The Black Library Readers’ Hall of Fame is the long-term, reader-participation initiative to recognize those novels that have “cultural, historical, or aesthetic significance” to the Black Library. Through the votes of readers as well as our community panel of community voices, we’ll examine the entire history of the Black Library, induct the latest winners, and vote for the next round’s candidates every other week.

Hello and welcome to the latest installment of the Black Library Readers’ Hall of Fame, here in its new home on the Wordforge! Last time I spoke about its move from Tabletop Battles, and we continue to be grateful to them for all their support of this important fan-driven imitative.

Today we are excited to welcome eight more books into the Hall, with the books of 2020 having been considered and assessed. As a reminder, we are almost at the end of the project as a biweekly enterprise, since we’ve nearly caught up to the current day. Thereafter it will be an annual exercise, just like most other sports and entertainment halls of fame. Here’s what that timeline looks like:

Today: The winners of 2020 announced, voting for the Class of 2021

22 Nov: The winners of 2021 announced, voting for the Class of 2022

06 Dec: The winners of 2022 announced.

07 February 20271: Voting for the Class of 2023.

21 February 2027: The winners of 2023 announced.

And then we’ll go dormant for another year, because it’s difficult to assess the historical impact of books unless you give a little time and distance for history to do its thing.

Vote for the Class of 2021

Before we jump into 2020’s winners, a note that the ballot for the Class of 2021 is now live!

Remember, you may vote for as many (or as few) books as you think are worthy of being inducted!

Now, let’s see those winners!

The Envelope Please

Here are the eight books inducted into the Class of 2020.

Michael, Track of Words: “Guy Haley injects character and interest into every scene, and it’s testament to his talents that this feels like both a powerful, dramatic tale in its own right and an exciting start to a much grander story yet to be unveiled. The wealth of rich 40k lore to absorb is worth the asking price alone. Haley has nailed it.”

Michael, Track of Words: “It’s fascinating to read a story which takes a notionally neutral character – this is 40k after all, so the enforcers are still pretty brutal – and asks him to dig beneath the surface of an element of Imperial life which perfectly encapsulates the inequality between rich and poor. This is undoubtedly the best example of ‘domestic’ 40k yet.”

Jay, Warhammer Wordforge and Tabletop Battles: “Long ago and far away- all the way back to May of 2001, in fact- Inferno! Editor Marc Gascoigne explained why they weren’t interested in submissions from non-human POV characters. ‘Things to avoid: any plot which features an ork (or orc) or eldar as a central hero; we will not take these.’

“It was likely the right policy at the right time, but as they say, times change, and in 2020 we saw our first novel with an Ork as the main character. Brooks was clearly the man for the moment, delivering a high-octane tale of absolute, kinetic mayhem that embodies the greenskins in Warhammer 40K perfectly contrasted with the dogmatic logic of their Mechanicus foes. An instant classic.”

Michael, Track of Words: “Bloomin’ brilliant, it reads like a proper hardboiled detective story, all noirish first-person narration and tropey but clever characterisation, which is exactly what I want from Warhammer Crime! It offers a great viewpoint on everyday, ‘domestic’ 40k and explores the fascinating setting of Varangantua, but where it stands out even amongst this series is the way it really digs into the contrasts and hypocrisies of the Imperium, with Noctis providing the absolute perfect POV character. He knows he’s a hypocrite, and he’s come to terms with it, and this makes him deeply interesting to read about.”

Jay, Warhammer Wordforge and Tabletop Battles: “This is the perfect example of a book that hits the ‘trifecta’ of being historically, culturally, and aesthetically significant. Historically, it’s been a massive success, a strong statement of intent for then-debutante Robert Rath that eventually dethroned Dan Abnett’s Horus Rising at Warhammer World for ‘top book.’

“Culturally it not only pushed out the envelope on Necron character work, but it opened up a new avenue for grimdark humor that had largely been the purview of the Orks and Commissar Ciaphas Cain. And aesthetically, it’s masterfully written, a perfect balance of humor and earnestness that even conceals an absolutely clever word-puzzle reveal. The Infinite and the Divine was destined for this.”

Michael, Track of Words: “The dynamic between Trazyn and Orikan makes for a wonderful mixture of humour and pathos, and this translates into a book that’s often laugh-out-loud funny as Trazyn mercilessly teases Orikan, who responds with increasingly sharp mockery of his own. Their relationship lends itself beautifully to witty crosstalk and cutting humour, which is a huge amount of fun to read, but there’s a darker side to it too.

“Their rivalry results in cataclysmic damage to various non-Necron civilisations, much to Trazyn and Orikan’s absolute lack of concern – to them, such damage is barely worth noticing, but of course to the younger races things look rather different. As it develops, the plot also digs into the painful history of the Necrons and their ill-fated alliance with the C’tan, and what biotransference has done to the once-glorious Necrontyr empire.”

Michael, Track of Words: “The Regent’s Shadow picks up where 2017’s phenomenal The Emperor’s Legion left off, and delivers another brilliant slice of Warhammer 40,000 storytelling. The narrative, character development and continued exploration of Terra are all deeply satisfying, and in typical Wraight fashion it continues to fill some of the gaps in recent 40k history in a powerful, very human way. In short, it’s another must-read.”

Michael, Track of Words: “An understated masterclass in balancing complexity and readability, The Reverie takes full advantage of the freedoms provided by the Warhammer Horror range to dig deep into everything that makes his style so compelling. It’s a character-driven tale full of typically vivid imagery and a creeping sense of dread and discomfort, where nothing is quite what it seems, where obsessions come to the fore and where ideas and intent are more important than strength or pretty words.

“This is low-key horror, heavy in intense dialogue, ambiguous visions and dream sequences, and relatively light in pulse-racing, visceral action (although there’s a bit of that, still). It’s the sort of story that leaves you uncomfortable rather than outright scared, and while it reveals all manner of truths about the Angels Resplendent it leaves just as many questions teasingly unanswered, inviting readers to draw their own conclusions and search through Peter Fehervari’s other stories for clues.”

Lenoon, Tabletop Battles (HoF Alumni): “Fehervari knows horror well. The Reverie feels like an experiment cut short, the first half playing with the boundaries of what Marines can be, the environments they can live in and their purpose when there isn’t Only War. It’s a horror without the horrifying, a Rebecca-style gothic novel where suspense, set dressing and dialogue create the feeling of looming, vital, doom without the need for a monster lurking under the stairs.”

Michael, Track of Words: “A 500+ page beast of a book in which secrets are revealed, big names start to fall, and the stakes – somehow – get even higher. This is classic Abnett – the master of the multiple-viewpoint war story – with four major conflicts taking place intertwined with smaller, subtler subplots exploring recurring characters and setting up questions or concepts for future development.

“It’s an incredibly complex book packed with characters (the dramatis personae stretches to eight pages) but Abnett nails the pacing and variation, always knowing when to switch between narrative strands, when to throw the reader headlong into the action and when to pull back for little moments of calm and humanity. All told, it’s a beautifully constructed book, an incredible achievement even for an author as talented as Abnett, and an absolute must-read for any Heresy fan.”

Congratulations to all, and especially to first-time winners Mike Brooks and Robert Rath!

The Leaderboards

As promised, here are the updated leaderboards. We’ll start with the list of authors, ranked by the number of books they have had inducted into the Hall.

Guy Haley continues to be enjoying a moment, with an incredible five books getting inducted from 2019 and 2020 and vaulting him into top-three territory. Another two first-time winners join the club this week as well.

Now, here are the top twenty books that got the highest level of support in the public voting. While not every book had enough votes to be inducted, this kind of acclaim is an accomplishment all its own!

Warhammer 40,000

We’ve gone a number of weeks without a lot of change to this table, leading to a general sense that the days of books getting extraordinarily high public acclaim might be in the rearview.

Then came The Infinite and the Divine, the first book to crack the Top 10 of the chart in a decade. The next-newest books on there, Soul Hunter and Helsreach (both by Aaron Dembski-Bowden) were from 2010, giving you some idea of how hard it is to crack. That says a lot about Rath’s masterpiece and how it’s perceived in the Warhammer community, but sadly it also does mean that Abnett’s Traitor General falls off the bottom of the table.

Horus Heresy

By way of a consolation prize for Traitor General, Saturnine charted on the Horus Heresy Top Twenty this week. That means we must bid farewell to John French’s The Solar War.

Age of Sigmar

This table remains in flux, with Age of Sigmar a relatively young imprint so far. With Profit’s Ruin jumping aboard, it knocked three books from their perch: Fury of Gork by Josh Reynolds, Scourge of Fate by Robbie MacNiven, and C L Werner’s Wardens of the Everqueen, which were all tied at 9.

Warhammer Fantasy

No changes here. We won’t see a new Fantasy book for a few years to come yet, when McNeill’s Lords of the Lance arrives in 2024.

The Hall of Glory

That’s all for this week! Congrats to the winners, thanks for reading and don’t forget to vote!

Welcome to the latest installment of my latest occasional series, Show and Tell, where I dive into the world of WarhammerTV’s suite of video programming.

For reasons that are both generally obvious and probably too lengthy to get into here, Age of Sigmar remains the suffering sister of the Warhammer properties. Just in the Black Library alone AoS releases account for no more than a third of all books published, and deluxe editions are increasingly elusive offerings.

And so when, during the Big Autumn Preview Show last September Arkanaut was announced, I was delighted to see it despite my interest in Dwarfs being somewhat between ambivalent and Gav Thorpe.

With WarhammerTV being one of the areas where Age of Sigmar still does a credible job holding its own in the attention space, from Sigmar’s Toll to Blacktalon and beyond there are a lot of great stories here. How would Arkanaut hold up?

Turns out, the Dwarfs did us proud.

The Story

In some of the tightest, most economical storytelling I’ve seen in Warhammer animations to date (I’ll get to that in a bit), the Warhammer Storyforge used every available second of allotted screen time to pack in a three-part tale of increasing peril and raised stakes.

Captain Orra Ironhelm leads the crew of the Therodoson, an Arkanaut frigate whose plight is familiar to many’s the seafaring yarn: a fishing or whaling expedition who’s poured all of its time and treasure into a final, desperate payday and finds itself on the precipice of wealth and ruin. Do they press on, hoping against hope to find that one score that will make it all worthwhile before running out of fuel, or play it safe and return to harbor as beggars.

Since nobody ever writes stories about the latter, you get no points for guessing which direction Ironhelm and her gang go, though the process is surprisingly democratic. While she may be the captain, Arkanaut sees her putting the decision to a crew vote- who, overwhelmingly- opt to press their luck.

Pressing on after shaking themselves free of some opportunistic skaven, they stumble upon a prize they’d never expected: the trapped soul of a Stormcast Eternal, caught inside an unnatural storm. Capturing the soul would let them sell it back to the Stormcasts for a premium, but first they’ll have to capture it.

And then, the real challenge: they’ll have to hold on to it.

The Talent

Games Workshop contracted again with The Damn Good Group for voice talent sourcing for the production, and in a post on their Instagram they four members of the voice cast: Laurie Duncan, Natalie Winter, Scott Joseph, and Joe Rooke.

Duncan is perhaps best known for his extended run on the soap opera Hollyoaks, where he played high school student Callum Kane for 140 episodes. He also voiced the character Noah Augustine in the gacha mobile game Silver and Blood, and this appears to be his first turn in a Warhammer production.

Next we’ve got Natalie Winter, whose video game resume is extensive. She’s lent her talents to games from Baldur’s Gate III to The Lord of the Rings: Gollum, Lego Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga to Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla, and a host of others. Beyond that, she’s also voiced Jean Grey in 24 episodes of X-Men: The Audio Drama and Catwoman in Batman: The Long Halloween.

When it comes to Warhammer, you’ll also have heard her as Akbani in Mechanicus II, Valantha in WarhammerTV’s Blacktalon series, and some supporting work for Space Marine II.

Scott Joseph crossed paths with Winter a couple of times, from Baldur’s Gate III where he voiced The Emperor to Space Marine II as Varellus. Other notable gaming roles for Joseph include 007: First Light, Onimusha: Way of the Sword, and Silent Hill: Townfall.

In addition to Space Marine II, he also played the role of Ragtoof in the WarhammerTV animation Adepta Sororitas: Penitence.

Finally, Joe Rook’s had an interesting career. While she’s not as recognizable for her acting work as some of the others, she nevertheless has lent her talents to some high-profile gigs. She’s been the spokeswoman for Omaze UK, a company that helps raise money for charities though prize draws and other high-engagement events. For a decade she’s been a presenter for CarFest, and commentated the 2016 Olympics and Paralympics.

Interestingly, not all of Arkanaut’s talent came through The Damn Good Group, as voice actor Richard Reed was also part of the cast. Playing the arch-villain of the third episode, he thanked the Voicefox Voiceover Agency in his Instagram announcement celebrating the role.

