The Emperor's Will art book review

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**Kid_Kyoto**

So I got my copy of the Emperor's Will this week and just posted my review.

The Emperor's Will is a sampling of art from across the 25 years of the game Warhammer 40,000 AD and it's various RPG and card game spin offs. It focuses on the Emperor's human servants such as Inquisitors, Arbites and tech priests rather than the daemons and Space Marines seen in other art books.

Most of it has been seen before, but there are a few previously unpublished pieces by Games Workshop's Art Director John Blanche. Blanche's work makes up about a quarter of the images with the rest from Jes Goodwin, David Gallagher and other artists. I'd name them but one frustration is the lack of proper credits for each image.

Another frustration is the complete lack of design notes, explanations or even much organization. Artists, eras, games and themes are mixed together willy nilly. We have an assassin on one page, hive gangers on the next.

On the plus side the book includes some rare images from the Inquisitor game and from Confrontation, the unproduced predecessor to Necromunda.

And the art really is good.

But other art books like Jes Goodwin's Gothic and Eldrich do much more to provide context and information. It's a shame the Black Library didn't put more time and effort into making this as informative as it is good looking.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1849701148/ref=cm_cr_mts_prod_img

Honestly for me it's great, I know what all these images are and heck for most of them I can tell you where they were published. But I don't know what someone who has not been into this game will get out of it. There's not even any captions, though there are some text pages which are just lists of grimdark words like "sage steersman aelmjak bog-ferrel" and so on for paragraphs and paragraphs.

So really I would almost give it 3 stars but the long-lost Confrontation art bumped it up one star.

**Howard A Treesong**

I've flicked through it and it's one thing I definitely want for christmas. I haven't seen much else. There's loads of art, some newer, some quite old, all high quality printing and full colour.

It's also all the less detailed aspects of the imperium, I didn't even see a space marine on flicking through. There are loads of various inquisitor and imperial henchmen and support people, loads of ideas for conversions and scratchbuilding.

**Aerethan**

Now if only there was a fantasy version of this out.

**Kid_Kyoto**

Howard A Treesong wrote:I've flicked through it and it's one thing I definitely want for christmas. I haven't seen much else. There's loads of art, some newer, some quite old, all high quality printing and full colour.

It's also all the less detailed aspects of the imperium, I didn't even see a space marine on flicking through. There are loads of various inquisitor and imperial henchmen and support people, loads of ideas for conversions and scratchbuilding.

It's quite good for that, but I found the Inquisitor art book a lot more useful because of the notes.