And I did, and it proved to be enormously successful to such the extent that the Eisenhorn books are regarded as a bit of a primer to get you into 40K." I wouldn't go so far as to say I didn't know what I was doing or where the plot was going, but it was very much I have a basic idea and I'm just going to go for it. If we can get a novel together by the time the game comes out, I’ll be able to get it past the people upstairs as part of an imaginary marketing strategy.’ And so I did, and basically just wrote the first Eisenhorn novel, Xenos, I just wrote it in the sheer white fun of just writing it. And I rang him straight back up and said ‘Can we not write a novel about this stuff rather than using it elsewhere because this is great!’ And he said ‘well, yeah, we can but we need to make it look deliberate rather than random. But at the time I looked at it and leafed through it – it was half complete, as I said photocopies and bits and pieces, brilliant spot illustrations and stuff like that.
And it showed the detail – the elaborate detail – of imperial life. And he sent to me simply because he thought I might be interested in and inspired by the images in Gaunt.
#Warhammer books order series
" I think I was 3 or 4 books into the Gaunt's series and just writing those and the then-head of the Black Library sent me a portfolio of photocopies and rules from the Inquisitor game that was going to be produced.
As he explained in February 2016 to the Backwards Compatible podcast: The series was pitched by Abnett when he was given material from the game in-development as inspiration for his Gaunt's Ghosts series of novels.