Like his peers, Reed has amassed a respectable body of work in video games, and his resume there is impressive: Warframe, Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous, Diablo IV, and Star Wars: Galactic Racer, just to name a few. Then there are the Warhammer ones: Space Marine II, Rogue Trader, Darktide, Chaosbane, Age of Sigmar: Realm War, and Total War: Warhammer II and III.

And if those aren’t enough bona fides, he also has done a number of Black Library audiobooks, such as Robert Rath’s The Infinite and the Divine and The Wicked and the Warped, Chem Dog by Calum Davis, and Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Starseer’s Ruin.

Still more? Let’s ice the cake with roles in WarhammerTV animations, appearing in two episodes of Hammer and Bolter and playing Techmarine Hadrael in 2021’s Angels of Death.

Reed is as steeped in the property as you’re likely to find, and rounds out a superb cast of voice talent for this latest round of episodes.

Notes & Impressions (Spoilers Ahead)

• This one was a family affair, as three of my kiddos (aged 9, 13, and 13) joined me to watch. I note this because while it’s listed as being recommended for ages 15+, I didn’t really note any objectionable content1.

• I was very impressed with the work of the writers here. Arkanaut is packed with incredibly tight, economical storytelling that didn’t leave a single moment wasted. Remember, this isn’t like a book where you have some fungibility on word and page count; you have three, thirteen-minute episodes to tell your story, and that’s all there is.

• While I’m no showrunner, it seems logical to assume that it’s easier to extend runtime a little more easily than to compress it. You can always pad out a few scenes, but cut too much and your production’s pacing risks feeling hurried and unsatisfying. Arkanaut goes from facing skaven to nighthaunt to Chaos Dwarfs in as many episodes, and I’ll be damned if it doesn’t work.

• The animation was very good overall, though a lot of it seemed a bit muted, even murky. One thing I noted with the last M2 Productions feature I watched, Aeronautica Imperialis (review), is that there’s a bit of unevenness in the quality. It’s not that the animation is bad- far from it. But there was a sort of submerged murkiness to a lot of the content, with many scenes being washed out by steam, fog, or smoke.

• I’m no animator, but it feels like a way to get more from a scene without having to employ detailed animation, a kind of animatic sleight-of-hand that allows the suggestion of a thing to stand in for the actual thing itself.

• Now, I’m fully prepared for the possibility that someone who’s an expert on the craft tells me that I’ve got it completely wrong, that doing it this way is actually more technically challenging than clarity. But while the opacity present in nearly every frame to some degree never compromised my ability to enjoy it, it was something I noticed almost right away.

• It’s a great example of the narrative tightness that one of the third episode’s biggest emotional payoffs- the rescue of the arkanauts by materializing Stormcast Eternals- is only moments long. By the time you’ve finished your first cheer, the scene has already moved on. But the beat landed hard, and we loved it. Two of my kids watching knew almost nothing of Age of Sigmar, but they were all in on the Eternals.

• That brings me to another point, that the amount of ‘lore foreknowledge’ you need to enjoy this series is almost zero. In other words, it’s a great onramp to the setting for those who have never experienced it before. Anything they need to know is largely explained either directly or by context.

• Overall, I definitely recommend Arkanaut. I had a blast watching it, and the story was terrific. It even had a suitably grimdarkish ending, nowhere near The Mist but definitely not a happy, tidy bow either. Worth the watch.

That’s it for Arkanaut. While we await proof of life on the next animation, The Butcher’s Nails, there’s plenty more in the archives to enjoy!

Black Library Bibliophiles is our occasional series on the collection and display of Black Library books. From diving between the covers of deluxe editions to chasing rare treatments and notable misprints… from collectors’ well-stocked personal libraries to the curated display of trinkets, curios, and other Warhammer memorabilia… we go beyond the pages to celebrate the love of the books themselves.

While at time of writing the woefully-priced Space Marines Codex Limited Edition still appears to be in stock on the webstore, the successively-released Adeptus Custodes one- with its significantly lower sticker- had no such issues. Games Workshop adjusted to to the market, and the market delivered a sellout.

It’s certainly not for everyone, but if you’re after some extraordinary shelf candy for the Custodes wing of your library or museum, there’s a lot to appreciate here.

I recorded a brief wakthrough of the contents of the box, and will take a closer look at some of the items included within.

As I noted in the video, this is a fairly hefty box in terms of weight, and much of that is from the metal Vexilla. Drop it into a sock and you’ve got a lethal weapon in your hands.

It’s solid metal- there’s no negative space in the back where they skimped on the construction. Here’s a look at how thick the thing is.

By comparison, the lapel pin is almost an afterthought, though it’s a very nice piece in its own right.

If there was anything I was disappointed in, it’s probably the dice box. Don’t get me wrong, it looks nice, but the quality tells the moment you handle it.

These kind of inexpensive, decorative enclosures are typically crafted from paulownia, white pine, or even veneered plywood or fiberboard. My guess here is pine, though my brother’s the woodworker, not me.

Still, this is a decorative library piece, not a family heirloom, and it manages the job nicely.

Finally, these are the art prints within. The envelope they’re contained in is sealed, but I tend to be a bit ambivalent on these sorts of inclusions. Prints are nice, but don’t always go well inside of my museum displays.

Still, this is the kind of single-release product that can make a decoratively-themed shelf all by itself- and that’s exactly what it will be doing in mine.

Now, let’s see what other goodies have been decorating shelves this month!

September’s Deluxe Offerings

Those who have champagne wishes and caviar dreams for their personal libraries at home had several reasons to enjoy what hit the shelves in September.

I’m sticking with the video format here, because I’ve frequently found that the deluxe edition treatments don’t always translate well into still photography. Since it can be difficult to make out the full range of textures and hues that are used to make them pop on the shelf, a visual look shows off quite a bit more.

They’ll be a little rough while I get the hang of it, so consider it a work in progress!

Blackheart: Claws of the Maelstrom, by Marc Collins

Deathwatch, by Steve Parker

Raldoron: Revenant, by Guy Haley

Community Shelfies

I first saw these photos of Arthur Van Marcke’s magnificent collection a year ago, and asked if I could feature them in an upcoming Black Library Bibliophiles piece. I lost track of the post, though, until I recently chanced upon it again!

This is a beautiful library, filled with both books as well as decorative accents (note the Mordheim shelf, for instance), and I love how he’s kept the shelving standardized. While there’s nothing wrong with using what you have to hand, there’s a certain aesthetic that comes from letting the books shine in a uniform display. Terrific work, Arthur!

Speaking of decorative flourishes, what is it about the Blood Angels that seems to bring out the flair? This impressive display belongs to Andy Shiels, and is a treat for the eyes when you look close. For example, note the Horus Lupercal bookends containing two of the most beautiful deluxe editions the Black Library has ever produced: Dan Abnett’s Penitent and Pariah.

I also love the purity seals throughout. I’m guessing Andy house isn’t blessed with cats.

Here’s Daniel Chrichton’s Horus Heresy display. What caught my eye here was the glass fronting on the cabinets, which I’m a huge fan of for their anti-dust attributes (plus a nice glass frontage looks classy as hell). Plus, I’m always delighted to see folks display their books and miniatures together, since when it comes to Warhammer paper and plastic go together like chocolate and peanut butter.

Another thing I’m a big fan of when it comes to Black Library displays is shelf lighting. It can get pretty dark, particularly in the deeper shelves, and we all know the fading hell that sunlight can subject books to.

Here, Will Lucnik shows off how much a bit of lighting can add to a collection!

One of Magic lead designer Mark Rosewater’s signature quotations is, “restrictions breed creativity.” What to do when your available space is somewhat limited? u/Stevo1765 put together a terrific collection in his loft, one that’s full of personality!

Finally, here’s u//vonongbong’s setup- including a beautifully-fronted array of a number of deluxe edition books (which I featured at the top of this section, too!). Note also the JOYTOY action figures standing sentinel on the right shelf.

That’s it for this month’s Black Library Bibliophiles! Next time we’ll be looking at October’s deluxe edition books, more display inspirations from around the community, and plenty more!

The Black Library Readers’ Hall of Fame is the long-term, reader-participation initiative to recognize those novels that have “cultural, historical, or aesthetic significance” to the Black Library. Through the votes of readers as well as our community panel of community voices, we’ll examine the entire history of the Black Library, induct the latest winners, and vote for the next round’s candidates every other week.

Hello and welcome to the latest installment of the Black Library Readers’ Hall of Fame- and the first one to be hosted here on the Wordforge!

As I shared in Black Library Weekly, Tabletop Battles has carried the ball this far, and are leaving it up to us here to get to the finish line.

We’re almost there, with 2022 being the last of the “catch-up years” before we switch to an annual format for the 2023 books and beyond.

Today we’re unveiling the ten winners of the Class of 2019, an incredible year that offered readers some of the best work the Black Library’s ever offered. The Horus Heresy wound down, giving rise to the Siege of Terra. Meanwhile, Age of Sigmar continued to get its legs beneath it as its fiction really started coming together.

Also, for those of you who enjoyed the Top Twenty lists I shared in The Hall Monitor, my “director’s commentary” companion piece to the Tabletop Battles articles, you’ve got a few less clicks today! Going forward, The Hall Monitor is being merged into the main Hall of Fame article, so once you get to the end of the ten inductees keep on scrolling to find the list of top-performing books in all four categories (40K, Horus Heresy, Fantasy, and Age of Sigmar) across the full range of the Hall project, as well as the “author leaderboard” for most inducted books!

Vote for the Class of 2020

Before we jump into 2019’s winners, a note that the ballot for the Class of 2020 is now live!

Remember, you may vote for as many (or as few) books as you think are worthy of being inducted!

Now, let’s see those winners!

The Envelope Please

Here are the ten books inducted into the Class of 2019.

Michael, Track of Words: “The fifteenth (!) Gaunt’s Ghosts novel, and the fourth and final instalment in the long-running The Victory arc, Dan Abnett’s Anarch picks up almost immediately after the conclusion to The Warmaster. This might just be the darkest place Abnett’s taken the Ghosts to yet.

“It’s not just dark in the violent sense either – for all that the series is very much about war stories, it’s also always featured personal dramas and tragedies, both of which are present and correct in this book. While the explosive action is undoubtedly great fun, the real reason you want to keep turning the page – and boy is this a page turner – is to understand where the characters go and what happens to them, and Abnett’s great success here is in seeing through so many characters’ journeys to their logical, (largely) satisfying conclusions.”

Michael, Track of Words: “Prolific Black Library author Guy Haley continues to explore the ‘Dark Imperium’ era of Warhammer 40,000 with Belisarius Cawl: The Great Work, tackling not just the titular Archmagos Dominus and his idiosyncratic adventures but also the fate of the remaining Scythes of the Emperor.

“Never one to take the easy option, Haley draws together threads from his Dark Imperium series and his Horus Heresy novels Pharos and Wolfsbane, plus the Scythes of the Emperor arc created by Richard Williams and LJ Goulding, cleverly bridging the Heresy, pre-Dark Imperium 40k and the ‘current’ timeline.

“All told this achieves the impressive feat of being a pacy, compelling read in its own right while balancing multiple existing story arcs in a cleverly constructed narrative packed full of creativity and character.”

Michael, Track of Words: “An Age of Sigmar novel released under Black Library’s Warhammer Horror imprint, Josh Reynolds’ Dark Harvest is a sinister, atmospheric tale of old gods and lost faith in the grey swamps of Ghyran. It’s a perfect backdrop to a slow-burn story about the weight of unhappy history, mortals trying to coexist alongside unfathomable, rage-filled nature, and questions of contrasting faith which hark back to the pantheon of the Old World. Old-school, atmospheric, and properly grim!”

Michael, Track of Words: “Andy Clark’s Age of Sigmar novel Gloomspite is straight-up disturbing…and the best thing he’d written yet. It’s crammed full of insects, spiders, lurking horrors and stomach-churning fungus-based disgustingness. The Gloomspite Gitz themselves are largely kept as distant antagonists but that gives them a real sense of danger and avoids any chance of them coming across as comedic. These are not cheeky little goblins – they’re murderous, insane monsters that bring with them fear and pain and death, and the toll they take on Draconium’s defenders is appalling.

“As Age of Sigmar stories go this is dark and disturbing and comfortably up there with the best.”

Gus, Black Library Subreddit: “Another story that cuts against the grain, it’s an Age of Sigmar story- but one of the most unsetting ones. While the novel Bad Loon Rising paints the Gloomspite Gitz as the gremlins of AoS, Andy Clark turns them into an unholy mash up of Cronenberg’s body horror and Del Toro’s unsettling environments.

“This novel is messed up, in the best way. The genius is that the entire novel is from the point of view of the poor souls of a border city of Sigmar. The horror is slow burning, misterous and the Gloomspite are this dread in the air that is like all around you but not present. Andy really gets the imagination going and by the time you’re done reading you feel sick, uneasy (well I did, since I don’t enjoy body horror, but the novel does with a purpose, not just for gratification). It was definitively worthy of the recent reprint.”

