Tuesday 6th of July, 2010

Guest Blog from C.L. Werner

Once in awhile you get something you really wanted. For me, that came with a brief query from my editor asking if I would like to do a series of novels focused on Grey Seer Thanquol. If I tell you it took me all of five seconds to answer that one, I’d be overestimating things.

The skaven have always held a special place for me. They were what first made me really notice Warhammer. All these weird little ratmen with guns and flamethrowers and gas masks were something that piqued my curiosity. Certainly none of the other fantasy settings flooding the market in the late 1980’s had such things. Then I saw an advertisement for Warhammer RPG in a gaming magazine that featured a lengthy text piece written from the point of view of an imprisoned witch hunter. By the end of the piece, the terrified man is turned over to the skaven by his corrupt gaoler. Even these many years later, that evocative bit of writing still sticks in my mind.

Of all the heroes in the Warhammer setting, I’m almost invariably drawn to the bad guys. Nagash, Azhag the Slaughterer, Mannfred von Carstein, Wulfrik the Wanderer, but above them all in my esteem towers Grey Seer Thanquol. Reading William King’s Gotrek and Felix stories, I found the scheming, craven Thanquol to be the star of the show. He was just so damn exciting and you never knew what he was going to do next or how he would try to twist something around to his benefit. There was something positively cathartic to read about a character with absolutely no redeeming values. A villain after my own heart (which, I’m sure, Thanquol would make a nice snack out of).

When I had the chance to write my own Thanquol stories, one thing I took extreme pains to do was keep Thanquol himself true to the way he was written in Herr King’s books. The second thing I decided was to make everything else as different from Gotrek and Felix in style and tone as I could. For the first novel, I pitted Thanquol against a mysterious wizard, the story unfolding in the shadows of Altdorf. In the second novel, Thanquol finds himself in the green hell of Lustria opposing a powerful skink sorcerer. In both instances, I tried to find challenges that would put Thanquol in very different situations from what he encountered against Gotrek and Felix. It was always a delight trying to figure out exactly how Thanquol would flatter, bully or trick his way out of trouble (with the occasional warpstone-fuelled magical assault when the opportunity presented itself, naturally). There’s something about an inveterate coward who doesn’t even understand why he shouldn’t use one of his underlings as a living shield, much less think twice about doing so.

Now, in Temple of the Serpent, we find Thanquol in very dire straits. Conscripted into a nefarious plot by Clan Eshin to help them assassinate the powerful Xiuhcoatl, Prophet of Sotek, Thanquol finds himself completely out of his element. The sweltering jungles of Lustria are just teeming with all sorts of things that want to kill him: dinosaurs, carnivorous plants, cannibal fish, piranha-lizards, venomous frogs, zombies and, of course, the lizardmen themselves. But his trouble doesn’t end there. You see, there’s an old enemy lurking among the skaven expedition and he’s not missing any opportunity to try to settle the score!

Posted by The Black Library Team