The Sabbat Worlds Crusade

Warhammer 40,000

by Dan Abnett

A luxurious in-universe historical account of the eponymous Sabbat Worlds Crusade, this volume is crammed with indispensable lore, never-before-seen images and illustrations, and a host of maps, charts and accounts. It is the ideal and unmissable companion to the phenomenally popular Gaunt’s Ghosts series by New York Times bestselling and award-winning author, Dan Abnett. Discover over 200 pages packed with exhaustive detail about the campaign, the regiments, the key theatres and personalities and military tactics, all lavishly illustrated, expanded and updated.


Written by Dan Abnett, and with particular focus on his beloved Gaunt’s Ghosts characters, this art and background is a celebration of a wonderful series of novels and a must for any fan of military science fiction or Warhammer 40,000.

Genres: 40k, Science Fiction, Fantasy, Military Science Fiction

227 pages, Hardcover

First published November 15, 2005

Reviews

[Olethros · Rating 3 out of 5]

-Sin salir de los márgenes de su trasfondo, un producto híbrido algo distinto.-

Género. Ensayo (es una crónica, casi más bien un informe, pero no tengo esa clasificación en el blog, y además es, en realidad, ciencia ficción).

Lo que nos cuenta. El libro La cruzada de los Mundos de Sabbat (publicación original: The Sabbat Worlds Crusade, 2005) es la narración de Antonid Biota, un táctico del Departamento Tacticae Imperialis del Estado Mayor con veinticuatro años de experiencia, de la campaña en los Mundos de Sabbat, una “gloriosa cruzada” en sus propias palabras que, para el táctico, merece ser pormenorizada, los hombres que murieron en ella deben ser elogiados y que, tras dos décadas de combates y aunque no se vislumbra un final cercano, debe continuar el tiempo que sea necesario por razones tácticas, materiales y psicológicas.

¿Quiere saber más de este libro, sin spoilers? Visite:

http://librosdeolethros.blogspot.com/...

[Michael Dodd · Rating 5 out of 5]

A richly detailed and beautifully produced 220-page hardback, this makes for a fantastic companion to his epic, 15-novel Gaunt’s Ghosts series. Written from an in-universe perspective as a historical account of the Sabbat Crusade from its outset up to the liberation of Urdesh, it covers everything from the macro-level – the original context of the crusade, and Warmaster Slaydo’s (and later, Macaroth’s) overarching strategies – down to the micro-level – individual character portraits, vignettes, even vehicles, wargear and regimental awards.

It’s unquestionably a valuable companion piece, appealing to an interesting cross-section of series completists, military history fans and readers looking for ever-deeper immersion in this fascinating corner of the Warhammer 40,000 setting. It might not be something to binge-read in a single sitting, but there’s a huge amount of information available and enjoyment to be had, along with considerable re-read appeal. In-universe items can run the risk of feeling like gimmicks, but there’s no chance of that here, with the phenomenal standard of writing, artwork and design ensuring that this is worth every penny of the (admittedly quite steep) asking price.

Read the full review at https://www.trackofwords.com/2020/02/...

[Patrick Stuart · Rating 5 out of 5]

(Five stars because I'm a massive nerd)


DESCRIBE WHAT THIS IS

For anyone who doesn't know what this is;

For twenty years and fifteen novels, Dan Abnett has been writing the 'Gaunts Ghosts' series, set in a particular segment of the Warhammer 40,000 galaxy; the Sabbat Worlds.

And not just a particular segment of space but a particular segment of time, about 250 years before the current 'now' of the 40k reality.

All of these stories take place in an area called the Sabbat Worlds and over the novels, short stories and various other entries, a handful by other creators, the history of the Sabbat Worlds Crusade has deepened and extended.

This Crusade, as a pseudo-historical event, got a background book back in 2005, told from an in-world voice.

Now its 14 years and several books later and Games Worship is BANGIN' with money, so Dan Abnett gets to make a new background book for the Sabbat Worlds Crusade, except this time its hardback A4 with gold goddamn leaf on the spine and loads of new art and maps, and a ribbon. This one is also written from an in-universe voice, and as it takes into account all the stuff that has happened in the last 14 years worth of novels, its written from an imaginary date several years on from the last book.

Being a shameless wehraboo, I ordered this as soon as it became available and Black Library were actually terrifyingly efficient and got it to my door incredibly quickly.

Considering that this shit is my jam, I own remarkably few highly-diegetic pseudo histories, I think this and the Gloriana book are the only ones that go this deep into it

My tldr review; I have a few quibbles but essentially the only thing I would ask for is more.




DIAGEIS OF THE TEXT

That's; "how deep did they go on this in trying to make sure the whole book really feels like it comes from inside the imagined world."