Michael, Track of Words: “Rachel Harrison’s debut Black Library novel, Honourbound follows on from several excellent short stories and features Commissar Severina Raine serving with the 11th Antari Rifles as part of the decades-long Bale Stars Crusade.

“Honourbound goes above and beyond expectations, delivering a complex, characterful, brilliantly plotted and beautifully written narrative that does everything a 40k story should do and then some. ‘I have always been keen to write a story that takes in the scope of a massive conflict,’ she shared in an interview, ‘with big battles (as befits the Astra Militarum), but that has very personal stakes as well as the crusade-scale ones.’”

Gus, Black Library Subreddit: “An underrated gem. Rachel gives us a female commissar who cares without slacking or compromising her beliefs. The book is long, chaotic, and a little bit of a hard read at first, but once it gets going, wow, it never stops. It’s violent, kinetic, the antagonists are extremely capable, and well developed. It is a “deep 40k’ story, in the style of Deathwatch by Steve Parker, where everything that makes this sense grimdark gets pushed further and to a place no one had thought it could go, but there you are, enjoying every second of it.”

Michael, Track of Words: “A twitchy, jittery collection of characters and plot threads, it sees Curze – twisted, haunted, damaged – spending the final hours of his life reliving some of the key events which led him inevitably to a moment he’d long foreseen.

“As Guy Haley said in our interview, ‘Curze’s story is totally messed up, just like him. My main question about his character always is how much of his madness is the result of his own choices.’ It’s not a book which provides straight answers, but instead it offers a sharp, insightful representation of a complex character which actively encourages the reader to draw their own conclusions.”

Michael, Track of Words: “Book two in Black Library’s Siege of Terra mini-series concluding the Horus Heresy, Guy Haley’s The Lost and the Damned picks up where The Solar War left off as Horus Lupercal launches his assault on Terra itself. Overall Haley has done a fantastic job of maintaining the tone and illustrating the complexity and ferocity of these first stages on Terra, while moving the narrative on, setting the scene for the siege to ramp up in intensity, and simply telling a compelling story.”

Michael, Track of Words: “Peter Fehervari has a unique perspective on the dark heart of the 40k setting, a mind-bending balancing act which takes familiar 40k elements and explores them in wildly different ways. It’s deeply unconventional and won’t appeal to everyone; readers who want to see bombastic, adrenaline-fuelled action bringing the familiar aspects of the setting to life might well find this impenetrable and unfamiliar.

“For those looking for a story which goes way beyond the battlefield and explores Fehervari’s intriguing corner of the 40k universe, this is an incredibly rewarding read which starts to consolidate much of what’s been written before about the Dark Coil. It’s perhaps the most developed and fully-realised example of his writing yet, and feels like a distillation of everything that’s gone before into a single story which – as you might expect – doesn’t provide any concrete answers…but does set the imagination aflame.”

Michael, Track of Words: “This is a complex book. It’s bold and brave, a single coherent narrative which manages to be both action-packed and deeply characterful, with the trademark Heresy achievement of fulfilling expectations and answering key questions while throwing in a few surprises along the way. It’s the sort of book which demonstrates just how painstakingly well planned it must have been by virtue of just…working.

“After a slightly slow start while characters are (re)introduced and arcs established, it quickly develops into a fascinating exploration of a war taking place on multiple planes – the physical and metaphysical, body and mind, the void and Terra – as seen through largely human eyes, featuring numerous viewpoint characters both established and brand new, bringing together plot threads from across the breadth of the (50+ book strong) series…and it simply feels effortless.”

Jay, Warhammer Wordforge and Tabletop Battles: “Although comparatively slender in page count, Chris Wraight manages to use every word to craft one of the greatest pieces of historical lore present in the Black Library. The wordbuilding here is extraordinary, offering a look at the early Imperium we rarely get. It’s not only the novelty aspect of a largely unexplored era of the setting, but Wraight’s masterful depiction of Constantin Valdor that makes this one such a page-turner. An essential read.”

Gus, Black Library Subreddit: “Historically significant, narratively glorious. A novel that finally give the Custodes the depth they’ve been missing. Chris Wraight is great at giving us immersion without fatigue (looking at you Dan).

“What I love about this book is how we get to ride shotgun with Valdor while exploring the nascent imperium, a very different one from the megalithic, rotten institution we’ve come to know and love. If we make a must list for 30k and 40k, Valdor is the first stop in chronological order (parts of Master of Mankind intertwine before and during, same with The Last Church). And what a first stop it is.

“The Emperor has just finished the Unification Wars and taken over Terra, everything in flux, chaos, everyone is questioning everything. Also, you will never see another Custodian be interrogated by the Adeptus Arbites, so for that alone, this is a must read.”

Congratulations to all, and especially to first-time winners Andy Clark and Rachel Harrison!

The Leaderboards

As promised, here are the updated leaderboards. We’ll start with the list of authors, ranked by the number of books they have had inducted into the Hall.

With three books in the Class of 2019, Guy Haley is having a moment as he leaps up the table into a top-three position. It’s always great to see new names get added, and we had two first-time winners this week.

Now, here are the top twenty books that got the highest level of support in the public voting. While not every book had enough votes to be inducted, this kind of acclaim is an accomplishment all its own!

Warhammer 40,000

No changes to the 40K leaderboard. 75% support has remained a fairly challenging barrier to entry. On the other hand…

Horus Heresy

Three of this week’s books landed on the Top Twenty for the Heresy, while four books were knocked off their perch at the bottom. We bid aideu to Graham McNeill’s Vengeful Spirit, Guy Haley’s Titandeath and Pharos, and Slaves to Darkness by John French.

Age of Sigmar

This table is still in a good amount of flux, with the Age of Sigmar property only recently having been founded. Nagash the Undying King by Josh Reynolds, Matt Westbrook’s Bladestorm, and The Tainted Heart by C L Werner all depart the table, with this week’s inductees taking the top two spots and setting a high bar!

Warhammer Fantasy

No changes here. We won’t see a new Fantasy book for a few years to come yet, when McNeill’s Lords of the Lance arrives in 2024.

The Hall of Glory

That’s all for this week! Congrats to the winners, thanks for reading and don’t forget to vote!

Amongst the books hitting store shelves this week was Auxilia, the debut Black Library novel from author Russell Zimmerman. While he’d probably scoff at the assertion, Auxilia to me had something of an air of inevitability to it. After all, we’ve seen a number of authors traverse the short-story-to-longform pipeline, and Zimmerman’s Warhammer ascent has been about as by-the-numbers as they come.

The steps have evolved over time; from the pages of Inferno! we’ve progressed into digital shorts and then eShort Theme Weeks1, and it was one of the latter that first brought Zimmerman to writing Warhammer. Released as part of April 2025’s Heretic Astartes Week (review), Seven Ships offered up a tale of the Death Guard’s slow but inexorable spread of rot and contagion. That year also brought us his second piece, Resounding, which was included in November’s Death and Duty: An Astra Militarum Anthology (review).

Three more stories awaited us in 2026, first Answered Prayers in the pages of White Dwarf #525, followed by Swift Resolution. The latter story was interesting in that it was quietly published as part of the Warhammer Alliance website, a program aimed at helping Warhammer hobby groups get established in schools. While the site’s story content also included Born of the Storm by Edoardo Albert and Noah Van Nguyen’s Monster, those stories had been published before; Swift Resolution represented something new.

Finally, Burden of Excellence is the only brand-new story anchoring a collection of digital shorts getting the paper treatment in Treachery Unbound, the latest 40K anthology going up for preorder this coming Saturday (10/24).

Not only has Zimmerman been fairly prolific, but he’s also highly accessible, active in the different communities he writes for and enjoys (such as discussing BattleTech here at Tabletop Battles). He graciously agreed to an interview for the Warhammer Wordforge.

RZ: I’m still getting a handle on that, in part because of the different scale of the operations, and in part because the majority of that Shadowrun and BattleTech fiction went through essentially one or two editors, a couple dudes I’ve been working with for ages now, and we’ve gotten very comfortable and confident.

With Black Library there’s a much more conservative, professional approach, with a lot more steps in the process and a lot more editorial input. There are novels I’ve gotten green-lit for Shadowrun after just a fact to face conversation hanging out in a hotel lobby at Gen Con or AdeptiCon. Black Library prefers a bit more structure and they want to make sure your idea’s solid before things progress.

RZ: Storytelling-wise, one adjustment is absolutely a matter of scale. Most of my Shadowrun yarns are about a hard-boiled noir private eye, and while Jimmy’s got a pretty sprawling group of supporting characters – ‘you are who you know,’ as the Shadowrun idiom goes – and that cast of characters includes his neighborhood, it’s still a jump to go from his stories, or other first-person narratives with Dash Red Clay or Kenji, from other Shadowrun stories… to a BattleMech company, with a dozen MechWarriors and all their supporting technicians and pilots… and then to an Imperial Guard regiment!

So that difference, zooming out to a bigger picture, juggling a larger cast of characters, still trying to make it all feel lived in and grounded and to make characters matter, that’s definitely a different idea.

I go hard on whatever it is when I’m mentally switching from one genre to another. I watch movies that get me in the right headspace, I change up the video games I’m playing, and – of course – I hobby, working up kit-bashes and doing some painting for one army or another. Whatever I can do to get in the zone and stay locked in, I just bust out all that geeky stuff and focus.

RZ: Different game worlds definitely run on their own, to think of it in video game terms a little bit, ‘game engines,’ that’s for sure, and that’s definitely where familiarity with these games comes in, having it ahead of time.

I didn’t stumble across Black Library on accident; I knew about Warhammer fiction because I grew up reading Warhammer fiction, just like with Shadowrun, BattleTech, Vampire, and everything else I’ve done.

RZ: I think instead of focusing on the tropes, I try to reach past each trope and find the humanity, the common ground that readers might have with these characters. That’s the important part to me, telling stories about characters folks are going to care about, are going to be able to – on some level – empathize with. Most of us aren’t super-soldiers or elven ninjas or driving giant robots for a living, so for me the important thing is to go past that surface level and find the things we do have in common with these characters; we all know what it’s like to work under a middle manager we don’t get along with, or we’ve all been new at a job and struggled to feel like we fit in.

As a historian, I’ve sometimes defaulted, with a shrug, mid-lecture, to a phrase like “people are gonna people,” as I tell students about young historical figures falling in love, or grieving the loss of a family member, or carving graffiti of dick jokes on ancient Roman walls. I think “people are gonna people” applies to Warhammer and Shadowrun and stuff, too. A lot of the trappings are very different, and the scale and nature of many of the problems they face, but at the end of the day, we’re writing stories about people, and that’s what can shine through.

RZ: So far, no, but that’s partially down to the fact I tend to not pitch for a faction I’m not pretty comfortable with to begin with, and that comfort comes from being interested in them already, and staying pretty abreast of their fiction/lore. No one’s slung me a curveball just yet, or pushed anything through that’s required major rewrites or changes.

I write in big enough settings that I’ve so far been pretty able to just carve out my own little corner and play in it, not really upsetting the apple cart for anyone else, and not having my precious apple cart tipped over, either.

RZ: By enjoying the gig, at its heart. I don’t regret or resent playing in someone else’s sandbox, I get to play with sand, y’know?

I’ve joked for a long time that I think like a player, not a GM, and for those that maybe aren’t as into RPGs, lemme break that down a bit. In a tabletop RPG, the game master is the one that designs the whole world, and populates it, and creates a framework to challenge the players, and handles all of the monsters, and threats, and the repercussions of the players’ actions. What the players do is look at the information the GM gives them, look at the existing lore when they bust open a book to make a character, and they focus on making one dude, who fits into all that.

That’s still the headspace I’m in, when I’m writing a novel – I look at what’s already there, I look at the plot hooks in the existing lore, I look at the friction points and the things that would make a good tie-in spot, I look at the existing history… and that’s how I get my characters, my story ideas, my narrative structure. Writing Answered Prayers wouldn’t have happened if I hadn’t already had the War for Armageddon, and that canonical, existing, Armageddon Steel Legion, and their canonical, existing, push across open ground, etc, etc.

The stuff that’s already there, it’s not limitations that hem me in, it’s a framework for me to hang my story on, and it’s where I get my story ideas in the first place! It’s great, it’s like someone else does half the job for me, handles all the big picture stuff, and then I get to just look for neat spots and zoom in and fill in the cracks.

RZ: I mean, more than anything else I think it just kind of shines a spotlight on the emotional stakes that are already there. It’s not like there wasn’t any romance in BattleTech until Valentine’s Day 2025 or whatever, when that first one came out, you know? The first thing Grayson Carlyle does when he sees an enemy MechWarrior in Willian Keith’s Decision at Thunder Rift is think about how hot she is, and then they fall in love and start a family. Mike Stackpole’s old stuff went on and on about this character’s chest hair and that character’s makeup and they had all sorts of forbidden romances and secret affairs and meet hates that turn from enemies to lovers. The foundational fiction of the setting is full of romances, and all the stompy robots and lasers and hex maps don’t take that away.

