DarkChaplain

Speaking of website issues, who the hell thought it was a good idea to have the category headers for the different systems hidden behind a Shop-button, just to do one more layer of their horrible navigation system? Such a pain.

Comparable novellas from back then clock in more around 3-4 hours. It's specifically mentioned to be a release in THREE PARTS, which would indicate the rough estimate holds true here as well. The Traitor's Gorge novella for Rynn's World had about the same word count according to my calibre plugin's estimate, and clocked in at 3h22m in audio. Kyme's Promethean Sun was around 10% longer (and had literally no chapters, what the heck) and the audio was a bit over 4 hours. Aurelian was a little shorter, and hit 3h17m anyway. This runtime, if anything, makes it look like they're planning a CD set release, since it's about what an audio CD is capable of, and they're trying to milk it on audiobook platforms / their terribad app, before they release it that way.

Wow. There's actually a new audiobook dropping that they haven't spoken about so far, as far as I'm aware. Audible lists "Armageddon: Blood and Fire" by ADB for September 1st. https://www.audible.co.uk/pd/Armageddon-Blood-and-Fire-Part-One-Audiobook/B0H8TQN83G However..... "PART ONE", of THREE, runtime 1 hour, 18 minutes. The runtime might indicate a CD release / audio drama format, but... it's just Jonathan Keeble narrating, so this seems unlikely. In other words, they're cutting up the Blood and Fire novella from 13 years ago, to sell it in THREE PARTS, when it's just a sodding novella and nothing indicates that they're giving it the audio drama treatment of old to come close to warrant this decision. Nevermind the cover being recycled art, not the original artwork of the novella, let alone the Armageddon omnibus art, and the Space Marine Battles layout was also scrapped. It seems solely aimed at milking the Armageddon launch box hype.

Yeah, this entire forum serves as a book club after all. Actually funny to me (and rather typical) that the other discussion remained open for almost a month and a half before it got locked like that, and new threads still were made and commented on, at least when GW/BL released anything warranting it. Cadia still stood, regardless. In better news, the Wicked and the Damned is coming sooner than expected, preorder next Saturday

Would you look at that, a new Black Library post on Warcom.... .....and it's for the re-re-re-issue of Galaxy in Flames. Yay....

Nothing new coming, but at least they're talking to Jonathan D Beer about his upcoming novel "Tomb World", which totally hasn't been released in October 2025. Nuh-uh.

It still ticks me off how they did Lucius dirty. He just got axed for no reason whatsoever in a novel not even covering his own Legion, without him being close to the protagonist in that book, and just never brought up again for *years*. As if nobody in publishing even remembered he existed, or maybe his entry in the spreadsheet got deleted on accident when the intern spilled coffee on the keyboard. There CLEARLY was a plan for him there. McNeill set him up to appear in that novel FOR YEARS. And then The Crimson King ended up in limbo, the Ahriman trilogy happened and TCK was already in a weird spot, and then it did so many different things on the side and forgot about Lucius in the aftermath, clearly set up for something BIG? Heck, as of right now, he's literally been missing for years during the Heresy and Siege, and we have no confirmation of when during the Scouring he'll even show back up canonically. The Siege should have been where Lucius fully embraces Slaanesh's offerings, but now he might actually be the most sane Emperor's Children character we got. That McNeill also dropped the ball on Magnus having plans for the Sysypheum crew as per Alpharius/Omegon in The Serpent Beneath, which he acknowledges having forgotten in the afterword for his Siege of Terra novella, is crazy to me, too. Damn that stuff makes me miss when they had Laurie Goulding actually keeping plotthreads together, because lord knows whoever took over after him clearly did not.

I mean, they held WHFB stuff back even way back when, to a point where it never got released before the End Times killed the system and put an end to BL covering it. Some of Josh Reynolds' short stories got lucky and went into Hammer & Bolter at some point iirc, but that's that.

The Ynnari were such a funky idea to bring into the setting... It really ticks me off that they were just basically eliminated like that.

Don't worry, Spears of the Emperor 2 will drop any day now, too....

Finally some good effing food!

The problem isn't that they're reusing stuff, it's that they're treating a simple reprint as if it was something to celebrate, rather than just, you know, PERIODICALLY RESTOCKING THEIR CORE CATALOG TO MEET DEMAND. There's really no reason for them to re-release a hardcover of The Devastation of Baal or Gloomspite - when all they need to do is keep the paperback in circulation longer, let alone the Omnibuses. There is absolutely NO reason to reprint a hardback of Devastation of Baal, when they released the Lords of Blood Omnibus three years ago, including Dante, Devastation and Darkness in the Blood as well as Astorath: Angel of Mercy. THAT should be part of the main catalog, particularly since it's the core Blood Angels collection of the modern era. Instead, they keep going back, untying relatively fomo Omnibuses which at times become unavailable to purchase within a month of release, just to milk specific novels with another different format release - and these days that's often a format we've already had, even. I'd go as far as to say the whole Horus Heresy redux nonsense with new covers they started releasing before even announcing Scouring 2 or the frakking Horus Primarchs novel, they should ACTUALLY condense the Heresy series in terms of ACCESSIBILITY, not just by scrapping most of the series, resulting in gaps of information for new readers. They SHOULD be releasing 3-4 volume Omnibuses for the series, same way they have been doing for the German and French markets for the past few years - AND KEEP THEM IN CIRCULATION, ad perpetuum, because it's a CORE PART OF THEIR CATALOG. I'd argue that the BIGGEST hurdle to getting into the Heresy series in 2026 is NOT the amount of content, but the lack of easy access to it, coupled with the financial burden it entails; stretched over the course of 15 years or so, with half the series being available in Mass Market Paperbacks first, which you could get for 7€ per volume back then, buying into the series and catching up was feasible. Now it definitely isn't, not when half the time you're expected to pay scalpers a premium. They could alleviate this by bundling books into omnibuses, reducing the cost, space requirement, and accessibility issues, but they choose not to, instead expecting people to buy ebooks that cost more than the MMPBs originally did, and now even do so on a terrible walled garden app with a dreadful reading experience.

More re-releases, meh. At least one sequel, but come on. But I must admit, I like that they at least officially ditched the Space Marine Conquests label on Devastation of Baal.

Yeah, whoever edited this really messed up by not splitting up the chapters into more digestible chunks. The audiobook has additional halfway chapter markers, which helps, but without those being added solely for the sake of navigating the audiobook, we're talking about 1:30h to 2h chapters. You simply can't tell me that there were no points where Abnett could've split them up, or that they all needed to be under the same chapter header. Heck, could've even used sub-chapters/numbered sections, which wouldn't be a first in an Abnett novel. This is the sort of thing where an editor should have raised the issue. This is a big chonker of a book, so long, they had to split it up. Editors should have readability and accessibility on their radar, to make sure the finished book is actually digestible, and that you can find your place easily enough if you happen to miss it. It's the bare minimum of reader accomodation to not endlessly textwall them but maintain a steady flow that makes it able to tell they're progressing at a comfortable pace, instead of getting bogged down in scene 30 of a single chapter. In this case, it seems again that they just let Abnett do his thing and didn't meddle even on the finishing stages, even though that'd have been their job.

Just call it Reanimation Protocols or sth heretekal. Problem being that the modpost ruled out a replacement thread before going into all the nonsense about indexing and splitting and what have you. I guess since that never happened, the ruling is kinda void, huh :')