Since the dawn of written language (maybe even before, who knows), humanity has been obsessed with the idea that human existence will eventually end collectively with a bang and lots of noise. Perhaps we simply cannot exist without a narrative arc of suspense. Leaving aside Ursula K. LeGuin's carrier bag theory and many a literary marvel (such as House of Leaves or Ship of Theseus), it usually consists of a beginning, a middle and an end. There are no limits to the imagination when it comes to total extinction, be it death by impact, death by machine, death by social collapse, death by bomb, death by pandemic or death by climate change. Of course, this provides plenty of ideas for cultural creators, such as a variety of films, music, theater or books, books and even more books. Let's start with the end: Rumaan Alam's “Leave the World Behind” gives us a very subtle and quiet creeping feeling. If you want to be pushed face-down into doom, turn to the classics “The Day of the Triffids” by John Wyndham (Death by Flora) and - particularly impressive - the alien invasion in H. G. Wells' “War of the Worlds”. Here, gigantic Martian creatures use heat rays to pulverize everything within a radius of one kilometer. What's an even better way to pulverize everything? Right, just drop the bomb. If you like dry humor, run straight to Kurt Vonnegut. But keep in mind, “Cat's Cradle”, “A Man Without a Country” and “Slaughterhouse-five”, will leave you with the strange feeling of having laughter stuck in your throat. Absolutely awful is “All the Fiends in Hell” by Adam L. G. Nevill. I'm talking about destruction on a biblical scale. It's not called alien-HORROR for nothing and is not for the faint-hearted. Speaking of the Bible, in J. G. Ballard's “The Drowned World” we get to watch a few survivors go mad while office buildings rise out of Jurassic forests. Absolutely fantastically written, absolutely uncomfortable, absolute recommendation. However, authors almost prefer to reminisce about the “what after?” rather than the bang itself.
In “The Doloriad” by Missouri Williams, we follow a third-generation incestuous family on the outskirts of an extinct town in the abysmal descent into psychological destruction. And Stephen King's “The Stand” revives the age-old battle between good and evil after a pandemic (including the trashcanman and a bomb) and in most apocalypses Zombies limp around here and there anyway. Zombies, but in a completely different way than usual: “It lasts forever and then it's over” by Anne de Marcken. It doesn't always have to be blood, endless suffering and tears, because what is the ability that makes us people as indestructible as cockroaches? Exactly, resilience and the ability for HOPE. Octavia Butler shows us this through Lauren in “Parable of the Sower”, who keeps holding on to dignity and humanity even under the most impossible circumstances. “The Ministry for the Future” by Kim Stanley Robinson should be on every curriculum for young and old and ends this text with a smile and warmth.
If you want to find out more about why we are so incredibly preoccupied with the question of the end, pick up Dorian Lynskey's “Everything Must Go”. Tom and I ate our way through it in no time at all and if we weren't annoying each other with it, then everyone around us - that's how much the book bangs! And even if it sounds strange: somehow you feel better afterwards?
I'm off to explode somewhere else and wish you a wonderful summer's day,
yours Esther from Otherland.
Science Fiction
The Neuromancer Trilogy #3
Mona Lisa Overdrive
Orion Publishing Co: €16,50
Audiobook from libro.fm
Kamiko is the daughter of one of the world’s most powerful men, but that hasn’t got her out of being sent to live on the other side of the world in London with one of her father's business associates. Apparently, the Japanese criminal underworld is about to kick off, so now she's stuck with an East End bodyguard called Petal and an intensely violent woman called Sally, who seems to be stuck there, too.
Meanwhile, ex-con Slick Henry is also stuck - out in the wastes in an off-grid factory where he runs down hours building robots for no one in particular. Then out of nowhere an old mob-tie, Kid Afrika, turns up looking to call in a life debt. Slick finds himself looking after some weird dude in cryosleep with cables shoved up his orifices and a huge ominous grey box. That would be bad enough, but this guy’s running some seriously suspicious tech. And Slick’s not the only one interested in it.
Angie Mitchell is the face of Sense/Net: a VR star of the highest trajectory. What her billions of fans don’t know is that Angie has some superhuman abilities on the side – like she appears to be able to jack in to the matrix through her regular dreams. But her employers are getting shifty about Angie's downtown activities. Is there compromising data in play? And how far will people go to cover it up? At the other side of life’s roulette wheel, working girl Mona is sixteen and SINless. Florida is treating her like a piece of shit, so when her pimp Eddie tells her he's found a way out of their vermin-infested squat, she jumps at it. But now it looks like Eddie's selling her out to a new handler. Along with offering Mona more money than she has ever known, her new owners want to change her body image for a one-time gig, all expenses paid. It sounded too good to be true, and now Mona is seriously wondering if it is.