And I think the same’s true in Warhammer, honestly.

And that means sometimes finding love, or at least lust, even under stressful circumstances and in a grimdark setting. There’s always been room for romance in Warhammer fiction, and I think we’re hitting a cool era, with a fan base that’s getting a little older and a little more grounded on average than maybe it used to be, that’s more and more okay with that.

RZ: On that one, I lean on editorial a little more than normal. I’m not afraid to ask them, ‘hey, what is this story for, again?’ Writing something for White Dwarf or Warhammer Academy, you have a different set of assumptions about faction familiarity (of course you also have different assumptions about available word count, too!). But yeah, exposition is…tricky. It might be the trickiest part of this whole gig, honestly.

But I think the answer is that it really comes down to each project, and to each lore question you might have – how much room do I have to explain it, how common is the knowledge, how crucial is the knowledge to getting the story, to understanding the stakes, the twist, the threat? It’s different every time, and sometimes you nail it and, I know some folks will point out, sometimes you don’t.

But you’ve got to weigh a lot of different qualifiers when you’re deciding on explanations and exposition. It’s definitely an art, not a science, and I don’t think there’s a hard and fast rule, I’m afraid.

RZ: Well, first off, thanks for thinking it was the right way! That means it worked okay. I wanted that sort of slow, crawling, dread, rather than quick staccato action, specifically because that’s how the Death Guard are, and how they should feel, I think. It’s kind of an extension of their tabletop vibe, right? Low movement speed, but a slowly expanding aura of oppressive dread? It’s kind of their thing, this inexorable, crawling, threat.

So there, I took the risk and I wanted the pacing of the story to match the pacing of the characters in the story, basically, and I’m glad to hear that, for you at least, it worked out!

RZ: I worked really hard at it, and I still wasn’t sure how I managed it. It’s definitely a harder balancing act than most, it feels like. I know I did multiple editing passes just looking at adjectives, just looking at describing monstrosities, just making it all worse. It was something I really wanted to nail, and it came down to really trying to make the grotesque so absolutely common that it was kind of taken for granted by our narrator, showing how twisted he was getting on the inside (as much as others were on the outside).

RZ: Uhh…everything? It meant everything, honestly, being in good company just being picked and listed at all, but then being neck and neck with Avalon, being neck and neck with Bryan, it was just really fantastic.

Avalon has turned into a really cool person to chat with as we’ve both moved from project to project and we excitedly bounce ideas off each other, and Bryan and I hang out every chance we get, we’ve been friends for years at this point, and knowing how hard working they both are, and how absolutely great at this job they are, it was really something sharing the pedestal(s) with those two.

The fan response has been fantastic, not least of which because it felt like Seven Ships was hard to write, like I said. I managed to start with a real uphill climb as my first Black Library work, but when other folks thought I nailed the landing, that was when I really felt like I’d nailed that landing.

One of the coolest things anyone said over on Reddit was that they thought Seven Ships was part of Chris Wraight’s Death Guard stuff – that was when I really, really, felt like I must have done okay with it, and treated the Legion well.

RZ: I think the trick I pulled there was just making myself do it. Not over-explaining it, not dragging the moment out, just yanking the tooth very matter-of-factly. A squad of Death Company against half a unit of Guardsmen? It’s over in no time flat, right?

Most game tables, you wouldn’t even necessarily have to roll the dice, odds are your opponent would just say “ugh, you want me to just pull my Guardsmen?” And I wanted that to hit, I wanted it to hit that fast and that hard. And that meant not giving myself the time to slow down and explain it, just to make it happen, and move past it, and then take time after the carnage to feel a little shock, and then… to hit home the universe, to basically make our survivor just shrug and have no choice but to keep going.

Because what else is there for him to do? The unit’s not even a footnote, the attack itself is probably not even a footnote, in the grand history of the planet. What’s another half-dozen deaths, in the middle of Armageddon?

So I didn’t want to dwell on it while it was happening, and in a way I couldn’t overdo dwelling on it after the fact, either. The war had to keep on churning. The world had to keep on turning.

RZ: Because I don’t think any of this should be a secret. Because I don’t want anyone to think they can’t do it, too. Some of my favorite panels I’ve ever done are when there’s multiple writers, and we’d all break down our process for a novel, and they’d all be so different… and I loved that, because the take-home was always “so find what works for you.”

My buddy RL King treats writing like work, sits down at 9:00 am, writes until 5:00 pm, you know, that type of schedule, sticks with a really disciplined regimen. That’s what works for her, and her output is awesome, and her content is fantastic, and it’s all great. I…don’t do that. She’s a ‘damage over time’ writer, I’m a ‘burst damage’ writer, I have a whole different process, that sounds insane to her, but is what works for me.

And I love when we tell people that, when a group of writers tells people that, because you can kind of see a little lightbulb go on, and there’s this ding, and people realize there’s no one way to do this gig, there’s no one right way, and I hope that’s really liberating for them.

So yeah, I’m just not afraid to be honest about the process, about how there’s not one way to do it, there’s not one answer, and that I’m not special, that we’re not special, for doing it.

But it’s not magic, it’s not impossible. We’re just geeks, too. And we’re all just geeks that found a method that worked for us, and that put in the time to get better at it.

While Denny Flowers has probably done the most heavy lifting in my year-long change of heart regarding Ork stories, first blood definitely went to Mike Brooks, author of today’s audiobook Brutal Kunnin’.

It’s not that I hated tales featuring the greenskins, nor stories with a more lighthearted tone. After all, I’m a big fan of Sandy Mitchell’s Ciaphas Cain tales, even if they have become increasingly derivative the further into the series I’ve gone1. But while I think Orks have made terrific villains when they’re faceless and savage, this particular brand of humor has struggled to land for me2.

This started to change when I read Brooks’s Painboyz, the opening story of the terrific Blood of the Imperium anthology (review). I found this one to be side-splittingly funny, with an easy humor that never felt forced for laughs.

As I read more such stories, first Grotsnik: Da Mad Dok (review) then Ghazhgkull Thraka: Warlord of Warlords (review), I found my original antipathy rapidly thawing, and by the time I finished Justin Woolley’s Da Freebooterz Code (review) I had to admint I was all in. The conversion was complete.

Of course, there’s a lot of classic Ork tales out there I’ve never given much attention to, and it seemed a good time to mix one of them into my audiobook rotation.

The Story

Brutal Kunnin’ tells the story of Ufthak Blackheart’s plundering of an Adeptus Mechanicus forge world, Hephaesto, as part of the Tekwaaagh! led by his Warboss, Da Meklord. Hepahesto is a planet made mostly of metal and tech, an irresistible prize to the covetous greenskins.

Of course, what one Ork wants another Ork wants too, and in this case that ‘other Ork’ is the Freebooter, Kaptin Badrukk. He warps in with his Flash Gitz with eyes on the same prize, and the two Ork leaders manage to set aside their differences and agree to a friendly competition to see who can loot the most goods.

Blackheart, a newly-elevated Nob of the Bad Moons, sets out to make a name for himself and outdo the hated Flash Gitz of Dadrukk. Backed by his second, Mogrot Redtoof, as well as gretchin Nizkwik and squig named Princess, the race is on.

Meanwhile, things are in a state of disarray with the planet’s AdMech squabbling leaders. The Tech-Priest Dominus seems to downplay the threat of the primitive Orks, while Lexico Arcanus Zaefa Varaz, recognizing the threat to the planet, races to back up their most valuable data and get it safely off-planet. Things go from bad to worse when they find there’s a Warpsmith of the Iron Warriors at work on the planet- and that their own Forge Lord is in league with him to animate a massive dameon engine.

All of these elements bounce and carom off of one another over the course of the tale, one which sees Blackhawk and his merry band- though that mix of random absurdity and dumb luck so particular to Orkish acts of derring-do- go from adventure to misadventure and back again in their efforts to get one over on Captain Badrukk and gain Da Meklord’s favor.

The Voice

Brutal Kunnin’ was narrated by Tom Allenby, one of three audiobooks he’s recorded for Warhammer with the other two being Mitchel Scanlon’s Fifteen Hours and some of the stories in Death and Duty: An Astra Militarum Anthology (review)3.

Interestingly, he’s also lent his voice to the Warhammer 40,000: Darktide game as a Groaner, one of the hive’s many enemies. I’d imagine that’s a pretty bit part, but for Brutal Kunnin’ Allenby threw himself in with reckless abandon.

It’s difficult to imagine what some of the more patrician and elocutionary narrators like Jonathan Keeble or Gareth Armstrong might make of a book like this, filled to the brim with a gaggle of bombastic, larger-than-life soccer-hooligan Orks. This makes Allenby the man for the moment, and while the execution was a little uneven- I found myself more than once wishing the presentation came with subtitles, particularly for the voicing of Mogrot Redtoof- it lent the story no shortage of kinetic enthusiasm that matched its energy perfectly.

Thoughts

One of the things I’ve enjoyed about the Ork books written by Denny Flowers is that he doesn’t rely on the humor to make the book, but rather makes it just one of several well-blended ingredients. With his Mad Dok Grotsnik, there’s a certain unsettling sense of menace that is woven into the character, like there’s something more to him than what you can see, and whatever that is is surely worse. Da Mad Dok, put simply, creeps me out- and that’s a real credit to the writer.

With Brooks, there’s a different element at work here, but one no less effective. There you’d be, listening to this zany, absurd story of Orks doing Ork things, and then you’d get a passage like this once it flashed back the point of view of the Adeptus Mechanicus:

Or here, a moment’s lingering on the Iron Warrior Warpsmith:

Brooks can write, and moments like these sprinkled throughout the tale not only gave us some pacing breaks from the Orks, but themselves made the story that much richer. Indeed, the non-Orks were every bit as interesting and entertaining as the Orks were in their own way, from diving into lore on the construction of daemon engines to the very understated humor of the tech priests (“please refer to my most recent noospheric upload”, which, if you change that to “email” is exactly the kind of petty, corporate- office barb it sounds like).

Up next in this series will be Da Big Dakka, which will be interesting in that Harry Myers steps in for narrative duties. I’ve heard complaints that a change in voice can really throw off listeners (most notably in the Gaunt’s Ghosts series), so I may let this one fade in the memory a bit so I can give Harry a fair go.

Until then, keep on listening!

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.

This week, I’m dedicating The Hall Monitor to the mighty leaderboard. “What are the best books?” is a perpetual subject of conversation around Black Library community watercoolers, and the entire Black Library Readers’ Hall of Fame project itself came about in part as a way to try and definitively answer that question.

But of course, that’s not the only way we can examine it. Another metric I’ve had fun keeping an eye on is the voting data from all of the polling we’ve done over the course of the Hall. Just as in boxing, a unanimous decision and a split decision may mean something to some folks, but in the end a win’s a win- so too is it with the Hall. If a book gets enough votes between the reading public and Hall of Fame Committee, they’re in regardless of whether they got 60% of the votes or 90% of them.

But it’s also fun to see just how positively the voting public has responded to a particular book’s candidacy, and I’ve used that metric- the percentage of public voters voting in favor of induction for a particular book- to populate the leaderboards I’ve shared with everyone here in this companion series.

Today, we’re gonna double down on that- go all in on the fun- but first, a word from our sponsor.

Now, back to our regularly-scheduled program!

What’s new this week is that I’ve broken out the leaderboards. Previously, we just had one side for fantasy and the other for 30K/40K, but it’s been increasingly clear- particularly on the fantasy side of things- that some books are getting ‘shaded out.’

Sure it’s interesting to know what the “Top 20 fantasy books” are, but with no Age of Sigmar title able to crack the list it seems the old fantasy books have a bit of a stranglehold on it. Putting them in their own categories offers a bit more nuance in examining how books are performing- and also reveals some interesting insights about popularity and readership.

So let’s start with the Horus Heresy:

The Horus Heresy

Little surprise that Dan Abnett and Aaron Dembski-Bowden have the strong showing here we’ve seen in the past, but opening the table up to more Horus Heresy books that would have been knocked off by mainline 40K stories presents a much more interesting picture. Graham McNeill, in particular, comes out strong here- not as flashy, perhaps, as the other two gentlemen at the top of the table, but a consistently strong presence in the canon.

What I found particularly interesting here is the lack of books with an ‘approval rating’ in the 60’s. We go right from The Path of Heaven at 59% to Mechanicum at 71%. Not concerning, but simply curious.

Warhammer 40,000

Last time we updated the table (for the books of 2017), the cutoff approval rate to make the Top Twenty was 78%. This is clearly the most competitive field, with the new cutoff only dropping to 75%.

This table really demonstrates the dominance of Abnett and Dembski-Bowden. Outside of two books (For the Emperor by Sandy Mitchell, and Chris Wraight’s The Carrion Throne) 40K is theirs at the top.

Warhammer Fantasy

Since Warhammer Fantasy already owned the fantasy side of things before, there are no changes here. And unless they release an Old World novel that charts highly, this one’s likely fully baked.

