Review: Sons of Dorn

This book by Chris Roberson tells the tale of some Imperial Fists as they go from being "regular" humans through their induction into the Fists, their time as scouts and their eventual elevation to full battle brothers.

This book is interesting because in the book Heroes of the Space Marines which was published a year or so ago, we see the main characters in the short story Gauntlet Run.  So this first story falls somewhere in the timeline of the novel, but isn't really discussed.

This wasn't a bad book but I kept having the feeling I'd seen it before. This is a story of "savages" taken by the sky warriors to become space marines. I was thinking, "I saw this in Space Wolf." They even have the plot device of Zatori hating du Quest because du Quest killed Zatori's master before both were taking up by the space marines. This is just like Ragnar hating Strybjorn in Space Wolf, but this is even better because in Sons of Dorn, you also have Taloc hating Zatori because Zatori killed Taloc's father! Its a hate three-way! So I'm sure that like Space Wolf, the three will finally come to an understanding that all of that drama was in their old lives, and their bond as battle brothers is stronger than past transgressions.

Wulfen anyone?

So the Mark of the Wulfen upgrade that I can put in one of my Grey Hunters, Blood Claws or Wolf Guard Units. The dude in the unit that has the mark replaces the number of attacks he normally has with D6+1 attacks with rending. If someone has a special weapon (fist, claws etc.) the special rules for the weapon are not used. This is still frigging awesome. I have charged a sole survivor with the mark into a full squad of Tau fire warriors and wiped them out.

For the modeling side of this, I wanted to get a box of the 13th Company Wulfen from the old 3rd ed mini-dex Eye of Terror. These minis are pretty cool and show the fluff of the model. It says that the marked Space Wolf has shunned the use of any close combat weapons and is clawing at his opponent.

The problem is that these minis are OOP and go for a mint on eBay. I believe the original box went for $35, and I have no problem spending $7 on a mini as most metal minis are $15+ on the GW site. On ebay you are lucky to get the box for $70.

So I was cruising the interwebs and I found these bits from Maxmini as I was reading the Hogs of War blog. I'm not 100% on these, but 6 heads for $10 beats 5 dudes for $70.

I may have to pick some up.

I am going to BoLScon

So I was thinking I was going to skip BoLScon this year. At first it was because of the seven 2000 point games. I am just too old and too fat and too crappy at 40k to spend so much time over one weekend standing around. Another thing is that with the 40k tourney I didn't get to see anything else going on, there were Space Hulk demonstrations going on last year that I really would have liked to have sat in on. So the tournament was right out for me.

Then they opened up the team tournament on Friday. Tamara and I were going to go and each bring 1000 points and throw down and get our asses beat. But that was gonna be a bit pricey. It would have been $30 each for weekend registration, and then $25 each for the tournament. I was planning on going down on Saturday and Sunday to watch games, find pick-up games and play in any demonstrations, but Tamara probably would not have come down, so we were paying $30 for her to get in for one day.

So the other day BoLS posts that Dave Taylor will be doing classes at BoLScon for green stuff and what not. If you don't know who Dave Taylor is, he used to be a GW employee, but has since moved on. He currently is a bad ass converter. Check out some of his conversions. 

Anywho, I am going to be signing up for this shortly, and I thought it would be cool if some of you guys came along as well. I know that just about everyone has done some conversion work on minis from time to time.

I Have an Author-Man-Crush

So I think Black Library has a new king and his name is Aaron Dembski-Bowden. I thought he did a excellent job in his first book Cadian Blood which I have already reviewed. I have just finished reading two of his most recent books Helsreach and Soul Hunter.

I fell both books are do a very good job of bringing me what i want in a BL book. A good friggin story and nothing else.

Now I consider myself a big Dan Abnett fanboy, but he seems to be getting into the Tom Clancy habit of having a mission sub-plots in each story. So many that some of them don't seem to have anything to do with the main plot, and so many characters its hard to keep track of everything. This was certainly the case in Abnett's book Titanicus.

Dembski-Bowden's first book had nothing like that. It had just a few characters that you followed and got involved with and made things simple to follow for a simple dude like me.


Soul Hunter is the best example of this. I am very surprised I actually liked this book. It is the story of 1st Claw, 10th Company of the Night Hunters. I usually don't go in for "bad guy" books, but Talos, the main character in the book does a good job of making me give a crap. He's not evil, and in fact he abhors how some of his legion embarased the ruinous powers.


In this book, we see the Night Hunters as a struggling legion. Individual space marines will fight to the death over a piece of wargear from a slain enemy, or ally.


