an afterthought.

It’s not as if officially licensed merchandise wasn’t prominently displayed there, as one whole wall was given over to another licensed partner, Warhammer Art. But alas, Cubicle 7 seems to get little love in the official retail space.

In fairness, I understand that Games Workshop mainly considers itself to be in the miniatures business, and with retail space tight in many of their locations they may be understandably reticent to devote precious space to something that, well, isn’t miniatures. But by the same token, there’s certainly some value in representing Warhammer as a broad property with many points of entry.

Given the rarity of coverage of Warhammer RPG’s on Warhammer Community, I’d argue this is more a company culture issue than a retail space issue. And to be abundantly clear, I’m not putting my disappointment on the very friendly Staff of the Grapevine store, either. They can only work with what they’ve been sent.

Rather, it feels like in licensing out production of the Warhammer role-playing games to another company, they’ve similarly offloaded the entire segment into the care of its own ecosystem (non-GW tabletop and board game stores).

Given how much IP Games Workshop churns out, this goes in the other direction as well. This was the focus behind my recent Bladeborn Goes Soulbound piece, crafting RPG assets from some of the underutilized creative work from GW. Expect more of this content ahead, and not just for Age of Sigmar.

I won’t boil this ocean today, but needless to say bridging the gap continues to be something that weighs on my mind. With that said, let’s get to the games!

RPG Bestsellers

Warhammer RPG Titles in the Top 200:

• #14 (-3). Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay: Sylvania: The Cursed County

• #67 (-10). Wrath & Glory: Lex Imperialis

• #99 ( - ). Wrath & Glory: Core Rulebook

• #131 (-80). Warhammer The Old World: Talagaad Adventures

• #134 ( - ). Warhammer Fantasy 4ª Edition: Guía de Juego: Enanos

• #159 (-13). Imperium Maledictum: Core Rulebook

• #174 ( - ). Warhammer Fantasy 4ª Edition: Señores de la Piedra y el Acero

Total Books in Top 200: 7 ( +1 )

• #192 ( - ): Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 4th Edition: Core Rulebook

Sadly, we bid farewell to Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 4th Edition’s Core Rulebook, which slipped off the table after climbing back on at #192. That said, it was interesting to see some WFRP 4th Edition translations from Devir chart today. The Spanish translations of both the Dwarf Player’s Guide as well as the Lords of Stone and Steel made their debuts, suggesting that either Dwarf characters suddenly became very popular with the Spanish-speaking community, or the translations hit the market this week. I’m guessing the latter.

ICYMI

• Interest in Imperium Maledictum seems to be growing, and Ill Met by Morrslieb took the opportunity to deliver a terrific review of the game’s Starter Set.

• Speaking of reviews, here’s a look at Warhammer: The Old World RPG by Nightharrow Gaming, too!

• Careless Conjuration resumed its terrific GM’s Guide to the Enemy Within series this week, pivoting next to kicking off Death on the Reik.

• This was an excellent piece from Miniature Realms this week on Warhammer: The Old World and its lack of support in the official house organs of Games Workshop. It’s focused on the tabletop, not the role-playing game, but the points about the opportunities for better support are worth considering for us on the RPG side as well. This is one reason why Codex Discordia (covered last week here) has been so intriguing!

• Not directly Warhammer related, but one piece on Substack I really enjoyed this week was this one by the legendary Monte Cook. Entitled For Every Right Way, There’s a Wrong Way, he talks about the law of unintended consequences in game design.

Coming Attractions

Here’s a list of the known upcoming physical releases from Cubicle 7 based on the available preorder information we have. Note that Cubicle 7’s own delivery estimates appear to be just that- estimates- which is why many products have an upcoming delivery listed for Q1 while we’re already past that.

This section will be updated weekly in this column, with new or updated info presented in boldface.

Shipping Q3

• Limited Edition Warhammer Fantasy Map Bundle 1 (July 2026)

• Limited Edition Warhammer Fantasy Map Bundle 2 (July 2026)

Shipping Q4

• Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay: Temple of Spite (Q4)

Shipping 2027

• Sylvania: The Cursed Country

Shipping Q2

• Warhammer: The Old World Roleplaying Game, Grand Duchy of Talabec Map Pack (May 2026)

Shipping Q4

• Warhammer: The Old World Roleplaying Game Starter Set (Q4)

• Warhammer: The Old World Roleplaying Game Gamemaster’s Screen (Q4)

Shipping 2027

• Talagaad Adventures

Shipping Q1

• Warhammer Age of Sigmar Soulbound, Champions of Chaos: Dark Gifts Card Pack (Q1)

• Warhammer Age of Sigmar Soulbound, Champions of Chaos: Spells Lore Card Pack (Q1)

• Warhammer Age of Sigmar Soulbound, Champions of Chaos: Artefacts & Wargear Card Pack (Q1)

• Warhammer Age of Sigmar Soulbound, Champions of Chaos: Core Rulebook (Standard and Collector’s Edition) (Q1)

• Warhammer Age of Sigmar Soulbound, Champions of Chaos: Bloodwind Spoil Map (Q1)

Shipping Q3

• Limited Edition Age of Sigmar Map Bundle (July 2026)

Shipping Q1 2027

• Warhammer Age of Sigmar Soulbound: Champions of Chaos: Carngrad Adventures

Shipping Q4

• Warhammer 40,000: Wrath & Glory, Adventures in Gilead

Shipping Q3

• Limited Edition Imperium Maledictum Macharian Sector Map (July 2026)

Shipping Q4

• Warhammer 40,000 Roleplay, Imperium Maledictum: Adeptus Mechanicus Collector’s Edition

• Warhammer 40,000 Roleplay, Imperium Maledictum: Adeptus Mechanicus Player’s Guide

• Warhammer 40,000 Roleplay, Imperium Maledictum: Adeptus Mechanicus Gamemaster’s Guide

• Warhammer 40,000 Roleplay, Imperium Maledictum: Adeptus Mechanicus Character Sheet Pad (Q4)

Undated

• (Nothing at this time)

Thanks for reading! If you found this week’s Warhammer RPG Weekly useful or interesting, might I ask that you kindly consider sharing it with others who may as well?

With much of my contemporary reading in service to writing reviews, audiobooks are my chance to “play catch-up” on the older catalogue of Black Library books. What you will find in this occasional feature is neither a full, formal book review nor a simple blurb, but rather something comfortably in between: impressions.

I genuinely enjoyed my last visit with Malus Darkblade, in part to the terrific story from Dan Abnett and Mike Lee but also in no small part to the masterful narration by Andrew James Spooner. As I wrote in my review of The Daemon’s Curse, while Spooner might not have the greatest character range amongst the Black Library’s stable of voice talent, he absolutely nails the druchii highborn, Malus. It’s one of the most delightful audiobooks I’ve listened to since jumping in on the format.

Originally published in 2005, Bloodstorm is the second book of the Malus series and unfortunately, the last one (at time of writing) to get the audiobook treatment. If you’re loving the Malus/Spooner dynamic, this is your final installment.

The Story

The Daemon’s Curse in many ways was a kind of origin story for Malus. It didn’t go back to his early life, but rather told the tale of how he comes to get possessed by a daemon- one of the character’s primary characteristics from the comic series. Indeed, the possession doesn’t even come until late in the book, making Bloodstorm the first full novel adventure we get seeing this ‘partnership’ in play.

Darkblade is compelled by his domineering passenger, Tz'arkan, to find a series of five artifacts to help free him, otherwise he forfeits his soul. To make things worse, he only has one year to accomplish this. With the first artifact secured at the end of The Daemon’s Curse, Malus must now take to the seas to secure the second: the Idol of Kolkuth.

After managing to secure a Writ of Iron from the Drachau (ruler) of the city of Hag Graef- a legal document cast in actual iron that grants him the Drachau’s authority, but also a murderous punishment should he fail in its appointed task- he reunites with three of his siblings to destroy the seafaring Nurgle-cultists known as the Skinriders and claim the Idol they hold.

Bits n’ Pieces (Light Spoilers)

• As noted above, Andrew James Spooner is a perfect Malus Darkblade. His anti-hero is dripping with venom, every bit exactly what you’d expect from a cutthroat highborn for whom the games of scheming and betrayal are as natural as breathing.