The answer is; slightly imperfect but honestly pretty fucking far.

The only references to the real world are Dan Abnetts name and Black Library on the cover and an ISBN & Credits page at the back.

The book opens with an Inquisitorial investigation. This particular text was created on the world of Urdesh specifically to commemorate its liberation (as seen in the latest books) and draws information from a wide variety of sources.

Unfortunately for Garnyme and Brothers Printworks and Bindery, Strallent Street, Great Eltath Municipality (who have their own pseudo-publishers page at the front) and Ludovik Dypole, Emeritus professor of Military History Scholam Univeritariate of Ghreppan, Urdesh (who has his own author page), in interviewing a bunch of people and clawing sources from everywhere they have regrettably put CHAOS STUFF and SECRETS in here, which is one thing you are absolutely not meant to do, so now they are going to get a visit from the people Nobody Expects.

And it seems the book has been pulped and only this copy has been retained for study. So in the strange relationship of reality between our world and 40k, your copy of the book, the one you are holding, is the Only Copy.




ABNETTS HISTORYVERSE

The Gaunts Ghosts series is a mad Collision of different kinds of stories - even within Abnetts main series, the opening ones are very genre and pretty much 'Sharpe-In-Space', then they develop into this chimeric pseudo-militarism.

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(WHAT I MEAN BY CHIMERAE)

Most fantastic paracosms, especially science-fictional ones, are chimerae of the structure of an imagined future and the elements known to the present.

There's a William Gibson view that Science-Fiction is really always about the 'now'. This gains credence when you look back at old science fiction because it utterly reeks of its specific decade and time.

I believe that most (good) science-fiction is about the interrelationship between an imagined future (or just an imagined other) and the present. Most functional science-fictions concepts, be they machines, social systems, aesthetics, worlds, environments or whatever, are chimerae made up with the shape, form or blood of the future, but with the scales, feathers and claws of today.

So everything you sense of the Other comes in the clothes of the Now.

Then you can understand it.

And then once its dead or old and someone looks back at it, it seems almost like a ridiculous costume of the Now.

But they are never just symbols for known events or current things, and rarely are they pure dreams of the Other.

They are complex living relationships formed of an exchange of energy between the two things and explaining the nature of one with the matter of the other.

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One of Abenetts greatest strengths in these stories has been his ability to comprehend and accumulate vast and (relatively, for a genre writer) deep awareness of different kinds of warfare over a huge number of fields and to incorporate that into active pseudohistories which involve wildly different scales and forms of technologies, and to incorporate those with solid, animated, visceral and sympathetic characters so that you feel the characters and you feel the world they are moving through.

I've really taken to writing long sentences recently, no idea why.

He is really really good at making these fields of conflict, which are truly more like dreams, because if they were considered coherently; well the delta v for orbital war doesn't work, the titans will sink up to their knees, the space marines can be taken out by hordes of suicide bombers who cost 1 per cent as much as they do, whoever has orbital control essentially rules a world, the ammo logistics don't work, etc etc etc.

But you rarely feel these things in the best of Abnetts work because the of depth, coherency and selection of detail and his creation of a mosaic of details drawn from all over military history, here’s a bit of Stalingrad, here’s a bit of the Iraq war, here's a 20th century air battle at a scale at which those battles almost never took place, here's some 21st century tank fights but also giant robots stamping about, here's an early 21st century special ops team fighting their way through an early 2oth century trench war etc etc.

Militarism I would say. not militarism as absolute chauvinism or love of warfare and killing for itself, but militarism love of, and interest in the military and military things as and for themselves. Which is parallel to, but not the same as, the love of war for wars sake, (not always the same people at the same time).

40k warfare through Abnetts eyes is to me, very much a crazed fever dream of 20th century warfare, swollen to enormous scale and delivered calmly. Militarism as as art.



THE ROLE OF GOD IN ABNETTS HISTORYVERSE

Well there are literal diegetic gods in the setting, and there is literally a god of Fate, and the duelling prognosticator thing that we have in the Heresy books.

A pretty strong developing theme in a lot of Abnetts warhammer work is of these forces beyond time and space 'picking up' individual characters and in a sense moving them around, or presenting them challenges and opportunities, and preparing them for conflicts with each other.

The way characters respond to these challenges, whether they succeed or fail, can differ. I get the sense that there is some level of individual choice or low level randomness, so even the gods don't know exactly what’s going to happen in any individual circumstance, or which particular playing piece will make it to the end.

But there is a strange relationship here between the will of the Emperor and the desire of the writer to make a good story.

