DarkChaplain

Every single sodding Omnibus should be a range item that sticks around and gets reprints as required. They used to be like that, too. Omnibuses are the END STATE of the novels. You can milk them through hardback, paperback, ebooks and audiobooks for *years* before an omnibus arrives. There should be no artificial scarcity with omnibuses from GW/BL. That they've actively chosen to introduce it for omnibuses is a sign of corporate disease, not a healthy company that gives a damn about what it puts out. And yeah, I'm also still miffed about Saturday's City of Ash disaster. Thankfully I should be good according to my prefered retailer, who I preordered with, but god damn they can't even make a freakin' STARTER SET that's obviously aimed at entirely new customers with one of the included booklets a new range item instead of a surprise limited edition which you only get confirmation on the moment the store page is up, with an order window of 4 minutes before it's sold out. Frankly, GW is driving the intentional supply issues up the roof and I can't wait for the moment it backfires on them. Hope they produced enough boxes of Armageddon, I suppose.

This discussion just made me look up if Scott Lynch's "Thorn of Emberlain" had actually released while I wasn't paying attention, since it was rumored/"confirmed" over and over since 2024 again. Nah, placeholder date of December 31st, 2026. Go figure. Book 4 of 7 and stuck on a major bloody cliffhanger since 2013.... Anyhow, wasn't Spears 2 supposedly almost done, too, and likely to be released before the Drach'nyen Black Legion novel anyway? Not seeing that one releasing anytime soon, either...

Imagine having the sort of announcement->preview->preorder->release pattern GW does and then only noticing that you need to delay a product two days before it's supposed to go up for preorder, afte you have already announced it as coming that day. If they had to delay it due to logistics, like because a shipment is delayed, they could've just said so and set the preorder window longer than two weeks. That they're not doing so would indicate a longer delay, which bodes ill. Might be a full-blown production issue that they only just caught - which would speak volumes about their quality control. But who am I kidding, they even manage to get the title or author wrong on covers and spines of limited edition books.

I got bad news for you there. The Black Library website is going the way of the dodo =/

I might actually try converting him into a Weirdnob Shaman for my Ironjawz. Should work well with some slapdash armor panels and tusks to cover up where the cables got removed. Definitely has a more aggressive stance than the actual Weirdnob Shaman model, which is nice.

FYI, Space Hulk's return also comes with a free update for previous owners on Steam. The three DLC Campaigns, Space Wolves Expansion and skin packs are all included for free now. The game got a bad rep back in the day because it really is just a straight up adaptation of the board game, and folks on Steam were complaining about it not being more action focused, which is why they released a modified version subtitled "Ascension" a while later, which bent the rules a bit to give a more dynamic experience. This has also returned. Well, they still had the license expire and went bankrupt... One game that hasn't returned in this wave is Eisenhorn: Xenos, which was.... pretty bad and never got followed up on. Probably another licensing issue. Also still gone is the Lane Defense game Storm of Vengeance, which adapted the Piscina IV Dark Angels stuff. It was sort of a reskin of the developer's original IP mobile game, and pretty rough, and again, expired license. Regicide, a loose adaptation of Chess with Space Marines and Orks and such (with a few gimmicks) also remains shut down and unavailable. Went from 2015 til finally getting taken offline in 2022 after one final tournament.

All of these have been available on GOG for years, and I seem to recall them also being either free or at least cheaper there at some point. Battlefleet Gothic Armada and the Dawn of Wars also never went away, so no Return. At least Space Hulk is back, though. The devs literally couldn't keep paying GW for the license extension, and went bankrupt.

Let's be real. If we were to get a second Scouring novel before the Holiday season, we'd have seen it leaked by now. After Era of Ruin, and then Ashes, and knowing the very long production cycle, and keeping things on warehouse shelves to hit arbitrary miniature release dates, this would've leaked out already. I just cannot see them announcing it anytime soon, and if they do, the release will be a while yet. Chances are it won't happen until the rumored Scouring expansion to the Horus Heresy game gets officially promoted.

....and now GW on Instagram or sth apparently stated that City of Ash is going to be a limited release despite Warcom making it very much look like a long-term new starter set. Gdubs, this better not cost half as much as the new laundry machine I'm obligated to buy today :V Kinda funny that they got two City-releases at once, tho. But yeah, Audible down the line it is. Has anybody actually checked out the new Black Library app for the latest set of releases, by the by? How bad is the user experience really? I absolutely hate that I now have to go to 3rd party stores / Audible even just to see the book's narrator or plot synopsis, because the publisher themselves turned its own web presence to ashes and GW's physical store pages get nuked from high orbit within weeks at most, erasing the backlog from public access. They're literally forcing people to check Kobo or Amazon to get info about their books, unless they wade into their app....

Meanwhile, I'm weeping over my wallet because I did not expect City of Ash to drop *this soon* after the reveal. Gonna be a real struggle to fit it in somewhere... Cool to see Hive not getting milked with separate releases (though the price will be set high enough to milk extra hard anyway), but I won't bother with limited stuff, so whenever it comes around for the regular folks...

Get 'em Fehervaris while you're at it!

World Ablaze looks like they recycled the Dawn of Fire photoshop cover template a bit. Yarrick getting an omnibus reprint again without a new Annandale novel being announced is decidedly annoying. And yes, they're well worth it, but keep in mind that this isn't yet 3rd War of Armageddon Yarrick. One novel is about his early years as a Commissar, the other is the 2nd War and the novella is about him captured by Orks at Golgotha, which rocked hard. The books were obviously building up to the 3rd War, yet a third novel has not happened to this day. Thanks, BL. The Ork omnibus is complete nonsense. People will buy it for Helsreach, which has been omnibus'd before elsewhere, Caves of Ice has been in an Omnibus with many reprints for almost 20 years and I Am Slaughter makes no bloody sense to bundle outside of its series, least of all in an Ork collection, because the book barely even has Orks in it. But seriously, they hit us with a Celebration that had, what, ONE new book we didn't have announced before, a little poll, an article about the Scouring without an announcement of book 2, then follow it up with multiple weeks of no releases, the website closure and forcing a poor App on us, then a two and a half year late sequel audiobook and now at least some new stuff that should've been shown off at the Celebration. Never change, BL/GW, never change. By which I mean, please, change, it's desperately needed.

All I know is that I generally do love 'em epigraphs. Ashes of the Imperium in particular gets a lot more weight through those historical hindsight bits. Tallarn had great stuff, too, although with Ironclad, the epigraphs were more interesting than anything going on in the actual narrative. So yeah, I'm in the Pro-Epigraph camp, even if there might be stinkers here and there.

Wow. Wow. Actually Wow. They FINALLY remembered that, back in the "good old days" of 2023, on November 18, they'd released the first of the Malus Darkblade novels as an audiobook. Then never again brought it up, let alone released book 2. It appears that on April 18, we'll finally get the second audiobook, only two and a half years after the first. You bet I'll throw a fit if they didn't at least keep Andrew James Spooner as narrator.... The Carnage Unending 40k anthology is also coming, as well as the standard edition/audio of Aestred Thurga: Pyre of Faith.

The box set is clearly featuring Blood Angels, so while a novel might feature others, if it's a tie-in, it'll have to primarily deal with BAs. Might be interesting to have some callbacks to Tycho and co, actually...