• Very few of the voice actors I’ve enjoyed from the Black Library have quite the range to pull off a host of characters well, and Spooner is similarly a bit limited here. His Malus is unmistakable, but beyond that you’ll want to be actively listening to get the most from his performance.

• The first part of the book, which involves Malus coming out on the receiving end of some manipulation and betrayal in Hag Graef, is a bit uneven. The quest structure here really gives the story purpose and direction, though, so once the table is set for the nautical quest to begin the story really begins in earnest- and never lets up.

• Lee’s writing here is pure delight. He positions Malus like a gardener of dissent, with him moving through almost every scene or conversation planning the seeds of unrest or the latest twist on his schemes amongst his companions. Watching him navigate- and orchestrate- an ever-thickening web of deceit and betrayal was wickedly delicious1, with all of it leading up to a climax where every scheme comes to fulfillment. For every hand extended, there’s a dagger held in the other- and that applies just as much to Malus’s three siblings as well.

• Indeed, Malus isn’t just scheming to get ahead. Each of the three have good reason to prefer him dead, and Malus quickly realizes that the best way to keep himself alive is to make sure their knives are pointed at each other. It’s a very delicate tightrope act, one that most assuredly does not have a net.

• In addition, Malus is written with a great deal of internal deliberation. Stories with lots of schemes and plots run the risk of losing the reader in their intricacy, but Lee avoids that by letting the reader sit in on Malus’s thoughts. He doesn’t automatically know the right thing to do in every circumstance, but rather frequently needs to reason his way through events as they unfold. This has the effect of making the reader almost a silent partner, highly engaged in his decisions.

• Finally, the further I explore the world of Warhammer Fantasy, the more maudlin I’ve grown about its passing a little over a decade ago. It really feels like something extraordinary was lost when the decision was made to destroy it and replace it with Age of Sigmar. That’s no knock on AoS, mind, and I know that the decision was in no small part guided by market data. But these are some wonderful stories tucked away in the less-frequented corners of the Black Library, and if you haven’t yet I hope you’ll give them a chance.

If your mind went right to picnic baskets with that title, I won’t blame you, but today’s theme has more to do with baseball than Jellystone Park1. For the many of us who braved the topsy-turvy weekend in the Wild West that is the Games Workshop preordering bonanza, the wit of famed New York Yankees catcher Yogi Berra that best summed it up.

“It’s like déjà vu, all over again.”

Once more, website issues reportedly made chasing this week’s most sought-after prize, the Special Edition of Steve Parker’s Deathwatch, an experience as soothing and tranquil as a caress from the butcher’s nails. Here’s a sampling from the Preorder Megathread over on the Black Library subreddit:

And finally, in the “laugh to keep from crying” department:

Déjà Vu about Déjà Vu?

Given the reported errors, it was clear that this went beyond just the usual frustration of demand well outstripping supply. It reminded me of what happened last June, when it seemed a website functionality upgrade (the addition of a ‘carousel’ to suggest additional products at check-out) ended up breaking the site altogether.

I can’t say for certain, but I also believe that the checkout screens looked different this week. Instead of one checkout screen for all the information (payment, shipping), I was first taken to a shipping screen and then to another to tender payment. The move between the two was instantaneous- clicking through to pay instantly loaded my pay details, it wasn’t having to pause for another data load- but it’s hard to attribute to coincidence when website functionality is changed and a large segment of users report issues.

Once again, by the time the preorder window arrived at our charmed shores here in the US, the issues appeared to have been worked out. I had no problems ordering Deathwatch at 11:57pm2, then once that order completed I went back and ordered a copy of the Illustrated and Annotated Edition of Prophet of the Waaagh!, by Nate Crowley3.

And then, once that one was all done on a lark I went back and put in an order for a second copy of Deathwatch. I’ve wondered for a long time whether or not Games Workshop polices quantity ordering. It doesn’t seem they do, since we often see scalpers with seemingly absurd quantities of chase items on eBay, but then I’ve also heard stories of people’s orders being canceled. I’m not sure what possessed me to roll the dice on Deathwatch, but roll them I did4.

KLight, who for the past couple weeks has been my “eyes on the ground” for ordering over in Europe, reported some improvement this week from the one before. “So today is 22nd of August and I’m here to inform you that on the preorder day for Deathwatch Special Edition, the site stopped working again. It’s two weeks back-to-back. After 23 minutes, things seem to be working again. At least I got my order and I'm seeing people saying they are getting theirs.”

Here’s how he described last week’s struggle5, when the Premium Edition of Galaxy in Flames was on offer:

As I noted last week, the best we can do in the now is hope for a fix. There’s still plenty of the Horus Heresy Saga to go, and if you think that’s crazy wait ‘til Abnett gets to release the third novel in the Bequin trilogy.

Now that will be pandaemonium!

Quick on the Trigger

Ever wish you had a personal bounty hunter working to help you build your Black Library collection?

When I was in heavy active acquisition mode, I quickly learned that eBay’s alerts were fairly useless for things you were aggressively chasing. By the time it got around to letting you know that a copy of the Night Lords Boxed Set had gone up for sale, chances are (if the price was good) that it was already long gone. You snooze, you lose pal!

There are other services and apps that can give you more timely alerts, and for awhile I used one called eFerret. It was definitely better for notifications than eBay, but as I recall it maxxed you out at five active searches (you could set more, but you’d get notified at the end of the day for those).

This week on Reddit a user named u/Jamiemufu shared a project he’d been working on called Shelfkeepr. “This is not AI slop,” he made sure to note, “I am software engineer with 12 years experience, got made redundant6 - so I’m working on this while looking for my next job.”

Shelfkeepr acts as that personal bounty hunter on eBay. You tell it what you’re after and what the most you’re willing to pay for it, and it will alert you as soon as it detects a copy. It’s still in beta, so don’t expect everything to be completely polished yet, but it seems quite promising!

Turning Over a New Leak?

Meanwhile on Vinted, a sharp-eyed u/korvenus spotted something rather unusual that had sold for the princely sum of… three pounds?

If appearances are to be believed, it seems an unreleased paperback copy of James Swallow’s Flight of the Eisenstein (Horus Heresy Saga edition) has somehow made its way into the world. As we all know, the warp plays havoc with time, and this one hasn’t even been announced yet, let alone released.

The art is certainly interesting, because it’s not anything that appears to have been used before. That means we should know soon whether this was a cunning forgery7 or the real deal once Flight’s upcoming release is announced. Given that the paperback of Ben Counter’s Galaxy in Flames hasn’t even been offered yet puts this potential early copy out with quite the head start.

Let’s Make a Deal

So from bargain hunting on eBay to a bargain from the future on Vinted, we’ve got one more from Reddit to spotlight. A redditor named u/mr_mango has created a subreddit dedicated to finding bargains on Warhammer. Called r/DealHammer, he simply posts regular links to on-sale minis he’s found online. That’s it, the whole thing. Reddit threads with links to sales.

Hey, it’s an expensive hobby, and I’m a huge proponent of ‘decorating paper with plastic’ in the home library or museum. If you can save a few bucks here and there, why not, right?

Arrivals & Departures

In this section I look at what’s coming up around the corner (Arrivals) and what’s landing on bookstore shelves (Departures).

Arrivals

Another Wednesday, (yet) another new Black Library teaser8. The mothership posted a short interview with Mike Vincent (The Remnant Blade, Blades of Atrocity) this week, teasing his upcoming novel Helbrecht: Sin of Hope. I thought it was interesting how much the Black Library was spotlighting Helbrecht when talking to Marc Collins on WarhammerTV’s Scribes and Scriveners last week, and while it might just be coincidence ‘top of mind awareness’ is a thing.

Meanwhile, Raldoron: Revenant finally will be up for preorder this Saturday, in both a lovely Special Edition as well as standard hardcover. The latest from Guy Haley, this sees Raldoron of the Blood Angels playing drill sergeant for a group of untested inductees!

Departures

Leaving to land on our bookshelves this week was the Special Edition of Bjorn the Fell-Handed, the latest from Justin D. Hill. The standard hardcover isn’t far behind, but this week it was just the one.

ICYMI

Here’s what’s been going on this week for Warhammer content!

Warhammer Wordforge

• As a Black Library Readers’ Hall of Fame weekend, in addition to the announcement of the latest class of inductees there was also a new installment of The Hall Monitor. The “behind-the-scenes director’s commentary” of the whole project, this time I talked about the possible role of novellas, anthologies, and short stories in the Hall.

