Aaron Dembski-Bowden's Blog, page 11

What’s on my desktop this month…

The last Desktop Watch came at the end of my Mega-Photo Canada Update(TM), but with deadlines looming and Alexander’s first birthday party this weekend, there’s only time for a flyby teaser.

Here’re the Word.docs I’ve got going on in the January/February/March period. Hey, I never promised this game would a) Be regular; or b) Be any fun.

As you can probably guess from the background, I finished TWD. In all honesty, The Walking Dead game deserves a much better post than I’m capable of making, but I’ll give it a shot at some point. For now, let’s just say I finished it about two weeks ago, and it was one of the most intense, evocative storytelling experiences of my whole life. I think it’s won about 100 Game of the Year awards by this point, and it deserves every single fucking one of them.

I was crying so hard at the end, when I went downstairs to tell Katie it was over, I was having trouble talking and breathing. That’s not an exaggeration. It may be less than cool, sure, but it’s not an exaggeration.

As for the actual Desktop Watch, it runs a little like this:

Howl of the Birthworld is my first Space Wolf pack, for ToFH.
Blood & Fire (Rewrite) – A sequel story to Helsreach, where Grimaldus intervenes with the Celestial Lions before they can destroy themselves. I did almost all of it in first-person present tense, then decided I hated it, and spent three days rewriting it first-person past tense. It’s almost finished now.
First King of Rome – Is a secret.
Blood in the Water – A Horus Heresy Blood Angel short story, and a prequel to Master of Mankind, my next HH novel.
The Lord Inquisitor – The current script for The Lord Inquisitor movie, obviously.

The first month of our Tale of Five Heretics is getting close to its update, and it’ll come as no surprise for y’all to learn that in the time it’s taken me and John to build and paint 5 Marines each, Eddie has painted 20, as well as a converted Contemptor Dreadnought, and managed to build a Land Raider just for kicks.  

You don’t get to know their names until they’re painted.

A Tale of Five Heretics

A Tale of Five Heretics: Dramatis Personae

I – IV – VI – IX – XX

 After infinite delays, let’s talk some hobby. Specifically, let’s talk Heresy armies.

As my 40K campaign grows ever-larger, I find it’s sprawling into this behemoth that almost defies discussion. Battle reports are tough to write out, because we’ve not played any traditional battles. Instead, the fights are a matter of ad hoc narrative deciding the game. Like 5 Chaos players all using a Lord and one squad as an ambushing strike to ambush the same 1-Commander / 1-retinue counterparts on the Imperial side, representing an assassination attempt as the Blue Team’s commanders gathered on neutral ground. Another of the battles involved the Eldar, Imperials and Chaos forces beating the snot out of each other downtable, while the Adeptus Mechanicus happily shelled all three forces from the objective zone.

Smug bastards.

So it’s happening – that’s a good thing – but it’s difficult to sum up. I love the new edition. You might think I have to say that, but that’s an assumption which doesn’t take into account how often I’m in trouble with my publisher Black Library (and the powerful, nay, monolithic entity that is Games Workshop behind it). I wasn’t huge on 5th Edition; a lot of its rules reminded me why I’ve always been more of a Warhammer Fantasy player. But I digress. I love 6th Edition.

The next 40K weekend will take us to 1,500pts. Since the last meetup was an icebreaker to get everyone acquainted and learn the rules, that weekend (which will take place in my new games room: The Aaronorium), will be the real deal. I’ll be able to discuss it with a little more coherency closer to the time.

So I’ll backburner all that for a while, and talk some Heresy. I’ve set this up before, with hobby talk and avoiding author bias. No more excuses. Time to get into it.

Here’s my ragged attempt to build a Heresy army with some friends. Katie said no. Her 40K Marines are enough work. Thus, I went hunting beyond the borders of the family unit. If anyone has any mega-inspiring advice, pictures of their own armies, or any general chatter, feel free to chime in with whatever you feel like. Consider this an open book.

We’ll start at the beginning. That seems wise.

So who’s doing this with me, and what armies are we all playing?

Eddie Eccles – Tournament Player, Painter, Marketing Guy, Poet, Lover.

This is Eddie. In the future, when Eddie’s writing, I’ll use this delicious green text, right here.

A cursory Google check (or perhaps your own unpleasant memories) will reveal the uncomfortable truth that Eddie is ferociously, ball-achingly good at Warhammer Fantasy. He’s been at a bunch of tournaments where he took home every award (except sportsmanship. Ha!) and my fave story about him illustrates this point nicely. Before I really knew who Eddie was, I knew this about him: At a tournament, there was one award – a measly lone certificate out of about a dozen in total – that his team hadn’t claimed. The tournament organisers wanted to share it in a joint-first-prize situation with another team. Eddie’s team resisted this act of honest and merciful charity, pointing out that they deserved it because they’d won more games and earned more points. The organiser tried one last time, one last vain hope to appeal to the sense of kindness that Eddie had clearly left in his car.

ORGANISER: “How about we share this prize? Look, you’ve won all the others. Some of these guys just came here to play games with their collections.” 

EDDIE: “I collect trophies.”

Given my utter disinterest in the whole concept of tournaments, you’d think I’d despise Eddie for this attitude. I don’t despise him. I fear him. That’s a crucial difference.

Eddie works in Black Library, as some of marketing overlord. I’m not even sure what he does anymore, to be honest. That place is like the Webway when it comes to who’s doing what, why, and where. All I can reliably say about my publisher is that I have a dinosaur picture I need to send to Rachel, Princess of eBooks.

Eddie is fated – nay, destined isn’t too strong a word – to make the rest of us look like absolute hacks in this project. His conversions are irritatingly masterful; his painting is frustratingly superb (“Ooooh, I’m Eddie, I can fucking wet blend, lah-di-dah”), and he also paints shockingly quick compared to, say, me. But then, so does everyone in full possession of at least one limb. As we’ve discussed, I’m really slow.

Eddie’s Legion: The Dark Angels.

A picture of me hating Eddie.

Admit it, you hate him a bit, too.

His WIP Contemptor – I look at this, and I realise that I wouldn’t even go to Eddie’s funeral if he died.

Hate, hate, hate.

His first month’s pledge is absolutely ludicrous compared to the rest of us (I’ve begged him to slow down). Here’s what he had to say about choosing an army, and the first month’s pledge:

“Picking a Space Marine army is tough.