Helsreach is another of the in the Space Marines Battles Novel. I was a little wary reading this one after Rynn's World because I was thinking, "Oh look! Another SM book, and they are fighting... orks... again." But this book is very different from Rynn's World. That book is about Pedro Kantor's struggle to get to New Rynn City to link up with the remnants of his Chapter. Helsreach is the story of Grimaldus, the newly promoted Relcusiarch of the Black Templars. The story of his struggle to feel worthy of his new position.


Helsreach does get a bit Abnett-esque in the amount of characters introduced, but he does a keep it together, and it is no where near Titanicus.


All in all both are excellent book certainly worth reading. I give both books 4 Ibram Gaunt's out of 5.

Audio Book Review: Thunder From Fenris

So the Black Library has been doing audio books for a little while now. One of the first ones they did was a Space Wolf book by Nick Kyme called Thunder From Fenris. I have been wanted to get it for some time now but I haven't been able to find it at Barnes and Noble or Borders. I finally got it off of eBay for a bit under "cover price".

I have never listened to a book on "tape" before, so I really didn't know what to expect. The guy the got to read it, Toby Longworth, did a pretty good job. There are three main characters and Toby did a pretty good job of making them all sound different (even though one of them sounded remarkably like a republican governor from California). I also enjoyed the sound effects. There were bolters and lasguns and howling wolves and the sound of a power axe going into a zombie brain; all were very interesting to listen to.

The story itself was pretty good. It is the tail of 5 Thunderwolf Cavalry. They come upon the remains of one of the own, torn apart as if by beasts claws. Worse yet, another of their brothers is missing, and what the fear for him is worse then death. So begins a chase across a world ravaged by Nurgle, where the dead don't stay dead for long.

The story took 75 minutes to tell which I think puts it at a bit longer than the short stories that the BL puts out, but no where near the length of one of their novels. And while the sound effects were kinda nifty, I'd rather have have a book in my hands. Plus the fact that these audio books cost about $20 for 75 minutes. To me thats just too much.

For the story, I give this a 3 out of 5, for the fact that it was a $20, 75 minute audio book, I give it a 1 out of 5. I don't think I'll be paying the money to get another one of these.

Not to be a D-Bag...

I know it's been a long time since the Eldar got any love, but I don't think I like the new Fire Prism model coming out in June.

Now I have seen the current Fire Prism with its off-ballance metal turret that causes the model to fall over if you look at it wrong, and I think it could use an update, but for some reason, I don't like the look of the new one.

Maybe its just the lenght of the weapon part. i guess it could look ok If you could end the weapon right after the "big" prism.

And while I'm being a bit of a D-bag, I guess I can point out that I don't like the Night Spinner at all.

To me, the turret looks way to bulky. I think the Falcon/Serpent/Prism body looks so cool and sleek, and then they F it up with these bulky, ungainly turrets on them and just (in my opinion) destroy the speedy look of the model.

It just kinda blows to see what should be a really cool model look bad.

Review: A Thousand Sons

Page 1: Blah blah blah...
Page 472: The Wolves Attack.
Page 556: The End.

I think Graham McNeill has the same problem that Dan Abnett has developed. They're both really friggin wordy. I know that this book and and Prospero Burns are supposed to go together, and I'm hoping that PB will deal a bit more with the actual combat, but after 470+ pages, I was hoping that there would be a bit more combat in the book.

Again, just like Abnett, there were a lot of sub plots that were just there...

Blah. 3 out of 5.

Review: Rynn's World

So I finished Rynn's World last night. Wow, what a book. Steve Parker did a really good job with this book. From reading a lot of the fluff from the 40k book and other sources, I knew that the Crimson Fists were gunna get jacked up in this book, but Parker did an excellent job of fleshing it out.

I have really been impressed lately with the action "scenes" in a lot of BL books (40k and Fantasy), and this book is just as good. The battles were pretty epic, even when it was just a skirmish. The only thing I was disappointed with was the fact that the space battle was glossed over, but this was a pretty beefy book, so a chapter or two of space battle missing isn't too bad.


My major pet peeve of having too many plots and characters going on at one time was thankfully absent in this book. There were quite a few characters, but they mostly revolved around different parts of two major plots. For me this was good because I got a bit of the "oh my god this is good, I can't wait to get back to it in the next chapter," but I didn't get the, "OK, now I have to remember what this character was doing 200 pages, and 15 sub-plots ago."


Another thing that was thankfully missing was the "uber-evil imperial guy" that is just there to make the lives of the major characters more of a PITA. There was one dude in the story that I thought was going to shape up into one of those characters, but it didn't turn out that way. Thank you Mr. Parker!