• For the Wednesday feature, Audio Impressions was back with a review of the audiobook for Graham McNeill’s The Outcast Dead, narrated by Jonathan Keeble.

• Finally, for Warhammer RPG Weekly (basically the same as this article each week, but for role-playing games), I looked at concerns around the health of the hobby segment, and Warhammer’s RPG presence.

Tabletop Battles

• Four novels were inducted this week into the Black Library Readers’ Hall of Fame, and it’s always a little extra exciting when authors get in for the first time. This week we had two new faces- and both named David!

• If you’ve ever wondered what Black Library writers get up to when they aren’t playing in the Warhammer sandbox, then my occasional series Beyond the Black Library is for you! This week I reviewed the new, original fantasy novel from John Sollitto (Rok Crackers, The Redoubt).

• Not Warhammer related, but robosquidd wrote a love letter to Netrunner, one of my favorite TCG’s of all time. Well worth a read!

Warhammer Community

• The mothership did a useful piece on what’s inside the new, 11th Edition Codexes, starting with the Orks. For me, the lower price point (thanks to the softcover printing) and expanded lore content makes these day-one buys for the first time since… ever?

• The Pages from the Black Books series seems to be flying under the radar for many, and it shouldn’t. It’s terrific content that’s long been difficult to get, and now we’re getting chunks for free each week. This time around it’s the Warp Cults during the Age of Darkness, make sure to check it out!

WarhammerTV (paywalled)

• The Black Library Book Club returns this week, with a discussion on Chris Wraight’s Ashes of the Imperium. Hopefully a new Scouring announcement soon…?

Around the Webway

• The Fluffenhammer gang has been reviewing the old Warhammer Monthly comics one issue at a time, and this week they looked at #31 in the episode “Gordon Rennie MVP.”

• Cinderfall Gaming, meanwhile, has been working through the catalogue of Warhammer Adventures, the book series aimed at younger readers (but surprisingly readable for us grown-ups). This week he reviewed Tom Huddleston’s Battle for the Soulspring.

• At Boundary’s Edge reviewed Chem Dogs, by Callum Davis, awarding it four out of five stars!

• Meanwhile here on Substack, Thomas Rawlins of Exploring Warhammer wrote a terrific piece examining the parallels between Dark Future and Rogue Trader. For you Warhammer history nerds like me, this was a real treat!

Cold Open Stories

• This week’s featured story is Home Sickness, by friend of the Wordforge, Joyce Chng. “Lethia has a new pet. It is an odd thing, not like a normal pet. But its hers, and in the hive, where life is harsh and grinding, happiness has to be taken where it is found. But when danger comes to the hive, even that small slice of normality is threatened”

Quick Hits

• The latest novel from Amanda' Bridgeman (Paragon of Faith, Reconsecration) arrived this week. A near-future sci-fi thriller of a tale, The Survivalist is the third installment in her Salvation series!

• James Swallow (Nemesis, Fear to Tread) may be a Black Library Readers’ Hall of Famer, but did you know he’s also done some video game work? He was part of the writing team for the Deus Ex franchise, and in a blog post written this week he looks back at that experience.

• Paul Kane (Triggers) has a new anthology he’s co-edited with Marie O’Regan, Land of Oz, that’s now up for preorder. With two of the contributors being Black Library writers, Adrian Tchaikovsky (Day of Ascension, Starseer’s Ruin) and Stark Holborn (Nightfall on Stygies), you can find it here on Amazon9.

• Speaking of Tchaikovsky, he’s got a new book coming up called The Eighth Face. It’s just had a cover reveal, and he describes it as having “creepy clone monks living in a crashed-spaceship monastery, horrible things from the sea, a past revealed in things cast up by the tide...”

• Coming from Ignition Press this November is a “hallucinogenic and brutal retelling of the oldest Arthurian tale of all,” Rampant Swine. Written by Si Spurrier (Lord of the Night, Fire Warrior), and you can find a preview of it here.

• Finally, congratulations to Gareth Hanrahan (Castle of the Exile, Grit in the Wheels), whose latest project, the cozy fantasy mystery RPG the Merryshire Detective Club, finished its crowdfunding run at double the target goal!

Coming Attractions

Here’s a list of the known upcoming releases from the Black Library based on the available preorder information we have. As always, take all of this with a grain of salt unless it’s Games Workshop-confirmed.

This section will be updated weekly in this column, and anything in bold has been added (or updated) this week.

Upcoming but Undated

• Blackheart: Claws of the Maelstrom, by Marc Collins

• Voice of Command, by Richard Swan

• Helbrecht: Sin of Hope, by Mike Vincent

Current PODs in Production

• Hive, by Dan Abnett (Special Edition)

Upcoming in 2026

• Galaxy In Flames, by Ben Counter (Premium Edition, hardcover, 8/29)

• False Gods, by Graham McNeill (paperback, 8/29)

• Blood of the Godeater, by Noah Van Nguyen (hardcover, 8/29)

• Witch Hunters: The Omnibus, by Nick Horth and Richard Strachan (paperback, 8/29)

• Deathwatch, by Steve Parker (Special Edition, 9/5)

• Ghazghkull Thraka: Prophet of the Waaagh! (Illustrated and Annotated Edition), by Nate Crowley (9/5)

• Bjorn, the Fell-handed, by Justin D. Hill (hardcover, 9/5)

• Demolisher, by Andy Clark (paperback, 9/5)

• Raldoron: Revenant, by Guy Haley (hardcover, Special Edition, 9/12)

• Words of Waaagh!, by DK Books (hardcover, 10/6)

• The Sundering, by Gav Thorpe (paperback, 10/6)

• Dropsite Massacre, by John French (paperback, 10/20)

• Apostle, by David Annandale (paperback, 10/20)

• Master of Rites, by Rob Young (paperback, 10/20)

• Death Rider, by Rhuairidh James (paperback, 11/19)

• Ghost Legion, by Mike Brooks (paperback, 11/19)

• Chem Dog, by Callum Davis (paperback, 12/17)

• Ghazghkull Thraka: Warlord of Warlords, by Denny Flowers (paperback, 12/17)

• Ashes of the Imperium, by Chris Wraight (paperback, 12/17)

Thanks again for joining me for all the going’s on in the Black Library, and see you next week!

The Hall Monitor is published every other week, the same day as the latest installment [UPDATE 8/22: LINK CORRECTED1] of the Black Library Readers’ Hall of Fame drops on Tabletop Battles. A cross between a director’s cut and a backstage pass, it’s a look behind the scenes at the Hall of Fame project.

If I didn’t just go and look it up myself I would never have believed it, but here’s a fun bit of Black Library Readers’ Hall of Fame trivia for you: in its original incarnation, the Hall was intended to review not only novels, but novellas to boot.

Here’s a snipped of the first-ever balloting article, which introduced the Class of 1989-1998, published back in November of last year:

Of course, there weren’t any novellas back then, and wouldn’t be until 2008’s Assault on Black Reach by Nick Kyme2. By that point, the Hall of Fame series had found its rhythm, and as part of the delicate balancing act between breadth of coverage, depth of coverage, audience interest, and anticipated column run3 the novellas never came up again.

Today, we’re going to ponder the question, should they?

A Novel Approach

There’s little disputing the fact that when it comes to telling the stories of Warhammer, the novel is the undisputed king. Aspiring writers are commissioned to contribute short stories in the hopes of being offered a novel, not the other way around. Novels have the page count and depth to tell the most detailed and impactful tales, and so focusing on them as the ‘pinnacle format’ of the Black Library and it’s attendant Readers’ Hall of Fame makes a lot of sense.

There’s also a more practical reason, which gets into that balancing act I talked about above. In 2012, there were 27 novels that we reviewed for that year. If we include novellas, the book count swells to 39. That’s a lot of polls to ask people to fill out.

The ‘audience interest’ factor has always been at the forefront of consideration throughout this project. As the Black Library’s early success saw it releasing more and more books each year, I’d made the call starting with the Class of 2003 to split the column in two. I was concerned that if we put too many polls in front of the reader at one time, they’d start to tune out.

Of course, this introduced its own problems. For one thing, it was clunky and inelegant. Take a gander at these article titles, woof.

Then there was the anticipated column run. By spreading each year into two columns, you instantly double the duration of the project. Could we be sure that we’d still have reader momentum with this thing running deep into 2027? It’s hard to say.

