Warhammer Wednesday: Audio Week 2017

I received a promotional email from the Black Library on Monday that rather took me by surprise. Apparently, this week is Audio Week 2017, and the story - or rather, two stories - serialised for the occasion are Eye of Night and Hand of Darkness by m'colleague Gav Thorpe. Here's the blurb for the two stories:

Now the funny thing about these stories, and the reason for me being prompted to write this blog post, is because the Eye of Night and Hand of Darkness are two creations of mine, even if I only really came up with the names*.

From 1994-96, after leaving university, I moved to Nottingham to become a freelance writer. It was then that I started working for Games Workshop, in a freelance capacity, writing colour text and short stories for the Warhammer Armies books and Warhammer 40,000 Codexes**. During that time I contributed words to the Epic 40,000 game as well as Warhammer Armies: Dark Elves and Warhammer Armies: Wood Elves, and Codex: Tyranids, Codex: Angels of Death, and Codex: Chaos.

It was whilst writing the interlinking stories that appeared through Codex: Chaos that I came up with the aforementioned Eye of Night and Hand of Darkness. The connected tales related the invasion of the planet Purgatory by the forces of Chaos, and at the end Inquisitor Horst discovers that the Hand of Darkness has been taken from its hiding place beneath the planet's crust.

In my mind, the Eye of Night and Hand of Darkness were powerful weapons, although unspecified, and GW took those ideas and ran with them*** when they created the backstory for the game Battlefleet Gothic, placing the alien artefacts at the heart of the story, a story which Gav is clearing continuing now.

It will be interesting to see what he does with those powerful weapons of antiquity next.

* Which, let's face it, aren't that original!

** I know it should be Codicies, but GW call them Codexes.

*** And it's not the only time this has happened.