Another from Xisor:

“What do you feel was your biggest ‘this might not make it’ idea that made it to the final cut? (Were there any such ideas which didn’t?)”

The answer to both questions is the same – Eldar gender-bending… For a long time I dabbled with the idea of having a prominent character who was a male member of the female Howling Banshees. I initially wanted to examine the somewhat fluid nature of Eldar gender and their attitude towards male and female roles and characteristics. In the end I abandoned it because it was too much to get across for a secondary character and would have been more confusing than enlightening; and it simply would have been too much to use such a character as the protagonist for the majority of the BL readership. I did, however, make a very small nod to this by having a female Exarch as the ‘Young King’; something that did cause some discussion with the editors but was eventually kept with a more explicit mention that the title was a non-gender honorific.

From LordLucan

“I liked the myth which hinted that exarchs were once the footsoldiers of Khaine against the normal eldar of Eldanesh. It could be taken as a metaphor or as a veiled reference to perhaps an actual civil war within the war in heaven. Was this a deliberate move on your part Gav?”

I like to muddy the waters when I can, and one thing that has bugged me a bit about a lot of the War in Heaven stuff is the mutation into part of the C’tan/ Necron background. Obviously such a monumental event would be featured in the Eldar mythology, but I wanted the myths to be a real mosaic of different things, not just a poetic record of a single period or event.

This is why some of the myths are deliberately contradictory to some of those already published in the background. A lot of the pantheistic mythologies started out as a real grab-bag of tales and beliefs, and even after a lot of recording and rationalisation they are far from consistent.

For me the War in Heaven is the Eldar take on the expulsion from paradise. At some stage, even before the Fall, the idyllic existence of the Eldar was torn apart by a cataclysmic event. The fact that Khaine, the embodiment of violence within the Eldar themselves, is at the root of this suggests to me a civil war of some kind. If the instigating figure had been Death – now equated to the C’tan Nightbringer in the background – that would have been more of an indication of external attack. How the two are connected, if at all, can remain a subject for fan (and author!) speculation.

There were already hints of division in the background with the rivalry between the houses of Eldanesh and Ulthranesh and I thought it would be cool to extend that a little further. Internal strife has been the downfall of countless civilisations and it seems natural to me that the almost eternal Eldar society would have suffered at least one internecine war. The myth itself I see as a warning against this sort of thing in general, rather than relating to one specific incident – they were likely several such divisions and unifications over the long existence of the pre-Fall civilisation.

More to follow…

Sigvald cover art

For the fourth book in our Warhammer Heroes series we're shining a light on the sinister, depraved world of Prince Sigvald the Magnificent. Series artist, Cheoljoo Lee, has done a great job of capturing Slannesh's most favoured son in all his decadent glory with this incredibly detailed piece of artwork. Sigvald is released in July.

In which formats will eBooks be available?

We will most probably produce our eBooks in Mobi (the Kindle format), ePub (most other eReaders such as the Sony Reader and Barnes & Noble Nook) at the very least. We are still looking into this; more info to come.

reds8n wrote:

Oh, and

It seems to go better here than anywhere else.
Dan Abnett's Gamesday photos

For those of you who haven't already heard, the Black Library submissions window is reopening for a brief period to allow submissions for Treacheries of the Space Marines - a Chaos Marine-themed anthology coming in 2012 from Black Library.

Stories must be focussed on one of the following characters - Lucius, Ahriman, Khârn or Typhus - and we need no more than 1,000 words of synopsis and 500 words of sample text. All submissions should be sent to submissions@blacklibrary.com by 22 October 2010. Authors whose work is deemed of a high enough standard will then be given 3 months to produce a 10,000 word short story based upon their synopsis.

More Eldary thoughts.

From Xhalax:

“Dear. Mr Thorpe.

Are Harlequins trapped on a Path like the Exarchs are?

Thanks.”

The short answer is no. The long answer gives away too many of my ideas about Harlequins that I have vowed never to reveal in full. Here is the medium answer…

In the time leading up to, during and following the Fall, the Eldar society as it had been was fragmented. There were four different responses to the creation of Slaanesh and the potential doom of the Eldar, leading to the emergence of four different Eldar sub-societies.

Let’s deal with the Exodites first. They saw something of the cataclysm to come and decided to try to wind back time. They left for the Maiden Worlds and retrenched their lives in a culture that existed (or they believed to have existed) before the descent into hedonism that led to the Fall. Their attitude harks back in time, trying to reverse the state of the Eldar. The spirits of their dead are locked up in the World Spirit of each Maiden World, forever protected from Slaanesh but divorced from reality, unable to truly die.

Then we have the Craftworld Eldar. They fled at the time of the Fall, and through the creation and adoption of the Eldar path, they seek to maintain the status quo, suppressing the cultural and personal factors that led to the Fall. They are in stasis, neither going back nor going forward. Their spirits end up in the infinity circuit of each Craftworld, neither dead nor alive, trapped for eternity but able to be given the semblance of life again in spirit stones.

Next are the Dark Eldar. I don’t know what new information and revelations may be in the forthcoming codex, but here’s where we were the last time I talked to anyone else about this sort of thing. The Dark Eldar strive to maintain the society of the Eldar as it was at the time of the Fall, ignoring the lesson of the past but unable to move forward. They live entirely in the present, hand-to-mouth in a psychic sense, sustaining their existence on a day-by-day basis. Their spirits are drained and replenished in an unending cycle.

Which brings us to the Harlequins. They see themselves as the future of the Eldar. They look upon the other Eldar societies and see that all of them are simply trying to survive rather than change. They are the true radicals of the Eldar, and they have a plan so audacious it fills other Eldar with horror. Their plan, their existence, stems from the myth of the Laughing God. This myth tells us that the Laughing God, Cegorach, eluded Slaanesh’s grasp and survives to this day. He is the only god to have properly survived the Fall according to the Harlequins, and in this lies their secret.

The myth goes on to say that every now and then Cegorach steals the soul of an Eldar from under the nose of Slaanesh, spiriting it away to safety (possibly whilst dancing, that’s Harlequins for you). They believe that in the long term, the only way to defeat Slaanesh is to break the link between the Eldar and She Who Thirsts. The Harlequins see themselves as those saved by the Laughing God, and in performing their masques, and in particular the Dance Without End, seek to show the other Eldar that the Fall cannot be turned back, it cannot be ignored, it cannot be appeased. The future of the Eldar depends upon being able to live in freedom from Slaanesh’s grip, and the only way to do that is to be rescued by the Laughing God. Their spirits…? Their spirits are saved by Cegorach, free to live and die without the touch of Slaanesh.

Death By Monkeys wrote:@reds8n - Can you give us a rundown on the stories and authors in the Sabbat Worlds anthology? I've been looking online and can't find info on the stories included.

As I promised on Facebook, here are a few sneaky peaks at The Bloody-handed, my forthcoming limited edition novella for The Sundering. It takes a closer look at Hellebron’s early days in the cult of the Lord of Murder, and is packed with some really cool illustrations too.

reds8n wrote:http://www.blacklibrary.com/Digital

get yerself a nice copy of issue #1 of "Hammer and Bolter", a good read indeed.

Prospero Burns seems very promising.

I imagine, including Larice Asche

Kroothawk wrote:The digital preorders are up:
http://www.blacklibrary.com/Digital