Finally, there was the budgetary consideration, since Tabletop Battles is one of those sites that crazily enough insists on paying its contributors. The Hall of Fame project has been very popular, but it doesn’t have what you call a “long tail” the same way things like reviews or strategy articles do. There isn’t a lot of traffic going to those older Hall of Fame pieces; once they’re done, we keep moving the project forward. Double the content, and you double the cost.

Think of the Children

All the same, this begs the question of whether or not the Hall should honor only novels, or should we be considering novellas, too? What about anthologies, or hell, even the short stories themselves? Shouldn’t they have a place amongst the best of the best the Black Library has produced?

It’s a complicated question.

Since we’ve already come this far honoring only novels, it doesn’t make sense to me to change things up midstream. If we start looking at the novellas of 2016, what do we do about the ones from 2008 to 2015?

And short stories, imagine the volume! What would a Hall of Fame short story even look like? How many, over the course of the canon, have truly been deeply impactful, historically resonant, or culturally significant? I’m not discounting the format- these stories have a place, and they certainly deserve to be honored4.

What about anthologies? To be sure there are a few that really stand out over the history of the Black Library. 2006’s Let the Galaxy Burn is a pretty impactful one, pulling a huge amount of the best tales from Inferno! to fill up around 700 pages. Tales of the Heresy in 2009 served as the tenth book of the Horus Heresy, and with significant stories like Graham McNeill’s The Last Church and Blood Games by Dan Abnett, helped ensconce the anthology as an important element of the mainline series. And how can we fail to mention 1989’s Ignorant Armies, which had William King’s first Gotrek & Felix story (Geheimnisnacht) and some early Kim Newman (as Jack Yeovil) as well.

I like considering anthologies because it shines a spotlight on the contributions of editors in shaping the Black Library canon, but it seems such a niche that it’s questionable as to whether it’s worth the time and effort.

A Compromise?

One way this might work would be to change the way we consider (non-novel) books for the Hall, making it more like what we did last year for the Goonhammer Book Awards. With those, the Award Committee did the nominating, then the public did the voting. This would allow us to consider large chunks of the Black Library’s history in a go, avoiding a dragged-out process after we finished the novels.

I’d be keen to hear your thoughts on this as well!

Overall though, we’re going to keep things as they are for the duration of the project, focusing on novels and using the same process we’ve used from the start. That being the case, we don’t need to have this decided in a week, but it’s good to be thinking about it.

Now, let’s get to the books!

The Vox Populi Top Twenties

So here are the updated Top Twenties for both halves of the Black Library, but first a look at the updated Leaderboard:

Hall Winners Leaderboard

I always love seeing new authors enter the Hall for the first time, as both David Guymer and David Annandale make their debuts! Guy Haley nabbed his second, while Josh Reynolds continues to climb with an eye firmly on that prestigious middle tier. There’s still plenty ahead from all these gentlemen, so it will be fun to watch how much further they go!

I’ll go ahead and spoil it now- the Fantasy and 30K/40K Top Twenties are the same, no new entries. The competition has matured, and the threshold for entry is quite high indeed!

Fantasy

30K/40K

That’s all for this time, thanks for reading!

It was another week of excitement for us data nerds, with some fascinating information coming to light from the Director of Events at Gen Con on the Discord for Buried Giant Studios. He shared a list he’d compiled of the top games that had “underserved demand” at this year’s convention, by which he meant you had players wanting to play these games but insufficient event capacity to accommodate them all.

Here’s the list, kindly posted on Reddit by u/johnny0neal on Reddit, with the RPG’s in boldface:

1. Dungeon Crawler Carl RPG

2. Dungeons & Dragons1

3. Call of Cthulhu

4. Dungeon Crawler Carl Unstoppable

5. Kingdom Death: Monster

6. Cosmere RPG

7. Daggerheart

8. One Piece Card Game

9. Pathfinder

10. Shadowdark

11. Delta Green

12. Dungeon Crawl Classics

13. Alien

14. Mistborn: The Deckbuilding Game

15. Draw Steel

16. Savage Worlds

17. Clank!

18. The One Ring

19. Vaesen

20. Lancer

21. Blades in the Dark

22. Mothership

23. Shadowrun

24. Starfinder

25. Vantage

26. SETI: Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence

27. Arcs

28. Cypher: Old Gods of Appalachia

While interesting, the list is a bit difficult to properly contextualize. After all, there are a number of reasons that might contribute to “underserved demand.” The first and probably most obvious is popularity. Matt Dinniman’s Dungeon Crawler Carl property is having its moment right now, one that is sure to endure with the release up the upcoming television adaption. Not only that, but the game is currently in preorder, meaning this was the first chance most would have had to even play it.

This was surely the case for DCC2, which apparently had over a hundred scheduled games.

On the other hand, there’s surely a logistical component here too, given that games cannot run without proper coordination. Gaming tables require reservations, scheduling, and of course a sufficient quantity of GM’s to run each table.

If we imagine that Renegade Studios (DCC’s publisher) had managed to line up 150 tables, making sure everyone who wanted to play had a chance to, the game wouldn’t even make the list.

As a result, it’s difficult to know whether I should be disappointed or relieved to note the absence of any Warhammer RPG’s on the list, though I suspect not having enough tables to meet player demand could safely be filed under “nice problems to have.”

With the recent launch of Cubicle 7’s Warhammer: The Old World RPG, it’s difficult to get a sense of how the launch is going. C7 certainly will have their own internal metrics and benchmarks to gauge by, but for those of us out here in the general public we must try and figure all this out the hard way. This is one reason I’ve been tracking how Warhammer RPG’s have been performing each week on DriveThruRPG’s Top 200, but that too is a bit like reading the tea leaves.

With the release of Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay’s 5th Edition right around the corner, the questions loom even larger. It’s a topic I’ll be returning to in the columns ahead, and for today if I had to distill it down to a single point of focus, it would be this one:

How can we know if our favorite games are healthy?

Inching Closer

Speaking of the upcoming new edition of WFRP, this week Cubicle 7 posted a Q&A on its blog focused on what’s coming up. Issues touched on include:

• Why make a new edition?

• Backwards compatibility

• Edition change resistance in the playerbase

• Dice and mechanics

• Status of Warhammer: The Old World

• Product array

While there aren’t any concrete timelines given for things like product release and pre-orders, it’s certainly clear that the chatter around the game is intensifying. That suggests a release is imminent, so we shouldn't have much longer to wait.

Welcome Codex Discordia

Ordo Discordia is a Discord server dedicated to developing and sharing homebrew and fan-made content for the various Warhammer 40K TTRPG’s, and this week they kicked off an ambitious new project. Just as Dragon Magazine used to carry all sorts of additional optional rules and content for Dungeons & Dragons, so their new zine, Codex Discordia, will for Warhammer.

The debut issue dropped this week, with a wide spectrum of content for various Warhammer 40,000 RPG systems, including:

• Minotaur and Carcharodon Specialties (Deathwatch)

• First Aid Overhaul (Black Crusade, Only War and Dark Heresy 2nd)

• Tomb Worlds Awakening (All FFG)

• Trau’s Tech Tweaks (Dark Heresy 2nd and Only War)

• Scorpion-class Grand Clipper (Rogue Trader)

• On Black Crusade: An Essay (Black Crusade)

• Indomitus Terminator Armor (Deathwatch)

• Leman Russ Krankheit (Only War)

• Umanoid Abhumans (Dark Heresy 2nd and Only War)

• Enhanced Called Shots (FFG Systems)

• Capes in Only War (Only War)

• The Labourer Background (Dark Heresy 2nd)

• Mythodes Akmon (Custom d100 RPG)

• Reinforcements from Ouros-Senn (FFG Systems)

• The Mesotherach (FFG Systems)

• Warriors of the Star Child: Sensei Patrons (Imperium Maledictum)

• House Peregrine (Rogue Trader)

• Something Had Gone Terribly Wrong (Art & Fiction)

• Armamentarium Discordiae (FFG Systems)

While necessarily a bit plain in terms of presentation (those pesky licenses and all), I’m very excited to see where they go from here, this idea has a ton of potential!