There’s a lot of choice, and they’re all awesome in their own way, (even the yellow ones). It’s not a decision to rush. Colour schemes must be considered, tactics, play style, background.

Its not like the olden days when all you had to do was pick your favourite primary colour. These days, the legions and chapters have their own identities and heroes, histories and tragedies.

When all said and done though, it still comes down to the same basic male calculus that you use to pick you favourite super hero: who would win in a fight. (its batman by the way)

The Dark Angels were the first Warhammer 40,000 army I ever collected back in the Age of Strife(second edition). To me, the sons of Caliban embody 40k like no other Legion, proper Space Marines: knights in space. Anyone who chooses to go to battle wielding a sword when perfectly functioning guns are available, must be the ultimate badass (see also, Optimus Prime and Jedi).

Also, they have those stylish robes – the Dark Angels are a legion that isn’t willing to compromise fashion for battlefield utility.

At the time of the Horus Heresy, the Dark Angels went to battle in stylish black.

Armies composed of entirely black miniatures can sometimes look less than awe inspiring on the tabletop, so I have covered my warriors in a Blessed Load-out of Imperial Neo-classical Gadgets (BLING). The Dark Angel plastic kits are amazingly generous when it comes to spare components, and I supplemented these with ForgeWorld MKIII marines, mainly for the techno-knightly look of the Iron Armour helmets.

My main inspiration for the paint scheme is going to be this awesome looking piece of Horus Heresy art by Neil Roberts. I’m going to try for some chequered shoulder pads on the units (we’ll see how that turns out).

as well as the power armoured Marines, I built a dreadnought.

I love dreadnoughts. To me, nothing sums up the gothic tragedy of 40k like a half dead hero of legend in a walking tank. This ancient champion has refused to let his near-death stop him going to battle with a sword, and now strides to war swinging a 4m long blade of calibanite steel. A weapon whose awesomeness is matched only by it’s impracticality.

The next addition to the army will likely be some vehicles (because the First Legion isn’t going to walk to battle!) and maybe some kind of character to lead the force.

Watch this space!

(the space in question being Segmentum Obscurus)”

John French – A cog in the grinding mechano-bowels of the great GW war machine. Not a particularly warlike photo, but he’s one of my closest friends, and this picture of him and his son Henry always breaks my heart a little. I don’t have any half as good of me and Alexander.

This is John French. The man who inevitably ends up chairmanning and overseeing every games weekend we have, because… well, just because. You may know him as an author for Black Library (and if you don’t, you really should), and every time I go over to Nottingham for Heresy meetings or BL events, I have dinner and drinks with John to chew over the complicated chaos of fatherhood, writing, gaming, and being married. It should be noted that he always blows the candle out on our restaurant table, in case it looks romantic and/or gay.

Or maybe he’s scared of fire? I don’t know. It could be.

John has a hand in the Forge World side of things, too – he writes material for the Horus Heresy rulebooks. When he writes here, I’ll use this rather attractive dark red font. Like so.

John’s Legion: The Blood Angels.

WIP – Blood Angel Destroyers of the Sixth Chalice. John’s promised us all that he’ll get around to drilling the gun barrels.

He has to play the Blood Angels, since I bought him a bunch of Blood Angel bitz for his birthday, effectively guilting him into a corner.

Having seen the first WIP pics of John’s Blood Angel Destroyers, I look forward to the uproar of “WHY ARE THEY WEARING SANGUINARY GUARD DEATH MASKS?” and so on. Also, John was the first to mention the sacred words: “I’m going to use bits of Mk7 and 8 armour without giving a shit in the slightest. I’m also going to convert a Storm Talon and Nephilim.”

The purist in me shudders just a little at that. On one hand, I know that an Armour Mark is something built with a thousand variations on a thousand forge worlds. The Marks we see are a template, and individual forges, foundries, manufactories and artisans will design their own versions and equivalents. I know the Space Marine Legions had hundreds of vehicles we’ve still not seen, and never will, and that in 40K that scale is magnified a hundredfold. Yeah. I get it, I really do. I love that. Scale, people. Scale.

But if I see something that’s clearly an Errant-pattern  collar without some fantastic unit description and cool lore behind it, then I’ll pop his eyes out with an ice cream scoop, and ask Phil Kelly if he wants to join, over John’s twitching corpse.

This is me. You know who I am. This unintentionally shit photo is one of my favourites, as I was trying to get the daemons and Khorne icon scenery in the cabinets, but someone said “That’s Aaron Dembski-Bowden” just before I took it, and it made me smirk/jerk, screwing up the pic.

If you’re reading this here, you probably know who I am, already. If you don’t, no worries, you’re not missing much. I drink, I write, I scowl. This is life.

My Legion: The Space Wolves.

I chose the Space Wolves for several reasons. Firstly, most importantly, tribal/clan fantasy races are my absolute Number One joy. I love the primal archetypes and shamanic mysticism of it all, as well as the deviations and variants between the noble/ignorant savage tropes. Think of the Cimmerians and Vanir in Robert E. Howard’s works. Orcs, trolls and tauren in WarCraft. The Aztecs. The Vikings. The Mongols. Slaine, the Celtic Fantasy series. The Thirteen Tribes of Werewolf: the Apocalypse. The list goes on and on, and I’m trying to be at least relatively brief. I don’t assume these cultures are better, deeper or more profound than any other, just that I find them fascinating to read and write about.

Secondly, I love the Space Wolves, because I love pretty much every Legion. The Space Wolves will have a longer wait than most Legions when it comes to bitz from Forge World, given that the next rulebook looks like Isstvan V, but they have some awesome bitz already available from GW in the basic Space Wolf pack. So we’ll see how that goes.

Speaking of packs, that’s what comes next. One of my favourite themes in fantasy and sci-fi is the feeling of a pack of characters. A coterie, a brotherhood, a warband. They don’t have to get on well, but they have to be close. it has to be them against the world.

You see it done to perfection in Robin Hobb’s writing, where FitzChivalry and Nighteyes are their own pack: it’s them back to back, against the whole world. Bernard Cornwell does it, too – Derfel Cadarn’s warband of wandering spearmen, with their shields marked by the Star of Powys in reflection of Derfel’s bride. They even have the little traditions that make these things actually matter: the warriors of the warband that went with Merlin on the hunt for one of the Treasures of Britain have five-pointed stars painted on their shields, but those who remained behind to guard their farms only have four-pointed stars. That’s what I love: the notion of a pack having its own rituals and rights of passage, unknown to most outsiders. It was a vibe I wanted to show with First Claw, and I hope to show with Abaddon and Khayon’s inner circle, in The Talon of Horus.