This series is a classic for a reason. It has been a little bit since I read the second instalment and a while since the first. So there was this experience of delayed and often patchy memory uploads. I knew I should recognise some of the names and faces, but it was interestingly murky. Some of that is on purpose. Even if you are coming fresh off the first two books, there are some solid “aha” moments. If you don't know Bobby Newmark, Angie Mitchell, Case, Molly or the Finn, I guess it makes sense to go back and read Neuromancer and Count Zero first, just to get the backstory. I won't say it's as good as the first two. But it's a very pleasing return to the original cyberpunk universe – ticking all the right boxes – and a stylishly neat conclusion to the trilogy. Gibson is the master of untrustworthy side characters, of giving not quite enough info to the reader for them to actually get a grip on what’s up, of philosophical assaults on Big Tech and reality itself.
[Tom]
Fantasy
Penguin Modern Classics
Night Watch
Penguin Books UK: €13,50
Audiobook from libro.fm
Sir Samuel Vimes is the picture of job security. As head of Ankh-Morpork’s night watch, he is such an institution that the local assassins’ guild has given up trying to off him. He is respected and avoided in equal measure – and about to become a father, too. Then, on a routine operation to bring in a serial killer, he falls through a time-warp and is thrown back in time to the early days of the watch.
Now Vimes is under the supervision of a sect of time-policing monks, and has to make sure his version of reality actually comes to pass. Unfortunately for him, his murderous target Carcer has also fallen back through time, and is now gleefully running amok. Nor is that all. Back-stabbing is rife in the old watch. A bloody rebellion is brewing. Shadowy figures are moving in the shadows. And there is also the fortune of one very young, fresh-faced Lance-Corporal Vimes to worry about. If Vimes can’t keep his past self alive, he will stop existing at all. It’s all in the job.
Penguin Modern Classics. Yes, you read that correctly. Classics. How good was Terry Pratchett? That’s a rhetorical question: he was awesome. Night Watch is held by many fans to be the masterpiece of an amazingly funny, intelligent, and humane corpus. Appearing five years before another police-officering Sam was curiously also sent back in time in the BBC’s Life on Mars, Night Watch is the 29th Discworld novel and several books into the Watch series, but don’t let that put you off if you have never stepped foot in Sir Terry’s secondary world. This is the perfect place to jump in. I have heard it said of tabletop sword-and-sorcery that everyone starts off wanting to emulate Middle Earth but ends up creating the Discworld, but reading Night Watch makes you realise most fantasy world-builders would be lucky to scrape together a tenth of the complexity Pratchett manages in his best bits.
It has tension. It has character. It has humour, of course. And it has all the wibbly wobbly, timey wimey stuff you can get your brain around. (Just don’t think about it too much – it’s quantum, baby!) Oh, and for anyone who has had it up to the hooded eyeballs with never-ending creeds of assassins, this book does a great job of making all the hidden blades and parkour look really, really, really silly. Hats off.
[Tom]
Horror
The Empusium
Penguin Putnam Inc: €22
Audiobook from libro.fm
I got into Olga Tokarczuk thanks to a glowing recommendation from one of our customers, who described her as hands down one of the most interesting writers of our time. Big claim.
I found a copy of Drive Your Plow over the Bones of the Dead and got stuck in. The book is about a string of bizarre murders on a hunting estate on the Czech-Polish border. Our protagonist – sort of an unofficial caretaker for the area’s summerhouses – is convinced that the murderers are actually animals getting their revenge for their hunted kin. I was really impressed. Poetry, philosophy, tension, horror, and some very dark humour, too. I was now an Olga Tokarczuk fan. (I should say, she won the Nobel Prize for Literature, so I am clearly not the only fan.)