RPG Bestsellers

Warhammer RPG Titles in the Top 200:

• #11 (-6). Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay: Sylvania: The Cursed County

• #51 (-8). Warhammer The Old World: Talagaad Adventures

• #57 (-16). Wrath & Glory: Lex Imperialis

• #99 (-4). Wrath & Glory: Core Rulebook

• #146 (-22). Imperium Maledictum: Core Rulebook

• #192 ( - ): Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 4th Edition: Core Rulebook

Total Books in Top 200: 6 ( -1 )

Cubicle 7 lost ground this week, but not a lot. Indeed, any single-digit movement in either direction is more or less ‘holding firm,’ given the steady influx of products than come in and out of the site on a weekly basis.

Sadly, the two books of Imperium Maledictum’s Adeptus Mechanicus guides have slipped off the table, but we did get an unexpected burst of activity from WFRP’s 4th Edition Core Rulebook, so some good with the bad.

ICYMI

• Looking for more characters to fill your Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay world? Ill Met by Morrslieb offered up a review of Patrons of the Old World II this week.

• Meanwhile, AngelAnvar of Careless Conjuration has 5e on his mind, sharing three elements of the setting he’d love to see explored in the next edition.

• Not directly Warhammer related, but I really enjoyed this piece by Mollie Russell over at Wargamer, discussing Paizo’s treatment of metaplotting. If you’re not familiar with that term, it refers to RPG’s having big, major events that move the narrative of the game world forward- with or without your player characters.

Coming Attractions

Here’s a list of the known upcoming physical releases from Cubicle 7 based on the available preorder information we have. Note that Cubicle 7’s own delivery estimates appear to be just that- estimates- which is why many products have an upcoming delivery listed for Q1 while we’re already past that.

This section will be updated weekly in this column, with new or updated info presented in boldface.

Shipping Q3

• Limited Edition Warhammer Fantasy Map Bundle 1 (July 2026)

• Limited Edition Warhammer Fantasy Map Bundle 2 (July 2026)

Shipping Q4

• Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay: Temple of Spite (Q4)

Shipping 2027

• Sylvania: The Cursed Country

Shipping Q2

• Warhammer: The Old World Roleplaying Game, Grand Duchy of Talabec Map Pack (May 2026)

Shipping Q4

• Warhammer: The Old World Roleplaying Game Starter Set (Q4)

• Warhammer: The Old World Roleplaying Game Gamemaster’s Screen (Q4)

Shipping 2027

• Talagaad Adventures

Shipping Q1

• Warhammer Age of Sigmar Soulbound, Champions of Chaos: Dark Gifts Card Pack (Q1)

• Warhammer Age of Sigmar Soulbound, Champions of Chaos: Spells Lore Card Pack (Q1)

• Warhammer Age of Sigmar Soulbound, Champions of Chaos: Artefacts & Wargear Card Pack (Q1)

• Warhammer Age of Sigmar Soulbound, Champions of Chaos: Core Rulebook (Standard and Collector’s Edition) (Q1)

• Warhammer Age of Sigmar Soulbound, Champions of Chaos: Bloodwind Spoil Map (Q1)

Shipping Q3

• Limited Edition Age of Sigmar Map Bundle (July 2026)

Shipping Q1 2027

• Warhammer Age of Sigmar Soulbound: Champions of Chaos: Carngrad Adventures

Shipping Q4

• Warhammer 40,000: Wrath & Glory, Adventures in Gilead

Shipping Q3

• Limited Edition Imperium Maledictum Macharian Sector Map (July 2026)

Shipping Q4

• Warhammer 40,000 Roleplay, Imperium Maledictum: Adeptus Mechanicus Collector’s Edition

• Warhammer 40,000 Roleplay, Imperium Maledictum: Adeptus Mechanicus Player’s Guide

• Warhammer 40,000 Roleplay, Imperium Maledictum: Adeptus Mechanicus Gamemaster’s Guide

• Warhammer 40,000 Roleplay, Imperium Maledictum: Adeptus Mechanicus Character Sheet Pad (Q4)

Undated

• (Nothing at this time)

Thanks for reading! If you found this week’s Warhammer RPG Weekly useful or interesting, might I ask that you kindly consider sharing it with others who may as well?

I’ve noted previously that Horus Heresy books tend to fall into one of two categories, and the public perception of them is much more favorable to one of them than the other.

The first one contains books that recount the events of the Horus Heresy. These are the big, grand space-operatic tales of the fall of Horus Lupercal and the civil war that follows. They move the narrative forward with big swings, often featuring highly dramatic scenes with highly dramatic Primarchs. For those wanting the essential story of the Heresy, these are the ones to read.

The other, seemingly less-loved category are stories that take place during the Horus Heresy. The Heresy isn’t the story here, it’s the setting. Yes, there can be Primarchs in them, yes some big events can thread through in some way, but they aren’t the heart and soul of the tragedy.

The first time I noticed this was with 2008’s deeply-unpopular Battle for the Abyss, by Ben Counter. In the online forums where Black Library fans convene, this one is frequently invoked as one of the series’ misses, a story that didn’t have a lot of impact on the events of the Heresy and felt like a letdown.

As only the eighth novel in the mainline series, I can see why many found it a letdown given how self-contained the story is. The preceding novels kicked off this massive, world-shaping series, and here you had what was in essence a side-story 30K version of Tom Clancy’s The Hunt for Red October. Series editor Laurie Goulding, writing in the afterword of the 2016 hardcover reissue of the book, addressed this head-on.

Dan Abnett’s Legion was the next time I noticed that in some ways, I found myself preferring some of the stories in that latter category. The big, splashy ones were a lot of fun, but the Heresy itself was an incredible time of upheaval, and seeing how that played out on a smaller scale could be just as fascinating1. This explains my love of Nemesis, James Swallow’s delightful Cold War-cum-30K assassination spy thriller (reviewed as part of this series here).

The Outcast Dead is the most recent inductee into this camp as I make my way through the Heresy, and once again I found myself really enjoying both the story and the exceptional narration of Jonathan Keeble.

The Story

Graham McNeill’s tale gives us a side of Warhammer that we very rarely see: the workings of the Astra Telepathica. In The Outcast Dead we meet Kai Zulane, a tremendously gifted astropath whose mind has been broken by terrible tragedy. Stationed as ship’s telepath on the Argo, an Ultramarines vessel, the ship’s warp-shielding Gellar field gives out, opening the vessel to a flood of ravenous daemons. With Zulane being one of only two survivors, he is sent back to Terra to recover.

While there, the psychic peace is shattered when Magnus the Red, Primarch of the Thousand Sons, uses his psychic power to appear before the Emperor and warn him of Horus’s treachery. While well-intentioned, the reverberations from Magnus’s sorcery are seismic, sending a shockwave of psychic energy that ripples across the Imperial Palace and beyond. Kai unwittingly receives a vision of the future, a glimpse of the future of humanity following the end of the Horus Heresy.

This secret lands him in the heart of a tug-of-war of intrigue and violence. On one side are his Imperial handlers, ready to psychically vivisect his mind in order to unlock the secret that Kai knows is there but cannot see. On the other are the ‘Outcast Dead,’ a band of Astartes from the Traitor Legions that were part of an honor guard on Terra- until their Primarchs rebelled. Thrown into a high-security prison, they manage to break out and seek to rejoin their Legions, and if they can do so with a telepath who holds the secret to the end of the war so much the better.

The Dead- led by Atharva of the Thousand Sons who orchestrated the escape- manage to secure Kai and go to ground in the slums surrounding the Palace. Now an Imperial kill team fronted by a Seer Hunter of the Black Ships, Yasu Nagasena, must track down the renegades to get to Kai before they manage to find passage offworld.

Telling the Tale

This is McNeill’s fifth novel in the Horus Heresy, and combined with his terrific work in Mechanicum it really crystallized how adept he can be at building characters. In both books you have a collection of people that are very different from one another, bringing them together in service to a vital task that gives each of them opportunity to memorably develop.

In Mechanicum that was Dalia Cythera, the Terran transcriber with an affinity for machinery. Tasked by Adept Koriel Zeth of Mars, she joins a team that includes machinist Zouche Chahaya, assembler Caxton Torgau, and others to build an esoteric device from incomplete schematics. Brought to life by Jonathan Keeble’s terrific vocal range, the dialogue, chemistry, and depth of the sequences with Dalia’s team are the very heartbeat of the book.