I really want that feeling with my Space Wolves. Every squad will be its own pack, with its own legends, heroes, traditions, markings, and rituals. I hope I can have it reflect in the models, as well as the background I’ll do for them.

Admittedly, I hesitated with the Space Wolves because – as I’ve said before – I try to avoid playing anything I write about. That’s pretty cowardly, so it’s time to knuckle up and ignore anyone who’s ignorant enough to genuinely think that implies bias one way or the other. People will always, always generate their own reasons for why other people do things, and no matter how wrong they are, reasonable discussion rarely changes anything.

I was tempted by several other Legions.

The Salamanders, because I think they look seriously lovely on the tabletop. A dead attractive green, and I love writing about fire.
The Blood Angels, because red is one of the few colours I can paint to an acceptable standard. And, as I’ve confessed before, they’re my favourite Legion. First among equals, at least. 
The Dark Angels, because… so many bitz. So very many awesome bitz. Also, because of Lynn Dunlop – a reader we met at the Black Library Weeeknder – who made Alexander this freaking incredible Dark Angel Chapter jumpsuit:  

Not the best photo I’ve ever taken of him, but you get the idea. How badass is this?

On the other shoulder, it says AD-B II.

Which is, objectively, just too awesome.

For my first month’s work, I’ll stick to a modest single squad. Given that it’s Heresy-style and squads are 10-20 guys, it might actually be a quarter of a squad. But, y’know, leave me alone.

Lord Alan of Bligh. Forge World’s lead writer, the guy behind the Horus Heresy rulebooks, and quite possibly the most English man I’ve ever met. The best thing about this photo is that it looks like Alan’s sent it out to people with nothing but two kisses in the bottom corner.

This is Alan.

For Alan, choosing a Legion was something of a nightmare, because avoiding spoilers is an absolute bitch. He was originally going to do [LEGION NAME HIDDEN TO PRESERVE MY PRECIOUS CAREER], but wouldn’t even be able to show his models, because of… well, because of spoilers. In the end, he settled on a Legion that I think he’s got quite a bit to say about. I’m not sure how much will make it out of super-secret emails, but bear with me – our jobs make opening up about the hobby pretty difficult.

Alan’s Legion: The Alpha Legion.

Alan’s first WIP shot, a Veteran Squad of the Saraph Splinter.

As a point of interest, Alan ends up sharing dual campaign management roles at 40K weekends, assigned the onerous task of saying “You need 3s to hit” and “Roll anything but a 1″ about eight-hundred-and-seventy-four times a day. He shoulders this burden with a patient smile and a mug of tea close at hand (even when Katie makes him and John build three (yes, three) Rhinos and Razorbacks the night before we’re all supposed to play).

I suspect his models will come out looking second-best after Eddie’s, because Alan has a John Blanche-style of painting going on with his 40K Adeptus Mechanicus, and it looks absolutely killer.

Ead Brown – Forge World bureaucrat; Chapter Master of the Minotaurs; Happiest and Grinningest Man in Britain. Look at him doing countryside things. LOOK AT HIM.

And here’s Ead, rounding out the batch. I’ve seen Ead’s Minotaurs a billion times (and if you’ve got the Badab War books, so have you), even going up to see a bunch of them in the Citadel Miniatures Gallery at HQ. Ead’s always a sane and stable presence in my professional life, which I appreciate immensely, but he also drinks the most random shit at the Games Day after-party – and gets me to drink it, too – which I appreciate a great deal more.

He’s also informally a member of my test reader circle, and rolls his eyes every time I try to be cool and call a heavy bolter a “bolter cannon”. It’s slang, you Forge World  son of a bitch.

Anyway, Ead’s basically lovely. Getting him into this was a bit of a trial, as Ead does Minotaurs, Minotaurs, and nothing but Minotaurs. I expected him to say no, so I added him to the secret Facebook group without his permission and started acting like he’d already agreed to join in.

Guilt. A potent weapon. Works every time.

Ead’s Legion: The Iron Warriors.

So here’s Ead, in his glorious blue-grey font, saying why he chose the Iron Warriors:

“Why did I chose Iron Warriors? To be honest it’s a delicious combination of a good, quick colour scheme (hazard stripes aside) and a cool bit of background. Peturabo is my favourite Primarch, especially the way that John (French) describes him in Crimson Fist. There’s something about the fact that such a clinical, emotionless statistician needing to actually watch his enemies being crushed that really grabbed me. Plus I’ve been trying to avoid doing a Heresy force for a while – madness, I know, I know, but I also have a large Minotaurs army and I thoroughly enjoy painting them most of the time – and this is a good excuse.
 
So, month one. I’m going to finish the Contemptor Dreadnought that I started months ago, and also build a Tactical squad. These guys might even get some paint added too!”

I just knew he’d bring up the Minotaurs somewhere in that.

So there we go. That’s the introductions done.

—   —   —   —   —   —

January Summary

—   —   —   —   —   —

The Rules:

Every month, a minimum of 5 models, or one Codex unit entry from Horus Heresy Legion Army List.
Every unit and character has to come with at least 300 words of history, personalisation, and background.
No spoilers from future Heresy releases, despite our spoilertastic jobs.
No crying more than once a week over Eddie’s progress photos.

January Pledges:

Eddie: 10-20 Dark Angels, 1 Contemptor-pattern Dreadnought.
John: Blood Angel Destroyer Squad.
Aaron: Space Wolf Tactical Squad.
Alan: Alpha Legion Veteran Squad.
Ead: Iron Warriors Contemptor-pattern Dreadnought.

Deadline Date / Next Post:

Monday the 11th of February. 
Potential Theme for Next Month’s Task: “Dreadnought Month”. Other suggestions are totally welcome.

The Walking Dead (Game, not the Series)

I usually couldn’t care less about spoilers, but if anyone ruins this for me, I will hunt them down and slowly spread Marmite over their juicy, squishy eyeballs.

I will then eat their eyeballs, like Marmite-stained, gooey gobstoppers.