Luckily for me Tokarczuk has a newly translated book out this year: The Empusium. The new story follows young polish engineering student Mieczyslaw Wojnicz as he travels to the spa town of Görbersdorf (present-day Sokolowsko) seeking treatment. He is looking to get into the local Kurhaus, but instead he finds himself stuck in the half-way Gästehaus für Herren run by the eccentric Wilhelm Opitz. The other guests (all men) are… interesting. Together they spend the time discussing everything from atavism, to evolution, to witchcraft. Does man have a soul? Is socialism the way forward? Should women be allowed to vote? All well and good, but to treat his apathy, paranoia, tuberculosis, consumption, and general fear of nakedness, young Mieczyslaw really needs a place at the big house. Unfortunately, places are in high demand. It seems you only get in if someone dies, and in Görbersdorf no one dies. (They don’t even have a graveyard.) A healthy climate or wishful thinking? Mieczyslaw soon learns that people have in fact been disappearing in the woods around the village for years – their bodies ripped to shreds by some unknown person, or thing…
Tokarczuk’s novel takes a modern feminist reading of Thomas Mann’s Der Zauberberg and weaves in her uncanny humour and philosophical wanderings. Meticulously researched and boldly told, the tale has a really peculiar style: a focus on the most minute details combined with a constant disruption of the reader’s perspective, as if the whole thing is a set of director’s notes on stage design and camera angles. Elements of the plot send you on weird tangents, like the Kurhaus itself, which is reminiscent of Kafka’s castle, an almost supernaturally unattainable goal which the protagonist can’t seem to crack. Combined with the cast of larger-than-life fellow patients and the ever-present Gothic script, the whole thing has the feel of a nineteenth-century play. And the absolute annihilation of early (and, sadly, modern) chauvinist thought is a joy.
[Tom]
Not a Speck of Light
Bad Hand Books: €23,50
Audiobook from libro.fm
He's back from the darkness to tell us all about it in his new book, huzza!
Finally, a new short story collection by Laird Barron – a collection jumping from the depths of abysses right into this year’s Bram Stoker final ballot, so you just know it has to be good, right? RIGHT!
Divided into four, partly interconnected, thematic blocks each consisting of four short stories, Not A Speck of Light features 16 stories as dark as the title implies, but also as kooky and strange as long-time readers will be familiar with. By kooky and strange I mean Edgar Allan Poe in puppet form, a recreated fake-town of Lovecraft's Innsmouth, aliens, dogs with souls, black magic, in addition to the recurring usual suspects, Jessica Mace, the Tooms' or Black Dog Security.
And yes, even in the most fantastic collections there will be personal highlights and lowlights, so here are my personal best of's;
The Blood In My Mouth follows a very intense kind of character and his relation to the love of his life. Even though the characters aren’t necessarily modeled to be relatable, they’re very personable to people of a certain age who were lucky to live through the heydays of The Cure and The Pixies, and the way Barron writes them, in a weird way, has such an "Americana" character, as all of his work does, but this one felt very authentic to me in that way, and I enjoy that.
Nemesis is about Larry, who sits in a room after a long walk, or in a Star Chamber (not sure which, maybe both at the same time), alternately, and tells how his father killed him, or just took out one of his eyes, but there are many versions to his story and it seems none of them are definite.
Soul of Me is a quite touching account of various incarnations of a dog, Rex, the German Shepherd. This book generally reflects Barron's affection for dogs, and this story specifically really goes deep, emotionally.
The titular novelette, Not A Speck of Light, gives the final blow, fantastic piece of writing about love for dogs, black magic, creepy neighbors, and the darkness from which one returns. I guess it’s safe to say it’s my favorite of the collection.
So, all this and more is awaiting you, if you don't want to miss the short story collection of the year (yes, I’m still salty he didn’t receive the Bram Stoker for best collection), grab it immediately, dive into that black.
[Inci]
Penguin Science Fiction
The Colour Out of Space
Penguin Books UK: €15
It all began, old Ammi said, with the meteorite.
My favourite news article of the last months was a report on a group of researchers from Berkeley, California, who claimed to have discovered a new colour. The (contested) experiments involved firing laser pulses at your face, after which you supposedly experience a colour never before seen by human eyes. The five people who have seen it so far describe it as “blue-green” (so turquoise) and the researchers have christened it “olo”. All well and good, but anyone unconvinced by the findings and left wondering how the scientists could possibly convey a previously non-existent colour can explore the same phenomena from the comfort of our Sci-Fi and Horror sections with H. P. Lovecraft’s The Colour Out of Space.
