Why no Horus Heresy Dies Irae novella

[Angel_of_Blood]

I really do feel like they missed on not putting out a novella about the Dies Irae. Could have been from Arukens POV as it becomes more and more corrupted. I mean there's tons of novellas they could have done of course, but really wanted this one.

[Marshal Loss]

Totally agree. That was one of my main gripes with Mortis, especially given the name - it felt like a massive missed opportunity to not circle back to POV characters from the beginning of the heresy. Legio Mortis have some excellent and creepy mythology surrounding their corruption as well, and seeing one or more of those theories get fleshed out could have been very interesting to see.

[Bobss]

I didn't like how Titandeath was written, so the complete removal of Traitor Titan crew perspectives in Mortis didn't really bother me. I also believe it was a stylistic choice: at this point in time the Dies Irae doesn't feel like a machine piloted by humans or even one that is possessed by demons, it has sort of become its own being - almost like Horus' own avatar on the battlefield of Terra, and I think John French did a beautiful job of describing its dark majesty. No one writes Chaos like John French. On the other hand, perhaps it was simply a matter of wordcount, but I don't think that reasoning holds water when in my opinion the Shiban Khan sections could've and should've been drastically cut down, and both Ollanius Pious' Bizarre Adventure and The Sindermann & Keeler Show could've been trimmed as well. So there would've been space for it.

 

There's also the matter of drowning (or expanding - depending on your viewpoint) the Siege in extra material and additional releases. Some readers like it; some don't. As we've been saying for the past few years, the Siege is in an impossible position where it can't satisfy absolutely everyone completely and utterly. This is ultimately the result of its parent series being so varied and expansive. It just is what it is. Regarding Graham McNeill's novellas, I personally believe they are a way for one of the founding writers of the Horus Heresy to participate in its climax without attending the in-person meetings due to his current roles and responsibilities living in the US.

[Angel_of_Blood]

Whilst I agree to an extent. I don't feel that the Die Irae was even remotely built up enough to have the presence it did in Mortis. As you said, by that point it is like its own entity. But we had nothing to lead to that. One minute we have it bumbling along in the opening trilogy like any old titan, could have been a reaver for all the presence and power it displayed. But we do have the crew, along with a schism within and some potential future plot line.

 

Then we have nothing at all until it appears in Mortis and is suddenly this unstoppable near mythical entity that just annihilates everything in its path with no resistance. I'd just have likes something....anything....to have led us to that.

[Noserenda]

Yeah its a shame that plot thread was dropped completely once the original trilogy finished, even gien how bloated it got in the middle id have thought they might have been excellent short story fodder.

[RedFurioso]

 

Then we have nothing at all until it appears in Mortis and is suddenly this unstoppable near mythical entity that just annihilates everything in its path with no resistance. I'd just have likes something....anything....to have led us to that.

Dies Irae was described like absolute beast in HH-2: Massacre, where he obliterated hundreds of space marines with every shot.

[DarkChaplain]

Which is cool for the people who buy & read the Black Books. Terrible decision to leave that stuff solely in the Black Books for anybody reading the novel but not willing to shell out that amount of money for supplementary material that didn't arrive until halfway through the novel series.

 

This is the perfect opportunity to air some problems I have on the whole with the FW/BL cross-polination - or rather, the lack of synergy.

 

The cheapest Black Book is still 50€ in softback - and that's only book two, the other softbacks are 56€. For some reason, book three is only available in hardback anyway, at 92€, with 7 being 100€ and 9 a whole 105€. That means a grand total of 627€ just on already released material in the cheapest formats FW offers them in right now, part of which consists of rules and datasheets somebody who doesn't play the game has no real use for, while the Black Books haven't even come close to the final acts of the Heresy.

 

Even assuming they're all going to hit softback at 56€, that's still 500 bucks.

 

.....and the Horus Heresy novel series started in Mass Market Paperbacks, which were well under ten bucks in any region. Oftentimes, I paid 6-7€, no more than that, per book. They might have scaled up the prices with the formats they added by the time of Angel Exterminatus, but there are still significant amounts of MMPB-only readers/collectors. A single Black Book can thus total as much as 5 to 10 MMPB books in the series.