The Walking Dead, so far, is breathtaking. I’m just gutted I missed out on the episodic release system, as that seemed like it would’ve added to the anticipation.

My only problem is that it’s really reinforcing the fact that I’ve almost entirely stopped playing single-player games, the last few years. Without a really worthwhile storyline (and I realise that’s relative) I’ve been feeling for a long while that single-player games are something a little like busy work. They eat time, and I have nothing to show for it at the end. I don’t go for unlocking achievements, so that’s meaningless to me. I rarely feel some massive splurge of inspiration after a game, the way I do for a good movie or a great novel.

Curiously, I’ve never enjoyed Halo on my own, but in co-op it was always one of the best ways to spend a weekend with my friend Barney. Similarly, Civ V is an astounding motherfucker of a game, but whereas I can spend 10-hours straight on Skype, playing Civ with Ben – when I load a solo game I just feel like, well, I have other shit to be doing. I’ve clocked up about 400 hours in Civ V, and only about 15 of them were on my own.

Anyone who knows me will be well aware than I’m a fantastically insular creature. I need to spend most of every day alone, or I get distracted, tired, irritable. Even on a 40K weekend with a bunch of my best friends and funnest acquaintances visiting, when it comes to playing card games and watching movies at the end of each night, I usually need to retreat to my office and detox from the press of humanity, while they all have fun downstairs. It’s not about enjoyment, but endurance. I’ll have a great day, but the constant press of “Am I showing the right emotion of my face? How do I reply to what he just said? Why did she say that? What is he thinking?” presses in on me, sucking up the immeasurable fluid from my brain-battery. People tire me very quickly. My involvement in conversations begins high, and trickles down to almost nothing by the day’s end. My head will be too slow to think of anything to say, and I’ll be second-guessing everything that comes to mind. Far easier to stay quiet, and even better to retreat.

So I’d have thought single-player games would be one of my main hobbies (like reading is), but I think at some point over the last few years, it’s mutated into gaming becoming a largely social deal for me. Part of that might be because I live 8,000,000 miles from all my friends, so although I usually hate the phone (if my tinnitus is bad, I can’t read lips over the phone), Skype is something of a lifeline. I mean, I do practically everything alone, and prefer it that way. If I gamed alone as well, I’d never see other humans.

Some of it surely comes down to the fact that some things are better with other people. You laugh more at movies if other people are there, laughing with you. But again, that’s not all of it.

I reckon the core deal is that most single player games aren’t made for me, or people like me. Skyrim was amazing, but so light on interaction and storyline that all I could think about while playing it is how incredible it would be as a co-op game. Heading into dungeons together, one as a mage or a thief; the other as a warrior, and so on. If the game offers you no interaction to fuel the immersion, I tend to need it elsewhere. And despite Skyrim’s beautiful setting, the lore was pretty thin on the ground, and the NPCs were never anything more than cardboard cut-outs with limited scripts. So I needed other “living” characters to make it real.

Like I said, “worthwhile” storylines are relative. I can’t stand military worship games like Call of Duty or Medal of Honour, and their infinite ilk, but Transformers: Fall of Cybertron kicked me in the balls hard enough that my soul felt it. Playing through that was a moving experience: it felt literally like my childhood had come to life, caught up with me, and wanted to know if I could come out and play one last time. Presumably, after waving farewell to me, Fall of Cybertron will then vanish to go play with another kid in need of a secret best friend, or something. The same with War for Cybertron, actually. Here were the same feelings I’d had as a kid – that potency of imagination – brought out before me again. People slated the gameplay of both games. I barely noticed the gameplay of either one. I was hanging out on Cybertron, running alongside the characters as Optimus became the Last Prime; as Megatron attacked the Ark before it could reach Earth.

I literally teared up at the moment you stand on the Iacon Highway, with all that road stretching before you across Cybertron, and Optimus finally, finally tells you to “Transform and roll out.” I don’t give a shit how lame that sounds. That was the sunny days of my youth, right there. I’ve waited my whole life for him to say that to me. The immersion was masterful. High Moon Studios, the guys behind the Transformers games, recreated the emotional intensity of the best novels and movies for me, right there in that moment. Emotion. Immersion. Involvement. Feeling like you’re there. Giving a shit.

Very few other games have appealed to me on that level, or through awesome enough characterisation and storylines, in a long while. The last to do it was Half-Life II, which I still regard as the best game ever made. Before that? Knights of the Old Republic II. Before that? Republic Commando; KotOR I; Planescape: Torment; Baldur’s Gate I & II.

I love Left 4 Dead; Civ; Portal, and Halo – with other players. Specifically with my friends. And I thought Portal I & II were great fun, approaching the above games in similar intensity without quite reaching it.

But right now, I’m only half an hour or so into The Walking Dead (love the comic book style graphics, by the way) and it took insane effort to log out and get some work done. I keep thinking about saving that little girl, and the decisions I’m making with everyone I meet, and wanting to know Lee’s story, and and and and and–

And that’s a good thing. This game is stellar. It makes me give a shit.

As 2012 Draws to a Close…

I mentioned this in my Facebook/Twitter splurging a few days back, but If I don’t get another chance to say it before the Big Day when 2012 becomes 2013, then Happy Holidays, Season’s Greetings, and a Happy New Year to everyone whose eyes fall over these words.

The last 12 months have been tough, enlightening, and amazing. Alexander came along, and is already walking (as long as he has something nearby to grab onto). I wrote my second Horus Heresy novel over the course of 9 months, which was “the hardest one to write yet”, just like I say about everything I write. Every novel is the hardest while I’m writing it, and the one I hate the most once it’s released. I think that’s just a hazard of the job. When you spend ages making something and that many people are staring at it, it doesn’t matter what they say. All you see are the holes and imperfections.

In other news, I constructed my games room (not on my own, obviously), so now I can say “Gentlemen, to the Aaronorium” with a straight face. I might even start saying it to strangers in the street. I’ll do it without blinking, for maximum effect.

This is the first year I’ve ever been in a position not to be freaking out that I’ll end up in the gutter come tax month, and you might think that finding my feet financially (along with being married for a year, and having a baby boy) would encourage me to actually get some writing done much faster than usual. Nice theory.

However, if you thought that, you’d be wrong. I’m still as slow as ever.

My bad.

