Articles tagged with: Warhammer 40000

As the name implies, this book is a novelization of 2009's special edition of the Space Hulk Boardgame, depicting missions from Blood Angels space marine terminators against genestealers.

All the boardgame missions are narrated, capturing quite well the atmosphere and narrative of the old Space Hulk text excerpts present in rulebooks.

We read adventures of 5 man squads of terminators, cleansing a dangerous space hulk. And in this point is where the story breaks with old roots, because this novel says that "a hundred terminators, plus techmarines are sent to the hulk", which would mean that the full 1st company of the Blood Angels would be risked on a single space hulk at once. This feels quite unrealistic, plus in old stories (and in real games) only one or two squads are deployed at the same time.

Another thing I learned with this book is a nice trick: If you want to make a novel larger, put a letany each two character sentences. Like "purge the unclean!", of course followed by another as a reply from a fellow marine. This way you get almost twice the pages with the same real content.

Despite the abuse of letanies, the novel is an enjoyable tale, hooking correctly most of the lore, marines, weapons and monsters from the boardgame in the novel.

Posted on 2013-10-12

Tags: Books Warhammer 40000

Note: I misunderstood this was a full fourth book, but it is instead a short story, part of the Victories of the Space Marines novel.

This short tale on the surface appears to be telling about Alaric's squad of Grey Knights' assault of an imperial ship captured by a chaos fiend, but really what it talks about is how the process of becoming a grey knight happens. From how the storm bolter bullets become sacred, to how their armour gets the magic wards, or how a simple human becomes an inquisitorial interrogator.

All of them share one common denominator: huge sacrifices.

Recommended read, I enjoyed it a lot.

Posted on 2013-09-14

Tags: Books Warhammer 40000

Videogames are an increasing source of piles of money, and Games Workshop has been "there" since long with all kind of games from their IPs, specially Warhammer Fantasy and 40k.

But lately, with yet another game announcement for Warhammer 40,000, it looks as a overflow of grim darkness ones while the fantasy worlds are left out. Let's recap all recently announced and released games:

• Space Hulk: 2009's limited edition boardgame edition computer version, just released few weeks ago.
• Warhammer 40,000 Eternal Crusade: MMO with strong PvP focus in development, scheduled for 2015. 3rd person battles between a few races, in theory could extend to all available ones with time in expansions.
• Warhammer 40,000 Armageddon: Turn based strategy game. Imperial Guard + Space Marines vs Orks in the 2nd Battle for Armageddon setting. Probably for 2014.
• "A Warhammer 40k game": Unspecified side-scrolling action game for smartphones and tablets. Not many details yet.
• Warhammer 40,000 Space Wolf: A digital collectible card game about Space Wolves vs Chaos Space Marines and Necrons. In 2014.
• Space Hulk: Deathwing: First Person Shooter depicting the famous Dark Angels chapter Deathwing company. You will control a single marine or librarian (I hope the CPU controls the rest or will be really weird "a one man army"). In 2014.
  UPDATE: Teaser video available.
  

Whoa, that's 6 games in the same setting... compare it with just one recent game for each of their active IPs (Blood Bowl, WHFB and Talisman) in the last months or even years, and you can clearly see where the trend goes...

But at least we will have plenty of options to choose from when not having our 40k minis at hand!

Posted on 2013-08-25

Tags: Videogames Warhammer 40000

Starting a new trilogy of books about the Dark Angels Space Marine chapter, Ravenwing tells the story of an astartes who just joined the Ravenwing company and is becoming initiated in the inner circles and secrets of the chapter.

The famous Sammael, company master, is present through the book, and the story, which I don't want to spoil, beings with the investigation of a distress signal in one of the planets that the Dark Angels use to recruit future marines. Things of course will go wrong, and secrets will be sometimes told sometimes kept hidden between battle brothers.

Having my SM marine composed of Dark Angels was a clear target for reading this summer. While the book pacing is sometimes a bit slow and you're left with the desire of more, how the chapter's secretive inner circles, rites and how the Ravenwing behaves is nicely depicted and will provide with "food" for those of us that like to know more about the sons of the Lion.

The way the author has made the Ravenwing bikes more present that you would initially imagine in a miriad of situations and scenarios is quite clever, not abused nor underused. Also how other normal chapters would feel of the Dark Angels sometimes strange actions in the battlefield (done to try to hunt the Fallen) gets interestingly depicted.

Although the book is chronologically set after another book I'll review soon, The Purging of Kadillus, can be read on its own.

Posted on 2013-08-02

Tags: Books Warhammer 40000

Closing the second trilogy of books, The Chapter's Due presents a quite weak and simple story of chaos space marines and daemons attacking the homeworlds of the Ultramarines.

The interesting points are a lot of battles and an abundance of known heroes: Uriel, Tiberius, Sicarius, even Maernus Calgar.

But even with all that, the book has a dumb plot, unexciting events, unrealistic battles * and in general feels more like a book just written to close the trilogy instead of because of having a nice story to tell.

* Sometimes a lot of space marines die against normal enemies, while other times a bunch of them kill all that gets in their path.

Posted on 2013-07-16

Tags: Books Warhammer 40000