The Black Library Weekender 2018 – Roundup

It’s the week after the Black Library Weekender, and I’m slowly catching up on life and processing all of the fun and excitement of two days spent absorbed in the worlds of Black Library and Warhammer. As usual after one of these events, I want to talk a bit about how it all went, so in this article I’ll try to provide an overview of the Weekender as a whole as well as a few highlights of the seminars I attended, and the news and information I gathered (at least, all that I can remember!). I’ll do my best to be concise, but there’s going to be lots to talk about because it was another phenomenal Weekender!

Organisation

I want to talk first about the event as a whole, and the overall organisation of it. I commented in last year’s Weekender Roundup article that it felt like the best organised of any of the Weekenders I’d been to, and I’m delighted to say that this year was just as good. It’s clear that a tremendous amount of effort goes into setting up and running an event like this, and I was impressed once again with how efficient the whole team was, and also the way in which everyone seemed so positive and enthusiastic throughout the event.

The tone for an event like this is generally set with the first interactions that fans have with the event and its organisers. Taking a step back from the weekend itself, I was impressed by the amount of useful information provided up front when tickets went on sale, although if I’m being picky then putting tickets on sale even earlier would be great, especially for anyone travelling from afar. At the event itself, the sales staff were friendly and engaging even while busy setting up on Friday afternoon/evening, and then again on Saturday morning in spite of the tills opening at 8am! It was great to see Charles – possibly the friendliest, smiliest man alive – leading by example as usual, and from the staff handing over goody bags and lanyards to those manning the tills, it was positivity all round. That’s exactly what you want for the early stages of an event!

Speaking of goody bags, this year’s selection of swag was particularly impressive. After handing over our tickets, we each received a lanyard (complete with a raffle ticket – more on this later) and a drawstring bag which included an event programme, a copy of the Crusade + Other Stories anthology, a set of the 20 Years of Black Library postcards, some A5 art cards, a poster of Gotrek Gurnisson (with author headshots on the back, for signing purposes), some stickers, a keyring and some badges. It was an impressive haul of freebies, and while free stuff isn’t a priority for events like this it was nonetheless another bit of positive reinforcement that helped everyone get in the mood for the event.

I’ll talk about seminars a bit later, but I want to mention the opening address from the Black Library manager, Neil Coombe, which also helped set the tone and got the whole event off to a great start. That’s despite the news that Brian Blessed wasn’t going to be able to make it – I thought Neil handled the delivery of the bad news clearly and sympathetically, and it was a nice touch to record a video of everyone wishing Brian a speedy recovery. In my opinion at least, while it was a real shame that Brian couldn’t make it, it’s testament to the quality of the Weekender that everybody seemed to take the news well and had a great time anyway!

I was pleased to see the usual ‘artists’ studio’ room set up, with not just BL stalwart and all-round top bloke Neil Roberts but also the very talented Johan Grenier in attendance. I only got to chat to Johan very briefly, but cover art is such an important part of the overall experience so I’m all for seeing artists on the list of guests. It was also cool to see the ‘audio listening room’ available as well, with excerpts from various audio dramas playing for fans to hang out and listen to, even if it was occasionally a little distracting to hear the booming tones of various forthright characters coming through the partition between rooms during a seminar!

While I didn’t go to any of the signings myself I did hear reports of some fans bringing entire suitcases full of books to sign. Nobody likes waiting for ages in a queue, especially behind someone who’s monopolising an author’s time, so that doesn’t feel quite right. It seems to me that the sensible thing would be to limit the number of books per signing, and I’ve certainly seen that be the case at events run by other publishers. I’d have thought that it would be easy enough to communicate that in advance on the event page online, so that everyone is aware of it and knows what to expect, and then to empower the staff running each signing session to enforce on the day. I’d imagine that would help keep the signing queues moving quickly, if nothing else.

As a final comment in this section, it’s worth talking a little bit about the number of attendees this year. I don’t have any insight into the actual figures of this year’s attendance – or indeed any other year – but it did feel as though the event as a whole was a touch quieter than previous years. To me there’s always a balance to be had, between too many people causing seminars to be packed out and the bar overflowing, and not enough people meaning things feel undersubscribed and lacking in atmosphere. Thankfully, I felt like the balance was just about right this year, even if some of the seminars were perhaps scheduled for the wrong size of room – although that’s easy to say in hindsight!

Seminars

I mentioned this last year, but once again I wish I could have cloned myself and attended all of the seminars on the schedule. I missed out on so many sessions I’d have loved to have seen, just by virtue of not being able to be in two (or three) places at once! That being said, across the weekend I went to eight seminars (plus the final ‘Coming Soon’ session) and hand on heart I can say that every one was brilliant. Crucially, all of the seminars I attended was hosted properly, with compères who were clearly prepared and had put lots of thought into questions and how to keep each session moving. I’d like to say a big thank you to Hannah, Kate and Nick for doing such a great job compèring the seminars I was in!