I’m currently getting close to finishing Blood & Fire, which is a little (well, a quite long, actually) tale featuring the words Season of Fire, Armageddon, Celestial Lions, Grimaldus, as well as the name of a certain Chapter that dresses in a blackish templarish way, and – of course – the name of a certain stormtrooper has been mentioned more than once.

After Blood & Fire, I’m starting The Talon of Horus, and I couldn’t be more psyched about it. Not much to say at this stage, except that the main character will be at the right hand of Abaddon through the fall of the Sons of Horus and the rise of the Black Legion, over the course of 10,000 years. Yeah, unless I get killed or banned from touching the IP, this series threatens to be a long one. If you’ve read Bernard Cornwell’s Warlord Chronicles (about “King” Arthur) or Steven Pressfield’s novels of Ancient Greece (Gates of Fire; Tides of War; The Afghan Campaign, etc.) then you’ll know the atmosphere.

The main character’s name is Inaros Khayon, though he has many, many, many titles by 999.M41, and hardly anyone knows his real name by then.

I’m dimly aware that I owe a few updates about my Heresy and 40K armies, so that’ll be inbound in January.

But thank you for enjoying what I do – evidently enough for me to have done it for another year. Thanks for all the feedback, and for taking time to review anything you’ve reviewed on blogs, on Amazon, on Goodreads, or wherever else. Best wishes (along with the blessing of your deity of choice, if appropriate) from the newly forged Dembski-Bowden family, on this Christmas morning.

 

First Claw (on the tabletop)

I get a lot of images (and often the models themselves, as gifts) of First Claw conversions. It’s always flattering, always awesome, and always a surprise. I keep every single one for my office (and soon, for the Aaronorium).

But… Jesus Christ. Here’s the newest one. Just look at these guys.

Freaking killer.

First Claw, by Dimitris Kiourtsoglou.

The Lord Inquisitor Interview

Totally forgot to post this. Grrr!

Here’s my recent interview about The Lord Inquisitor, in case you happen to give a damn. Behold!

Clicky clicky - it’s on the LordI Facebook page, so you may need a FB account to read it.

 

Photos from the 40K Campaign Weekend

The Alpha Legion’s unpainted Maulerfiend gets ready to absolutely destroy several more tanks, and make its way onto the Christmas list of every Chaos player in the campaign.

A rather nice aerial view – with infinite thanks to GW Dublin for painting my board and all the scenery.

Alan’s Adeptus Mechanicus out for their own goals, hiding behind a rather snazzy Aegis Defence Line in matching colours. Note the Baneblade sponsons/turrets on the  Land Raider’s hull, which are sick-awesome.

Ross’s Grey Knights (oh, how I loathed fighting them) moving in support of Emma’s unpainted Eldar.

John’s Night Lords and Cultists swarm forward. Not Pictured: Them dying mere minutes later.

I learned a lot in this game. Here’s the one and only shot of my unpainted force: my Lord and Raptor Squad. Firstly, I learned that lightning claws don’t do shit against Terminator armour. Secondly, I learned that I hate playing Grey Knights. Thirdly, I learned that I felt really bad killing Ross’s Brother-Captain with two meltagun shots. Fourthly, I learned that I felt even worse when his Terminators came back the next turn and killed this unit so hard that even their kids felt the fall of the daemonhammers.

Jon’s Imperial Guard preacher makes the rather foolish mistake of charging a Mechanicus Magos who has a chainsaw for a face.

A very brave, very doomed lone Cultist preaches of Khorne’s glory to a passing phalanx of Grey Knight Terminators.

While Chaos and the Eldar spazzed it out downfield, the Imperials actually go for the objective, trying to stop the Mechanicus from reactivating Greymantle’s planetary defence array. Thus, was the Mechanicus denied their shot to win the 4-way battle in a storm of orbital bombardment.

Katie’s Shadow Wolves (purple) and Jon’s Imperial Guard hang out at the back with some unpainted Eldar.

Alan Bligh, no doubt measuring how much pain that Dreadknight and Katie’s Assault Marines are about to hand-deliver to his front line.

Another aerial shot. My fave.

Katie’s Assault Marines bring down hammer-based pain to various Mechanicus leader-types.

The Painted and Unpainted alike wage war upon their plastic and resin brethren.

Last weekend saw the ‘First Blood’ phase of our Thracian Caul campaign, where about half the group gathered with 850pt. armies in a bid to get to grips with 6th Edition. I loved it lots. I wasn’t so big on 5th.

I’m mad-busy this week with my taxes; writing about the Black Templars; and building my games room in an old, outdoors farm building, so I can legitimately say “Gentlemen. To the Aaronorium.”

So please excuse the lack of any real content, or the narrative behind the campaign.

Army fluff (and army stuff) is incoming, but this isn’t a week for fucking around, so here’s a three-minute blog update to show that I’m not dead. Yet.

Betrayer – Preorder

I thought you might like to see this.

And to know you can preorder Betrayer from today in hardback and ebook, and you’ll get it in a week. The release date is Saturday 15th December for the hardback, and Friday 14th December for the ebook, according to the Powers that Be.

(Spare me any format questions. I’m just a hired gun.)

Heresy & Black Legion chatter in the mail this morning…

Here’s a fun one, in my inbox today. Not sure if serious.

“Is The Master of Mankind about Horus? I heard you want to tie things into your Warmaster Chronicles?”

Firstly, The Warmaster Chronicles isn’t what I call it.  I call it “The Black Legion Series”, or “Rise of the Warmaster”, or “That series I’m likely to spend the next 15 years of my life writing”. The Warmaster Chronicles sounds like a badass newspaper, or a very angry blog. If it’s a play on Bernard Cornwell’s The Warlord Chronicles, then that’s very clever and I love you, as that’s exactly the feel I’m going for (and have said a bunch of times that I love that breed of historical fiction, a la Bernard Cornwell; Steven Pressfield, et al). I may steal this reference and pretend I said it first, so thanks for that.

If it’s not a reference to that, then I guess I hate you. I’m assuming it is a reference, though. I bang on about those books enough at every signing, after all.

However, to business. First, incredulity.

Is that a real question? You’re asking if a novel called The Master of Mankind would be about Horus?

I want to hate you for that, but I’ve only got myself to blame by doing titles like The First Heretic and Betrayer – titles which apply to several characters in the novels they represent. So, okay, you win this round.

But, no.

Jesus, no.

