The wheeling-dealing duardin Drekki Flynt is a hero of the Mortal Realms, a swashbuckling Kharadron with a reputation for sharp wits, a sharp axe, and sharp practice. His story has been chronicled by author Guy Haley, who was kind enough to answer some of our questions.
Warhammer Community: Bringing a brand new character to the Mortal Realms is an exciting opportunity – how did you approach it?
Guy Haley: Drekki was the result of a close collaboration between Black Library, the miniatures designers, and the Warhammer Age of Sigmar team. We wanted to create characters that exemplified various factions in the Mortal Realms, and who would be a good fit for their own miniatures. A list of possible characters was drawn up, and then various writers were invited to come up with ideas.
Ultimately, Drekki and Cado Ezechiar were chosen – and Black Library introduced them to readers via a series of short stories ahead of their first novel release and miniatures.
I’ll stress here that the brief was loose – it was ‘Kharadron Overlord’ and ‘Soulblight Vampire’ – so we had loads of space to exercise our imaginations. Quite often, people ask me how much leeway I get with writing Black Library books. Some believe I get a very strict script to stick to, while others assume I am responsible for the whole narrative of the universe! Neither of those things are true, and this sort of directed creation is an example of the way it does work.
WarCom: How did you approach the character of Drekki Flynt?
Guy: I’ve played Warhammer since the very first edition (I’m getting on a bit!). I’ve always loved greenskins – as I think a fair few people already know – but I’ve also always loved their chief opponents, whom we now know as the duardin.
I really like the evolution in duardin character we see with the Kharadron – a technological society that emerges by necessity from a very traditional, slow-to-change culture. Although it’s firmly in the background, a lot of what I am writing is really about the Kharadron in the general. Then it’s a case of setting Drekki against that culture. He’s from a small skyport that is part of Barak-Mhornar’s wider holdings, so he has that mercenary attitude common to the City of Shadows – something that’s perhaps more noticeable in his character because he’s a bit of a renegade.
But he’s not an actual pirate, as he is at great pains to point out! He fits into the rogue archetype but he’s not a villain. He always does the right thing in the end. Although Kharadron society is much more fluid than that of other duardin we’ve so far explored, it’s still pretty rigid. Drekki is not a duardin who likes to follow the rules, but he is still a Kharadron and a duardin. You can’t stray too far from the faction archetype when writing, or the story ceases to do its job.
WarCom: How does the model match up to the vision in your mind’s eye?
Guy: It was a collaboration right from the start! The model didn’t exactly match my mental image, but nothing made in this way ever will. There’s no problem with that – this is a joint effort, and such initial differences in vision often add more depth and complexity to a character. When I saw he had a two-handed axe with an aether-harpoon, for example, I tweaked the Drekki in the book.
A few details aside, he does look like I envisaged. I was much inspired by the rendition of the White Dwarf that appeared on the cover of the tenth anniversary edition of White Dwarf – I have that in a box in my attic!
WarCom: What do you enjoy most about Warhammer Age of Sigmar?
Guy: It’s such a huge, sweeping setting. It’s high fantasy – larger than life, with huge monsters, gods, and supermen in golden armour. I really enjoy the game as well as the setting, and have several armies for it. There’s a trick to balancing those high fantasy trappings with Warhammer’s innate darkness. A big advantage of the Warhammer settings is that they are so big they allow you to tell all kinds of stories. I see Drekki Flynt fitting into the category of those old Saturday morning adventure serials (really old now…). It’s a bit lighter than some of the stuff I write.
I find that it’s best to steer away from the huge, ongoing narratives. The game and the sourcebooks tell the stories of gods fighting gods. That’s a level of incident way above someone like Drekki! I’m telling a story of a character who is trying to live in a world where the gods do meddle in mortal affairs. Things like the fallout from the Era of the Beast get mentioned and riffed on, but he’s not a driving force in those events.
It can be a challenge to pitch the story at the right level to give it its own a sense of consequence and importance. I invented the Skyshoals, where Drekki plies his airborne trade, for this purpose. It’s a part of Chamon that isn’t too small and isn’t too big. Big things can happen to it without it impacting on the wider Realm. I partly modelled it on the Caribbean in the Golden Age of Piracy, although its flying islands, weird creatures, wrecked empires, and the constant threat of Chaos make it completely and uniquely Warhammer.
What’s even more important than the setting is the stakes for the characters. It makes no difference to Sigmar if Drekki finds his father or not, but it’s a pretty big deal to him! These character-level events are enough are involve you in the story, and for there to be compelling defeats and successes for Drekki, without us getting tangled up in the game’s overarching narrative.
WarCom: In a drinking contest between Drekki Flynt and Gotrek, who would win?
Guy: Gotrek, obviously! Drekki would beat him at cards, though.
Thanks Guy! It just so happens that Drekki’s first full-length novel, The Arkanaut’s Oath, is coming out in paperback next week.
It’s joined by a new battletome for the Kharadron Overlords – which goes into detail about what the return of the maker-god Grungi means for the duardin he abandoned in the Age of Chaos – as well as a legalistic new hero, the Codewright.