 

Given the sheer volume of short stories and novellas we've had over the course of the series' history, including a spinoff series and now also a second, there is literally no excuse to keep these kinds of things, the character development, world building or faction highlights exclusive to the Black Books. There should be zero requirement for a novel reader to deep dive into background/rulebooks for a game they don't even play, just to be in the loop about what's going on int he novel series - and no, not even when the same author is writing a particular novel and also wrote the sections in the FW books.

 

If French already wrote parts of the lore about Mortis somewhere, or was involved in the process of that happening, he should be the first to make that stuff accessible to the audience of his novels, if Mortis is supposed to play a role in those novels, or adjacent anthology material. "I know this is the big baddy that I named the book after, but I won't actually showcase them in any meaningful way, just go read this other niche publication sometime" just does not cut it.

 

And this definitely isn't the first time this stuff has happened since FW started out, especially with French's works.

[DukeLeto69]

I get the frustration @DC.

 

On a FW black books related note...

 

I have the full set in hardback up to book seven. They are beautiful but that is some serious investment.

 

When Book 8 came out I held off for a bit due to real world cash flow and prioritisation issues and... missed out on the hardback. I was really annoyed at first as my collection is incomplete.

 

Nonetheless I waited for the softback and got it but then came to the decision that going forward I would only buy in softback, so no Book 9 yet, as that kind of kept my collection consistent going forward rather than flip flopping b/w HB & SB.

 

Now something that annoys the “I am only here for the lore as not played since 3rd Edition” person in me is that while the rules folks (players) can purchase the red books, us lore guys have to buy the whole book. I really wish they had collected the lore together into a volume(s). Grrrr.

[Angel_of_Blood]

The other thing about the black books, is I've read most of them, but it's at times quite a slog. I don't want to have to read about pivotal events and characters from the series, in a history book style format honestly. Don't get me wrong, I like history books, and I do like reading the black books when the mood takes me to read some history style accounts of the Heresy. But yeah, as DC said, not to mix and match.

[Petitioner's City]

I don't know, I think the history book style is what makes the black books special, and it was Alan Bligh's lasting contribution to the hobby that he did that style so well. That style works far better than most of those realist prose novels we tend to complain about here, in part because it wears on its shoulder an authorial perspective and subjectivity that makes things feel more immediate, more real (especially compared to the omniscient perspective we tend to see in BL books, outside of rare first-person or fragmented narrative).

 

More so, the black books' content isn't the kind of content that easily works or is interesting as another kind of genre. The black books succeed because they are fake history books. If they were novels, wouldn't they most likely just be "battles of the heresy" bolter - or titan - porn? Not exactly interesting.

 

Not everything needs to be immediately adapted into another media - because of course we often struggle with how adaptations - to succeed - need to fundamentally change the originating material if they are to succeed in that new medium. That can include changing the "facts", "core story", "characterisation", or even the "setting" of the material. These separate works don't need to exist "in continuity", and indeed they certainly don't. They exist as separate works of art and craft providing different views into the IP's cardinal mythical setting. There is metatextual relationships between the two groups, and there are authorial links like French, but I think with the heresy there just isn't a neat envelope that encloses everything the heresy can include. Instead, extra information you don't necessarily know is part and parcel of it (as it touches every pie in 40k as an IP) - and surely just as there is information about Dies Irae not explained in any depth, so too the four chaos gods, the eldar fall, the extra races who make up the Cabal, what the heck a boltgun or lasgun or rhino or land raider are, etc. They aren't explained, and thus the same with this titan.

 

But on how people feel they don't have access to the black books, which seems to prevent people engaging with them, I find that unlikely. Let's not pretend most people *can* read them - this is *the* pirate's hobby, and all 9 are a simple Google search away, with iterations on the usual sites. It seems mad that people use this reason to say they won't read the black books, when they seem to endlessly Google and pirate so many other bits of this hobby. I'm not condoning piracy here, I just find it a bizarre excuse to not read them given how most people seem to "read" the hobby (be it the source books, the novels, the rules, or other things).

 

Ideally, however, they will put the books on the Warhammer vault; that would be a really nice thing to do as the new box launches.