During each of the seminars I was live-tweeting highlights and snippets to give people who couldn’t attend a sense of what was being discussed. I hadn’t planned on doing quite so much tweeting, but I ended up doing loads – I hope it was useful! You can find those threads on Twitter if you’d like to have a read of them, so instead of going into lots of detail about each seminar I’ve grouped them together below into loose themes.

Novellas and short stories
With the Black Library Novella Series 1 available to buy at the sales stand, a fair few of the seminars focused on the stories told within those ten books. I went to two seminars relating at least loosely to the novellas, as well as another one about the Black Library Event Anthology 2018/19 and the short stories therein.

• Novellas of the Dark Imperium with Mike Brooks, Nick Kyme and Danie Ware (compèred by Hannah Hughes).
• Warrior Queens in the Age of Sigmar with David Annandale, Darius Hinks and Nick Horth (compèred by Kate Hamer).
• The Black Library Event Anthology with David Annandale, Darius Hinks, Graham McNeill and Chris Wraight (compèred by Hannah Hughes).

In the ‘Novellas of the Dark Imperium’ (click link for Twitter thread) session we got a fascinating insight into three very different-sounding books, with Danie talking eloquently about her protagonist’s faith and the ‘squaddie’ dynamic within the story, Mike offering some fascinating insights into the motivations of his characters in the Underhive, and Nick talking about how his novella explores the changing role of the Custodes in 40k.

The ‘Warrior Queens’ seminar was one of my highlights for the weekend, as it quickly turned into a fascinating discussion on the topic of female representation in Black Library. Compère and editor Kate did a fantastic job of framing the conversation right at the beginning (three male authors talking about female characters, remember!) and keeping things going throughout, while the authors were all brilliantly open about their processes for writing female characters, and the pitfalls of doing so. I’m afraid I didn’t do much tweeting in this seminar, as I was too busy listening to the conversation, but suffice to say it was a really, really interesting session.

With four great authors on the panel, the ‘Event Anthology’ seminar covered a broad range of topics – after all, across their stories in the anthology they cover Erebus, Uriel Ventris, Gotrek Gurnisson and Neferata! There were some really interesting ideas floating around about how much of the author goes into these characters, and what the objective of a short story can be, and I’m sure I wasn’t the only person to go away really looking forward to digging into all of those stories.

Space Marines
As you might expect, plenty of the seminars focused on Space Marines, including two that I attended:

• Spear of the Emperor with Aaron Dembski-Bowden (compèred by Nick Kyme).
• Space Marine Heroes with Phil Kelly and Graham McNeill (compèred by Hannah Hughes).

Aaron’s Spear of the Emperor has got to be one of the most highly-anticipated BL releases for a while, and in the seminar of the same name he talked us through some of the themes of the book, and what his objectives were. The conversation covered how this fits into the wider meta arc of the setting, how Aaron developed the character and background of this new Chapter, influences he drew from historical fiction and elsewhere, and all sort of other fascinating topics. Aaron’s grasp of the IP has always been a real selling point for his books, and this one sounds like it’s going to explore the implications of the Great Rift in brilliant detail.

In the ‘Space Marine Heroes’ seminar Graham and Phil started by talking about what it is that appeals to them about writing about Space Marines, and then went on to discuss all manner of interesting topics regarding how to write and think about Marines. Between them these two know pretty much all there is to know about Marines, so it was something of a masterclass!

Gaunt’s Ghosts and The Horus Heresy
Across three fascinating seminars we got a load of brilliant insight into books that were either available to buy at the event, or in one case is going to be out early-ish next year.

• Anarch with Dan Abnett (compèred by Nick Kyme).
• Titandeath with Guy Haley (compèred by Kate Hamer).
• Siege of Terra: The Solar War with John French (compèred by Nick Kyme).

I’ll start with the ‘Anarch’ seminar, which saw Dan Abnett talk not just about the novel itself – the fifteenth Gaunt novel and apparently Dan’s longest ever BL book – but the series as a whole, including some ideas he has for future stories. Unsurprisingly the conversation also turned to Dan’s predilection for killing off his characters (I’ve a feeling Anarch is going to be brutal), as well as some interesting ideas about character arcs and what to do once a character has achieved their personal objectives.

In the ‘Titandeath’ seminar Guy Haley showed how good a public speaker he is, first of all launching into a brilliantly interesting lecture on the history and importance of the Beta Garmon system (including some exclusive Forge World images) before giving a reading from the book itself. It was great to hear how closely Guy had worked with Forge World on this one, and you could really feel his enthusiasm for the subject matter.

