Warhammer: The Old World is nearly here, bringing back the Bretonnians, Tomb Kings, and many more factions from the Warhammer Fantasy Battles setting. This isn’t the End Times, though – the von Carstein dynasty is currently as dead as can be, the Colleges of Magic have not yet been established, and the Skaven menace has vanished into myth… but the World of Legend is no less dangerous, and the first you’ll get to read about it is in Graham McNeill’s Lords of the Lance.
The son of Baron Lothar Aquilena of the Border Princes has been taken hostage. Despite their bitter relationship, the Baron has called the debt of honour owed to him by Duke Carrard of Quenelles, and their uneasy alliance of warrior knights is forced to mount a treacherous expedition into the Land of the Dead, where kings and queens of old rest uneasy in their tombs, and life struggles to find purchase.
This tale will be available as a regular hardback, an eBook, an audiobook, and as a strictly limited special edition with a faux leather cover with screen-printed art and a blue-ribbon bookmark. There’s sumptuous full-colour artwork inside and a map giving you the lay of the land. Each numbered copy is signed by author Graham McNeill and will feature an introduction and a special in-universe appendix, the Journal of Ebrardus Evotarum.
To celebrate our triumphant return to the World of Legend, Graham McNeill was kind enough to share a few words.
How does it feel to write the inaugural novel for our return to this beloved setting?
GM: The Old World has always held a special place in my heart, and I loved telling stories set in its grim and perilous landscapes. I’d always held out hope that I might one day go back there, so to write this inaugural novel of the setting’s return is pretty special. I have the rare privilege of introducing a whole new swathe of readers to the Old World, how cool is that?
What's the novel all about?
GM: Lords of the Lance is a tale of an expedition into the Land of the Dead to rescue the captured son of Baron Lothar Aquilena, a Bretonnian knight living in self-imposed exile in the Badlands. His former brother-in-arms, Duke Cyricus Carrard, and his Knights of Quenelles ride with him, but there’s no love lost between the two. Add in a Grail Knight, Pegasus Riders, Handmaidens of the Lady, and – of course – the denizens of the Land of the Dead, and you’ve got a recipe for adventure. As to what readers should look out for, well, it’s a tale of classic Warhammer derring-do, fantastical monsters, gallows-dark grit, and a fight for survival against the odds.
How does the World of Legend setting differ from the End Times?
The Old World is always teetering on the brink of destruction, but where the End Times had a real fatalistic vibe to it, where the doom of the world was, if not assured to the heroes fighting against it, at least highly likely, this time period still has hope. Of course, it’s still a monstrously dangerous world, but the fight against the encroaching hordes of darkness is still very much one to be fought and won, it’s an age where the light can still push back against its nightmarish hosts.
Is the 'character' of Bretonnia different, a few hundred years in the past?
Very little of this book is set in Bretonnia, but the attitudes of the lords and knights to the peasant host will be very familiar to fans of that realm. In many ways, it's a ‘the more things change, the more they stay the same’ situation, but there are a number of differences the readers will spot very early on in terms of who can be a knight and how some of the characters feel their land could or should be, as opposed to how it actually is.
Are there any echoes for the future, perhaps to tie events into more familiar lore?
Lord Cyricus Carrard is an ancestor of Leofric Carrard, the Bretonnian knight who – perhaps unwisely – rode into the forest of Athel Loren in my novel, Guardians of the Forest. There’s also more than a few nods to what lies ahead in the decades and centuries to come. Nothing too overt, but if you know, you know…
You've written novels set in the Old World before, what new challenges did you face this time?
It’s been a hot minute since we saw the last novel set in the Old World, so the first challenge was getting back into the groove of what the setting was, the tone and tenor of it. Then it was all about reflecting that setting in a time that’s several centuries before we previously wrote in; so the lands are in various new states of war, kings and queens are not the same, what people know of the world is different, and more pertinently, magic is not codified as it will later become. This is in a time before the elves taught humans the various disciplines, so, while magic is still very present in the world, how it manifests and how people understand it is very different. And while Chaos is still very much a threat to the world, it’s not the immediate, it’s-on-your-doorstep threat it will become in later years. The threats in this age are very different but no less dangerous.
Do you have any plans for more novels? Are there other cultures you'd like to return to?
Like I said, I love the Old World as a setting for stories, and I’d love to do more novels. Lords of the Lance is potentially just the beginning of what some of these characters might have to face in their immediate future, and, yeah, there are loads of places I’d love to visit in future novels. I did three novels about the Elves, but never got around to the Dark Elves, and I’ve always hankered after a full-bore novel set in the Empire, since the stories I told of that realm were those concerning its legendary founder, Sigmar…
Lords of the Lance will be available to pre-order in the new year – and Warhammer Community will have all the news and pre-order dates in good time.