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.
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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!
Sorry about that, I forgot to update the link to the current article on Tabletop Battles. If you visited that article (which was from two weeks ago), you would have found the poll it linked to for voting to be closed. I’ve updated it to the correct article (today’s, 8/22).
The 128-page book was a tie-in novel for the 5th Edition boxed set of the same name.
By this I mean how many articles this series was expected to take to complete, which from a business side of things is a natural point concern for Tabletop Battles.
I’ve already been planning an article for this coming January that builds a “2026 Anthology” of the dozen best short stories published this year, so there’s that. Might even do a 2025 one at some point.