I had a very similar feeling towards the band of renegades known as the Outcast Dead here. A trio of World Eaters alongside a Death Guard, Luna Wolf, and Emperor’s Children, their sequences were remarkably moving. There’s one scene were, just after they manage to escape from imprisonment, they’re all sitting around a fire wondering what they will do next, or even what they should do next. They had no idea, after all, about the events of the Horus Heresy until they were taken into custody for no reason other than their Legion affiliation. Caught between loyalty to the Emperor and to their brothers and Primarchs, it’s hard not to feel for them here.

When the central event of the setting focuses so much on the military events that comprise it- particularly easy to do considering it’s build on a tabletop wargame- it’s not hard to lose sight of just how momentous this event would have been to the countless souls that make up the Imperium. That’s why stories like James Swallow’s Liar’s Due (included in the Era of Darkness anthology, covered here) are able to mine some of the richest narrative veins in all of Warhammer.

It’s for that reason perhaps that I find these “skippable” books in the Heresy every bit as riveting as the others. Here’s McNeill from the book’s afterword, discussing what attracted him to the setting to write a story like this one:

The military stories are terrific, but yes- more of this too, please.

Editor Wanted

One impression that lingered throughout the entirely of The Outcast Dead was that McNeill’s editing team may have let him down a bit here. Nothing quite so grievous as lore breaches or dropped plot threads, mind, but I was taken aback by the sheer volume of duplicated word usage that occurred throughout. A few here or there isn’t anything unusual or problematic, but it’s when they’re so frequent that they distract from immersion in the story that’s something that should be addressed before a manuscript is advanced to print. A few examples:

Well, you get the idea. This isn’t something I’ve particularly noticed in previous books by McNeill, which means either this was particular to writing this one or that perhaps it’s one of his writer’s foibles that usually is wrinkled out on the editor’s desk.

Again, not enough to derail my enjoyment, but one of those things that once you start noticing a few, you can’t help but notice the rest.

Bits n’ Pieces (Spoilers)

• This is the perfect book for Jonathan Keeble to narrate, and one that would have suffered, I think, under some of the other narrators I’ve enjoyed. The greater the range of voices a narrator can develop, the more distinctive they can make the characters in a story. I’ve noted that narrators like Gareth Armstrong have terrific voices but more restricted ranges, and would have suffered somewhat in a book with a cast as broad as this one.

• At the time I’m writing this, there was an interesting discussion in the community on the tension between going into a story fresh versus having some things spoiled by watching lore videos. “Go in cold,” I noted, “you get it all as new but may miss things. Go in prepped, it’s less surprising but you’ll see more things. There’s no ‘wrong’ answer, so if you just do what you’re enjoying you’ll be minted either way.” This one’s a great example of that, as one of the Outcast Dead (Severian, the Luna Wolf, the only one who appears to survive at the end) apparently has a larger part to play2.

• One of the book’s real treats is the presence of Thunder Warriors. McNeill does a good job concealing their true nature until later in the story, and this is another example of something you might miss by ‘going in cold.’ The Thunder Warriors were essentially proto-Astartes, the Emperor’s earlier attempt at making genetic super-soldiers, and it was generally accepted that they’d been wiped out much earlier in the lore. McNeill not only introduces a couple of them here, giving them significant presence as secondary villains, but he also ends the book on a bit of a cliffhanger with them. I have no idea if that thread ever gets picked up in subsequent stories, but I’ll definitely be keen to see if it does.

It’ll be awhile before we see another Heresy novel from McNeill, with Angel Exterminatus being the 23rd in the series. But I found this one great listening, and don’t hesitate to recommend it.

“No problem,” I’d thought, “there will be plenty of time to get in some writing early Monday and get it out the door.” Ha! I refer the reader to the title of this week’s piece, a Yiddish idiom that means “man plans, and God laughs.”

Being able to write productively here at the hospital means finding the right combination of flat surfaces and electrical outlets, the pairing of which is surprisingly uncommon and often hotly contested. Shortly after her early morning blood draw, I found one and managed to get set up and working. Bingo, here we go! Alas, not half an hour later we were called back down for another round of blood draws due to a clotting issue with the first round.

Once things settled back down, I was eventually able to secure another workspace. Ten minutes later… fire alarm.

It’s been that kind of day.

Of course, the show must go on and eventually I’ll have typed the last word of this week’s column, given it the ol’ once-over1, and sent it out into the world. Ahh, the carefree life of the writer!

In reality, though, life’s a messy thing. We get to read our books when they’re published, but all writers have endured life’s many trials while pushing forward to get their words into being. Dan Abnett had a serious health scare when writing Prospero Burns (discussed here), for instance. And I can think of more than one Black Library author who struggled with grief over the loss of a parent or loved one in the course of writing a book.

Life, the good and the bad, happens at its own pace and on its own timetable. Not ours.

So here’s to all the writers, who find and make the time to commit the fruits of their passions and imaginings to the page. And to all the readers, who might forgive yer man in Houston a small delay on a Monday.

Now, let’s talk some books!

Scalpers Gonna Scalp

It was nice for awhile, not talking about scalpers, wasn’t it? Of course, opportunity never sleeps as they say, and where there’s a chance to make a quick buck off the skin of others any respite will prove very short-lived indeed.

Predictably enough, last Saturday’s offering of Ben Counter’s Galaxy in Flames was chum in the water for the opportunist segment. There were also some reports of critical website ordering issues. While many had little problem securing their copy (myself included), for others it was a decidedly less enjoyable experience.

Interestingly, some regions experienced a second window of opportunity as stock returned several hours later. Sharp-eyed readers discovered Galaxy in Flames was back in and let the community know, proving once again the value of participating in places like the Nutters on Facebook and the Black Library Subreddit.

I’m glad to report that this enabled our friend Max Brown here to get his copy, ensuring that- at least for today- his question would go unanswered.

Remember, folks, only in death does duty end. If Big E can sit on the Golden Commode for millennia without uttering a single word of complaint, surely we too can persevere…right?

In the meantime, though, we can continue to hope for a fix.

Writers are Fans, Too!

Adrian Tchaikovsky (On the Shoulders of Giants, Starseer’s Ruin)

Adrian unveiled a batch of “springy chaos cultists,” a terrifically-painted box of Kill Team Goremongers. That yellow really pops!

Justin D. Hill (Hell’s Last, The Bookkeeper’s Skull)

Justin showed off his work in progress on a Luna Wolves army. With the release of his Bjorn, the Fell-Handed right around the corner all we can say is, wrong wolves, Justin!

That emblem absolutely pops, though…

Danie Ware (Aestred Thurga: Pyre of Faith, The Triumph of Saint Katherine)

Finally, here’s a look at one of Danie Ware’s paperback bookshelves. “Top one is Warhammer,” she notes, “middle one is a full row of Fighting Fantasy green spines, bottom one is a lot of very, very old Forgotten Realms books.” Everything you need for a year’s worth of rainy days.

Love to see author shelfies, Danie, and thanks to all for sharing!

Arrivals & Departures

In this section I look at what’s coming up around the corner (Arrivals) and what’s landing on bookstore shelves (Departures).

Arrivals

Another week, another new Black Library teaser. Fresh on the heels of Krakenblood, Marc Collins is back with Blackheart: Claws of the Maelstrom. This latest tale sees Huron having to navigate the treacherous web of diplomacy as the shadow of the Great Devourer falls over his domain. No release date yet, though it would have been a synergistic home run if it had been ready this past February. Still, we’ll take it!

We’ve also got a number of things to look forward to coming up for preorder this week.

Deathwatch, by Steve Parker (Special Edition)

The Sunday Preview was unusually light on details for this one this week, but we can assume deluxe cover treatment and ribbon bookmark at the very least. It’s been a good Summer for author Steve Parker, with his Rynn’s World recently being reissued in a Special Edition format as well.

It’s here! We’ve known this one was coming since last March, but the next installment of the Illustrated and Annotated Edition series is here with Nate Crowley’s Prophet of the Waaagh!. Here’s my look at the last two in this series, For the Emperor by Sandy Mitchell and Robert Rath’s The Infinite and the Divine.

Just two short weeks since the Limited Edition was offered, the standard hardcover is coming up for order. Justin D. Hill’s story features the oldest living Space Marine in existence standing vigil on Fenris and taking on all comers.

Finally, Andy Clark’s Demolisher arrives in paperback! The tank crew is assigned to escort duty for a Commissar on a Chaos-infested world in this sequel to 2021’s Steel Tread.

