reds8n wrote:

Generalstoner wrote:Tell me some about Path of the warrior? Does it follow only the striking scorpion aspect? Does it follow a specific craftworld? Who do they fight?

We follow 1 Eldar -- a sculptor initially -- as he moves onto the Path of the Warrior. It is set on Alaitoc. They fight .. humans...

Kroothawk wrote:Any Slaanesh worshipping Eldar in Gav's novel?

Looks like Anthony Reynolds Brettonian series is getting cut short The last two books are not getting full novels just novellas. A bit disapointed cuz I loved those books was really looking forward to read more about the story and characters. Oh well, lets hope they are as good as the other books.

Hi,



You are indeed correct that the 2 novellas in the omnibus replace a singular novel release for the Knights of Bretonnia series.



Sincerely



Ragnar Karlsson

Direct Sales Manager

Black Library

www.blacklibrary.com

reds8n wrote:

Kroothawk wrote:Any Slaanesh worshipping Eldar in Gav's novel?

..hmm... no.... but she-who-thirsts isreferenced and is always a shadow on them.

Waiting.

Spoiler:

you do learn some stuff -- not a lot -- about their Dark Kin, including at least one possibility that ahd never occured to me before, which makes sense when you read it

.

Lord of battles wrote:I just noticed that Aaron Dembski-Bowden got another Night Lords book coming out in may of 2011: Blood Reaver

A UNION OF CHAOS
Driven on by their hatred of the False Emperor, the Night Lords stalk the shadows of the galaxy, eternally seeking revenge for the death of their primarch. Their dark quest leads them to a fractious alliance with the Red Corsairs, united only by a common enemy. Together with this piratical band of renegades, they bring their ways of destruction to the fortress-monastery of the Marines Errant.
THEY SEEK ONLY TO BRING DEATH

No picture but it sounds awesome!

Alpharius wrote:

reds8n wrote:

Generalstoner wrote:Tell me some about Path of the warrior? Does it follow only the striking scorpion aspect? Does it follow a specific craftworld? Who do they fight?

We follow 1 Eldar -- a sculptor initially -- as he moves onto the Path of the Warrior. It is set on Alaitoc. They fight .. humans...

Fantastic.

Lots of "Mon-Keigh" drops then, I take it?

Ugh.

first up, I’ve been working feverishly (ish) on my contribution to Age of Darkness, the Horus Heresy anthology. My story is entitled ‘Forgotten Sons’ and features an Ultramarine left behind when the rest of his Legion muster to Calth and a Salamander who is one of the few survivors of the Dropsite Massacre. The two Astartes are charged with the protection of an Imperial iterator who’s going to try and sway a compliant human world still ’sitting on the fence’ when galactic war breaks out. His only problem? Horus has sent one of his flunkies to debate for his cause. Obviously, there’s twists and turns to this tale, death and violence in abundance but you’ll just have to see where that goes when you read it! I’ve got about 11 pages of roughly scribed notes in my moleskine, relating to character, theme, plot points and more. I’m actually finding this project is a great one for some longhand planning as the tactile nature of actually writing and scribbling is really promoting my thought process. More on that as I progress. I’m actually hoping to have plotted the entire thing in a fair bit of detail, though, before I commit to the keyboard.

reds8n wrote: who comes across as a nice enough chap, but twice now I've failed to get into the book, something about it just don't click.

Questions with Chris Wraight
Author Chris Wraight returns to answer questions about his novel Sword of Justice.


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Sword of Justice features two of the most iconic characters in the Empire, Ludwig Schwarzhelm and Kurt Helborg. Was it a challenge to recreate these two characters for the novel whilst staying true to the established background?


It was more of an opportunity than a challenge, as there’s relatively little info on both characters, either in the Army Books or past BL novels. That said, it was very important to get the feel of the two men right – they have a definite role in the Empire hierarchy which needed to be respected. Readers rightly care about fidelity to the established Warhammer background, and, as a writer, I lose a lot of sleep trying to make sure those expectations are met. Thankfully, there’s plenty of room in the Old World to flesh out the key concepts creatively without violating what’s been laid down already – I certainly hope that balance has been struck in the book.

