This post has only parts that have something to do with Gotrek & Felix, not all the Newsletter.
One pleasant surprise was is that in the recent Voices of Warhammer Humble Bundle of Black Library audiobooks I found Trollslayer. Jonathan Keeble, the actor reading, does a superb job. He conjures up the differences between all the many characters just with his voice. My only complaint, and it’s not really a complaint that affects most people, is that Gotrek has a Yorkshire accent instead of a Scottish one. Gotrek does not sound like my grandfather. I remember thinking the same thing playing Shadow of the Horned Rat on the PlayStation many years ago. Anyway, I can hardly blame Jonathan Keeble for any of this. He is quite brilliant.
Listening to the book has been a strange and nostalgic experience for me. It transports me back more than 30 years. I can picture writing some of the stories on my old Atari ST in Protext, my word processor of choice back then. I can even visualise sitting in the room in our old house in Stranraer, right down to the quality of the sunlight.
One of the nice things about revisiting Gotrek and Felix in this format after all this time is that I can appreciate just how much my younger self got right. From the opening paragraphs on the opening page of the opening story, the pair are themselves. It’s all there in their dialogue and behavior. The other thing this book reminded me of is how much I loved the Old World. When I started writing these stories, I was still running a twice-weekly game of Warhammer Fantasy Role-Play in what we now refer to as the first edition. (Hard to believe that it’s now in a fourth edition.)