It’d be about the Master of Mankind, as in the Emperor of Man. I mean, seriously, I’m trying to be obvious for once. The idea came from several chats with Alan Merrett, and this ancient piece of art, which is one of my fave 40K images of all time:

But it’s at least a year away, so you’ll have to excuse me not mentioning it as more than a plan, at this point. I know there are lists out there naming Dan and Graham’s next 2-3 HH novels, but I need to sit and nurse this one in dignified silence, as it’d be a beast.

As for tying into my Black Legion series, I’m actually more of the opposite. Part of 40K’s appeal is the inconsistency. The IP folks have explained to me oh-so many times that 40K writing is about every author having their own sandbox, their own sectioned-off corner of the setting, to do with as they please and show their perceptions. It’s not Star Wars, with that same aggressive continuity shrinking the galaxy word by word, annihilating all mystery. Which is why when there’s something like Kharn getting the same voice actor in an HH audio drama and a 40K audio drama, I just don’t really care. My Lorgar isn’t Anthony Reynolds’s Lorgar. My Kharn isn’t Ben Counter’s Kharn. My Logan Grimnar isn’t Bill King’s Logan Grimnar. And so on.

That’s very much the point of the license as it was explained to me, and it’s why 40K is much less “tie-in fiction” than many other licenses. You get the bare bones of a colossal universe, and that’s it. You’re not writing characters that have been on TV for 10 years, bound to their personalities and pasts. There’re degrees of Tie-In, and 40K is at the loosest end of it. The Heresy series is the exception, as it’s very much a different set of rules to usual 40K writing. Continuity matters a great deal because it’s a single storyline with multiple authors, with established beats and immense character crossover. But in 40K, as long as you’re not passing off core lore mistakes as personal style, continuity is very much not the point of the license. Individual perception, from gamer to reader to author, is everything. It’s what you see of the setting. It’s what you bring to it. it’s taking what you like, and throwing it into the mix. Reading the novels is about enjoying other people’s perspectives, and seeing how they match/contrast your own. Not about them feeding you drips of information to be slavishly obeyed.

Marc Gascoigne said it best in an old quote, when he was Head of Black Library:

“Keep in mind Warhammer and Warhammer 40,000 are worlds where half truths, lies, propaganda, politics, legends and myths exist. The absolute truth which is implied when you talk about “canonical background” will never be known because of this. Everything we know about these worlds is from the viewpoints of people in them which are as a result incomplete and even sometimes incorrect. The truth is mutable, debatable and lost as the victors write the history…

Here’s our standard line: Yes it’s all official, but remember that we’re reporting back from a time where stories aren’t always true, or at least 100% accurate. if it has the 40K logo on it, it exists in the 40K universe. Or it was a legend that may well have happened. Or a rumour that may or may not have any truth behind it.

Let’s put it another way: anything with a 40K logo on it is as official as any Codex… and at least as crammed full of rumours, distorted legends and half-truths.

I think the real problem for me, and I speak for no other, is that the topic as a “big question” doesn’t matter. It’s all as true as everything else, and all just as false/half-remembered/sort-of-true. The answer you are seeking is “Yes and no” or perhaps “Sometimes”. And for me, that’s the end of it.

Now, ask us some specifics, eg can Black Templars spit acid and we can answer that one, and many others. But again note that answer may well be “sometimes” or “it varies” or “depends”.

But is it all true? Yes and no. Even though some of it is plainly contradictory? Yes and no. Do we deliberately contradict, retell with differences? Yes we do. Is the newer the stuff the truer it is? Yes and no. In some cases is it true that the older stuff is the truest? Yes and no. Maybe and sometimes. Depends and it varies.

It’s a decaying universe without GPS and galaxy-wide communication, where precious facts are clung to long after they have been changed out of all recognition. Read A Canticle for Liebowitz by Walter M Miller, about monks toiling to hold onto facts in the aftermath of a nucelar war; that nails it for me. “

The key, of course, is not to outright contradict things too much out of professional respect and personal courtesy. And I do my best there, too. I kept Sahaal as an important part of the Night Lords Legion, but I brought him back down to earth in terms of being as flawed as the rest of the Legionnaires, making sure the other characters noticed the treacherous things he’d done to the Legion, or the things he was incorrect about, which a lot of fans obviously ignored or forgave as we all often do with a cool protagonist. We see a wider picture, but the people living in that universe with a character may not, or may have different perspectives to us. And still, several characters liked him lots, while others disliked him – the same as every Night Lord in authority. I didn’t want to mention him very much because he’s not my guy, but he’s tricky because that novel was written when the license was in a different place, and stuff was published then that really wouldn’t get past the loremasters and IP hounds now. Black Library had… looser standards of adhering to the IP (even a cursory glance will show that’s true), and 40K is a different beast now. Some of the claims made by Sahaal (which are revealed as lies in the end of LotN – as they counteract the established Index Astartes lore even then about how the Legion functioned) would be considered much less believable or true now, compared with the age when that novel offered an incredibly rare and unchallenged first-look at a primarch. I liked LotN, so I made the referential nods, and only contradicted the tiny stuff that no longer flew, license-wise.

But tying stuff really close together is actually something I rarely do, in the 30K to 40K divide, and I’m in no rush to make any references between the Heresy series and the Black Legion series. Obviously, there’ll need to be some for realism, but they’re separate deals, and I like to keep them that way. The only frontloading I’ve done for the Warmaster Chronicles at all is the short story ‘Extinction’, which was me doing something different for a change, and trying to write a trailer of sorts, just for kicks. None of those characters are even in the novel (for obvious reasons) and the main character in the series isn’t even in ‘Extinction’. Nor, incidentally, are any of the other principal characters, with the exception of Abaddon. So you can probably see I’m keeping all Black Legion stuff on the down-low for now. It’ll come when it comes. It doesn’t need frontloading. I don’t need to write about Horus and the Sons of Horus now, to prime the Black Legion series. Trust me, that will carry its own weight. It’s the Traitor Legions fighting each other in Hell, before rising to become the threat we all know them as in 40K. It doesn’t need me capering through the HH series and doing prologue novels: the Black Legion’s prologue is the Heresy itself. That’ll serve nicely.

