How do?
More ramblings from what I'm regularly assured is a brain.
Now, once upon a time, Black Library treated us to some absolutely gorgeous artbooks. You may be familiar with them, you may not. But here's what they were (and I'm almost certainly missing some)
Which featured various and sundry autopsies/vivisections of lots of Xenos creatures. Some familiar, others first introduced in this book
Mostly a Fantasy affair, but with hint and snippets of 40k - treatises on each of the four gods, by a completely insane author. Very evocative, very cool. I've got the hardback edition. No I'm not selling it
And one for the Skaven. Again, yes I do, no it's not
In fact, on balance, Warhammer Fantasy did better out of these. Which is oddly disappointing. I mean, The Old World is cool and everything, but there's so much more to play with in 40kland. So much is unexplored and unknown.
Take The Ghoul Stars. We know it's forbidden. We know even the Great Crusade struggled to make much progress there, which really suggests something. But....for me that's not good enough. I want tantalising glimpses. Perhaps a Rogue Trader's memoirs, replete with 'remembrancer' style sketches and pics.
In short, we need these in our hobby lives. They do what games and traditional novels can't. They can show us Xenos species which will never make it to the board What do I mean by that? Well, case in point, courtesy of Xenology
Cool Alien concept.....but would make for a rubbish looking army. But I still want to know more about them. These books were a way for us to explore the wider galaxy in a cheap and effective manner - and they all completely sold out (sadly, a I leant Xenology to a friend, who moved, then moved and again, and moved again for a third time, and it now can't be found :'( )
We need these. So why not join me in slightly hassling BL over email and that to see if they'll reprint, even digitally, or do new editions.