Book review: Vermintide

I picked up "Vermintide" because I was asked if my collection of Warhammer novels included any with skaven in it. The answer was pretty much no, with there being a bit of skaven in a few of the ones I had, but none that were primarily about skaven, as I have not got the Thanquol and Boneripper-series. Fortunately, there was this book which was by an author unknown to me and not part of a series.

 

I was not technically correct about any of those things, apart from skaven being prominently featured. The author is C. L. Werner, a man with many fans, including a few in my circle of friends. I count myself as a sometimes fan, as I like some of his books (Wulfrik, Palace of the Plague God, Blood for the Blood God), but not all (Forged by Chaos? What a a piece of...). I find that I like his work best when it isn't a fry up of a film, so I have steered clear of the Brunner books so far, but I may dip my toes one day if I hear persuasive arguments in favour. So yeah, Bruno Lee is a pseudonym. I guessed as much when I bought it, but never checked whose.

 

Second of all, the book kinda ties into other works, as it has some characters familiar to veteran Warhammer readers and a few references to other "famous" Warhammer characters who are simply mentioned in passing. Some may find that awesome, either because they like that sorta familiarity, or because they like the sense of an elaborate tapestry where all the books are connected and fit neatly together. They usually don't though, so I suppose one solution is to just have the same four guys write most of them, and that plan is fine, if you've got the right guys.

 

Is Werner the right guy? The plot was good. I won't reveal it, but of course it involves tunnels full of foul ratmen with fiendish schemes, treachery both among human and skaven alike, and some characters that are quite cool, along with some that are... less cool. As usual, Werner has quite a good rogues gallery, and the villains are very villainous indeed, making (most?) of the protagonists seem more generic. The hero, Heiko Geissner for instance? No mental image of him for me, and he came across as quite generic, even if I have come to appreciate older heroes as I slide further and further out of the "intelligent late teens boy"- reader segment. There were some attempts at explaining motives, pitting different morals against one another, etc and I was quite impressed with that in a 250 page novel where stuff all does blow up. It managed to not seem too added on or annoyingly out of place, and the only thing some readers might not like is how Werner has a tendency to kill off quite a few characters, often in a way that's best described as callous or unceremonious, so... brace yourselves for that.

 

Oh yeah, and seeing as how it was the international Women's Day yesterday: There is absolutely no female contribution in this whole book. Well, if there is, it's part of the backstory for a character, and that woman was a whore. So... Yeah. No Xena, no Pippi, no Hillary.

 

I did like this book, primarily because I thought the plot was fairly solid for what it is, and because it made very good use of its 250 pages without there being either a need for more or any point where it dragged on to no use. Like I have said before, some of the longer books have pointless long "A to B"-sequences where your gamemaster would roll dice for a random encounter if this was a night of RPG'ing, but when you're down to 250 pages this is most often avoided, and things don't get too complicated to be resolved with a big fight at the end.

I give this four stars out of five*. This was like a nice warm soup, hearty, but maybe not very filling.

*Maybe three and a half due to the character with the Trainspotting accent who just always pisses me off. 

Fire bad!

Flesh golems... The range these days for an aspiring Prometheus is from the Karloff-monster to fleshy piles of limbs and huge body builder types.

Then there are these two weird ones that I am not even sure I like... They are ripped and muscular, but not gargantuan. They have Iron Maiden-faces with character, and odd limbs, fists in particular. They stand up well, fall down well...

So far, so good with the painting.

Comments welcome. Are they up to snuff?

Forever remain

I have  started converting and painting up zombies for the necromancer team that I inflict upon my friends in our small league...

So far the Odenwald Goolies are not up to much, languishing mid-table, groaning for brains and calling for others to join their ranks. So I have begun work on the skin of those who still have some, ie zombies and glesh golems, as the still living ghouls will most likely be done differently, and the wolfmen are a different story altogether.

So far it is early days, and this is just a teaser.

They'll not play in pinkish red when done.

Sea elves or high elves

Recently persuaded to support further exploration of an otherwise non-canonical blood bowl team I have set sails for Ulthuan, a land where puffy shirts may well be in vogue...

Sea elves are a funny team, and luckily one can cover the high elf list with the same miniatures in terms of positions: 2 throwers, 2 catchers, 4 blitzers and the rest linemen. This meant I did not have to put the knife down and start again or add to my original plan.

These minis are not giants. In a size creepy world such as this, they strike me as refined and elfishly lean in a way that a few wood elf teams that one can purchase are simply not.

Colour suggestions welcome. Don't say white.

Bully boy

This piece is... Well, I would not say that I actually like it, and there are several reasons.

1. It is feckin huge.

2. It has a tail. Yes, I could have fixed that, but it does.

3. It is a 'comission' and will probably murder som of my players in the near future.

So normally this would not be on here. It is not my 'style', and I mostly just cobbled together some bits and bobs and used a truly fugly head to replace one that was actually worse.

Book review: Gilead's blood

Much like the previous piece of classic fantasy pulp fiction reviewed on here ("Zavant"), the first book (out of three, I think) about Gilead the elf is not a novel, but a collection of short stories.