It’s a great list of some amazing stories, though, and I’d always recommend a visit for those wanting to see what the ‘world that was’ was like.

Age of Sigmar

That lack of a 20th book is not a typo, but just a result of not (yet) having twenty books in the Age of Sigmar line to rank. This one will have the most volatility for the remainder of the project, since there’s lots of room to grow here. Books with a single-digit approval rating today will be tomorrow’s casualties as Age of Sigmar fiction continues to expand.

That leads me to the second thing that’s interesting here. Those approval ratings are low across the board- Soul Wars is the undisputed king of the hill, here, with just 27%. That’s about half of what the lowest-rated Fantasy book scored in the Fantasy Top Twenty.

What gives?

A closer look tells the tale. Here’s how Soul Wars looked in the polling:

With just a 12.5% vote against induction, Soul Wars actually did quite well in polling… but the overwhelming majority of readers simply had no opinion of it.

This is the biggest driver of why the Fantasy books scored so much lower than the 30K/40K ones. It’s not that they’re worse books, it’s just that they appeal to a much smaller population of Warhammer readers.

This shouldn’t be all that surprising, and is the reason why in the modern era you’re seeing Age of Sigmar account for only about a third of Black Library releases. It just doesn’t have the same level of readership.

The takeaway here is that one shouldn’t look at these low numbers and draw the wrong conclusions. You can still have masterpiece-level books that simply enjoy a smaller target audience, and that doesn’t necessarily prejudice them against successful induction into the Hall of Fame.

And- thus far, at least- it seems like Age of Sigmar has been given its due.

The Author Leaderboard

Finally, here’s the updated author leaderboard, to round out today’s statistical journey through the Hall.

Hall Winners by Number of Books

First off, congratulations to first-time winner Nick Horth, who made it in thanks to the grizzled Age of Sigmar duo Hanniver Toll and Armand Callis!

For the rest of the table, Abnett and Dembski-Bowden continued to keep space between themselves and the rest of the pack, but veterans Chris Wraight, Josh Reynolds, Guy Haley, and John French continue to climb.

With 2020 being the last year of Black Library production for Josh Reynolds (Fabius Bile: Manflayer was released in June of that year), his tally for the Hall will soon be locked in place- barring, of course, any future return.

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

The Writer Files is a companion series to WarhammerTV’s Scribes & Scriveners, sharing highlights from featured interviews as well as looking at the writer and their Black Library history.

A New Face

British writer Mike Vincent is one of the Black Library’s roster of younger talent, having only come aboard in 2024. Since that time he’s had a trio of short stories and two novels to his name, most recently Helbrecht: Sin of Hope.

Vincent’s relatively narrow author profile gives us very little insight about the man behind the pen. From his Simon & Schuster bio we learn only that he is married, has a dog, and loves to be in the great outdoors. Goodreads doesn’t reveal much here either, somewhat dubiously crediting him with early 1990’s books British Railway Steam in Colour and Through Countryside and Coalfield: The GWR's Bristol and North Somerset Railway.

That made the most recent episode of Scribes & Scriveners especially welcome, giving us some insight into a writer who’s breathed a bit of recent life into my favorite Legion, the Night Lords.

Here’s a quick walk through his novel portfolio.

The Remnant Blade

As you’ll see from the Scribes & Scriveners interview that follows, my review of The Remnant Blade got at least one thing right. “I have to imagine that there might have been a little bit more pressure than usual for Mike Vincent to deliver a book worthy of the Legion,” I noted at the time. “Indeed, one Black Library author mentioned to me in passing recently that following ADB with the Night Lords was ‘intimidating… a tall order.’ Not hard to see why!”

The Remnant Blade was an audacious debut, and the community of Black Library readers seemed to applaud the attempt. The book was well-reviewed, as was the return of the Night Lords to a front-and-center role for a book.

Helbrecht: Sin of Hope

In a funny bit of coincidence, Marc Collins (the subject of the first Writer Files feature himself penned a Helbrecht novel, Knight of the Throne back in 2022. Having just released this past weekend (almost a year to the date from his novel debut), time will tell how his sophomore effort is received- but I certainly give him a bit of credit for once again stretching to take a challenging assignment with a significant expectation.

“I like writing competence,” Vincent notes in the book’s Special Edition afterword. “Contrasting a capable protagonist with incapable characters is, I feel, something of a trap, and can tend to false conclusions about the worth or necessity of a protagonist’s decisions. We as an audience like seeing stuff get done, even if it is unspeakably horrible stuff, so competent characters, regardless of where on the monster-hero spectrum they fall, draw us like moths to the flame.

“Fundamentally, this was a story about hope. While hope has no place in 40K, people will always be people, and the will to forge a better tomorrow, however that looks to you, does not wither simply because today is bleak.”

Vincent on Scribes & Scriveners

Finally, last month Vincent 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 Helbrecht: Sin of Hope fast approaching (at time of recording), much of their discussion centered around The Remnant Blade and the Night Lords, and I’ve excerpted it here with light editing.

Alex: So most people know you from The Remnant Blade, a wonderful... I say wonderful, it involves an awful lot of violence and backstabbing, exactly what we want from Warhammer 40,000. But before we get to that, what brought you into Warhammer?

For Vincent, his story is a familiar one of youthful curiosity. “Like many people,” he shared, “I was a wee lad. I had lots of small interactions with it. I’d sort of brush by it in this quite short space of time. Nine, ten years old, mates would turn up with White Dwarfs at school.”

“I remember vividly being on a school trip and walking past an old model shop and seeing some in the window, and being like what is that?” When it turned out one of his friends had some Warhammer minis at home, it was all over. “It was the coolest thing I’d ever seen, and I was hooked from there.”

Alex: How’d you go from there, to writing, and more importantly, writing about Warhammer?

Here too Vincent trod a path familiar to many of us. Enchanted with the lore he found in the books and White Dwarf, he began writing stories of his own. “It wasn’t a separate thing, the keenness for the storytelling was part of my hobby. And so I wrote a lot of Warhammer stories, just off my own back for nobody else but me from a very young age.”

Writing for the Black Library was, as he puts it, “a bit of a bit of a pipe dream.”

“So they run their open submissions window, and I started submitting my first open submissions was when I was seventeen years old, just a wee lad. And bar one, I have submitted to every open submissions window ever since.”

“So... persistence, I guess?”

Alex: Dedication.

“Dedication yes, we’ll go dedication. I’d gotten into the habit...it was a really good practice is what I ended up using it for- writing to a brief and to a deadline. And it was just a good exercise, I really enjoyed the exercise and sent it off. And that was always sort of the end things, really.”

And then one day he heard back that after all these years of being interested in the Black Library, the Black Library was now interested in him.

Alex: So from there obviously we’ve got your open submission, the email, the proposal, how does that evolve into writing a book, your first book for Black Library?

Vincent’s path to a debut novel follows a path common to a great many Black Library writers over the years, which involves proving yourself first with short stories. For Vincent, tales like Exterminator and The Vengeful Dead showed them what he was capable of. “After three short stories, they said ahh, okay Mike, do you reckon you could do something more longform? To which I said yes, absolutely, completely, completely confident [voice cracks simulating nerves] that I can do that. And yeah, it was a result from that.”

Alex: So did you propose Night Lords, or was that something that was asked of you?

“I chose Night Lords to be my sort of antagonists for my very first short story, the one I submitted,” noted Vincent. “They are one of my favorite factions, in no small part due to Mr. [Aaron] Dembski-Bowden. They’re some villains I can do some cool stuff with.

“And my commissioning editor said, yeah, we quite like how you treated the Night Lords, could you do something else with them? So that let to my second short, Exterminator, which was sort of a Night Lord unleashed from a very, very miserable human perspective.”

From there, he was asked to write a short story based around a “prospective character,” one that could carry a larger narrative. That led to the creation of Dalchian Rassaq, “The Skin Taker” for Blades of Atrocity, released as part of Hereteic Astartes Week in April of 2025 (review).

“They said yeah, we quite fancy [Dalchian] for a longform. Which was terrifying.”

Alex: You mentioned Aaron being one of your influences. How does it feel to sort of tread in the footsteps, cause the Night Lords trilogy is incredibly popular and your approach to the Legion is slightly different than his. It’s a very interesting take. How does it feel to follow that?

Vincent saw the opportunity as something of a dream come true, and in search of inspiration he raced back to pull his battered old copy of Soul Hunter off his shelf. “I got about three pages in and I had to close it. (laughs) I was just shaking. Aww no, how do I follow this?”

Alex (gesturing): Just feel the bar raising...

“It was a huge amount of pressure that sort of all fell on me straight away,” shared Vincent. “I was very, very aware. And of course Si Spurrier’s Lord of the Night was pretty seminal when I read that as a wee teenager. I just had to sort of stop and take a few backwards steps, like, I cannot beat Aaron at his own game. Not by a long shot, and I wouldn’t wish to try.”

He continues: “So I sort of had to think about how I would do it differently, and that led to the very, very conscious decision to make Dalchian completely sort of 40K. He’s not a child of the Heresy, not a veteran of the Long War, he only has a tangential relationship with the legion and with Konrad Curze and those sorts of stories, and that helped me delineate his story, his context.

“But it also gave me something to hang off of, his sort of conflict, his internal conflict. Because he starts out in the short story where he appears as very confident of what he is and what he can do, and that’s not necessarily intrinsically a Night Lord characteristic. He was way overconfident and he got absolutely humiliated. And that’s sort of the incitement for the bitterness that the 8th Legion are so sort of renowned for. And it gave me an interesting way, I thought a quite compelling way, to explore that sort of anguish and agonized frustration that the Night Lords are, is so sort of wrapped up in their identity as a Legion, but to bring it from somewhere else.”

Alex: That’s a double down obviously for the warband, the former Blades of Atrocity having been whittled down significantly. And it’s created this significantly more bitter environment for him.

“Like all Chaos Space Marines, he’s not necessarily a nice character. He’s really compelling and he’s super fun to write, but he’s not a nice guy and so I don’t feel much compunction in putting him through the wringer.

“But that’s really essential. I think that’s really a defining characteristic of the Night Lords is that since the Heresy they haven’t been given what they need to function as a Legion. It’s always been, whatever help they have been given has usually been taken away. Obviously, spectacularly by their own Primarch in their history. They’re always scrabbling around, they’re always the underdog, which I find very, very compelling.”

Alex: There’s never a focal point, a unifying force for them.

“One of the most interesting aspects to write about when it comes to the Night Lords is, is their lack of spiritual or philosophical drive. So they don’t have a big thing that they want to do as a cohesive unit. Which is quite rare in the Warhammer 40K universe, whether its the Imperium or whether is Abaddon the Despoiler or any of the Xeno factions. They have a thing that they’re trying to do, usually, a big and impossible thing for which they will dash themselves against impossible odds, ad infinitum. The Night Lords don’t have that.

“If anything, their struggle is to figure out what they themselves are for. But they are also Astartes, so they have inbuilt into them...”

Alex: This drive...

“They have to do something, they don’t know what it is, but they have to win.”

Alex: They have purpose but no direction.

“Yeah, absolutely. And so its this really interesting sort of dichotomy that you get, that I get to explore is that. The Night Lords just want something, but they don’t necessarily know what it is.”

Alex: There’s a poignant little moment where Ibriel finds the Penitent Engine is using a pain device that has Nostraman origins, and Dalchian hears that and thinks, hhm, that’s interesting. But no further. It’s like if a Space Wolf appeared, this is ancient Fenrisian technology they’d be all over it. He just, there was that connection, that acceptance, ahh yeah that’s vaguely in our region, but at the same time there was no drive. There was no desire to go, oh are we gonna incorporate that into something. There’s no reverence.

For Vincent, this was a conscious decision. “They don’t really respect anything, least of all themselves. That’s part of that. It’s just a curio to him. But its still, it’s meaningful in his context. Its meaningful to the audience. And I think it is meaningful to Dalchian, but he doesn’t know what to do with it, doesn’t know why. And so he just sort of files it for later, because he’s- again, sort of going back to that because of that distance that he has from the sort of foundational mythos of his own Legion even, he sort of keeps it at arm’s length.”

Alex: There’s a sense of irony in the Night Lords lack of that purpose. But it makes them more dangerous, particularly when we discuss the politicking of warbands. They never know exactly what the Night Lords are after, so it actually works to their advantage in that situation. Because when we talk about the Imperium, the massive bureaucracy is always the thing holding it back, and the momentum drives it on. The Legions probably actually have it worse when it comes to the bickering and the politicking and the backstabbing, Dalchian’s great at that, but at the same time he only has a handful of Remnant Blades.

“Yeah, so that was something I’ve always been really compelled by about Chaos Space Marines, is the level to which they were fractured and never have re-coalesced really. I wouldn’t say necessarily it’s worse than the Imperium, but it’s definitely a different shape, it’s a different flavor.”

Alex: More stabby.