With prior knowledge of that fact that the Crimson Fists were going to get mauled in this book, it made me hesitant to cheer for characters, but I knew that many of them were gunna be blowed up, and this was the case. I actually think this was a good thing in the book because every time a new and interesting character was introduce, I was like, "Oh no! I hope he doesn't die!" Another thing I liked was that Mr. Parker did in fact kill off some of those likeable characters you were just getting to know. It made it feel real. It made it feel as if the Crimson Fists were well and truly boned.

A couple of the things I didn't like about the book were the distain that many of the Space Marines felt towards the humans that they were fighting for. There are some circumstances that do come up in the book that explain it, but it was the differences between that different Astartes that really made me stop and blink before continuing.

The last thing that sorta stuck in my craw was the fact that we saw Space Marines in this book had a stat line that was roughly, in my opinion, BS 7 WS 7 S8 T8 W10 I6 A8 Ld 11 Sv 1+. Regular tactical marines were ambushed by Orks and killed every ork without taking a casualty, there were fights were you would think SOMEONE is gunna bite it, but no one does. Now I understand why this is written this way. It's a Space Marines novel, so we want them to be heroic. We want them to stand against the Green Tide and never give up, but there were a couple of occasions where it was a bit unbelievable, even for Space Marines.

Overall this was an excellent book. I would encourage anyone to read it. I give it 4 out of 5 stars!

Damn You Black Library!

So I've been reading a lot of Black Library books. Recently I've started in on Fantasy. The first one I picked up was a Dorf book (of course) called Honourkeeper by Nick Kyme. I then went into the Gotrek and Felix First and Second Omnibuses (Omnibusi?). There were some really good books in there. I especially liked Daemonslayer and Beastslayer, and I loved the use of the Skaven in the books.





Well after I finished the second omnibus, I didn't think the third was out yet, so I bought some other books. I picked up the 40k book Inquisition War which seems very interesting and it also happens to be one of the first Black Library publications, I believe. I also picked up Matthias Thulman: Witch Hunter which is a three book omnibus as well as The Blackhearts yet another omnibus. I heard on one of the podcasts about the Times of Legends series, which looks to be WHFB version of the Horus Heresy, so I picked up and read Heldenhammer with is the story of the rise of Sigmar and the fledgling Empire. Good book. After I finished reading that I went back and read the first short stories and the first book in the Witch Hunter book. I then saw the Third Gotrek and Felix book so I had to pick that one up.

Then Tamara comes home with Rynn's World which seems to be the first in a new series of books for 40k which go over some of the significant battles that the Space Marines have fought. And F me if it doesn't start out good. So not-so-long story, long. I've got an ass-ton (perhaps even a metric ass-ton) of really good books waiting to be read.

Anywho, I'm off to read some more Rynn's World.

Review: Titanicus

So Dan Abnett's Titanicus now that it has come out in soft back.

So believe it or not, this book deals with a Titan war. A forge world in the Sabbott Worlds area (The same region of the Imperium that Gaunt's Ghosts takes place) has been attack by a chaos Titan legion. The Titians of Legio Invictus are rerouted against orders to defend the forge world.

I am an admitted Abnett fan boy (I think he is the best Black Library author bar none!), but I was not very happy with this book. I think that Abnett was reaching to far when he wrote this book. There are literally twelve plot lines going on in the book. And there are a few of those plot lines that have absolutely nothing to do with the overall story line.

There are so many characters, and so many jumps within each chapter it is hard to remember, was this the tank commander guy, or the commander of the Warlord titan? I am used to authors having multiple plot lines going on and just as you get into one, it jumps to the next one, but this book takes this idea to the extreme. I found it difficult to follow.

Review: Cadian Blood

One thing I tend to forget when considering the Imerial Guard is that when we think of the countless billions that die everyday in the wars of the Imerium; regiments tossed into the meat grinder to take a nameless hill, the barely trained conscript given a lasgun from the fellow in front of him that just took a bolt round to the face, these are the "normal" Guardsmen of the Imerium, and for some reason, I always lumped the Cadians in there with these poor schlocks.

For some reason I had assumed that the Cadians were the lowest common denominator. I mean it isn't like they were Catachans, those guys grew up on a jungle death world! The trap a fell into is that although Cadia isn't technically a death world, the Cadians treat it as if it is.

It says in the fluff that Cadians learn to strip a lasgun before they learn to walk. They are inducted into the guard at age 14. The thing I forget about the Cadians is that they are all badasses! These guys are like the Green Berets, Navy SEALs and the SAS all rolled into one.