DarkChaplain

There's a new Reader's Choice poll going on, and the picks are mindboggling again. Vote Josh Reynolds' Neferata for WHFB. Even if it's just to signal them that Josh is beloved, and that they :cuss:ed up magnificently by axing the Blood of Nagash trilogy that Neferata opened.... Finale didn't happen because the End Times had to instead.

For my part, HH is entirely uninteresting so long as it is so utterly reliant on Forgeworld resin. That's what ruined Blood Bowl for me when they rebooted it. But I guess they might drop another tie-in anthology or novel like with 2nd edition? Still haven't read that one. Other than a proper new edition of Warcry, which they've repeatedly left out of reveal shows over the past year, indicating it is likely dead (despite supposedly being a fantastic game), I can't think of anything besides HH slotting into summer this year, either. ...then again, I really just want to see them unveil more AoS at Adepticon, particularly a new Spearhead board, cards & book with some new thematic Spearheads of armies they don't have slated for quick Battletome rollouts. Which the rumors would indicate right now, at least. What do you mean "you already own 8 Spearheads"? Don't judge me. That number is going up to 12 this year, anyway.

Good news: There is a new release going up for preorder next Saturday, and it's a surprisingly quick turnaround from announcement to release Bad news: It's Phil Kelly's latest Farsight novel....

Where is my Crying-Reaction?!?! I was laughing at "Reconquests" and wanted to weep by Phil Kelly...

There's been NO word about the fourth and final book in the only series (excluding the Genevieve reprints) that Horror had. The whole Morghast thing was ditched despite repeatedly stating it was a 4-book-series during advertisement.

Yeah, but cross-author, with specific characters. McNeill has forgotten where he left the Sysypheum crew the last time he wrote them (iirc), and he's been the exclusive author as far as I remember. There's not been any meddling with what he set up for them, unlike the various character relays across the series. You'd THINK he had talked those plans for the characters and their relevance to the ONE Primarch he'd taken main "ownership" of (to the point where he wasn't even properly touched for years while he had a novel about him stalled during his departure from BL to work at Riot Games full-time, and when he finally wrote the thing he didn't account for the John French Ahriman trilogy...) over with the editors, or left some sticky notes, or had some drafts on his PC, considering he made the ONLY REASON THESE CHARACTERS SURVIVED a specific plan for them by another Primarch than the one who would've otherwise killed them. Like, this is the stuff you go into having an idea already for their future use. It's not something you'd just establish and think to yourself "I wonder what I'm gonna do with them when this comes back around". Even just thinking about it, you'd probably come up with multiple scenarios during the brainstorming stage already, let alone the writing, rewriting, editing and getting it signed off by your editor. This would inevitably come up during their discussions, considering its the climax of The Seventh Serpent. That being said, I'm still upset that the Sysypheum crew was used as a crutch to enable future Primaris, when WE HAD A PERFECTLY VIABLE WAY TO GET TO PRIMARIS ALREADY in another forgotten plotline from book 18, which never satisfactorily got picked up again or made a real impact.

The afterword also makes it clear that McNeill himself forgot about the whole Magnus-has-plans-for-them plotpoint until now :')

Second dead week in a row....

We should also keep in mind that individual marines may fall in whichever direction, really. The times in which entire Legions would turn to a specific god are long in the past, and at this point we're seeing more general corruption, with particular individuals or groups drifting towards specific entities and trends, even while others trend more towards the opposite. Chaos is a spectrum in most cases; the individual or even Chapter could be placed on any set of coordinates within the chaos star-chart, at any depth level, closer to the center or right at the tips of the arrows, but the Gods are rarely mutually exclusive. In the era of Cult armies and a lack of generic daemon entities on the tabletop, we easily forget that Chaos is all manner of corruption, and that this corruption is conflicting, contradictory, convoluted and not as simple as "the red ones" or "the pink ones". The four major Gods are the big players in the Realm of Chaos, but they're not the exclusive rulers of the entire realm. Things are in flux, always, and Fehervari would rather you think about the seeping corruption and the arcane influences tugging at the human mind, than assign clear adherence to one god's prefered characteristics. ....man, they really dropped the ball by bringing back an amazing model for Be'lakor, but not releasing non-aligned daemons to go with him. Best you can do is probably the Ruinstorm daemons from Forgeworld, model-wise, or daemon engines. The setting really needs to take a step away from individual cults and towards Chaos Undivided again, now that Emperor's Children are finally out.

To add to that, post-Siege, he is still obsessed with beating Dorn somehow, and humbling him. And then he ascends to daemonhood and... buggers off, to lock himself up on Medrengard, isolating himself from even his own Legion for the next ten millennia and however long it was within the Eye. He rages at his sons, he wails, he lashes out, and laments his own fate. He didn't move on, he didn't make plans, he didn't decide his own future.... he got stuck in an emotional trauma spiral.

Ah, yes, a "new" old novel getting re-released in an expensive format. A novel, which never got a follow-up despite being headed that way, because BL likes canning series.

Oh hey, Open Submissions starting during BL Celebration week, just in case anybody wants to never hear back from them and then never get promoted even if they end up moderately successful :')

Yeah, I don't think whatever Aaron and Alan had planned will ever happen at this point. I'm already doubtful we'll see Black Legion 3 before the 30s, and what was originally sketched for Sevatar in Nightfall obviously got scrapped and went utterly unaddressed. I have no hope for this one anymore.

I still want a Brotherhood of a Thousand novel from him...

So apparently Cado Ezechiar, the Hollow King, is getting a second model as well. That's the John French novel character for AoS, who already got a model a few years back... for BL Celebration, iirc. Minka Lesk, Ven Denst, and now Cado... what is it with BL-models just retreading the same characters? Not even counting Neave Blacktalon, at least she had a dual kit with a generic option at first. There's so many they could be doing instead. Heck, what's next, Drekki Flynt version 2? I mean, I like these models and think it's fantastic that BL characters get miniatures again. But their priorities seem so awkward, it's annoying. ...and unlike the Minka Lesk model article on Warcom they also published today, this one wasn't even marked as part of the BL celebration DESPITE being about a BL character AND advertising both novels.