Gotrek & Felix: The First Omnibus

Gotrek & Felix: The First Omnibus, published in 2006, gathers the three novels that launched Warhammer Fantasy's most famous partnership, Trollslayer, Skavenslayer, and Daemonslayer, into a single volume, and in doing so collects the foundation stone of Black Library fiction itself. William King had been writing these characters since the late 1980s, in short stories that predate the imprint, and the omnibus lets a new reader watch the saga grow from episodic tales into full-length adventure.

The premise is elegantly doomed. Gotrek Gurnisson is a dwarf Slayer, a member of that grim brotherhood who, having suffered some unforgivable shame, dye their crests and seek redemption in a glorious death against the mightiest foes they can find. Felix Jaeger is a well-born, university-educated human poet who, in the course of a drunken night gone badly wrong, swore an oath to follow Gotrek and immortalise his doom in an epic poem, only to discover, to his continual dismay, that Gotrek is infuriatingly difficult to kill. The joke and the engine of the whole saga is that the promised death never comes, and Felix is dragged through horror after horror waiting for it.

The omnibus's early volumes are largely episodic, a chain of self-contained adventures that carry the pair through the dark corners of the Old World: cursed manors on Geheimnisnacht, doomed expeditions, the sewers beneath a great city overrun by ratmen, and eventually a perilous voyage in search of a lost dwarf hold. That structure makes it an ideal entry point, since each story stands alone while the larger relationship deepens. By Skavenslayer the skittering menace of the ratmen has become a running throughline, and Daemonslayer pushes the pair toward the grander, more dangerous quests that would define later books.

What makes the saga endure is its voice. Framed largely through Felix's eyes, the stories are the reader's own window onto a brutal setting, a civilised, squeamish man perpetually appalled by the violence his oath demands, set against Gotrek's magnificent, half-comic, half-tragic death-wish. King fixes the tone early: dry, weary, and human, with gallows humour running beneath the carnage. The Old World it depicts is one where Chaos gnaws at everything and heroism means surviving with your soul intact, an ethos rooted in the ancient culture of the dwarfen holds.

Nearly everything Black Library later became owes something to these stories, and the saga they begin would run for decades, outlast the Old World's destruction, and even carry Gotrek into the Age of Sigmar. For readers seeking the roots of Warhammer fiction, or simply a rollicking, blood-soaked fantasy adventure, this first omnibus is where it all begins.