Schwarzhelm and Helborg are portrayed as rivals as well as comrades in the plot. Did you find yourself favouring one over the other?

Difficult to answer, as the last manuscript I submitted was for Sword of Vengeance, which has Helborg in the starring role – I think it’s inevitable you come to sympathise with the heroes of your current project, and he’s such a great guy to write. That said, I have the greatest time for Schwarzhelm. He’s not as refined and polished as the Reiksmarshal, and is much more of an outsider in the Imperial order. He’s sullen and brooding, has flaws aplenty, but he’s virtually unstoppable and he’ll never back down – they’re the qualities you want when the walls have been breached by a gibbering horde of horrors and the reinforcements are still a day away. And after Spaceballs, it’s impossible not to love that name…

Sword of Justice features some spectacular battles against orcs and beastmen. Is there an aspect of these battles that you feel makes them stand out amongst the many BL Warhammer battlescenes?

There have been some fantastic battle scenes in BL novels, so when it came to Sword of Justice I thought very hard about how to make the set-pieces distinctive. I wanted to make sure that the combat sequences were firmly embedded in the unfolding plot, and to avoid having action scenes just because the story is set in a war-torn environment. The battles were part of wider political machinations played out by several of the characters, and they create consequences that go beyond simply surviving (or not). With that established, I worked hard to try and imbue the fights with a suitably epic quality - the opening engagement has a cast of thousands, from Knights Panther to Helstorm crews, and by the end of it there’s a lot of blood on the floor.

As well as massed battles in the Warhammer world, Sword of Justice also deals with the convoluted politics of the Empire. Was it difficult to balance both these aspects of the plot while writing the novel?

Yes! But fantastically enjoyable too, and it was amazing to be given the green light to do some of the things I pitched when the novel was in the proposal stage. The story is rooted in the Empire’s complicated electoral system, and I spent a long time reading various Warhammer and WFRP source material to try and get the politics right. One of the best things about the Empire is the delicate balance between the various potentates and nobles – when they’re not fighting external enemies, they’re fighting amongst themselves. This doesn’t have to be a matter of pitched battles – it’ll more likely involve bribery, rabble-rousing, smuggling, espionage, seduction and assassination. All of these things, as you’d expect, are in Sword of Justice.

You’ve written several novels set in the Warhammer world now. Do you own a Warhammer army? If not do you have a favourite army or faction?

I don’t own a Warhammer Army, but if I did it would definitely be an Empire force. Something massively impractical, involving a squabbling mess of warrior priests, engineers, wizards and halflings. And they’d be fighting fishmen, naturally.

How does one get into the mind of an eldar? Short of a bottle of absinthe or licking some of the more exotic species of frogs in the Amazon rainforest, the best I could do was take our everyday human experiences and turn the dial up to eleven. Imagine the greatest slight you have felt, the highest moment of achievement, the deepest times of grief and sadness; now imagine experiencing that for every second of your life, a life that can last more than a thousand years. There is no description in human psychology that could encompass such a tumult of emotion.

Add to this heightened emotional volatility a physical sensitivity and self-awareness that for us would be considered supernatural. Try to picture an existence in which you can feel the slightest current of air on your skin and hair, the subtlest nuance of taste, the infinitely small degrees of hue in the spectrum, the music in silence. The buzz of an insect is an orchestral work; starlight dappling on water is a rainbow of colours; the scent of a flower a melange of smells that each elicit the most powerful response.

But we are not done yet. Each of those exquisite phenomena, every tiniest experience, is imprinted upon your mind in stark clarity. Not for the eldar the comfort of pain dwindling with time, not the hazy, comfortable recollection of love and happiness. With the turning of a thought, you can experience again every strata of sensation as if it were happening right now. Could you fight the temptation to wander through the joys of childhood forever, the dark abyss of every tragic loss waiting to consume you in a moment’s indulgence?

And still there is another facet to eldar life that we must consider; one which with all of the imagination in the world we cannot hope to emulate with human experience. The perfection of emotion, thought and body is physical, chemical, natural. The eldar existence goes beyond this, into the realm of the psychic. I’m not talking the big stuff – the prophecies of the farseers or ravening blasts of lightning – I’m talking about the everyday empathy, the sense of the wider universe and the crushing awareness of all other living things hovering on the edge of detection. Grief shared is not just social or a matter of body language, it is an unconscious touch inside your mind; joy shared is not just a contagious smile, it is a flood of happiness fuelled by the experiences of others.

