Forum adverts like this one are shown to any user who is not logged in. Join us by filling out a tiny 3 field form and you will get your own, free, dakka user account which gives a good range of benefits to you: No adverts like this in the forums anymore. Times and dates in your local timezone. Full tracking of what you have read so you can skip to your first unread post, easily see what has changed since you last logged in, and easily see what is new at a glance. Email notifications for threads you want to watch closely. Being a part of the oldest wargaming community on the net. If you are already a member then feel free to login now.

Just a novel recommendation, more than anything.

Finished it yesterday, and it's very good. Like a lot of politics/intrigue 40k novels, it builds details of the universe very nicely - if you've read Watchers of the Throne, it's a very loose sequel in that you're seeing the planet they save (Vorlese) a few hundred years later in the dark Imperium era, where thanks to the big stable warp route it sits on it's become the defacto homeworld of most of the navigator houses not based on terra itself.

The protagonists are refreshingly not cardboard cut out superheroes. Lady Chettamandy Brobantis, warp-eye aside, is a sarcastic old woman with a gammy hip whose combat effectiveness in the couple of fights she's in on the book falls pretty much where you'd expect for an arthritic seventy-year-old. The one Inquisitor to feature is as ruthless, clever and determined as she should be but is also completely out of her depth because (As is a common trope in black library) she's an Ordo Xenos Inquisitor dealing with what really should be the Ordo malleus' problem by virtue of 'being the only one there' - the downside of unlimited authority is that everything falls under your jurisdiction. She's quite frustrated because "I can identify twenty xeno species from their architecture, I've studies the fighting styles of the Scythian warrior monks, I've written papers on the best ways to disable ork warriors*, but I have no idea what I'm doing with sorcery and the warp..."

It also adds in little details that fit the universe - one thing I find very sensible is the idea that Tzeenchian heretics really, really hate Navigators. "You're blessed with glorious mutations, vast amounts of wealth and political influence, you get to look the gods in the face on a daily basis, and what do you do with all these gifts? You move bloody starships around. For the corpse-emperor's lackeys. I mean, come on!."



* admittedly when Chetta asks out of curiosity, recommendation #1 is "lascannon".

I'll definitely check this out, I've been meaning to read some more black library stuff but my main problem is unfortunately black library itself..

I'm in the middle of this one at the moment. It is good so far, especially for middle tier nobility and a look at a 'street level' chaos cult that aren't all 'kill everything' fanatics.