As for self-references, I usually avoid them. Writing so much Chaos stuff means I’m probably in the easiest position to have that level of crossover between characters who were there at the Heresy and still around in 40K, but that’s not really my angle. Dan was comfortable making Enuncia show up in the Heresy as well as his 40K Inquisitor stuff (and it worked great), but I’m not so keen on tying things that closely together with my own work. I like the distance. I’m already a little uneasy at the fact I’ll need to sneak major Warmaster Chronicles (I really like that term – thanks, dude) characters into the Heresy series, just so they’re shown somewhere in the background, rather than exploding out of the unrealistic tides of nowhere. I might have Telemachon mentioned in a scene where the Emperor’s Children show up, or Inaros with the Thousand Sons. But that’s it, at this stage.

Part of the reason it’s not my angle is that I’m trying to show a greater number of Traitor characters that actually die, that aren’t around in 40K, because from my perspective there’s enough focus on the main 40K Big Bads. If none of the Red Team die in the HH series, then they’d win the war. So the point of a character like Argel Tal is that he’s not around in 40K. He’s a major character in the 30K era, but he dies in the heresy. The Traitor Legions lose, after all. They need to take real casualties.

And another part of the reason is that I just get uncomfortable with too many heavy-handed references, as it makes the universe feel too small. Like how Boba Fett is the “greatest bounty hunter in the galaxy.” Uh. Okay. I’m not really sure if that takes into account the size of a galaxy, and the number of planets in it. I can’t name the greatest soldier/bounty hunter/plumber in one city, let alone a nation, a world, a solar system, a subsector, a segmentum, or a galaxy… but whatever. Showing a spread of warships, and naming one of them as the Covenant of Blood? I like that. That’s real. Having Talos show up in a Heresy-era Night Lords novel would a bit too much for me, similar to having a major Black Legion series character being front and centre in the Heresy series. There are other important characters, tens of thousands of them, that don’t get the airtime. Some of them will rise and shine, too.

Hydras and Wolves

People ask me, at least a dozen times a week, what armies I play. It’s one of the Top Ten questions I get, along with “When will you do more about Sevatar?” and “When is Betrayer released?”

I’ll answer those two now, so I have something to link to.

1. I don’t know. Soon by my standards, but not soon by publishing (or the public’s) standards. The second half of 2013 will likely be dedicated to writing my next Horus Heresy novel, but because of timelines and schedules, it’s looking to be more likely it won’t be a Night Lords novel. The Night Lords have had a lot written about them now, and there’s a risk of sustained violence to dead horses being done. They’ve been in several short stories and novellas, and have had more said about their primarch’s backstory in the series than anyone else, in Shadows of Treachery. So they’re not in any urgent need of attention. Since the gang have a habit of saying what their next book(s) are gonna be even a bajillion years ahead of schedule, I’ll throw you a bone in the same way. My next Horus Heresy novel is likely to be called The Master of Mankind. No points for guessing what that’ll be about. Even the title gives me goosebumps.

Don’t ask me if the Emperor is going to be a point-of-view character. I’m not an idiot.

2. Betrayer is released very, very soon. There’s a new system for announcements and preorders and stuff for the hardbacks… I won’t go into it, it’s not my end of the process, really. I’m just a hired gun, not a scheduling servitor. Suffice to say, we’re talking a handful of days, so look to the skies.

But, yeah. “What armies do you play?” is right up there.

I can answer that, but it requires some context.

I paint really, really slowly. That’s partly why I played Necromunda and Gorkamorka so much - 11 House Cawdor gangers was within my sphere of realistic ability, but my 4,000 points of High Elves just… weren’t. For a start, Christ, did I ever hate painting cavalry. A Bretonnian army would slaughter me. I’ve always been more of a Warhammer player than a 40K one (something about the aesthetics of the Fantasy armies has always clanged all my bells) but they were never painted. At best, one fellow in each regiment would get a test scheme, and I’d declare “Sure, I like that, I’ll do the rest at some point.”

At Some Point never came. I had 2 painted Necromunda gangs back in the day (Cawdor & Delaque), but only 1 painted High Elf model in a 4,000 point army, and 3 painted Wood Elves in a 2,000 point army. Incidentally, there’s not a single Fantasy army I don’t love. Beastmen, Wood Elves, High Elves, Dwarfs, Lizardmen, Bretonnia and the Empire just about beat the others, but I love them all. I just dread painting them, even while I know it’s an essential part of the process to make an army feel like it’s “yours”.

Hobby-wise, I was always more interested in the campaign’s narrative – the pre-game stories, the battle itself, and the post-game fiction – as well as kitbashing with my attempts at basic converting. Building models? Sure. Army lists? Yeah, insofar as every unit needed a name, a backstory, a reason to be there, a mission/flavour/grudge/rivalry/debt/whatever that coloured their personality and outlook. I had a unit of Glade Guard with banners made from dwarf shields lashed together with vines, and a Wardancer unit with beastmen skulls on the bases, and red tattoos instead of blue, to represent the months they left Athel Loren in pursuit of a particular bray-shaman they had a blood-oath to slay. Half the Wardancer troupe – the veterans who survived that hunt – wear red tattoos to show they fulfilled their oath, while the newer members, who weren’t part of the troupe at the time, still have blue-green tattoos.

Stuff like that. I’d write it out, or convert it, then never get around to painting it.

I’ve never played any tabletop wargame without it being part of a wider narrative, because that’s just how I enjoy playing them. Pick-up games with strangers and tournaments hold absolutely no interest – no vitality – to me. I get that they rock for other people, but for me the hobby has always been about long campaigns with a bunch of friends, and the stories that rise from those games. The unlucky moments that shape a character, regiment, or battle make for amazing moments of personal history attached to that regiment. The one man that stands up to the dragon. The one cavalry charge that turns the tide. The thirty soldiers locked against another regiment for the whole battle, in the thickest, most savage fighting. The grudges from losing territory, and the exaltation of stealing it back. Me rolling 5 “Slag” territories in Necromunda, making my gang’s turf the most useless, income-less wasteland of industrial run-off imaginable, and the strangely fierce pride that comes from defending glorious, worthless “Slaghaven”.

I play for that, with armies me and my friends have raised and infused with whatever creativity we could cobble together. And yet, despite that attitude of needing it all to be intimate and intensely personal, the painting has never really mattered that much. In hobby terms, the actual painting never fired my guns, so to speak. I was a slow painter as a kid; slow as a teenager; and even slower now. It’s the one step of the hobby I look at with dread. I’m not even that bad, just slow and inexperienced. When I bother to do a model, they’re at least neat, even if not visually inspiring.