No wonder the eldar went insane.

And so we come to the Path. This is the means by which each of these tortuous gifts can be turned off and on. The Path is the net that caught the eldar after the Fall. It is the Path that brings calm to the mental storm, brings peace to the constant bombardment of sensation, dulls the psychic sense and allows the exploration of self.

But for Korlandril, protagonist of Path of the Warrior, the Path brings no peace, only war and death, experienced in a way only an eldar can experience it...

Once in awhile you get something you really wanted. For me, that came with a brief query from my editor asking if I would like to do a series of novels focused on Grey Seer Thanquol. If I tell you it took me all of five seconds to answer that one, I’d be overestimating things.

The skaven have always held a special place for me. They were what first made me really notice Warhammer. All these weird little ratmen with guns and flamethrowers and gas masks were something that piqued my curiosity. Certainly none of the other fantasy settings flooding the market in the late 1980’s had such things. Then I saw an advertisement for Warhammer RPG in a gaming magazine that featured a lengthy text piece written from the point of view of an imprisoned witch hunter. By the end of the piece, the terrified man is turned over to the skaven by his corrupt gaoler. Even these many years later, that evocative bit of writing still sticks in my mind.

Of all the heroes in the Warhammer setting, I’m almost invariably drawn to the bad guys. Nagash, Azhag the Slaughterer, Mannfred von Carstein, Wulfrik the Wanderer, but above them all in my esteem towers Grey Seer Thanquol. Reading William King’s Gotrek and Felix stories, I found the scheming, craven Thanquol to be the star of the show. He was just so damn exciting and you never knew what he was going to do next or how he would try to twist something around to his benefit. There was something positively cathartic to read about a character with absolutely no redeeming values. A villain after my own heart (which, I’m sure, Thanquol would make a nice snack out of).

When I had the chance to write my own Thanquol stories, one thing I took extreme pains to do was keep Thanquol himself true to the way he was written in Herr King’s books. The second thing I decided was to make everything else as different from Gotrek and Felix in style and tone as I could. For the first novel, I pitted Thanquol against a mysterious wizard, the story unfolding in the shadows of Altdorf. In the second novel, Thanquol finds himself in the green hell of Lustria opposing a powerful skink sorcerer. In both instances, I tried to find challenges that would put Thanquol in very different situations from what he encountered against Gotrek and Felix. It was always a delight trying to figure out exactly how Thanquol would flatter, bully or trick his way out of trouble (with the occasional warpstone-fuelled magical assault when the opportunity presented itself, naturally). There’s something about an inveterate coward who doesn’t even understand why he shouldn’t use one of his underlings as a living shield, much less think twice about doing so.

Now, in Temple of the Serpent, we find Thanquol in very dire straits. Conscripted into a nefarious plot by Clan Eshin to help them assassinate the powerful Xiuhcoatl, Prophet of Sotek, Thanquol finds himself completely out of his element. The sweltering jungles of Lustria are just teeming with all sorts of things that want to kill him: dinosaurs, carnivorous plants, cannibal fish, piranha-lizards, venomous frogs, zombies and, of course, the lizardmen themselves. But his trouble doesn’t end there. You see, there’s an old enemy lurking among the skaven expedition and he’s not missing any opportunity to try to settle the score!

reds8n wrote:
I'm really looking forward to the squeekel...oohh...sorry

BrookM wrote:I like CL Werner's stuff, with exception of his Chaos novels, those were pretty boring. But his Brunner and Thulmann novels are ace. I've got the first Thanquol novel lying about and read it a wee bit, some time soon I'll read it proper. After Sword of Justice and Nemesis.

Captain Godfrey wrote:Back to the HH... The only books i found truly disappointing, were the Dark Angels books. As said, SURPLICE. But actually, i dont understand all this criticism for The Flight of the Eisenstein, i truly thought it was a good book. IMO of coarse.

reds8n wrote:Sword of Justice is well worth a read if you're an Empire fan. Actually, slightly, moves on the timeline a step or two as well !