The great thing about Warhammer, in the early days, was its rarity. The first books and miniatures that I saw were at Campaign Outfitters, back in Winnipeg, back when ‘Ere We Go was the primary source for Orks and Rogue Trader was still the core rulebook – we’re talking before 2^nd edition, even. The cool thing about it is that you only learned about the Warhammer universe from blurbs in White Dwarf, or, if you had a crapload of money, from buying one of the massive tomes like Lost and the Damned.

                  But best of all were the little blurblets in the earlier issues of White Dwarf, where you’d get a glimpse of the Warhammer universe – baroque, ultra-gothic, unforgiving, harsh, medieval or techno-medieval. You would get a little glimpse into a world that was miles away from some of the homogenized sameness of fantasy at the time. It was pretty heady stuff, and got me heavy into Warhammer. (That, and the fact that Campaign Outfitters would let you display the miniatures that you painted in their display case for free; which was really cool of them to do.) The scarcity of the information made it valuable, so when you read something about the Warhammer universe, it was short and made you want a lot more.

                  As time’s gone on, the Warhammer universe has been fleshed out a lot more – unfortunately, it’s gotten a lot simpler and a lot less interesting. I believe that the average age of the GW player over in Britain is approximately ten years old, and I’m not joking in the slightest; wargaming is hot among preteens in Brtain, or so I’ve heard.

                  What made me interested – very interested – in the Warhammer 40,000 universe again was Dan Abnett, and the Gaunt’s Ghosts and Eisenhorn novels. What makes Abnett different from a lot of game fiction is that he concentrates on the world as a whole, as opposed to the parts that are most toyetic; you see Space Marines, one of the staples of the Warhammer 40,000 universe, approximately once in the entirety of the Gaunt’s Ghosts novels, and only then at a distance. So, when Abnett wrote a novel set in the Warhammer Fantasy universe, I perked up my ears and requested it as a review item from rpg.net.

                  Here’s the problem: Riders of the Dead just isn’t a whole lot of fun, investing a lot of time in a pair of cultures, one interesting, one not so interesting. When I mention that the one that isn’t interesting is the Chaos-influenced culture, then you can undestand what I’m getting at here.

                  Anyways: The book’s setting is during the big Empire-Archaon war, a meta-event in the Warhammer universe that’s provides justification for a bunch of summer tournaments and leave the Warhammer universe pretty much the same way that it was before. (I’m sorry; I’ve just seen this happen one time too many in the Warhammer universe.) The story focuses on a pair of individual soldiers, Gerlach and Karl; Gerlach is an arrogant, stuffed-shirt noble, while Karl is more diplomatic and less of a titanic ass. We don’t see them together for long, however, since their army is destroyed by a sudden, unprecedented attack by Chaos troops – as the book explains, even Chaos armies need time to work themselves up to a major attack, so the ambush of the Imperial army comes as a complete surprise. One of the men is captured and becomes a slave to Chaos; another rides off with the Kislevite winged lancers, slowly learning their ways and becoming a member of their rota, their unit.

Surprisingly enough, though, it’s the friendly, diplomatic soldier who becomes a slave to Chaos, and later a willing accomplice; and it’s the stuffed-shirt jackass who finds himself becoming part of a culture which is entirely alien to his way of thinking. Any other author would have done it the other way, and it’s a tribute to Abnett’s skills that he chose to switch around what would have been a cliché any other way.

There’s a number of problems with the book that prevent it from being as good as a lot of Abnett’s other work, though, and a lot of them have to do with the book’s flow.

To explain: Probably the biggest problem with the book is that Abnett chose to set it during the war between Archaon and pretty much evey good-aligned race in the Warhammer world. Most of the book involves Gerlach’s struggle to get the rota that he’s taken up with to go to fight the Chaos horde; having seen one Imperial force already devastated, they’re more interested in retreating and waiting for a collective regroup before sallying out again. The book proceeds to detail Gerlach slowly becoming one of the rota, while meanwhile coming up with little stratagems to bring them against Chaos – including swiping their banner and riding south with it in hopes that they’d follow – while we learn about the Kislevite culture.

When I read the book a second time, I found myself really enjoying the details about the Kislevite horse lancers, ranging from the way that they fight to what they eat and drink to the way that they recruit their men, and their fatalism, which dictates that it’s better to run and survive than to die in a fight that they can’t hope to win. Abnett’s gift for humor permeates this section as well; the lancers nickname Gerlach “Vebla”, for example, and if you’ve heard the joke about why the Lone Ranger shot Tonto, you’ll know where it’s going. (Well, vebla isn’t quite as bad as horse’s ass, but in the same ballpark.)

The problem is that it’s difficult to enjoy what’s otherwise an interesting anthropological study while visions of Archaon and his horse doing the Charleston on a thousand-foot tall piles of corpses.

Yes, his horse would be doing the Charleston as well.

It’s true that Gerlach repeatedly attempts to get his adopted unit south to fight, but he never seems aware of just how important it is that every hand be turned against the encroaching Chaos horde, that the riders of the rota aren’t going to have a village to return to – or even ground upon which to pour invisible corn and say “Is no matter”, at least not ground that isn’t shrieking like a stuck pig and bleeding neon-green pus – if they don’t fight against Archaon and his hordes. So there’s a major tension in the book that’s never really resolved.

There’s also the problem of Karl’s part of the story. While I normally love Abnett’s take on Chaos to death – some of his work in the Gaunt’s Ghosts novels can be taken as a perfect example of how to make Chaos unique, yet strangely familiar – the tribes that Karl have taken up with are basically Chaos warbands, each of them worshipping a different Chaos power, each of them using Imperial prisoners to fight against each other. Unfortunately, they’re just not very interesting. There’s none of the flash that you see in the Gaunt’s Ghosts novels – just barbarians doing barbarian things, with the occasional reference to Chaos powers and a single encounter with a Chaos lord. Abnett’s skill has always been in keeping away from the obvious cool bits of Warhammer and making you thankful for it, but there’s a certain point where you want him to bust something out.

Meanwhile, Karl spends most of his time as a slave of evil powers, forced to passively witness his friends being killed, trying to decide when he should make a break for freedom, or an attack on his captors, or even suicide. Since there’s no real way for him to affect his fate, it’s difficult to empathize with him; and when he does take the initiative, he becomes a pawn of Chaos. There’s a number of interesting characters that we see, including a blinded Panther Knight who becomes a mystic after a blow to the head, but nothing that I really remember as standing out.

There’s also the matter of the end of the book; while the events of the conclusion are perfectly reasonable, Abnett has one of the characters suggest that the fate of the world relies on the conflict at the book’s end. Since it’s basically a fight between a former Imperial soldier and a champion of Chaos, neither of whom have an influence over the entire Chaos horde, it’s kind of difficult to take the claim at face value. It’s a good ending, but no matter how I look at it, I don’t think that it could be qualified as being convincingly a factor in the fate of the Empire. (I should mention that Abnett’s habit of building up Chaos champions, only to have them killed really, really quickly is still in force here; but I’ll go more into that when I review his Eisenhorn novels.)

Is it a good book? Absolutely. Abnett is still one of the best writers that Games Workshop has. Is it as good as Gaunt’s Ghosts, or the Eisenhorn series? I would say no. As a matter of fact, while this would make a great paperback release, I would suggest that this book’s only of value to people who really enjoy Abnett’s work; it’s one good story mixed in with one poor story. I would recommend it in paperback, but not in hardback.

-Darren MacLennan