Early Warhammer Fiction

In my post on What is Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay I talked at some length about what it is that makes WFRP identifiably WFRP to me¹. Over the past few months I have been re-reading some of my old Warhammer fiction – books like Drachenfels, Beasts in Velvet, the Konrad trilogy and the short story anthologies Ignorant Armies, Wolf Riders and Red Thirst. Revisiting some of these books has led me to the realisation that they contributed to my conception of the Warhammer world and WFRP just as much as the First Edition rulebook and the original Enemy Within campaign.

In some ways they are standard dark fantasy stories. None are going to win prizes for Great Literature. Heroes are usually young and male (with one major exception on both counts!²). There’s usually some bloody action, often a bit of titillation but never anything really graphic. I’m certain that the intended readership is teenage boys. I’m certainly not a great expert on fantasy literature, so I can’t compare these novels to a huge range of other material, but to me they stand apart from the other fantasy novels I read at the time for being a bit darker and having a bit more of a social conscience.

One major thing I notice is that mutants are often treated with sympathy. This is in stark contrast to the classic WFRP adventures (especially the Enemy Within), in which they are generally presented as monsters to be put to the sword, their minds corrupted just as surely as their bodies. In these novels – particularly those written by Jack Yeovil (a pen-name for Kim Newman) – mutants are just as likely to be good people, horrified at the changes they are undergoing and desperately hiding them from even their closest friends. Indeed, in Yeovil’s stories, the principle villains are likely to be nobles, physically uncorrupted but secretly descended into evil. There is a very clear sense of social inequality – that in this society, the rich and powerful probably don’t have your best interests at heart (though, to be fair, there are good examples among them).

Main characters are likely to be rather greyer than in some standard fantasy of the time. Many protagonists in short stories meddle in dark forces and receive their comeuppance (often at the expense of other innocent lives) – morality tales in the Warhammer world. Characters are also very human (literally so, since non-human protagonists are vanishingly rare – once again Genevieve being a notable exception!) with doubts and fears. Some are warriors, but our point of view character is just as likely to be a playwright, a gardener or a farmboy. None are really larger than life – even the legendary Gotrek, who is admittedly a badass warrior (and never the point of view character) loses an eye to a humble goblin in one of these stories!

There’s also lots of worldbuilding going on, much of it beyond the bounds of the Empire. One short story contains a fabulous description of Parravon with some truly excellent Chaos corruption going on. Gotrek and Felix adventure in the Border Princes. Johann von Mecklenberg ventures into the honest-to-goodness Chaos Wastes in pursuit of the Champion of Chaos who has kidnapped his brother.

It’s an interesting mix. I’m not going to claim these stories are great literature, and my opinion of them is inevitably heavily clouded by nostalgia. I’ve not delved into the Warhammer fiction of the Black Library (and nor do I particularly want to) so I can’t say how later Warhammer novels compare – though the impression I get is that they are much more focused on Big Characters and Epic Action, neither of which really interests me. (Perhaps I’m being unfair and judging the books by their covers!)

1. While acknowledging that WFRP is many different things to many different people, and my opinion on this isn’t any more right than anyone else’s! ↩︎
2. That would be Genevieve Sandrine du Pointe du Lac Dieudonné, a 600-year-old vampire forever frozen as a 16-year-old ↩︎