Our title story follows an unnamed narrator as he carries out land-surveys on an area called the Blasted Heath. Disturbed by the terrain, he seeks out local recluse Ammi Pierce, who tells him of a family who disappeared or worse thereabouts. Nahum Gardner, his wife, and their three sons, were astounded when a metallic space rock fell into their farmyard. The rock defied all attempts at scientific analysis, giving off colours previously unseen on the human spectrum (potentially olo). Samples taken from it were impervious to damage, gave off limitless heat, and could disappear into nothing without warning. Soon the local crops are taking on curious properties, too, and they aren’t the only ones…
As short stories go, ‘The Colour Out of Space’ is a solid entry point into the strange meanderings of the Cthulhu mythos – a smorgasbord of otherworldly creatures, misbehaving laws of science, and peeks behind the veil of reality. If this wonderfully nasty little tale isn’t enough for you, the mini collection also has ‘The Whisperer in the Darkness’ – a thorough introduction to H. P.’s secondary world, and a tale with a final line that makes, I think, the best ending to any cosmic horror short story. Meanwhile, ‘The Shadow Out of Time’ tells of a lecturer who experiences a replaced personality for five years, arriving back to find his actions and intent in the lost period utterly unexplainable. He feverishly tries to fill in the gaps, but the revelations might be too much for him. The three make a neat little welcome packet to the weird and wonderful workings of Lovecraftian imagination. What’s more, there’s something very cool about this stylish, pocket-sized series where the books genuinely fit in your pockets.
[Tom]
Buffalo Hunter Hunter
Titan Books: €28
Audiobook from libro.fm
In the age of never-ending reinvention of the vampire trope (and frankly, of every other trope too), it is pretty damn hard to create something original, and more importantly, something meaningful out of this rusted, crusted, dusted motif.
One way of achieving such originality is by putting the vampire in all
sorts of unconventional, unexpected, surprising, sometimes even silly or
compromising situations, which, if we're being honest, isn't all that
original anymore.
Another way is to dive into the heart of what vampires are about, and
use or maybe modify that foundation in order to suit your story and to
make your point. Horror author Stephen Graham Jones makes exactly that
in his latest novel, The Buffalo Hunter Hunter, and to make a meaningful
point, as is well known, is his strong suit.
The Buffalo Hunter Hunter is the nested narrative of present-day academic Etsy Beaucarne who wants to write a book about the 1912 diary of her great-great-great-grandfather Arthur after it was recovered from the remains of a wall during some renovations. In his journal, the Lutheran priest tells the story of an indigenous man turned vampire looking for justice for a massacre committed against his community, in which 217 Blackfeet died. So, the story works on three levels which throughout the course of the book gradually find to each other, and blends the historical into the horror, while the line between these two remains blurred, as it is usually the case when Jones writes about Blackfoot people, now or in the past.
“This, I believe, is the story of America, told in a forgotten church, in the hinterlands, with a choir of the dead mutely listening.”
The Blackfoot named Good Stab first shows up to pastor Arthur Beaucarne's Sunday speeches, and in time he makes it clear that it's actually a confessional that he wants. The pastor accepts, and that is the point where the real story, and the fun begins. This peculiar Indian who wears darkened spectacles in church has had a close encounter with what he calls "Cat Man" and it transformed his life in ways he never would have thought. Being an immortal, rather beastly, wild kind of vampire, and needing to drink blood to survive, he shifts his shape according to the being whose blood he drinks. Thus, he is in a constant state of dilemma of wanting to still belong to his community, but needing to consume them in order to stay one of them - and that's only one of his struggles.
As in each and every one of Jones' novels, the climax in The Buffalo Hunter Hunter too is a breathtaking one: there is a reason why Good Stab chose to confess to Beaucarne and the showdown is crushing. The path leading there meanders through constant clashes, debates, and conversations of two characters who couldn't be any more different, but still pull this confession through. What they have in common is that they are both unique characters and have a sense of humor. That humor keeps on resurfacing throughout the whole book, and even briefly takes grotesque dimensions when we move forward in time, from the 1910's to 2012, when we find out what genius strike Good Stab plays on Beaucarne.
Which brings me, again, to the interesting division of the story, something SGJ does a lot - the number three, the trinity seems to play an interesting role here. Both Good Stab's and Beaucarne's lives can be seen in three stages, their lives before the massacre, the massacre which transforms both their lives and the aftermath. While Beaucarne ends a man of faith, Good Stab is taken by dark forces, placing them on opposite sides of one scale. And yet, nothing is as it seems. While, from the very beginning of the book, Beaucarne shows a distinct weakness for worldly pleasures, is a glutton, and that gluttony is an attribute which can easily be extended to his "tribe", colonialists, Good Stab, in his heart, does the right thing, since revenge is arguably the noblest of causes. His story is one of pain, he is haunted, he is the Byronic, tormented main character we've been waiting for (and he wore sunglasses back in 1912!).