It seems like the one thing the Emperor and the Chaos Gods agree on is that things should play out in as dramatic and high-risk a way as possible, with as much as possible riding on a small handful of people and choices over a limited period of time.

Which, as it happens, is also the substance of a plot for a really good book.

So Abnett and the Emperor both have an interest in the plot being good. The Emperor Protects, he protects your fanbase and your book sales. Ave Imperator.




BRIEF BREAKWAY HERE ABOUT HOW THIS ACTUALLY MIMICS THE LIKELY STRUCTURE OF WAR

I've often thought that if genuine chaos (small-c chaos as in Randomness) were a force in human affairs then it would be almost impossible for a structural historian to see.

I do think large events can turn on very small incidents, especially in war, and bits and pieces of military theory do seem to suggest that many battles and encounters are essentially decided by a relatively small number of people who are willing to do very extreme high-risk things with a great majority of people behind them following along and being more systematic and sensible.

So is Abnetts pseudo-historical fate-influenced 'heroverse' in some ways a reasonable image of what history might actually look like? No idea.



CONFLICTS BETWEEEN ABNETS HEROIC STORYTELLING AT THE LOW LEVEL AND PSEUDOHISTORY AT THEHIGH LEVEL

Abnett loves ice-cold REALISTIC pseudo-histories and really HEROIC characters.

In the Ghosts books, the Taniths super-duper badass scout mkoll kills a chaos dreadnought with a grenade and some plants (thanks 1d4 chan) out-stealths a magical space elf from the stealth dimension, and most recently, defeats a warp-empowered chaos ultimate bad guy by shoving a det charge down his gob.

Its fun in the moment, and it gets a little silly considered as a whole.

That's an extreme example but tonalities of that are written throughout all of Abnetts work. He is perhaps the least 'dark' writer of the Dark Millennium (except for Sandy Mitchell).

The two don't go together well, except they kinda do but just awkwardly. In this pseudohistory 'good' commanders who try to do the right thing get shitcanned for political reasons and end up shooting themselves, innocent worlds are left to burn, purges take place and lots of random military stuff happens which inevitably leads to completely, or largely, innocent soldiers getting screwed.


In the _novels_ all the same stuff happens, just less of it and less often to 'our' characters and our characters aren't the ones who do it and so on and so on.

So its a very Dark Millennium but if Gaunts Ghosts are involved in your million-to-one last stand theres a nine out a ten chance that you will win.

This seems to me part of the books old DNA, going back to Sharpe, which is a tough-guy edgier Hornblower, and back to Hornblower who I think may have started the 'paragon-military-dude-in-an-unfair-world' genre

This hardly hurts the book, its probably part of the reason it works as a whole.




IS THE ART ANY GOOD

The artists list at the back reads like a 'whos who' of warhammer art; David Alvarez, John Blanche, Luke Blick, Daniel Bolling Walsh, Alex Boyd, George Brad, Da Yu, Paul Dainton, marta Dettlaff, Tomas Duchek, Johan Grenier, Aaron Griffin, mark harrison, Ralph Horsley, Akim Kaliberda, Dave Kendall, Nuala Kinrade, Vladimir Krisetskiy, karl Kopinski, Anna Lakivosa, Clint Langley, Phil Moss, Nicotene, Filipe Pagliuso, Grzegorz Przbys, Fred Rambaud, Mikhail Savier, Lie Setiawan, Evan Shepard, Adrian Smith, Raymond Swanland, Jason Rainville, Thomas Rey, Adam Tooby, Tiernan Trevallion, Wayne England, there's a LOT, and it all comes from different origins, different books and publications over the last twenty years

For Nu-Warhammer, its good.

I don't think Nu-GW can be as good as the best of the old stuff

Firstly, we are comparing a wide range of current stuff with the very best of the old stuff.

Second, while you can do a lot with digital, in the final analysis for me its highest reaches simply can't compare with the base-reality texture and feel of fully-physical art.

In some ways I think it might be better for GW to just completely forget John Blanche because no-one can do what he can do and trying to imitate him just produces lesser things. If they broke free from him they might be shit for a while but then maybe produce entirely new stuff?

I can't tell if that's a radical statement or not.#

Kylo Ren baby! Somtimes you gotta talk about breaking free from the past but then don't.

There's a strong RPG-art influence, which is mixed, it does give us an interest in portraiture and human character which hasn't been a big element of 40k stuff previously, it also has the slight blandifying effect of most rpg art

However,

this volpone blueblood;

and this portrait of macaroth

Are both really good and good examples of the new style

And this Slaydo portrait in the older style

There are some images in here which were in White Dwarf and, in my opinion, should not have been cut down to A4 size as it made them look more stiff and rubbish than they are.