These stories are told as 'yarns', or 'legends' if you will, and that is generally always a good way to frame tales like these, as they often do not handle scrutiny very well... So too these stories, as some become almost too intangible and expressionistic to really enjoy, while others seems to involve Gilead slaying hordes of foes, and one is a somewhat poor fry up of "Seven Samurai" (Or "13 assassins")...

I am getting ahead of myself. Gilead the elf is a tragic hero, a melancholy, dysfunctional shell of a man, robbed of his twin, his heritage, other elves to pally around with, etc. It does not spoil things in major ways to reveal that Gilead, the son of an elven lord somewhere in the old world, loses his twin brother, and with him the will to live, and becomes as if half dead. It all works very well, and the character is quite believable and well written, so that the reader understands WHY Gilead is off swinging his sword at anything that seems to need it, relentless and with an obvious deathwish.

Well, it is not quite clear how Gilead got to be SO lethal, but this is a legend, so...

Gilead travels the Old World with his last remaining and ever loyal retainer Fithvael, now in search of other elves, but mostly finding problems and disappointments. Their relationship is interesting, part Crockett and Tubbs, part Batman and Alfred. Homoerotic? I would not say that. Not because the sometimes obvious dificulty in how to handle sex and sexuality in GW books rears its ugly head again, but because Gilead is more akin to a patient, a terrible burden to Fithvael that he carries out of feelings of duty, guilt and responsibility, with perhaps just a ghost of affection for what Gilead was or could have been.

The stories are largely well written, engaging and exciting, with one possible exception that seemed like one had to be chemically enhanced to enjoy it to the max, and the last (and sadly longest) story that just came out a bit predictable and lame.

I liked the book, mainly for the melancholy, and I tend to like that sort of thing, but that does not mean I like ALL the tales of tragedy, vengeance and so on in these books, and it could have easily been handled too crudely to win me over. But it did, and I will probably read more of Gilead, hoping that they have the same strange and terrible beauty to them.

Over all I give it a four out of five. It may not entirely earn it, but it was better than some of the three's, and I enjoyed it.

Book review: Zavant

I managed to get a lot of reading done over the holidays. This is what happens when all you basically do is open presents and digest food. This combines well with reading, and I continued my journey through the old "classics" of GW's fantasy books with Gordon Rennie's "Zavant".

I knew Rennie's work from the excellent 40K novel "Execution Hour" as well as a few short stories here and there. To me he is one of the best writers under the GW banner. I have not read any of his other works, so I do mean specifically under the GW banner, and not in a general sense. This is probably not his best book, however...

Oh. Before we begin properly: What an ugly cover. Zavant looks like he went on to father Beavis, and Vido looks like my friend Martin from Blood Bowl. That latter factoid is of course neither here or there, but... wow.

This is not so much a novel as it is a collection of shortish stories about the character Zavant Konniger, a sort of Sherlock Holmes of The Empire. I had just re-watched the Sherlock Holmes films the other day, so the thought was not far off to begin with, but it is no doubt a deliberate pastiche. Zavant, a sage detective (or was that detective sage?) and his halfling sidekick Vido basically fight crime. Or chaos. Evil. You know, stuff that heroes fight. Because this is perhaps THE thing about these stories: Zavant and his fellows basically fight stuff. While there is some talk of deductive reasoning and a long list of cases mentioned, Zavant basically just kicks ass, and we are not treated to a great deal of mystery as such, and when we are, the answers are pretty obvious, and the plot resolves itself by means of some violence. Is this okay? Well, sure, who would honestly enjoy a book where a "Schierluck Heimers" and "dr. Wassonst" went around Altdorf cracking cases that were rewrites of Conan Doyle's books? Not me. Would I have liked a character who was a little less omnipotent and garnished with silly abilities like "martial arts taught to him by a traveller from Cathay"? Yes, I would.

I am not saying that Rennie couldn't write a true mystery to save his life. I believe he probably could. The writing is excellent in many ways, vivid, evocative and with some really nice touches here and there. I particularly enjoyed the tale with Nurgle-stuff  in it (! Spoiler!), even if that one really is a prime example of stuff just happening to Zavant and co. more so than any actual detective work getting done. So what I am saying, is that a more happy medium could have been found, if the mysteries had been turned a bit more mysterious, Zavant himself had been streamlined a bit and there had been fewer "big brawl"-endings. That may just be my personal preference though.

It is not quite clear to me if this book is conceived with the WHFRP career system and rules in mind, but it does not have any MAJOR battles where thousands die, and that DOES count for something in my book. It sometimes gives you these muddled "adventurer" types - for better or worse - who then require more personality to come to life, but in spite of Zavant Konniger's patchwork character, the cast is overall quite good, and Rennie manages to stay clear of using the same four or five German names that so many of the other books peddle, and there are some very good characters in some of the stories.

Rating? I give it 3,5 stars or skulls or whatever it is that I give these. It is a bit like Christmas dinner with all the trimmings, where some of it is delicious, but other stuff is... not as good as it looked.