Departures

This week saw Robert Rath’s Necron duology The Wicked and the Warped arrive, as well as the hardcover reissue of The Infinite and the Divine.

Fans of Age of Sigmar weren’t left out either, with Warhammer Age of Sigmar: The Ultimate Guide from DK Books landing in stores this week as well.

Swan Song

Last June in my review of the anthology World Ablaze, I noted that author Richard Swan (Tears of Raphaela, Blood Harvest) had shared in a Reddit AMA that he had a Black Library novel in the pipeline, with an expected released of this Summer. \

It looks like that day is fast approaching! r/BlackLibrary subredditor u/Hasvik212- the Roboute Guilliman of Black Library publishing data- uncovered what appears to be information on that very novel. Titled Voice of Command, the back-cover blurb reads:

Fandoms can be incredibly persistent at ferreting out info that hasn’t quite been made public yet, since publishers have to prime the media ecosystem in advance for any such releases. That’s why we can sometimes find placeholder listings for unannounced books on Amazon, for instance.

Hasvik212 notes, of course, that this is all unconfirmed, so… big if true?

ICYMI

Here’s what’s been going on this week for Warhammer content!

Warhammer Wordforge

• I took a bit of a detour this week with Black Library Bibliophiles, giving a look at the JOYTOY line of Astartes helmets as ways to spruce up a library or collection. Don’t worry, there was plenty of books to talk about too!

• In Warhammer RPG Weekly, I took advantage of a slow news week to talk a bit about the Wordforge’s plans for regular RPG content.

• And finally, speaking of RPG content, I debuted a new regular feature, RPG Conversions! This series will adapt Warhammer lore and stories to the tabletop, and I kicked it off with a couple of Warcry warbands for Cubicle 7’s Soulbound.

Tabletop Battles

• Meanwhile at Tabletop Battles, I reviewed the new Illustrated and Annotated Edition of For the Emperor, by Sandy Mitchell. Another win for an amazing series!

• For you Battletech fans, lynnding-library also reviewed Bryan Young’s These Violent Ends!

Warhammer Community

• Butcher’s Nails, the next Warhammer+ animated series, has seen a slight delay. Rather than this month, it will be releasing in October. Worth the wait? Let’s hope so!

• In the ongoing Pages from the Black Books series, this week saw a look at Horus Lupercal’s early campaigns in the planning stages!

• And of course, there was the aforementioned teaser for the upcoming Huron Blackheart book by Marc Collins here!

WarhammerTV (paywalled)

• Marc Collins (Eidolon: The Auric Hammer, Helbrecht: Knight of the Throne) is appearing on Scribes & Scriveners this week, the Black Library author interview series as we start preparing for the upcoming Blackheart: Claws of the Maelstrom.

Around the Webway

• New YouTube channel Concilium Historica Imperialis did a deep dive video review on Dead Men Walking, by Steve Lyons.

• Into Orks? Mars Garrett of Bell of Lost Souls published a guide to a number of Ork books and Ork-themed merchandise this week. Treat yourself!

• Jordan Sorcery sat down for an interview with Nicola Griffith (Vespertine, The Voyage South). Nicola’s wrote some of Warhammer Fantasy’s earliest fiction, and this is a real treat!

• Cinderfall Gaming has been rocking the Warhammer Adventures series recently, and they’re back this week with a look at Tom Huddleston’s Fortress of Ghosts. These were the Black Library’s short-lived experiment to aim fiction at a younger audience, and make for interesting reading now.

• The TTP Field Manual Book Club tackled The First Heretic, Aaron Dembski-Bowden’s Black Library Readers’ Hall of Fame novel of the Word Bearers. As an added bonus, they’re reviewing the audiobook version, narrated by Gareth Armstrong (my thoughts here).

• Jen and Keri of the WH40K Book Club reviewed William Crowe’s Veterans of the Fall. “The perfect palate cleanser,” they noted. “It’s exactly what we needed and wanted.”

• In the odd chance BL Readers’ Hall of Famer Josh Reynolds (Lukas the Trickster, Nagash: The Undying King) was having a down week, here’s a terrific appreciation thread that popped up this week on Reddit.

Cold Open Stories

• This week’s featured story is Home Sickness, by Alex Gentem. “After six long years of war, the Guard is finally called home. The initial emotions are myriad, and mixed – relief, astonishment, disbelief that it has happened at last. But once those settle, other things come in their wake. What has changed in their absence? Are the people they left still the same? Are they?”

Quick Hits

• Black Library Readers’ Hall of Famers Dan Abnett (Hive, Interceptor City) and James Swallow (The Flight of the Eisenstein, Nemesis) will be appearing at Monster Mania 2026, which is taking place in Kent on 30 August. Attendees are encouraged to bring memorabilia for them to sign, and Swallow has more details on his site here. He’ll also be appearing in Bexley for An Afternoon With James Swallow this coming Saturday (8/22), so make sure to check it out!

• Gareth Hanrahan (Grit in the Wheels, Rites of Binding) held an AMA on Reddit last week as he promotes his latest novel, The Dungeon Book. It’s “Kipling’s The Jungle Book meets Dungeons & Dragons,” as he describes it2, and he’ll also be doing a book signing at the Cork Waterstones this Saturday!

• Not enough Black Library author appearances, you say? Fine, fine, howabout Gav Thorpe (Kill Team, Luther: First of the Fallen) and Victoria Hayward (Deathworlder, Blood Sands)! On 24 October they’ll be appearing at three different locations- alas none in Kentucky, it seems. Sheesh, don’t any of these writers like a good bourbon?

• Maria Haskins (The Jagged Edge) has a new story appearing in Translunar Travelers Lounge magazine. Entitled The Fall of the Automatous Abbey, she describes it as a story about “a cleaning bot, a war, and finding something new at the end of all things.”

• It’s always great to see it when my favorite Black Library writers work with other, unrelated properties that I love, almost like chocolate and peanut butter. Andi Ewington (Da Red Gobbo’s Last Stand, Fire and Fungi) has an ongoing Rogue Trooper story playing out in the pages of Judge Dredd Megazine #495, with the latest installment dropping in two days!

• Speaking of chocolate meeting peanut butter, this isn’t directly Black Library related but just too good not to share. Last year Bryan Young won a Goonhammer Book Award for the BattleTech novel Outfoxed, an award he co-shared with Russell Zimmerman (Seven Ships, Resounding) for Violent Inception. This week he posted an interview with James Luceno, one of the two authors who wrote Robotech novels back in the 90’s under the name Jack KcKinney. I’m not sure how big the Venn overlap is between Warhammer, BattleTech, and Robotech, but I’ll be happy to save you a seat in here.

Combat Cards Code

Last week I had a Tacticus code up for grabs, and this week there’s one for any of you Warhammer Combat Cards players for the game’s seventh anniversary. As part of my Warhammer+ subscription I get the occasional code for bonus goodies and like to pass them along to a lucky reader.

The latest code is: reilvfww

Using that will grant you a nice little tranche of bonus summons and resources, including Supreme Commander Belisarius Cawl! As always, I simply ask that the first person to redeem it leave a comment below so that everyone after knows it’s been used.

Enjoy!

Coming Attractions

Here’s a list of the known upcoming releases from the Black Library based on the available preorder information we have. As always, take all of this with a grain of salt unless it’s Games Workshop-confirmed.

This section will be updated weekly in this column, and anything in bold has been added (or updated) this week.

Upcoming but Undated

• Blackheart: Claws of the Maelstrom by Marc Collins

• Voice of Command, by Richard Swan

Current PODs in Production

• Hive, by Dan Abnett (Special Edition)

Upcoming in 2026

• Bjorn, the Fell-handed, by Justin D. Hill (Limited Edition, 8/22)

• Galaxy In Flames, by Ben Counter (Premium Edition, hardcover, 8/29)

• False Gods, by Graham McNeill (paperback, 8/29)

• Blood of the Godeater, by Noah Van Nguyen (hardcover, 8/29)

• Witch Hunters: The Omnibus, by Nick Horth and Richard Strachan (paperback, 8/29)

• Deathwatch, by Steve Parker (Special Edition, 9/5)

• Ghazghkull Thraka: Prophet of the Waaagh! (Illustrated and Annotated Edition), by Nate Crowley (9/5)

• Bjorn, the Fell-handed, by Justin D. Hill (hardcover, 9/5)

• Demolisher, by Andy Clark (paperback, 9/5)

• Raldoron: Revenant, by Guy Haley (hardcover, Special Edition, 9/24)

• Words of Waaagh!, by DK Books (hardcover, 10/6)

• The Sundering, by Gav Thorpe (paperback, 10/6)

• Dropsite Massacre, by John French (paperback, 10/20)

• Apostle, by David Annandale (paperback, 10/20)

• Master of Rites, by Rob Young (paperback, 10/20)

• Death Rider, by Rhuairidh James (paperback, 11/19)

• Ghost Legion, by Mike Brooks (paperback, 11/19)

• Chem Dog, by Callum Davis (paperback, 12/17)

• Ghazghkull Thraka: Warlord of Warlords, by Denny Flowers (paperback, 12/17)

• Ashes of the Imperium, by Chris Wraight (paperback, 12/17)

Thanks again for joining me for all the going’s on in the Black Library, and see you next week!