“Yeah, it’s a bit more stabby. And it’s a bit less... The Imperium, obviously it’s death by bureaucracy, so it’s wrapped up in process and in institution and it’s sort of just as cruel and miserable but it has that sort of veneer of officialdom. Whereas the Chaos Space Marines are a lot more, because of their innate capacity and because of the level to which they can operate independently of a lot of other heretical institutions, they’re a lot more anti-heroic, I guess.”

Vincent picked back up the thread of Night Lords identity here. “That is a strong point of the Night Lords, that they can be on someone’s side as long as it suits them, and I think that probably goes to the heart of one of the real conflicts of this story in particular. Because of that lack of a sort of spiritual or philosophical driver, the Night Lords can be ruthlessly pragmatic in a way that lots of other characters can’t, they’re [not] bound by their own lofty goals and intentions.”

Alex: So the Night Lords being this incredibly backstabbing, conniving... cunning? group, how did you go about writing them in a way that is compelling without sort of making people assume that around the next corner they’re gonna stab somebody else.

“Good question,” he replied. “Again, they’re not having a sort of philosophical drive, that needs to be counterbalanced by your characters and your main character having a very powerful personal drive. Something very much that he wants to achieve, which he does. And its, to me, its again a strength of the Night Lords is that their choices whether to engage or not or how to go about pursuing their particular objective are driven by the objective that its the ends, not the means.

“So that allows you to, in a way it makes them more compelling because they can come at certain problems in quite a human way. They can choose- especially when there’s only a handful of them- they can choose to be circumspect or to try to concoct victory that is not just sort of direct confrontation. And when they choose to avoid the big scary thing, I think that’s something we sort of recognize in ourselves hopefully. I think it doesn’t make much sense to just throw yourself meaninglessly against certain death. Whereas that’s kind of a lot of Space Marines, especially Loyalist Space Marines, is that that’s kind of their schtick. They will fight to the last drop of blood, every single time.”

Alex: It’s that whole, ‘know no fear’ aspect of them. I can’t back down from this confrontation. But to the Night Lords, [it’s] why am I engaging in this?

“It’s literally that,” concurred Vincent. “It’s that pragmatism again, it’s choosing their battles, choosing what they actually want out of a situation because it’s not just victory for victory’s sake. It has to be of practical value, it has to be of worth to engage it. But I do think that lulls your audience into a false sense of security, or I try to lull them into a false sense of security because they sort of are conniving, ducking and diving for a bit and they get sort of funneled into a dead end.”

“That contrast was something that I really enjoyed playing with. To make them, ohh yeah of course they’re gonna run away… of course they’re gonna sneak around… of course they’re gonna sneak out of this. Oh no- they’re actually gonna tear it up. And there’s going to be not a lot left once they’re finished, because they’re still Space Marines, because they still have that capacity and that physicality.

“I found it really compelling to write, it was a wonderful sort of duality and it’s something you can reflect in the characters as well. So there are some characters who are very sneaky and very conniving, and will almost avoid a confrontation at all costs. And there are some characters who will let the objective fall by the wayside and simply seek out confrontation, so I used that, I mirrored that within the warband itself as sort of a mechanic for narrative drive and tension.”

Alex: You mentioned the end- now, spoiler for anybody who’s not read the book- they end up with a Black Ship. That’s terrifying. There’s a huge potential there, obviously, the Night Lords in charge of an incredibly stealthy ship. Any hint as to what the purpose of this is, or is this again, that was the ends then, but now there is something else and this is the method by which we’re getting there.

“Well I guess this is a key question for Dalchian,” replied Vincent, “as the character that he is at the end of the story, having gone through what he’s gone through, and now having this tremendously powerful prize. Because the question of his journey is always about what he needs to do versus what he wants to do versus what his fellow warriors want him to do. And it sort of almost leaves the echo ringing once you finish the book, the question of what he is going to do with it.”

“But yeah, there’s certainly a lot that he could do. (laughs) There is huge potential and I think it will be really interesting to explore that potential, yeah.”

Alex: Speaking of that, is there an aspect of Warhammer 40,000, Age of Sigmar, anything within the Warhammer universe that you would like to explore.

“Well the glib answer is ‘all of it,’ obviously.”

But Vincent narrowed down what he finds most compelling to write about in the Warhammer universe. “I love the frontiers, the wild edges. I love the bits where what we know about the universe is very thin, very fuzzy, and whether that’s in the depths of some forsaken hive somewhere or whether it’s on the fringes of the core stars or wherever. Anywhere where the lines are blurred and you haven’t got these huge edifices. Like, I love stories about Terra and I love stories about Ultramar, I love stories about those big sort of...”

Alex: Well-known and well-trod...

“…but they are the center of things. And that has its own power and majesty- of course it does- but I love the scrappy bits at the edges, the burnt ends.

Alex: So your journey to writing this book, we’ve got the Black Library submissions process for many years, finally the short stories... Do you have any advice for writers that were in your position?

“Keep writing. It’s such an obvious thing to say, but it’s so easy- especially if you’re not sure where its going, either narratively or in your own life, if you haven’t got an agent, if you haven’t got a publisher, if you’re just writing it can be really easy to convince yourself that there’s no point doing it.

“Decide who you’re writing for as well, because there are thousands- millions- of people who write stories for themselves. And that is a beautiful thing, and I love that. I did it for many years, I was the only person who read the stuff I wrote. And its great, its a great way to spend your time and to use your brain.

“If you want to write commercially, then the craft. That’s something I come across with a handful of beginning writers, they’re full of awesome ideas and really cool concepts, but there is a tendency to sort of ignore the basics. And they are the basics for a reason, so plot and character and arcs and motivations and things like that. It can be dry, but it doesn’t have to be. But an awareness of it, even if youy are then going to subvert it. I think its certainly allowed me to suddenly see a story and a character as like a whole thing rather than just, I’m typing along and I have no idea where it’s going.

“So learn your craft, keep writing, and keep submitting as well. There’s so many different places depending on what you write, especially now that we have the magic internet. There’s so many places to go with writing. Find those places. Ask people. Get emails of authors you admire and get in contact with them. Be necky, because with any creative endeavor no one is going to come along and drag you along with them. You do have to put yourself out there and push yourself and persist for over half of your life, until (laughs) someone picks you up.

Alex: It’s been absolutely brilliant to talk to you. Thank you so much for being here.

Thanks for reading today’s profile of Mike Vincent. There are plenty of Scribes & Scriveners both ahead and behind, so look for the next installment in the near future!

For awhile there, my frequent long drives back and forth from Houston let me rip through quite a number of audiobooks- so many that I still have a backlog of reviews to write- and I’d hoped that the end of those trips would mean that things would slow down on the audio front and I’d be able to catch up a little. After all, I only listen to audiobooks when I drive, and I don’t presently have a work commute.

With that in mind and with October approaching, I opted to take a nice detour into the worlds of Warhammer Horror with Dark Harvest, by Josh Reynolds. What’s Spooky Season without the spooky, right?

As it turns out, I missed the mark on two fronts.

First, with hockey season kicking off and three of my kids playing, I underestimated how many trips I’d be taking to the rink.

And second, I underestimated just how damn good this book would be, which found me squeezing in extra listening sessions whenever I could. From listening while watching hockey practice to listening while doing the laundry, I raced through this story with a week to spare before October even began.

Ahh well, it was a nice thought all the same.

Horror Folk

Not long ago as part of my occasional Beyond the Black Library series over on Tabletop Battles (where I look at non-Black Library books by Black Library authors), I reviewed White Feathers, Crimson Leaves. Also by Reynolds, this was billed as a folk horror tale set in the world of Legend of the Five Rings. While I enjoyed the book, in my review I did note that it didn’t quite live up to my expectations of folk horror, but rather was more in the supernatural adventure/detective vein.

Dark Harvest, on the other hand, delivered that vibe in spades. Set in Age of Sigmar’s Ghyran, the Realm of Life, Reynolds skillfully transforms a remote corner the lush, verdant plane into an oppressive green hell that’s as much a character as any in the book.

The story involves gang enforcer Harran Blackwood, a former and disgraced Warrior-Priest of Sigmar and ex-member of the Order of Azyr. After receiving a cryptic message from an old colleague, Blackwood makes his way to the distant, swamp-cradled town of Wald to find out what he knows and, if necessary, silence him forever.

Accompanied by Gint, a card sharp he met on caravan duty, Blackwood soon finds himself encountering suspicious, insular townsfolk, a capricious and erratic lord, a sadistic local sheriff, and the stirrings of an ancient and malevolent god beneath the soil. Like a hunk of meat tossed amidst the leopard eels infesting the swamps, he is beset on all sides as he tries to uncover the truth of what’s really going on in Wald- and why he was summoned there.

The Voice

Dark Harvest is brought to magnificent life by Jake Urry, who despite having a fairly expansive catalogue of narrative work availaable on Audible has only voiced two Warhammer books (the other being Black-Eyed Saint, by Dale Lucas).

Right away, I could tell I was going to be in for a very different experience. I’ve been well accustomed to a more heroic tone and timbre from audiobook narrators, which makes a lot of sense when dealing with the mainline stories of Warhammer. But Urry’s sinister vocal presence and slower, deliberative pacing were a perfect match for the book.

Typically when assessing narrators (especially for my first time hearing them), I look at two different elements of their delivery. First, how their natural ‘reading voice’ is, and second, what their range is when reading lines for other characters. Urry cleared the bar for both; his range of characters were notable not only because of the change in voice affect for each, but he truly inhabited the characters of Blackwood and Gint. Because the story is told in the first person, Blackwood of course is the ‘default’ voice of the book, and there’s almost a noirish detective element at work here. It’s riveting stuff.

When you match the right book to the right narrator, as with Robert Rath’s Fall of Cadia, you end up with a truly magical bit of Warhammer media. I found that to be the case here, and as a result Black-Eyed Saint is going straight onto my Audible wish list for the next sale.

Bits n’ Pieces (Possible Spoilers)

• There’s a lot of parallels between this story and White Feathers, Crimson Leaves, making this feel very much like a Reynolds story in all the good ways. From lingering ghosts/geists that exist almost as mute spectators, to the idea of the land itself being a source of gloom and corruption, atmospheric mystery is something he excels at.

• The rustic horror element was on point here as well, with tonal echoes of The Wicker Man, Children of the Corn, or even The Shadow Over Innsmouth. The fish-out-of-water1 visitor to an isolated rural community, one that keeps faith with the old ways, with things ancient and primal and doesn’t like to be disturbed… these may be common tropes in horror but Reynolds weaves them in with Warhammer with terrific effect.

• I’d have loved to have seen this set up more adventures with Blackwood and Gint even if the story’s direction precluded this possibility. The interplay between the two was every bit as enjoyable as that of Callis and Toll.

• Reynolds crushed it in depicting the gloomy, damp oppression of the swamp. It drips off of Urry’s every utterance, and as mentioned earlier is almost a character in its own right. That last time I saw this done so effectively was Fire Caste by Peter Fehervari.

• Urry’s slower pace was a perfect match for Renyolds’ writing here, as he also takes his time in the story’s more descriptive passages. It never overstays its welcome, instead languidly setting scenes that serve to heighten the book’s delicious tension.

• Even when the book was moving towards its conclusion at the end, Reynolds didn’t succumb to the temptation to race for a finish. Instead, you get one of the book’s best, most intense passages recalling the murder of a Stormcast Eternal.

• I enjoy the Age of Sigmar setting, though it’s a bit higher fantasy than I tend to prefer. This was AoS at its most grimdark, and that might be one of the saddest casualties of the soft scuttling of the Warhammer Horror imprint.

• Finally, while Urry has a very miniscule internet footprint (his personal website is no longer available), he did briefly feature on the audiobook podcast AudioShelf with an amusing recording of him attempting to narrate Edgar Allen Poe’s The Raven.

At some point if I get around to keeping a “Top Ten” favorite audiobooks, this one’s in with a bullet.

Or cornhusk antlers, take your pick.

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.

The comedian Rodney Dangerfield built an entire career on the back of the perception of being perpetually undervalued- not for nothing his 1980 Grammy-winning comedy album was titled No Respect. “I could tell my parents hated me,” he characteristically joked. “My bath toys were a toaster and a radio. When I played in the sandbox, the cat kept covering me up.”

While he played the image to perfection for laughs, Dangerfield was very successful. He was a regular on the late-night talk-show circuit in the 1960’s and 70’s, headlined shows in Vegas, and his breakout film role in 1980’s Caddyshack led to a succession of films in the 80’s and 90’s.

The juxtaposition between Dangerfield’s on-stage persona and personal one was of course deliberate (he’d paid his dues as a struggling jokewriter and comedian before adopting the persona), but this week it put me in mind of longtime Black Library author Guy Haley. Like Dangerfield’s persona, Haley too doesn’t necessarily get the respect he deserves.

“Guy Haley is the vanilla of the Black Library,” said one commentor in the Black Library Subreddit, “he gets the job done and is given the big things to handle because Abnett is too busy. Like vanilla he's good.”