DIAGESIS OF THE ART

Like the rest of the Diagesis, its slightly imperfect but a damn good effort. All the art as these little 'museum tags' giving an in-universe origin for them. Like;

"(right) Engraving of Kolstec infantry and Prefectus officer at Lyuobhive."

Often with little micro-histories which work really well, especially with the chaos stuff which is all from creepy images recovered from enemy strongholds, or seen in obsessive dream-visions by madmen, and which are inevitably haunted. And there's a note at the end saying 'yeah we had to inquisition and/or destroy this one because fucking ghosts kept coming out of it'

(Will ghosts come out of my copy of this book Games Workshop? And if not, why not?! I demand actually literally haunted images for the third edition!!)

Which leads us back to the Inquisitorial Statement at the front of the book and an in-universe account for writing a 'True History' in a universe where, famously, no History is True.

There are some fun bits when a picture is very clearly from some other 40k book and entirely different conflict and the in-world description is "possibly mis-labelled" or "likely a generic image of war later filed with the Sabbat Crusade section" or "likely done from descriptions of the event much later".

There is an attempt with some of the newer stuff to do a kind of version of 8th and 19thC British Imperial war images in which someone defends the gates of khatmandu with a pistol or cradles their dying general while blasting away at the French/Colonials/natives with a Brown Bess.

It’s sort of successful. The arrangements of the figures in the images seems about right and the quality ranges from high to ok but they are still digital images and very clearly not the oil paintings they are simulating.

Points for effort!


Last bits of review there wasn't room for here;
https://falsemachine.blogspot.com/201...

[Станислав · Rating 3 out of 5]

В худших традициях Osprey Military : красочно и ничего не понятно. Сильно не хватает карт, чтоб можно было видеть 3-мерную карту Миров Саббат и понять каков был план Крестового Похода, где размещается враг, что пошло не так и расположение театров военных действий. Без этого читать про Гаунта несколько неудобно, там, скажем, обсуждается битва на мире Х и начинаешь думать - где и когда это было, так ли это важно или Дэн это только что придумал. В общем, не хватает структуры.

[Matthew Taylor · Rating 2 out of 5]

A potentially very interesting read expanding on a wildly popular corner of the fictional corpus of 40k, sadly let down by poor text-to-illustrations linkage, very poor mapping and sometimes amazingly lazy image manipulation.

[Freya · Rating 5 out of 5]

Needed more paintings of Ibram. For... science. Definitely for science 👀

I definitely paid more than I should have on the second-hand market but it was absolutely worth it. Very much enjoyed having a lot of the background filled in.

[Arthur B · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nice in-universe slice of military history. Full review: https://fakegeekboy.wordpress.com/201...

[T R Alexander · Rating 4 out of 5]

This beautifully put together book is an expanded and updated version of a book of the same name published in 2005. Written from an in-universe perspective, this book covers the events from the beginning of the Crusade, up to the liberation of Urdesh and therefore contains major spoilers for anyone not up to date with the Gaunt’s Ghosts series of books. The writing is as good as you would expect from Dan Abnett, being both informative and interesting.

One of the best things about this book, for me, was the wonderful and evocative artwork that is scattered throughout. While some of the pieces have been reused from other places (with a couple clearly not depicting what the caption says there are depicting) they are still great pieces that were good to see. The book also includes a number of interesting maps, often in the style of ancient illustrated maps, and some sketches of various woe machines and Archenemy troops that have been very well done.

[Matthew Taylor · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fantastic new edition of a disappointing 2005 work. This book contains much expanded content (reflecting the ongoing novel series) but while no one can take away from Dan Abnett's skill at writing, the real victor of this book is the editor, who has taken a very messy book, filled with enthusiastic-but-terrible elements and produced this polished work that genuinely feels like an artefact from the Warhammer 40,000 universe.

For me, the finest example of this improvement was the secondary character illustrations - in 2005 they were embarrassingly lazy photoshop jobs on pictures of Victorian-era soldiers and sailors, but in this work they are original artworks.

[Steve · Rating 3 out of 5]

If you are a fan of the Gaunt's Ghosts novels, this is well worth a read. It's cost is prohibitive, but if you can find a copy for a reasonable price, I say go for it. Honestly though, you've really got to be a fanboy to appreciate it - if you're not already familiar with Gaunt's Ghosts, start there and see if you like it.

[David Hellstrom · Rating 5 out of 5]

"historical" look at the Sabbat Worlds crusade.

[Aleksi · Rating 5 out of 5]

A must read for all fans of the Warhammer 40,000 setting. The book would be a perfect background book was it not for a few cheap looking pictures.