Sigmar’s Blood by Phil Kelly – A Review

I managed to pick up a copy of Phil Kelly’s Sigmar’s Blood (for free!). Vampires, Witch Hunters, grimdark Fantasy! What could go wrong?

Well, I wasn’t really impressed however. Sigmar’s Blood is hectic and jumbled and, for me, fails to really create the mood and theme necessary for its, at first glance, interesting premise. Also, a cliff-hanger-ending? What the hell?

A great darkness has fallen over the land of Sylvania, and monsters are abroad… When an artefact of unholy power and evil is stolen from the Imperial Palace itself, Grand Theogonist Volkmar leads a crusade of the faithful into the benighted realm of the vampire counts to confront and destroy the source of the darkness: Mannfred von Carstein. With the aid of an embittered witch hunter and a senile old wizard, Volkmar faces the dread forces of the undead even though he knows it means his own end…

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#1 – Sigmar’s Blood: The Book

Sigmar’s Blood is one of the (now) familiar Black Library novellas, 126 pages for £ 12,-.

There is a mean-looking Vampire – presumably Mannfred von Carstein – on the cover. No coloured internal pages or anything of that sort. Curiously, Sigmar’s Blood is split into 20 (!) chapters and an Epilogue, despite it’s small size. And as each new chapter is preceded by a blank page, there are another 20 black pages in the book.

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#2 – Sigmar’s Blood: The Story

The story, on the face of it, is deceptively simple. In the opening chapters, an evil artefact is stolen from the Imperial Palace itself by vampiric minions. In turn, the Empire’s Grand Theogonist Volkmar gathers a small crusade to head to Sylvania to retrieve it.

Volkmar is joined by a very grumpy Witchhunter, as well a variety of units that – for the most part – directly showcase GW-miniatures, a band of Demigryph Knights, a Wizard with a Luminark of Hysh, State Troops, Flagellants, and more.

The story sticks very closely to “official units from the game”, which is unsurprising as it came with a campaign-book allowing players to re-play the events told in the book in a campaign between the Undead and the Empire.

Meanwhile, Sylvania itself has fallen under an unnatural, permanent darkness, which hints at other dark and evil things going on.

And indeed, there is an evil ritual going on, meaning the story ends…

• …on an interesting twist (good) and…
• …a cliff-hanger, which leaves ultimately leaves the twist unresolved (bad, because I don’t know where it continues?).

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#3 – Sigmar’s Blood – Is It Good?

As you can probably see from the rating, I did not enjoy this book.

I don’t think it is the fault of the author, truth be told, but more the fact that this novella was meant to serve a campaign book. While I haven’t played the Warhammer Fantasy campaign to go with it, the story feels like it suffered from having to include all the units, the key events, and the battles from the campaign at the expense of the story.

The frantic pace of the book, with 20 chapters in a novella. many only a page or two long, and with dozens of battles and characters and little time to “develop” scenes and characters, also makes it hard to connect with anything happening in the story. It is hard to care for the outcome of a battle or a character in peril, if 3 pages on there is another battle without another character doing something dangerously heroic, and 3 more pages after that, another, etc…

Sigmar’s Blood isn’t really a “story” first, but an in-universe write-up of the many battles that make up the Sigmar’s Blood campaign.

Ironically, the best part of the book is probably the last battle, simply because it had a few more pages devoted to it. On the other hand, as noted, the Epilogue leaves things hanging for the reader, just as the story finally got to a point where I felt that things “mattered”.

Sigmar’s Blood is probably only worth it if if buy or play the campaign with it. As a story by itself … well … there are better Warhammer stories out there.

Z.