Just as we did with our Sanctus Reach deep dive two months ago, today we’re stepping into the Black Library to take a look at the trio of novellas that accompanied the Shield of Baal campaign supplements.
As TheChirurgeon explained in his excellent lore primer, the Shield of Baal focused on three factions, each getting new rules and models over the course of the campaign:
- The Blood Angels and Flesh Tearers Space Marines
- Tyranids
- Necrons
One might be tempted to think hey, three factions, three novellas, line ’em up and let’s go, but that’s not at all what happened. Instead, we got a bit of a literary succotash. Just as with Sanctus Reach, the three stories are themselves completely unconnected, with only the common narrative setting uniting them. And as with Sanctus Reach, it’s a bit of a mixed bag.
Deathstorm, by Josh Reynolds
The trilogy starts off with an absolute banger by Josh Reynolds, one of the Black Library’s most prolific writers. Reynolds clearly understood the assignment here, delivering a rollicking tale of Blood Angels battling Tyranids on Asphodex, a planet on the verge of being devoured.
It’s a high-stakes extraction mission as First Company Captain Karlaen, the “Shield of Baal,” must recover the planetary governor (or his next-of-kin) Augustus Flax before it’s too late. It’s not necessarily Flax they’re after, per se, but rather his blood; Sanguinary High Priest Carbulo has learned of a clue within his lineage that could hold the key to unlocking a remedy for the genetic curse afflicting the Blood Angels
Karlaen and a score of his Terminator brethren teleport down to the governor’s palace- or what’s left of it- and the race is on as they search for the governor beset by Tyranids on all sides. Wouldn’t you know it, turns out the sons of Sanguinius aren’t the only ones with a genetic curse to contend with.
Although it’s the longest of the three stories in the series, Reynolds writes with a taut compactness that never overstays its welcome. In this regard it reminded me a lot of Ben Counter’s Blood on the Mountain, which we reviewed as part of our coverage on Sanctus Reach: a perfect match of scope of story and novella format, yielding a tale driven forwards by its action but with just enough mystery to keep things compelling.
While it’s Karlaen’s squad that takes center stage, it’s the Death Company that steals the show. Showing up later in the story to provide fire support to Karlaen’s desperate team, these are Blood Angels who have succumbed to the Legion’s curse so thoroughly that they exist half within reality, and half lost within the misty mindscapes of their memories.
In my recent review of Fulgrim: The Perfect Son, I touched on how much the notion of tragedy provides the Black Library with so much of its emotional depth. Whether it’s the fall from grace of the Traitor Legions or the chiseling away of the very being of the Stormcast Eternal’s soul with each reforging, there’s a sorrowful romanticism utterly bound up within the heart of Warhammer. Here Reynolds brilliantly channels this though the Death Company, and Cassor the Dreadnought in particular.
Dreadnoughts already have ample measure of that within them; there’s a reason heroes like Huron-Fal and Ancient Rylanor are so fondly regarded in the Warhammer community. If during the course of Deathstorm I had occasion to shed a singly Manly Tear, you won’t get me to admit it. Suffice it to say, this is a superb story, tragedies and all.
Tempestus, by Braden Campbell
If Deathstorm was exactly what you’d expect from a Shield of Baal story (Blood Angels versus Tyranids as the world goes to shit around them), Tempestus is very much the opposite. There’s not a Blood Angel in sight; Tyranids mainly only show up at the end and are so immaterial to the narrative that you could leave them on the cutting room floor and actually improve the finished product. I’m not kidding- the word ‘tyranid’ appears once in the first eight of the story’s nine chapters (and chapter nine is when the Tyranids invade the planet).
Tempestus centers on an ambitious and embittered Inquisitor of the Ordo Xenos who, along with his retinue of Temepstus Scions, descend on a world in search of an alien specimen to bring back to Holy Terra. The Black Library blurb for the story specifies that this is a ‘Tyranid’ specimen, but not only does the book itself never make that distinction, the alien they’re after doesn’t seem to have a lot in common with the ‘nids.
It’s almost like Campbell had written a solid Inquisitor story, then was told by his editor that they could slide it into the Shield of Baal series if only it had a few more Tyranids in it.
I’m not trying to be cynical here; writing for an IP is a mixture of both art and craft. If the needs of the team is for more cowbell, then more cowbell it is. But it’s worth pointing out that Tempestus feels a bit shoe-horned in, and removing the Tyranid element would let the story breathe more.