For the last seminar before the closing ‘Coming Soon’ session, John French discussed his upcoming Siege of Terra novel, The Solar War. Yep – the first book in the Siege series! The seminar included no fewer than THREE readings, each very different, the last of which left the room pretty much speechless. It sounds like this book required a phenomenal amount of planning, but from what John talked about it promises to be an absolute cracker of a novel. Can’t wait!

Coming Soon
This article is already pretty lengthy, so instead of going through all of the new releases confirmed during the final seminar of the weekend, I’m going to suggest you take a look at this Warhammer Community post which has the majority of the details. You can also read through my Twitter thread for the details that I covered during the session. I’m hopefully going to put together a wider ‘upcoming titles’ post in the next week or so to pull together everything we know that’s coming up.

Suffice to say it looks like 2019 is going to be a CRAZY year for Black Library fans, with the final novel in the main Heresy series and at least the first (if not also second) Siege of Terra novel, a load of cool stuff coming along for the ‘Black Library Celebration’ in February, the first few Warhammer Horror titles, and even a load of exciting Print on Demand releases. Personally I think these are the things I’m most looking forward to:

• Requiem Infernal by Peter Fehervari.
• Honourbound by Rachel Harrison.
• The start of the Siege of Terra.
• Print on Demand Horus Heresy hardbacks.
• Warhammer Horror (especially Perdition’s Flame by Alec Worley).

Saturday night and Sunday morning

The weekend’s schedule was fairly packed with seminars and signings, but there was room for a few rather more relaxed activities as well. On the Saturday evening, after the seminars had finished and we’d had time for a bite to eat, the evening entertainment started with a raffle – although I suspect a fair few people chose to stick around in the bar and watch Aaron Dembski-Bowden, Guy Haley, Phil Kelly and Gav Thorpe battle it out over a game of Warhammer Age of Sigmar – which was unexpected but pretty cool! I believe Guy was the eventual winner, and it will be interesting to see whether this game gets a mention in a future ‘Tale of Four Wordlords’ article on the Warhammer Community site.

For those who did attend, the raffle offered the opportunity to win one of various LE/SE hardback novels, a couple of framed posters signed by loads of authors, or one of a pair of one-off artworks drawn that day by Neil and Johan. What’s more, everyone had an even chance of winning because we all received a single raffle ticket in our lanyards – I do love a raffle which isn’t dependent on how much money each person can afford to spend! I was fortunate enough to win a prize myself, much to my surprise, and it was great to see the enthusiasm in the room when each winner was announced.

The final part of Saturday’s organised entertainment was an audience-participation audio drama written especially for the Weekender by David Guymer, entitled Brewslayer. Where last year’s event saw Toby Longworth play Lukas the Trickster, this year it was the turn of Gotrek Gurnisson to take centre stage, and played by an audience member no less. We had actors Steve Conlin and David Seddon playing a pair of Fyreslayers, BL editor Hannah Hughes playing Malenth the dark elf, and audio producer Matt Renshaw directing proceedings – all of them in costume – while members of the audience auditioned for the roles of Gotrek and a duardin bar matron.

It was certainly an…interesting…experience, complete with chants and bellows from the audience, and a lot of laughter. It was essentially a duardin/dwarf drinking contest between the Fyreslayers, Maleneth and Gotrek, with predictably hilarious results. The ‘official’ cast members did a grand job, especially Hannah’s rather sinister take on Maleneth, and while the chap cast as the brew matron put in probably the most bizarre performance any of us had ever seen in any forum, I can only say that Big Stu was born to play Gotrek on stage! I think these audience-participation audios are the perfect evening entertainment for a Weekender, as they’re great fun without descending too far into madness, and are certainly a massive step up from previous events’ quizzes, which inevitably ended up with plasticine phalluses – nobody needs to see those.

After the carnage of Saturday night’s audio drama, Sunday morning featured an author ‘meet and greet’ session which was, thankfully, a little more mellow. It was a nice ‘kaffeeklatsch’-style environment with chairs and tables set up and the chance to sit down with a group of authors and other fans to just have a chat, and while it felt at first as though nobody was quite sure what to do, after a while I thought it settled into an enjoyable way to kick off the morning. If I’m being picky then perhaps it would have been nice to have had someone from BL taking charge a bit more and helping people get their heads around what to do, but I think we got there in the end.

Sales

No Weekender would be complete without the chance to spend a small fortune on books, audio CDs and other Black Library merchandise, and this year the sales stand was piled high with veritable mountains of stock. Temptation was rife, and I’m sure I wasn’t the only person to go home with bags jammed full of stuff – here you can see the pile of books and CDs I accumulated on the Saturday morning (and I may even have added to that as the event progressed).