But that’s changing. Katie paints now. Her 40K army is more painted than mine. We have a campaign now, and something to focus on. The painting will come.

Choosing a 40K army in recent years has been a pretty frustrating deal. That’s partly because of my own insecurities, and partly because… Okay, it’s entirely my own insecurities. But one of the things I loathe most in any fandom is the accusation of bias. That somehow because Author X likes Faction Y, that’s why Event Z happens in their novels. Or, vice versa, because they hate Faction A, that’s why Faction A loses to Faction B. I hate that because it’s ignorant, and it implies a staggering (and stupid) lack of integrity. Notice I don’t say professionalism. I’m not professional. I’m tactless and naive and overly emotional. But I have integrity about my work. The Blood Angels don’t die at the end of Soul Hunter because I hate the Blood Angels. The Blood Angels die at the end of Soul Hunter because the fight’s not in their favour, and the Night Lords have home court advantage. I love the Blood Angels, as it happens. I’ve refrained from admitting it in the past, but I’m getting braver about it these days, especially in all my interviews and panels where I flat-out admit they’re the one Heresy Legion I’d love to write about above any other. Ask any of the HH team, and you’ll find half of them probably say the same thing.

The Blood Angels are my favourite Legion, but it’s relative, because – just like ice cream – I love pretty much every flavour of ice cream there is. I like Raspberry Ripple slightly more than the others, but it’s all relative. Similarly, the Orks don’t die in Helsreach because I hate the Orks, and the Ultramarines don’t suffer in Betrayer because I hate the Ultramarines. Again, I love the Ultramarines. Just because you like something doesn’t mean they have to win all the time. If they did, well, that’s pretty fucking childish, if you’ll excuse the blunt honesty. That’s not a story. That’s masturbation.

There’s only one Heresy-era Legion I don’t like as much as the others, and since I’ll never write about them, it doesn’t matter at all. I’m not a biased author, and nothing boils my piss more than getting accused of it. It’s such a petty, meaningless, knee-jerk bullshit internet comment that sounds great as an insult because it requires no evidence, and is intimately insulting, attacking personal opinion and professional integrity all at once. That makes it juicy. That makes it stick.

But I’ve talked about this before. It’s the art of walking the line between fan service (making the novel’s chosen faction unrealistically The Best to please its fans), and unfair bias (making a faction look terrible because the author hates them). The former is a pretty popular trope in tie-in fiction, and is a good way to grab many solid reviews and hugely positive fan feedback, even if it’s sort of lame. The latter is something I’m willing to bet almost never happens in real life.

The key is to go between those extremes. Take something you like and understand, and make it realistic, compelling, and interesting. Not better. Just in-depth. If they win, they need realistic reasons why. If they lose, they need realistic reasons why for that, too. In this regard, I’m always kinda amazed when people want me to write about their favourite faction, because my immediate answer is always the same: “You know if I do it, they’ll probably lose, right?”

Which is fair enough. The Grey Knights and Space Wolves come to a political, tradition-bound deadlock in The Emperor’s Gift – both sides have wins and losses, and while both sides “lose”, no one looks stupid or unrealistic. It’s a clash of ideologies in a galaxy-spanning tyrannical dictatorship, not a game of who has the bigger dick. The Grey Knights suffer embarrassing losses once in a while, and the Wolves have to compromise on their principles. It evens out, come the last day. In the Night Lords Trilogy, not only was it always supposed to be a tale about the deterioration of 10th company, their best victories always come from either huge sacrifices, or just running away like the cowards they are. In The First Heretic, I told the tale of the one primarch who hadn’t found his place, and didn’t live up to his brothers’ legacies at that point in time. It was about Lorgar’s first steps (and his Legion’s) to finding themselves by the Heresy’s end, and becoming their 40K incarnations. Helsreach has every main character except Grimaldus dying to a man (and woman), and isn’t the tale of the badass, invulnerable Codex character: it’s the story of how he becomes that character, through doubt and the self-discovery that leads from abandonment. Being denied the death he felt he’d earned made him feel his own Chapter held no value of his deeds, partly because of his own arrogance in the midst of his doubt. He also had to come to terms with his mentor’s primary lesson not being as universally true as he’d thought, which altered his worldview considerably, making him into the Codex character we’re all familiar with. He grew as a character, but the Black Templars lost, and lost hard. That’s what I mean. Me writing a book about a faction you like will hopefully bring some light and depth and realism to it, but if you’re after an actual overwhelming victory, you may wanna ask one of the other folks putting fingers to keys under the watchful eye of Black Library.

You can probably see why I get so riled up by accusations of author bias. And I’m lucky: to be honest I very rarely get any of those accusations, but I see it in half a dozen fandoms with insane frequency. It gives me The Fear. So I’ve resisted playing anything I write about, which has clashed with also not playing anything I can’t paint, shrinking the window of opportunity enough that it became not playing 40K at all. Complicated or cool colour schemes are usually beyond me, and I’ve avoided playing anything I write because I didn’t want idiotic accusations like “He only made the Night Lords awesome because they’re his army.”

Which is another thing I don’t understand. Just liking one army above all others. I can understand collecting one above all others, because money and time is finite. But my 40K Chaos Marine army doesn’t mean I love Chaos Marines more than any other faction. (Again, between you and me, my favourite 40K faction is Dark Eldar, and has been since they first showed up years ago with the vaguest allusions to Space Fleet, that game of old). But I kind of love… all of it. That’s the point. That’s why I work in the setting. Different parts of it appeal to different parts of my skulljunk. I have a 40K Chaos Marine army because I have some good ideas for them, and I love the lore and the models are easy to kitbash. Not because all other races suck. Not because I like Chaos best.

Anyway! There’s been a lot of interest in my 40K dealings lately, and I promised some answers.

Check back tomorrow, and I’ll spill the beans on my Heresy army (with its Tale of Four Gamers project), as well as the details of my 40K army (and its pretty massive campaign in the opening stages this weekend, as it happens). Spoilers: it’s the Hydras and the Wolves. Details to come.

This all times quite nicely with both projects, which I’ll be (infrequently…) blogging about a bit in the future (campaign fluff, army stories, progress pics, gaming weekend write-ups, etc.)

Good luck with Betrayer. Hope you like it.