The setting itself is almost delightfully Lovecraftian. The planet Lysios was a perfectly productive Imperial world until three thousand years ago, when the system’s binary stars suddenly began heating up. This caused environmental devastation on the planet as its polar ice melted and formed a new ocean. Thanks to the gravitational pull of its large moon, Ixios, the new oceanic waters formed a giant tidal wave which follows the moon as it orbits, circumnavigating the planet every ten years.
Lurking within this slowly-moving “worldwave” are eldritch horrors that attack and consume anyone they come across, giving the whole thing the same wonderfully frightening vibe as Stephen King’s The Mist. The locals have come to worship and pay sacrifice to them, and their devotion has left many of them with hidden mutations (a detail that itself invokes The Shadow over Innsmouth).
Our intrepid Inquisitor isn’t there to capture just any random horror from the depths, but rather has his sights on the entity the locals worship as their water deity- and bring it back to Holy Terra.
This is a cracking setup, and could easily have carried the novella (or even a novel) on its own. And being fair, it doesn’t lose a lot by being stitched in to the Shield of Baal campaign. The arrival of a Tyranid invasion in the final chapter has a bit of a deus ex machina feel to it, but the story has wonderfully conventional horror story finish.
Devourer, by Joe Parrino
Overall, I found Parrino’s closing novella to be the weakest of the three- but that comes with a hefty caveat I’ll touch on in a moment.
In this story we have two separate points of view that move to converge by the tale’s end. On the one hand you have Anrakyr the Traveller, a Necron Overlord. Anrakyr’s a man on a mission, there to awaken an ancient tomb’s worth of his people.
Jetiel, meanwhile, is a sergeant in the Second Company of the Blood Angels. Onboard the Golden Promise, he chafes at his orders to orbit the dead, virus-bombed world of Perdita and keep an eye on things from afar. Unusually for an Astartes, Parrino portrays his protagonist as ordinary, a man of little ambition content in the knowledge that he has reached the maximum of his trajectory in life. If his brothers in the Blood Angels happened to look down on him for it, well, that was their problem.
Speaking of problems, Anrakyr’s got a big one. The dynasty he’s come to awaken is infected with the flayer curse, which turns Necrons into the equivalent of the zombies from 28 Days Later. Harried from all directions, the last thing they need is to add Tyranids to the mix, but that’s exactly what happens when the Golden Promise crashes on the planet after unwittingly drawing the attention of the Tyranid fleet. The surviving Blood Angels are chased into the underground by the ‘nids, run into the Necron going the other way, and in a moment that won’t quite remind you of the football scene in Joyeux Noel they find common cause to team up against the hungering horde.
If that all sounds a little bit busy, that’s because it is. In a case of addition by subtraction Parrino could probably have left the Blood Angels out of the story entirely and it would have made for a stronger, tighter narrative. Necron POV stories aren’t especially common in the annals of the Black Library, and Parrino writes the faction well.
Ultimately, there’s that hefty caveat. Devourer isn’t a bad story, but rather one that isn’t a great fit for the format. If instead it had simply been the first eleven chapters of a novel, it would have worked far better- particularly as it more or less ends the moment the Necrons and Blood Angels team up.
Finally, apropos of nothing, I found an unexpected similarity here with the Necron and the T’au, with both races prominently using nonverbal modifiers in their communication to enhance their message and meaning.
This, from Noah Van Nguyen’s superb Elemental Council (review here):
‘Gather the auxiliaries. I will be ready.’ Orr glanced at J’Kaara. ‘Assuming you retract your objections to my presence with a combat detachment?’
J’Kaara smoothly brought one hand over the other, forming the supplicant student. ‘You know the language. You know the ground.’
And this, from Devourer:
A cyclopean eye met Anrakyr’s fell gaze. A cryptek. It chattered, its body hunched in a posture that screamed excitement. It wrung its hands together, digits flashing in complex formations that conveyed the emotions that its skull-like visage never would.
Excitement. Relief. Obeisance.
Anrakyr waved the cryptek into stillness. ‘Your news?’
‘We have aligned the maps and the portents, my lord. The approximate entrance location has been found.’
When I reviewed the Sanctus Reach trilogy, I concluded by saying that “as always, your mileage may vary. As a trilogy this was a bit uneven, but all the same as a time capsule for the 7th Edition’s narrative campaign this was a fun exercise.”
That seems to fit here just as well.
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