Well, what else can I say? A bona fide fan of SGJ now and always, even I am surprised how each new book he writes is better than his last one, and this one indeed one ups all that came before. If you see cover blurbs saying this is his masterpiece, believe it. The Buffalo Hunter Hunter isn't only his best (I’m still leaving a tiny space there since I’m on the fence whether The Only Good Indian comes first or this) yet, I think it is also a good starting point if you don't know the author, but want to try reading him, as the historical aspects, the many massacres and the vampire story make for a speedy pace. And it’s a no-brainer if you already know his work. As they say, if you're going to read only one horror book this year, make it this one.
[Inci]
The Worm and his Kings
Off Limits Press: €17,50
“This is a good place for people to disappear.”
New York. 1990. Falling off the ladder of societal safety has never been easier. For Monique and her girlfriend Donna, lost jobs lead to lost appartments and lost ways. Then Donna vanishes from the homeless community, and Monique finds herself without food or friends, scouring the city for her lover. She is not the only one. A pale reptilian fiend is stalking the backstreets. With sickle-clawed feet and a 10-foot build, “Grey Hill” has been snatching up homeless victims and dragging them down to the city’s underbelly. Down to... something. Down past the squatters and the subway tunnels, down through abandoned buildings and cracks in the sewage lines, a new society is gathering. Now Monique is certain that Donna was taken, not killed, and she is determined to bring her back.
I’m still working my way through the suggestions from Sadie Hartmann’s 101 Horror Books to Read Before You’re Murdered, and I’m currently on the cosmic horror chapter. Other chapter entries include LaValle’s Ballad of Black Tom (insert love heart) and Langan’s Fisherman
(insert fish), so it is a pretty classy selection to find yourself in.
Hailey Piper’s 2020 novella is a good fit: a must for anyone keen on the
alternative, indie publishing side of modern horror, and it has an
emotional punch alongside the expected creepy cult vibes and the
monster-of-the-week creature features. Much like in Black Tom,
the traditional cosmic horror elements are repurposed for a new
community here. As well as shining a light on the failures of America’s
(absent) social protection system, Piper puts a LGBTQIA+ spin on the
Other, and comes up with a refreshingly new take on self-love, damage
and personal identity. And at 114 pages you could read this in a day,
there and back on your U-Bahn commute. Just don’t fall through the gaps.
[Tom]
Non-Fiction
Flatline Constructs
Collective Ink: €23,50
Mark Fisher’s Flatline Constructs: Gothic Materialism & Cybernetic Theory-Fiction is the latest zer0 classics publication investigating the idea of the Gothic Flatline: a plane of existence where it is “no longer possible to differentiate the animate from the inanimate”.
This is a space where to have agency is not necessarily to be alive, a realm of Gothic Materialism, flitting between living and non-living, animate and inanimate – what Fisher terms the “anorganic continuum”. Fisher does this through looking at Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (and to a lesser extent Philip K. Dick), Gibson’s Neuromancer trilogy, Ballard’s The Atrocity Exhibition, and Cronenberg’s Videodrome. There are even dalliances with Lovecraft and Carpenter’s In the Mouth of Madness.
Through four sections, Fisher lays out his notion of the Gothic Flatline. So, chapter one, “Screams, Screens, Flatlines”, looks at the relation between the Gothic, postmodernism, and cybernetics. Chapter two, “Body Image Fading Down Corridors of Television Sky”, tackles the deconstruction of subjectivity in modern media. Chapter three, “Xerox and Xenogenesis”, is musings on sex, reproduction, and replication – and whether machines can do any of these or you need to be “alive”. And the last chapter, “Black Mirror”, discusses the end of fiction as a mirror, and the start of media feedback loops in place of realism.
A word of warning. This is Fisher’s previously unpublished doctoral
thesis. It is heavy on theory and light on explanation. If any of the
above sounded new and/or unclear, don’t expect any hand-holding. The
same goes for references to Spinoza, McLuhan, Baudrillard, Jameson,
Deleuze and Guattari. You are required to have brushed up on your
literary theory before pulling up a seat. Even after rereading, some of
these paragraphs simply went over my head. I found a single endnote that
was six pages long. And the introduction by Adam Jones is some of the
most indecipherable academese I have ever come across. That said, the
discussions on Sci-Fi lit and film are genuinely stimulating – and
though it is true that Fisher would go on to rehash a lot of these
ideas, there are passages here that are up there with some of his best
writing. (Just skip the intro…)
[Tom]
RPG
Corp Borg
bnw: €39
Welcome to Hell, firm-rat. Where d’ye work? What’s yer job? Who cares. Yer penpushin’ skills are irrelevant here. The only thing that matters is corporate survival.
