Warhammer Fantasy

There is no light at the end of the war. There is only the next battle, and the certainty that the horizon will always be black with the banners of Chaos. This is the Old World: a grim mirror of our own late-medieval Europe, where the fractious Empire of men holds its borders against the ratmen who boil up from beneath its cities, against the walking dead of the vampire counts, against greenskins, and against the horrors that pour south from the Realm of Chaos. Faith is a blade, mercy is a luxury few survive, and a hero is measured chiefly by how well he dies. Published under Games Workshop's Black Library, the fiction runs to hundreds of novels and tales by many hands. William King set the tone with Gotrek and Felix — a doom-seeking Dwarf Slayer and the poet sworn to record his end — while C. L. Werner, Josh Reynolds, David Guymer and Gav Thorpe carried the world across Bretonnia, Ulthuan and the northern wastes. The Time of Legends cycle reaches back to founding myths: Sigmar's Empire, the rise of the necromancer Nagash, the first vampire wars. Jack Yeovil's Genevieve Dieudonné and the scheming dark elf Malus Darkblade run their own grim threads. Then The End Times burned it all down — an apocalypse that unmade the world and birthed its successor, Age of Sigmar, set among the sundered Mortal Realms. Expect no comfortable victories. This is grimdark in its purest strain: courage without hope, glory without reward, a world that kills its protagonists and means it. There is no single thread through a shared setting this vast, so newcomers do best to begin with Gotrek and Felix — start with Trollslayer, whose linked tales open the whole doomed continent one blood-soaked road at a time.