Black Library Weekly – W/C 12/02/18

Hello and welcome to the latest instalment of Black Library Weekly, my regular look at what’s been happening in the world of Black Library. It’s not long until the big Black Library Celebration on the 24th, so this week’s been understandably a little low key. That’s not to say there hasn’t been some interesting stuff to talk about though, so let’s take a look from the top.

Monday
For the third week running, Digital Monday brought with it a standalone release for an existing short story. This time around it was the another Age of Sigmar Fyreslayers story – in fact it was the third of four stories from the Legends of the Age of Sigmar: Fyreslayers anthology (as well as the Legends of the Age of Sigmar: Omnibus 1) to get the standalone treatment. Shattered Crucible (£2.49 in ebook) is one of two stories by David Annandale in that anthology – I haven’t yet read and reviewed it, but keep an eye out for a review coming soon.

Midweek
After last week’s reveal of May’s upcoming releases, this week it was back down to earth on the news front…or at least, for the most part it was. You might have seen on Sunday (11th) that the cover for an interesting new Age of Sigmar release started doing the rounds – in true Warhammer Community fashion, a few days later that went from probably-but-unconfirmed to fully confirmed and announced with a post giving the lowdown on…drum roll…Realmslayer by David Guymer.

Yep, that’s right – Gotrek Gurnisson is back in action! Just Gotrek this time (for now at least), in a brand new four-part audio drama series. Excellent news! If you’re not familiar with the old-school Warhammer Gotrek and Felix stories, then I would strongly recommend you have a read of that Warhammer Community post, as it does a great job of summarising the story so far. Suffice to say he’s one of the most beloved characters in the old Warhammer world, and it’s going to be very interesting indeed to see how he fits into the Mortal Realms. I’ve actually seen a few people not demonstrating quite the same levels of enthusiasm for this as I’m experiencing, largely for two reasons – firstly that old characters should stay dead, in favour of brand new characters without any baggage, and secondly that it’s an audio release and not a novel.

First of all…that’s not a bad point about bringing back old names. Generally speaking I’m all in favour of allowing Age of Sigmar to stand on its own right, and giving authors free rein to introduce cool new characters for us to enjoy. After all, even the best-loved old characters started somewhere. And yet…for all that, there’s no getting away from the fact that Gotrek is cool. Simple as that. I’m delighted authors are introducing us to great new characters, but at the same time if anyone’s going to get brought back (alongside the handful of names already confirmed, like the gods and Nagash’s Mortarchs) I’m very happy that it’s Gotrek. I think he’ll be great fun.

Secondly, the point about this not being a novel…sigh. I get it, I do. Some Black Library fans just don’t enjoy audio dramas, and want everything to be released in prose. I get it…but I don’t agree. Audio as a medium allows authors to tell stories that wouldn’t work in prose, and personally I’m very keen for this format to be explored even more. Realmslayer is a four-part series, which means Guymer’s got loads of room to have fun with the format, and give us something really interesting. I mean, why wouldn’t you want to hear a brilliant actor bring the grumpy, dour slayer to life? I can’t think many people would complain about a Gotrek TV show, and this is the next best thing, in my opinion. Obviously time will tell as to whether it’s as good as I’m hoping…so fingers crossed.

That was the main news, but it’s also worth pointing out that there seem to be a fair few jobs going at Black Library, including one which was mentioned on BL’s Facebook page – for a Black Library Community Manager. That one actually looks like it’s got a closing date of today (Sunday 18th Feb), but there are a bunch more BL-related jobs going at the moment if anyone fancies applying. Check out the Games Workshop careers page if you’d like to take a look. Perhaps the most interesting role is the Commissioning Editor, but it’s also very interesting to see that there are a few for a newly created Partworks team. Sounds like the Hachette/Black Library collaboration isn’t going to be the only partwork we’ll see…very interesting.

Weekend
There was just a single release from Black Library this weekend, in the shape of Heirs of the Laughing God: A Deadly Wit by Gav Thorpe – a new 40k audio drama available in the usual CD (£12) and MP3 (£9.99) formats. Gav never fails to impress when he writes audio dramas, or eldar stories in any format, so a Harlequins audio drama was always likely to be good – and so it proves with this one! You can check out a quick Rapid Fire interview with Gav by clicking on the banner below, or have a read of my review by clicking here.

That was it really, apart from a whole raft of new French and German editions of recent (and in fact not so recent) titles. If you’re a native French or German speaker and fancy some new reads, now is a good time to go take a look at the BL website!

Thoughts on the week
It’s not been the biggest week in terms of new releases, with just a repackaged Age of Sigmar short story and a 40k audio drama, so I can see a fair few people not being massively impressed. After all, both Age of Sigmar and audio stories in general are still strangely contentious for a lot of BL fans. I hope weeks like this encourage those fans to give one or both of those topics a go, however, rather than grumbling about them. Nobody is obliged to like anything just because other people do, but I really do think there’s a lot to enjoy in the Age of Sigmar as a setting, and audio as a storytelling medium.

I’ve already mentioned audio quite a lot, so I won’t say too much more other than to encourage anyone who’s wavering to give A Deadly Wit a chance. I stuck it on while I was painting recently, and ended up happily listening to it all the way through twice over the course of a two hour session. If you’re still on the fence about audio, I’d strongly suggest you try it while painting – it’s a perfect combination, and since A Deadly Wit is so heavily dialogue-led it’s a great choice to have on while you’re working on your latest project.

As always, here’s the list of what I’ve posted so far this week:

Coming up…
Next weekend is the Black Library Celebration, with plenty of exciting new books due out as well as the new Eisenhorn miniature. Don’t forget to head down to your local Games Workshop or independent retailer to see what’s going on, if you can. From what I can see it looks like we’ve got The Magos by Dan Abnett, Lukas the Trickster by Josh Reynolds and Ashes of Prospero by Gav Thorpe all due out, as well as a free paperback anthology of some form for those attending the celebration. Should be fun!

As always, if you’ve got any thoughts or comments on the week’s news and releases please do get in touch via the comments section below or on Facebook or Twitter.

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