Warhammer wargame books and novels are packed with incredible drama, but they aren't written for the GM's screen. Each installment of RPG Conversions strips down the lore, builds the encounters, and adapts Warhammer's best stories for your favorite tabletop RPG systems.

Released in 2021, the Age of Sigmar: Bladeborn box combined the warband skirmishing of Warcry with the hex-based movement of Underworlds. As with most of Games Workshop’s other board game releases, it’s intended as a pick-up-and-play release that can serve as a gateway into the mainline game ranges.

Setting up on opposite sides of the board were two Chaos warbands, Khagra’s Ravagers and the Godsworn Hunt, and today we’ll be adapting both to the Soulbound RPG.

With the recent release of Soulbound: Champions of Chaos, GM’s have plenty of options to use one of both of them to spice up their player’s adventures. Whether as allies or adversaries, each bring something very different to the table and we’ll have a number of tips for integrating them into the campaign.

Finally, for the avoidance of doubt these are an unofficial adaption, the result of my own work and not intended to represent Games Workshop or Cubicle 7 Games. As GM, you’re the final arbiter of what you use at the table, so feel free to adjust any aspects you like to suit your tastes and preferences!

About this Conversion

I’ve long been one of those folks who enjoy picking up old Warhammer tabletop books just for the lore. Used bookshops are terrific for this, and when I recently found the Warcry: Tome of Champions 2021 book at Half-Price Books for six bucks, well, I couldn’t resist.

Within was an absolute treasure trove of game data for all sorts of different warbands, and as I flipped through the pages it didn’t take long for the GM in me to wonder how they might translate to the role-playing realm.

In creating the Soulbound NPC profiles for each of the two warbands, I looked not only at their Warcry: Tome of Champions entry but also their Age of Sigmar warscrolls and Underworld cards, to try and get the best overall sense of each character. Because these are both Chaos-aligned, I drew from Soulbound: Champions of Chaos for some of their makeup. If you don’t yet have access to Soulbound: Champions of Chaos, feel free to make any necessary substitutions.

Khagra’s Ravagers

Khagra’s Ravagers are an elite, four-member Slaves to Darkness warband- one riven by internal power dynamics that are never far from once more boiling into the open.

At its heart are the sisters Kharga the Usurper and Zarshia Bittersoul, whose uneasy relationship provides plenty of opportunity to drag players into their web of scheming and betrayal.

One of the first things I looked at when building Khagra was mapping her unit point value in the wargame to her adversary tier in Soulbound, developing a guideline that would help me determine the potency of each member of the warband:

• Chosen: 180+ points

• Champion: 105-179 points

• Warrior: 50-114 points1

• Minion: <50 points

Khagra easily clears the Chosen tier, opening up the opportunity for Wounds and Mettle to help make her a truly formidable presence2. She also has a few bespoke traits that help bring her to life.

Runic Shield-Ward is a carryover from her tabletop ruleset, which allows her the opportunity to damage from magical attacks. It’s only a one-third chance, but such are the fickle whims of Chaos!

The Sibling Rivalry traits bring the warband’s core personality dynamic to mechanical life. As each strives to outdo the other, they gain a bonus when seeing the other successful on the battlefield (you’ll see the other half of this in a moment).

Finally, Desecration reflects Khagra’s wicked delight in despoiling and corrupting the sacred spaces of her enemies. This is another nod to her objective-centered tabletop origins, but can give her a situational boost perfect for the climactic final battle of an adventure!

Bittersoul Backlash is a potent attack that’s a nod to Zarshia’s skirmishing origins. She can dish out some solid damage, but she won’t be able to do it for long- especially if she starts drawing fire of her own.

Mask of Darkness is a nifty bit of battlefield generalship, teleporting one of her warband to where they’re most needed. Often that will be springing an ambush on their enemies, but can also be used in a pinch if she’s under threat to being in a defender.

Finally, Zarshia’s Spite is her version of Sibling Rivalry. Each time Khagra lays someone low, her rage fuels a surge of mystical might.

Note also that under attacks she’s got Dark Magic, which is in keeping with her Warcry abilities. It’s a streamlined option for quicker combat, but feel free to substitute standard castings of Chaos Bolt instead.

Not a very inspiring bio, is it. Clearly the sisters are the personalities in the group, with Razek and Cragan serving more or less as their mooks. Of course, given the intrigue between the sisters you certainly will have opportunities to flesh out his personality as you like.

Dour Cragan’s model shows him dual-wielding a broadsword and axe, but he also has a shield strapped to his back. I’ve given him statlines for both stances, letting him adapt to battlefield conditions as he sees fit.

When more offense is called for, the two blades give him considerable flexibility on the offense given Soulbound’s dual wielding rules. On the other hand, Cragan didn’t get where he is by being a fool; if he’s up against any magical attacks he knows he’s better protected due to Runic Shield-Ward.

How to Use Khagra’s Ravagers

While Bladeborn intended for Khagra’s Ravagers and the Godsworn Hunt to be well-matched, under Soulbound’s conversion that goes right out the window in large part due to the Ravagers’ heavy armor. They’re certainly the stronger of the two, so canny players may try to exploit the tensions between the two sisters before combat is even joined3.

For heroic parties, the Ravagers make great opponents for adventures tied to a particular location, such as a consecrated holy site or a Sigmarite temple. Here Khagra’s Desecration ability can come to bear as she tries to profane that which is sacred.

Alternately, rather than having the party defend a location, they could be tasked with investigating a source of corruption. Perhaps the fish in a river feeding a town start to die off mysteriously, the water turning a strange and unsettling color. Players investigating would eventually find Khagra and her warband set up in a ruined outpost upstream, introducing unspeakable concoctions into the water to weaken the town before a raid. What constitutes a “narrative objective” for the purposes of her ability is wide open and entirely up to the GM.

The Godsworn Hunt

Much more volatile and unpredictable are the members of the Godsworn Hunt, a warband of more mobile harriers and harassers as compared to the hammer-meets-anvil brute force of the Ravagers. Players whose members include Stormcast Eternals will find them particularly nettlesome…

Theddra Skull-Scryer is a Chosen, and leader of the warband. Pact of Soul and Iron reflects her oath to hunt down the chosen and favored of Sigmar, allowing her to reroll 1’s in her attack pool.

Skull-Scryer’s Enfeeblement is her signature withering ensorcellment, and makes her a very nasty opponent against those who rely heavily on armor to shield them in battle, while Oath of Conquest is a powerful (if situational) ability she can use to bolster the defenses of her and her warband when they need to hold ground.

Finally, the Oathstone that she carries can give her extra Mettle once per battle- but at a cost in blood should she fail her vow. Note how this synergizes with her Oath of Conquest, and using both in tandem can really give her an edge.

As with Zarshia Bittersoul, I’ve streamlined her magical offense as an Attack (Gorespeaking Bolt), but this can easily be reverted to the more rule-compliant approach.

The official lore notes that Grundann wields “heavy blades,” but the model shows him brandishing a great axe so that’s how he’s been built. Toof-taker’s Oath is his secret weapon, upping his combat effectiveness whenever he takes down an opponent. When he lays down by the campfire at night, he dreams of chaining this ability across multiple turns.

Shond, too, has his abilities optimized for hunting down armored prey. Using this warband most effectively will require some tactical prioritization, as they’re somewhat ‘glass cannons’ due to their nimble, unarmored bodies. Trying to slog it out toe-to-toe heedless of their own vulnerabilities will see these Darkoath warriors falling quite short of their potential.