While that’s somewhere between a genuine compliment and ‘damning with faint praise’ territory, Haley’s reputation in Black Library reader circles has generally been as a steady and dependable writer, stronger in substance than in flair and with a high fidelity to the lore and close relationship to the tabletop

I’m not sure that’s entirely fair.

“Honestly he’s a sleeper writer like people talk about ADB and Dan Abnett but Guy Haley is up there too,” read one comment on a Reddit thread praising Haley’s stories.

Haley’s case for greatness received a nice boost this weekend, with Dante, Dark Imperium, and The Devastation of Baal entering the Black Library Readers’ Hall of Fame. Fittingly enough, he’s only the third Black Library author to ever manage that incredible feat, as he joins William King (Class 1999-2000’s Skavenslayer, Space Wolf, and Trollslayer), and Aaron Dembski-Bowden (Class of 2010’s The First Heretic, Helsreach, and Soul Hunter).

With this bringing his Hall of Fame total to five, he’s now in the top 25% of Hall of Fame authors by book count as well. Not a bad place to be at all!

So for those sleeping on Haley, today’s inductions may well be one heck of an alarm clock.

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

First off, congratulations to first-time winner Robbie MacNiven, who entered on the strength of his trilogy-opening Red Tithe! The Carcharodons have long been a fan-favorite, so that comes as little surprise.

Next, the “middle tier1” Josh Reynolds pushed himself past Sandy Mitchell to draw level with the legendary William King. And Guy Haley firmly climbs into that tier just on the strength of this incredible year.

Finally, frontrunners Dan Abnett and Aaron Dembski-Bowden climb up a rank apiece.

Fantasy/Age of Sigmar

No changes to Fantasy/AoS this time, but wait till we see what happened on the other half…

30K/40K

A seismic change! The congestion at the bottom of the table has long been teetering, but Aaron Dembski-Bowden’s Black Legion coming in to tie at #19 finally gives a shove to clear out the table a bit. We bid adieu to the incredible six books that were all clinging by their fingernails:

• Betrayer, by Aaron Dembski-Bowden

• Double Eagle, by Dan Abnett

• Know No Fear, by Dan Abnett

• Only in Death, by Dan Abnett

• Ravenor Returned, by Dan Abnett

• The Talon of Horus, by Aaron Dembski-Bowden

So what does this mean for the table? Well, Dan Abnett now sees his dominance slightly reduced, owning just under 50% of the table. ADB is right behind with seven entries, and all other authors account for just four. I haven’t run a number crunch on the “percentage of author’s books that made it into the hall,” but I suspect ADB would be untouchable there. I may do just that for next time; I’ve got the stat-loving heart of a baseball fanatic.

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

Black Library Bibliophiles is our occasional series on the collection and display of Black Library books. From diving between the covers of deluxe editions to chasing rare treatments and notable misprints… from collectors’ well-stocked personal libraries to the curated display of trinkets, curios, and other Warhammer memorabilia… we go beyond the pages to celebrate the love of the books themselves.

Few people would argue that the most important thing you get when you order a deluxe edition from Games Workshop is the book, right? I mean, that’s what we’re all doing this for, our love of the stories and tales and legends and- when it comes to the fancier editions- their visual and tactile appeal.

But the book is not the only thing you get when you receive a deluxe edition. You also get a tissue-paper wrapping, color-coordinated with the design of the book within. There’s a circular sticker, with an icon unique to that release, holding the tissue paper together. And, finally, there’s a form-fitted box that keeps the book safe1.

The question we’re looking at today is, what is the value of what we’ll call these extras… and are they worth holding on to?

You can usually tell what a collectible community values by the premium attached to it. How can you tell that the sports card and comic book industries value condition, for instance? Because better-condition copies sell for more than worse-condition ones. Collectible card games like Magic: the Gathering offer additional considerations that fit the bill, such as playability/card power and even exclusivity/scarcity.

A great example of the later recently played out with the most recent set release. Both the cards below do the exact same thing- functionally, they’re identical, and no competitive advantage is gained in playing either over the other. Yet, at time of writing, the one on the left lists on TCGPlayer for about fifty bucks, and the one on the right at $32,0002.

Whenever I bemoan the collector state of the Warhammer hobby3, I count my blessings that it’s nowhere near as commercialized as the sports card hobby and, over time, what’s been happening to Magic: the Gathering4.

All the same, it’s worth bearing in mind that once Henry Cavill’s passion project drops on Amazon, interest in Warhammer will be at an all-time high. If you think a slabbed and graded, PSA 10 copy of the Night Lords Boxed Set seems ridiculous, consider that the Smaug on the right would have been at least as preposterous to Magic players not all that long ago5.

So again, people tend to pay a premium for what’s important to them.

The Market Argument

As someone who spends a lot of time online where Black Library books are bought and sold, when it comes to the ‘extras’ for a deluxe edition- the shipping box, the tissue paper, the label- in my experience these are important considerations for about 10% of the collector public.

There aren’t any great consumer studies done on the matter6, but I’m basing this off of what I see in the sales listings and conversations around them. Potential buyers saying “I’d be interested at that price, but only if you had the original packaging,” for example, would be a tell that the market has a baked-in premium on the extras, but that’s by far the exception rather than the norm. Books sold by themselves versus with the extras sell just as quickly, and for typically around the same amount of money.

So what value, then, are the ‘extras,’ and why would someone want to retain them?

From a market perspective, it certainly makes sense to appeal to the broadest range of potential customers, right? If by throwing them away you can appeal to 90% of consumers but by including them in the listing you get 100%, why wouldn’t you?

The Archivist Argument

For many, a product’s original packaging is just an inconvenient barrier between the product’s natural state on the retail shelf and the enjoyment they’ll have once its opened and in their hands. Toys are meant to be played with, and books are meant to be read.

But at the same point, is there not some value and enjoyment in seeing a product’s original packaging? Check out ol’ B9 in the above image, standing next to the box you might have seen on the store shelves if you were a kid in the 1960’s. Art and design went into making that box, isn’t that worth preserving as a relic of its era?

To be fair, the cardboard box that Black Library deluxe editions come in is nothing too fancy in comparison- you have to look at the bottom of the box’s product info block to even know what book is contained within- but the tissue paper and sticker that seals the wrapping are the product of the same design process that brings you all of the other elements of a book’s treatment. They’re arguably one component amongst several that constitute the special edition of the book itself, and worthy of preservation.

“This is how it came if you bought it the day it arrived” counts for something- even if it’s not everyone’s cup of tea.

Do What Makes You Happy

This, I think, is the most important takeaway. You’ve spent your money, do what you like with it. If you aren’t concerned with a potential future resell or preserving every aspect of an edition’s design components, you shouldn’t give a moment’s thought about tossing the original packaging into the bin7.

At the moment, Black Library and Warhammer remains on the right side of the hobby/investment divide. Scalpers are a problem, for example, but it could certainly be worse- go ask any casual Pokémon CCG player or collector, where an entire cottage industry has parasitically sprung up around obtaining sealed product in big box retailers and flipping them for multiples of price.

That means that ultimately, there’s no wrong answer here. The boxes and tissues have very little intrinsic value outside of book accompaniment, otherwise we’d see them appearing on resale sites like eBay from folks happy to keep the book but looking to recoup a bit of its cost.

I can tell you that storing a large quantity of them is a bit of a pain in the ass, too (note the earlier picture of a box-filled tote that contributes nothing other than taking up space). Even if you take the time to flatten them8, it adds up quickly. If you’re not concerned about potential resale or preservation, off they go to the Great Beyond.

Because the point of the Black Library Bibliophiles series is to look at all elements of collection and “should we save the paper” is a common question from those joining the hobby, it’s a question worth considering- especially if you’re just getting into the hobby.

August’s Deluxe Offerings

Those who have champagne wishes and caviar dreams for their personal libraries at home had several reasons to enjoy what hit the shelves in August.

I’m trying something new this month here, with some short video clips of the books. That’s because I’ve frequently found that the deluxe edition treatments don’t always translate well into still photography, where it’s difficult to make out the full range of textures and hues that are used to make them pop on the shelf.

They’ll be a little rough while I get the hang of it, so consider it a work in progress!

Bjorn, the Fell-Handed (Special Edition), by Justin D. Hill

Galaxy in Flames (Premium Edition), by Ben Counter

Mephiston Box Set, by Darius Hinks

The Wicked and the Warped (Special Edition), by Robert Rath

It was pretty fun to just riff on books vocally for a bit, but if nothing else I hope this helps get an idea of what these books look like in real life, not just the promotional stills.

What a Weekend

It’s difficult to imagine now, but back in the simpler, pre-pandemic days Games Workshop used to hold an annual convention dedicated to all things Black Library. These Black Library Weekenders would have appearances from a number of authors, contributor panels and product previews, as well as merchandise exclusive to the event.

Recently u/yannabus shared one of their more treasured collector pieces, a programme from Black Library Weekend II in 2013. As shown from the shared snaps, yannabus did terrific work making the rounds and getting many of the luminaries present to grab a marker and sign their John Hancock.

If nothing else, take a moment to marvel at what it must have been like once upon a time to get all of those writers into a single event. While the Black Library collector community seems less enamored of philography than some other fandoms9, it’s still quite impressive. Thanks for sharing that, yannabus!

Community Shelfies

I’m a huge fan of glass-fronted, lighted cabinetry for book and curio display, and Nick Chopp’s library here is aesthetically magnificent. I particularly like how he’s set the boxed sets at the top, though of course being outside the glass means Nick almost certainly keeps a feather duster nearby!

Here’s Nils Kreutzfeldt’s library, using a square-display type of shelving (an IKEA Kallax unless I miss my guess). Nils has one of those libraries that’s just visually fun to crawl through, as it has pockets here and there of “mini-collections” rather than one big integrated shelving system. I spy with my little eye all four of Steve Lyons’s Krieg Special Editions here, and there is a run of Da Red Gobbo novellas!

And if you like Where’s Waldo-type visual puzzles, bonus points for finding the Jet Medallion from Tempest!

A couple of shelves from Corey Don Sprang’s library here, this is a great illustration of why the print-on-demand series tend to remain in perpetually high demand. Back in 2023, the Black Library began offering POD reprints of the Gaunt’s Ghosts and Commissar Cain series, and both are visually striking examples of what can be done with that format.

Note also Corey’s got the full nine-book run of the Dawn of Fire paperback series on the shelf, with Throne of Light being the gem in that particular collector’s crown.

When u/Mental_Olive269 shared this in the Black Library subreddit with its incredible collection of JOYTOY figures, I had to ask to see more.

I was not disappointed!

While I personally prefer actual Warhammer miniatures in my library over the action figure ranges, there’s no denying they’ve got an arresting visual appearance to them. It’s not hard to imagine putting some of these in and around a particular legion’s deluxe edition books to really make the shelf pop!

Finally, Jon Tod Weiss added some lighting and decoration to his own shelves and the effect is terrific. The plants are artificial, so there’s no worry about moisture or insects interfering with the safe condition of the books. The Ork Goff plush pairs nicely with the plants, too!

That’s it for this month’s Black Library Bibliophiles! Next time we’ll be looking at August’s deluxe edition books, more display inspirations from around the community, and plenty more!

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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!

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.

Black Library Bibliophiles is our occasional series on the collection and display of Black Library books. From diving between the covers of deluxe editions to chasing rare treatments and notable misprints… from collectors’ well-stocked personal libraries to the curated display of trinkets, curios, and other Warhammer memorabilia… we go beyond the pages to celebrate the love of the books themselves.

If, a year ago, you were told that Chinese toymaker JOYTOY would be having a product announcement during the 2025 Big Summer Preview, odds are pretty good you would have assumed it was going to be a new wave of action figures. After all, the 1/18th scale figures had been their bread and butter offering since acquiring the Warhammer license in 2021.

Instead, they were kicking off an entirely new product line- one that puts them squarely in the frame of library display. When the first 1:1 scale Space Marine helmet decked out for Lieutenant Titus in Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2 hit the screen, it was a perfect addition to my Black Library Museum.

Today we’ll be giving it a thorough look- both this helmet and the line.

The Hat Makes the (Transhu-)Man

So the first thing to note is that it’s big, with the interesting “in-between” dynamic of being scaled by Astartes but wearable by us mortals. In my head I’d envisioned it sitting snugly on the top shelf of one of my displays, a nice centerpiece for the Ultramarines wing.

Not a chance. With the optional display stand, this thing’s a beast. For those who are considering adding one of these to their Black Library collection, don’t rely on eyeballs and vibes like I did. Get out the tape measure and make sure for yourself. For me, it instead had to sit on top of the display altogether.

I added Bobby G. on that last pic just to help give a sense of proportion.

The optional stand it sits on is a nice bit of work. I’m always impressed by the inclusion of less-necessary details, such as the decorations on the stand itself that aren’t really visible when you’ve mounted the helmet (which will be almost all of the time for most folks).