I think what’s important at an event like this is to give fans the chance to pick up brand new and pre-release books and audios, as well as back catalogue titles, as we want the excitement of getting our hands on things early. This year there were plenty of recent releases on offer, not to mention a stack of limited and special edition hardbacks, but it was great to see so many new and advance releases too – by my count somewhere over twenty titles, including paperback editions and omnibuses, available to get our hands on before we would otherwise have been able to.

Some of those were books released for pre-order that weekend, like Gav Thorpes’ Wild Rider and the ten volumes of the Black Library Novella Series 1 (plus Phil Kelly’s novella Death Knell), but others won’t be available for weeks or even months yet. Anarch by Dan Abnett, Spear of the Emperor by Aaron Dembski-Bowden, Titandeath by Guy Haley, the new Visions of Heresy, various audio dramas…the list goes on. Personally I was particularly excited to get my hands on Inferno! Volume 2 and the Black Library Events Anthology 2018/19, as there are some exciting-sounding short stories in those two!

There was, unsurprisingly, a lot of excitement around the limited edition hardback of Spear of the Emperor, which is priced at a slightly eye-watering £85. I’ve talked plenty in the past about limited editions so I won’t go into it too much here, but I will say this – I had a look through the contents of the box for Spear, and it’s amazing! I really didn’t think I would be tempted, but the book itself is beautiful, there’s a fascinating, deeply tempting little Index Astartes background book, some beautiful little art cards, a transfer sheet, and a ‘Chapter Tactic’ card. Even the extra little gubbins – an objective marker, a pin badge and a purity seal-style bookmark – are really nice. Is it worth £85? That’s a tricky question, and something that each person will have to decide for themselves. Is it a beautifully thought-out, designed and presented box set? Absolutely.

Meeting people

Despite all of the fascinating ideas and information to come out of the seminars, the great fun had in the entertainment, and the MANY things to buy, there’s no question for me that the best thing to come out of the Weekender (all of the Weekenders, really) was the opportunity to spend time hanging out with other people who love Black Library and the worlds of Warhammer as much as I do. I’m part of a gaming and reading group in London who all met through previous Weekenders, and who I wouldn’t have known otherwise, and we’re all in agreement that the social aspect of the Weekenders is what sets them apart from other events.

This year I met SO MANY great people over the course of the weekend as well, from familiar faces who I catch up with every year to fans making their first Weekender visit, as well as authors and actors and staff from all across Black Library. I finally got to meet up with Kenny from the Combat Phase podcast, put a bunch of faces to the names of people I’d been chatting to on Twitter for ages, and just meet really lovely people who all enjoy reading Black Library stories as much as I do. Clark, I’m expecting you to show up in full Custodes cosplay for next year’s event!

I have to make special mention of Brad, who you may remember as having played the young Blood Claw in last year’s Lukas the Trickster audio drama. I was absolutely blown away when, while waiting to go into a seminar, Brad handed me a Millie’s Cookies box containing a pizza-sized cookie celebrating my 1,000th post on Track of Words! Brad, you’re an absolute legend for that, thank you so much! It’s things like this which demonstrate the sense of community that the Weekenders engender.

It’s not just the fans that you get to hang out with, either – I spent a great fun hour or so chatting to actors Steve Conlin and David Seddon about audio dramas and acting, and hung out with loads of BL staff and authors, some for the first time (hello Alec, Danie and Mike). Particular highlights were chatting about Blood Bowl, Dark Angels and beards (obviously) with Phil Kelly, talking connected stories with David Annandale, and generally catching up with editors Hannah and Kate. The chance to mingle with authors and BL staff is worth the entry price alone, in my opinion.

Having been to all of the Black Library Weekenders, I’m now at the point where I know a lot of people at these events, and while I’m not a naturally outgoing person (FAR from it) I’m getting pretty comfortable in this environment. When I think back to the first Weekender I went to, however, I turned up on my own and didn’t know anyone, and certainly wasn’t very comfortable introducing myself and joining in with conversations. I’m not quite sure how to do it, but at future events I would love to see some sort of organised way to help solo travellers mingle and join in with the fun. If anyone has ideas for this, I’d be very interested to hear them! The social element is so important, in my opinion, so I feel like we should all try to help make it as relaxed and comfortable as possible.

***

So there you have it, another fantastic Black Library Weekender. If you were there too, I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did, and if you didn’t go then I hope that I’ve encouraged you to think about joining in with the fun at a future event. Now I’m just looking forward to 2019’s events – hopefully I’ll see you there!

As always, if you’ve got any comments or questions please do let me know in the comments section below, or find me on Facebook or Twitter.