One wrong PowerPoint presentation and some demon (or Kath from Human Resources) will have yer eyeballs out and ye’ll be on fixin-the-copier duty. Still, some of the lads and lassies in accountin’ reckon there’s another plane of existence out there, the great Mundane, and now the idea’s gone got stuck in yer head. Another world. A way out. They say the veil is mighty thin in places, just need to find someplace to get through. Maybe the back of Clarkey’s office…
Mörk Borg is the gift that keeps on giving. If you are already through exploring its cyberpunk, slavic, piratical, and ORC! versions, here’s another for you. Corp Borg pitches itself as an office-crawl TTRPG, a standalone game that borrows heavily from the parent system, but has a lot of its own charm and humour thanks to the bizarre minds of Paweł Kicman and co.
Here players are small-time bit-workers in one of a handful of infernal
dystopian monopolies. So you could be a proud employee of the likes of
Griftoil (they make petrol from human bones and have solar panels that
actively drain the Sun), The Journey (redistributing your data and
planning your future without you even having to ask), GRVN TSK
(definitely not the world’s premium creator of viruses), or Nekker Bell
(just a regular bank). Need help with your Lebenslauf? As a base-layer
employee, you can take on exciting roles such as helpdesker (3 eyes –
one of them must be paying attention to me), engineer (her wrench is
talking – problem?), sales person (specializes in sentient ticks), or
supplier (looks like Death; in charge of staples). If that was not
enough to get your started, there’s Office-Master tables for urgent
emails, things you find in your desk, random elevator encounters (a 9
gets you our Esther), deadly office equipment, general reactions to
stress, and rituals you can perform next to the coffee machine. You
probably have enough to get through a regular day. Suit up.
[Tom]
Warhammer Wrath & Glory
Wrath & Glory Starter Set
Burst: €40,50
Fear spreads across the eight worlds of the Gilead system, cut off from the hand of the Empire by an intergalactic warp rift. The forces of order and civilization are beset on all sides by traitors, heretics, aliens, and demons. These are the dying years of the 41st millennium. There is no peace amongst the stars. In the grim darkness of the far future, there is only war.
Every now and then I like to poke my nose into systems that are not D&D just to see what is going on. Wrath & Glory is the latest (but undoubtedly not the last) in the TRPG adaptions of the Warhammer 40,000 wargame. The game is easy to pick up. Tests are entirely run on d6s, with 4, 5 or 6 being successes, and the number of dice you get to role being determined by your skills. There are also the central concepts of wrath and glory: one of your dice is a designated wrath die. A 1 on this leads to complications, while a 6 is a critical and brings glory points, which can be used to up your dice, increase damage, or seize initiative in combat. The team-wide pool of wrath points can be used for rerolls, changing aspects of the narrative, or recovering from negative effects. In terms of approach, the game essentially does what 5E did for D&D, so it is a simplified gaming model which pushes quick action over number-crunching and rulebook-munching. The upshot of all this is if you are for fast, easy gameplay with more focus on fun then this will suit you nicely. You do not need to be too concerned about watching your figures. One of the common critiques from reddit et al is that it is actually too easy to max out characters – some ace weaponry here, stat stacking there – to the point where they are practically invincible. For many players, however, that won’t strike you as a bad thing.
The Wrath & Glory starter set gives players a setting book
for the Gilead campaign, an initial adventure book with hints for
further expansion, six potential characters (a sanctioned psyker, a
rogue trader, a space marine scout, a sister of battle, an aeldari
ranger, and a skitarius tech-priest) and seven d6s – one being a red
wrath die. In terms of the reading material, The Varonius Flotilla
provides a wealth of background information on the solar system, plus a
who’s-who of important side characters, including the heads of the half
a dozen city-sized spaceships hanging around Gilead. It also has a
series of tier-2 adventures for weaving into campaign play, dealing with
a broad range of foes from orks to tyranids. Traitor’s Hymn,
meanwhile, is a substantial introductory scenario in which players try
to rescue a ship that has unexpectedly become stuck in the warp. For a
starter mission there is a lot here. It is suitably creepy, has great
Lovecraftian vibes to it, and makes good use of the pre-made player
characters. If you are familiar with the 40k universe it has all sorts
of easter eggs and name drops, but it works really well for complete
novices, too. All in all, a solid introduction to the key rules of the
system, including fear tests, combat, corruption, and the specific skill
sets.
[Tom]
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