This being a helmet, of course, it’s meant to be worn. While it’s bulky and cumbersome and not the easiest thing in the world to see through1, it is rather comfortable thanks to some thoughtful padding placement on the inside.

That third picture also shows the battery compartment, as this thing’s illuminated. It takes two AAA batteries, and it’s an easy installation. The helmet’s lights have a toggle switch that’s visible in that first pic, just below the headband.

When turned on, you get two red-colored lights just above the eyes. Were I to wear this as a prop, I’d probably want to build in a little visor of some kind to keep the light out of my eyes, as it’s a bit intrusive. The batteries are visible in that first pic for display, but the cover is one of the ‘snap-in’ types that’s simple to remove2.

Buyer’s Remorse?

Overall I found this to be a solid product that was nicely made and won’t make you feel badly about the pricetag if it happens to be the kind of collectible you enjoy displaying. Altogether with shipping it’s going to be above $200- again, it’s big, and the box it comes in is very well padded making it even bigger- so it’s a centerpiece level of investment for most.

For me, it’s an odd fit, and the second time I jumped at a luxury collectible that ended up being a bit bigger than I’d expected and therefore not quite a match for my museum display. (The previous time was the Sanguinius limited edition Displate, which I reviewed here). That’s certainly no fault of JOYTOY’s, and I’m perfectly happy letting it sit atop one of the display stands rather than within it.

That said, in a world where I had an unlimited checkbook I’d grab one of every one of these they made. It’s not hard to imagine having a display case for each of the 20 18 Legions, with one of these proudly sitting atop it.

Since I don’t, I’m going to enjoy having the one where it is in my office, sitting above the Ultramarines display. But JOYTOY, if you ever expand the range and make a Night Lords parade helm, bat wings and all… we’ll meet again.

The Line Forms Here

JOYTOY’s designers have mastered both the art of individuation as well as iteration. Their action figure line for Warhammer is incredibly varied, yet they also expand the range through variations on a theme where appropriate. And given Warhammer’s technical modularity, where a lot of power armor really is largely the same outside of factional customization, it works:

Little surprise, then, that with the helmet line presumably selling well enough to warrant continuation, JOYTOY has begun pushing out the boundaries of what it’s able to offer.

The range of helmets now extends to five, with generic (non-character-specific) options available for the Ultramarines, Dark Angels, White Scars, and (currently on preorder) Blood Angels.

Each is available with and without the display stand, which adds an additional USD $30 to the helmet price of $160.

Now, let’s take a look at some books!

July’s Deluxe Offerings

Those who have champagne wishes and caviar dreams for their personal libraries at home had several reasons to enjoy what hit the shelves in July.

Ghosts of Cadia (Special Edition), by Rob Young

On occasion, the designers of the deluxe editions like to pretend you’re plucking something right out of the grim, dark future and sticking it on your shelf. The Special Editon of Robbie MacNiven’s Vagabond Squadron, for example, looked like a technical manual complete with a few grease stains right off of a mechanic’s table.

This time, though, they really outdid themselves with the visual trompe l’oeil that made the book look creased and well-worn. Check the ‘creases’ out on that title page, or the scuffing on the back cover. If I didn’t have it in my hand I wouldn’t believe that wasn’t the result of a bad day at the printer’s.

Overall it’s a solid design, nothing all that flashy aside from the gold foiling on the cover. There’s an author’s afterword, which is one of the features I most enjoy from deluxe editions.

For the Emperor (Illustrated and Annotated Edition), by Sandy Mitchell

I feel a bit like Flavva Flav to GW’s Chuck D here, but I won’t stop bragging on these editions. Pound for pound they’re one of the best values in the Black Library and the perfect ‘starter book’ for building up a deluxe collection. Added art throughout the inside of the book paired with a treasure trove of author insights, all in a lovely sprayed-edge hardcover with ribbon bookmark. Chef’s kiss.

Don’t be thrown by the spartan foreword, there’s also a lengthier afterword from Mitchell at the end of the book. Indeed, this is the first book I can recall that’s offered both.

I recently reviewed Robert Rath’s The Infinite and Divine from this series, and a full review of For the Emperor is right around the corner.

Cainaphanalia

Alongside the new edition of For the Emperor, it was a good time to be a Ciaphas Cain fan as we finally got to see him in plastic. While the official Games Workshop photo gave Cain and Jurgen something of a simian appearance I didn’t love, I actually prefer the unpainted look for most of my minis and they look much better on their own.

We also saw the release of a new regimental banner, this one for the Valhallans. For scale, I put the Cain/Jurgen mini in the center, so it’s a nice size for your wall or shelf. The banner is made of canvas and is great, but the cord and dowel setup are fairly chincy. Still, it’s not something you’ll notice once you’ve got it up.

Rynn’s World (Special Edition), by Steve Parker

Yeah, stock photos for this one. If you’ve been following my Rynn’s World saga the last few weeks as it’s unfolded in Black Library Weekly, you already know my heartbreak. The TLDR is this: I successfully managed to score one online, but when the box arrived at my local Warhammer store we opened it to find the picker had tossed in something that… wasn’t… my book. Not even remotely close.

Fair play to GW, I got a “double-refund” for my trouble (which I later used to get the Mephiston Box Set), but all subsequent efforts to track down another copy have come to naught.

Consequently, I can’t give any firsthand appreciation for the work that went into this one. Perhaps someday, once the ‘scalper rush’ calms down.

False Gods (Premium Edition), by Graham McNeill

Finally, the Horus Heresy Saga rolls on with the Premium Edition of Graham McNeill’s sophomore entry. It has a lovely leatherette cover with embossed metal medallion, with a spine treatment that looks awfully classy when seated alongside others that are similar.

As a Premium Edition, there’s no unique numbering or author autographs here, but it does have a small six-panel map folded up and seated within. Sadly, no additional author commentary from McNeill.

Community Shelfies

Finally, some shelfies that caught my eye recently from around the community, because as much as I like to look at what’s in my own study, it’s a blast to see how others are displaying their own collections!

Here’s u/robynjames777’s Gaunt’s Ghosts shelf, with the recent edition of The Sabbat Worlds Crusade as well as a number of the print-on-demand novels by Dan Abnett.

I wanted to highlight this one, though, because of their display’s centerpiece. It’s always great to see people go outside the usual when decorating their library, and this was a framed printout that really pulls it together.

Speaking of going outside the usual, nobody should have to wonder what Devin Lea’s favorite faction is, and it’s probably not revealed by the presence of that one hapless Tyranid. Plenty of Black Library books, Games Workshop goodies, and Etsy pickups have made this less of a library and more of a shrine.

If I might offer one suggestion to those who store their books like this, it’s that having them out in the open makes them a magnet for dust and calamity. It might be worth grabbing a few acrylic book protectors to safeguard them- some of those Blood Angel deluxes go for stupid money on the secondary market- and if you have a decent painting hand you can even thematically decorate the acrylic cases, too!

A ‘first shelfie’ is always a special moment, because it’s the first time you realize you’ve built something worth photographing. It’s no longer just a collection of books, but a thing greater than the sum of its parts. A collection.

u/Own-Function6537 celebrated getting a new place that had room for theirs by posting it up, and ever since I’ve seen this image I’ve been ruminating on how slick it looks to have tight shelf spacing. I have a lot of “dead air” in mine- easily enough for another shelf if I was able to compress the unusued space- and when the time finally arrives for shelf upgrades this is exactly the kind of functionality I’ll be looking for.

Having little air gap atop the books also is a great way to reduce the dust that loves to collect on books.

Matt Kadish also enjoys working JOYTOY figures into his collection to great effect, and the plastic is definitely competing for available display space with the paper. Matt noted he’d had to banish the paperbacks to a new shelf (don’t worry, he notes he’s ‘working on’ a solution to shield them from the sun), though these days copies of Throne of Light and The Wolftime can go for as much (or more) than a new Limited Edition hardcover.

Thanks to all those who take the time to open up their collections and show them off, it’s great to see these books being so treasured.

That’s it for this month. Until next, may your library be every bit the collection you want- or at least be moving in that direction!

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.

Somewhere around 2011 or 2012, Games Workshop appears to have made the painful and difficult decision to kill off Warhammer Fantasy Battles1. The fans wouldn’t know this for a few years yet, but the property was a dead man walking.

When looking to understand why GW would kill off a storied property that had enjoyed three decades of lore, story, and development, there are three major factors to consider.

The Financial

By the time you saw the game’s 8th Edition in 2010, its most prosperous days were well behind it. It’s often cited that a Space Marine Tactical Squad box by itself was outselling the entire Warhammer Fantasy Battles product range, and whether that’s true or not it certainly hits at a financial reality for the game: it just wasn’t making money.

There’s a number of reasons for this- as with any property consumer interest comes and consumer interest goes depending on all sorts of factors both internal and external. But it didn’t help that the barrier to entry for the game was quite high. Building a playable army required a substantial investment, while your most mature consumer base- who already had their preferred armies bought- weren’t incentivized to continue their purchasing2.

Games that don’t make money do not stay games forever.

The Legal

In 2010, Games Workshop sued a Texas-based company called Chapterhouse Studios over copyright and trademark infringement. Chapterhouse had existed on the margins of Warhammer; it wasn’t so much creating counterfeit miniatures as selling miniatures accessories (heads, shoulder pads, weapons, etc.) for players to customize their Warhammer models.

Chapterhouse fought back, using the defense that they were in the aftermarket business selling non-infringing accessories that were simply “compatible with” Warhammer figures. After a bruising three-year trial, the jury ruled in favor of Games Workshop- but only just. Damages were reduced down to $25,000, and GW left to learn some painful hard truths about their market position.

For one thing, the entire affair revealed just how exposed their IP was. Orcs, Elves, Space Marines, Imperial Guard… far too many of Warhammer’s core factions were based upon concepts that were firmly in the public domain, and therefore could not be trademarked. Now Orruks, Aeldari, Drukhari, Adeptus Astartes, or Astra Militarum… now those are substantially more enforceable.

Given how much of Warhammer Fantasy’s IP was based on a blend standard, Tolkien-esque tropes and Renaissance Europe, however, the writing was almost certainly on the wall. What looked rich and deep to us fans on the inside looked generic and unprotectable in a court of law.

The Narrative

Warhammer Fantasy- based as it was on European history with a seasoning of fantasy- did not have a lot of narrative agility. By having everything tightly locked on a map you had to do a lot of lorework if you wanted to introduce, say, a new faction, or shake things up politically. Sure 40K had a “map” of the galaxy, but its immense size meant that you could stage just about anything anywhere and not bump into anything around it.

The flexibility of settings like AD&D’s Planescape (released in 1994) was surely not lost on Games Workshop, with the “planar model” meaning things could be added and subtracted almost at will with minimal disruption to the rest of the setting.

Ripping the Bandaid Off

The transition from Warhammer Fantasy to the Age of Sigmar presented Games Workshop with a problem- but also an opportunity. The problem they keenly wanted to avoid was having too long a lead time between the demise of one franchise and the birth of its replacement. After all, gamers tend not to sit still, and if the market was allowed to move on from WFB while Games Workshop worked on its replacement, they’d find no small portion of the market no longer there when Age of Sigmar launched.

This required a fair bit of behind-the-scenes coordination, with development of the Age of Sigmar property going full tilt behind the scenes while Warhammer Fantasy began its sunset. Narratively, this found its fruition in The End Times, a story-based detonation of the entire property woven through both the tabletop as well as the fiction of the Black Library.

I was never into Warhammer Fantasy; my introduction to 40K came at around this time so I was busy with Eisenhorn, Cain, and Gaunt while the likes of Karl Franz, Thorgrim Grudgebearer, and Vlad von Carstein faded into history. But as I’ve been walking through the hallways of that history thanks to the Black Library Readers Hall of Fame project, it’s been difficult to escape a sense of the maudlin while through its echoes.

This world- these characters- were beloved once.

The End Times was a commercial success for the Black Library, though hardly one without a great deal of controversy and upheaval- not least due to its feeling very compressed and arbitrary. With pallets of Age of Sigmar plastic waiting in the wings, the clock was ticking to wind one world down so that another might be born.

It’s been heartening to see that denouement being well-recognized in the Hall as well. There were more fantasy titles inducted this week than any other property, which might well be a first for the Hall. It may be going out, but it’s not going out with a whimper.

Exactly how it should be.

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

Exciting news for Rob Sanders, of course, as he gets his name amongst what remains very select company indeed. A second for John French and Josh Reynolds, Chris Wraight jumps up a bit, while Aaron Dembski-Bowden draws level with Graham McNeill towards the top of the table.

What’s particularly notable here is that Wraight landed two Hall of Fame books in 2014. Bartender, I’ll have what he’s having, please…

Fantasy

30K/40K

Not a lot of movement in the Top Twenties, but this far along in the project that’s probably to be expected. I think the days of extraordinary unity as seen with books like Horus Rising and For the Emperor are likely behind us, but it’s fun guessing which books have the best shot at landing here in the upper 70’s and 80’s.

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