Continuing one of the most enjoyable storylines from the Age of Sigmar Realmgate Wars series, Josh Reynolds’ novel Hallowed Knights: Plague Garden returns to the Hallowed Knights’ campaign in Ghyran against the forces of Nurgle. As Lord-Castellant Grymn leads his warriors against the sargasso-citadels of the Order of the Fly, Lord-Celestant Gardus Steel Soul prepares to return to Ghyran and rejoin his warrior-chamber, accompanied by the contentious figure of Tornus the Redeemed. When Grymn is lost to the Garden of Nurgle, Gardus leads a rescue mission that risks the very souls of the Hallowed Knights.
There’s plenty of characters in here, both old and new, so it’s worth being up to speed with the Steel Souls storyline before picking this up – that’s The Gates of Dawn (in War Storm), War in the Hidden Vale (in Ghal Maraz), and Wardens of the Everqueen. On one level it’s a very similar story to its predecessors, with an ever-diminishing force of Stormcasts battling their way towards a grand, noble objective, but Reynolds uses that as a base on which to build a story that’s really about some key characters – on both sides – working out how to cope with changes forced upon them. The breadth of characters helps it feel connected to not just the other Hallowed Knights stories but other Stormcast-focused tales as well, and Reynolds seems to have made a (welcome) point of demonstrating much more variety amongst these characters than we’ve seen before – including female Stormcasts, which is great.
Narratively it does sometimes feel like a bit of a slog, cleaving quite closely to the Realmgate Wars template, although (assuming you’ve read the previous novels) by now at least there’s less need for hammering (sorry) home the different unit types and so on. The fighting is fine, and there are some impressively inventive set-pieces as the end approaches, but it’s the quieter moments which work best, offering the most interesting exploration yet of the differing impact that reforging has on Stormcasts. It’s becoming a question of purpose (god-given or otherwise) for many of these characters as Age of Sigmar’s mythical overtones are explored yet further, with similar themes in evidence for the Nurgle characters as well, albeit coming from different directions, and it’s interesting to see in-universe perceptions being explored at the same time as we, as readers, are tackling the same questions.
The Stormcasts-on-a-quest structure is starting to get pretty tired now, but thankfully Reynolds finds ways to avoid some of the obvious pitfalls, not least by subverting the narrative get-out-of-jail-free card that reforging offers – both in terms of the impact it has on characters, and also the warping nature of the Garden of Nurgle. Speaking of which it’s nice to see the variety in Nurgle’s followers, with a variety of beliefs and sometimes conflicting ideologies – characters like Gutrot Spume are fun to spend time with, but the Order of the Fly are particularly interesting and prove surprisingly relatable antagonists. For all its familiarities, there’s more than enough here to set it apart from what’s gone before, and it certainly feels like the most cohesive and well-developed of this sort of Age of Sigmar story so far.
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