First introduced over 30 years ago, Gotrek Gurnisson – depending on how you look at it either the best or worst dwarf Slayer of all time – has gone on to be one of the most successful and enduring Warhammer characters of all time, featuring in eighteen novels, four audio dramas, one novella and loads of short stories…so far. Three decades after his first appearance, 2019 was a bumper year for him, with a second massive four-hour audio drama (voiced by Brian Blessed, no less) and the first new Gotrek novel since 2015’s Slayer in the shape of Darius Hinks’ Ghoulslayer. Oh, and a new plastic miniature, too.
I thought it was about time I took a look at the grumpy Slayer’s long history, so I enlisted the help of the four Black Library authors most associated with him – William King, Nathan Long, David Guymer and Darius Hinks. Join me as I look back through the history of this most well-loved of Warhammer characters, drawing upon the memories and thoughts of these four fantastic writers. In this first part, we’re going to talk about who Gotrek is and why he’s so popular, and start to go through a brief history of his adventures – then once you’ve read this, there’s a link at the end for the second part in which we’ll continue the history, look ahead to the future, and talk about what it was like writing this most enduring character.
To start things off though…
Who is Gotrek Gurnisson?
In case you’re not already familiar with the character, here’s a quick overview of who and what Gotrek is. First and foremost he’s a Slayer – a dwarf who’s committed a sin so awful the only way he can redeem himself is by seeking out a heroic doom battling the biggest, most dangerous monsters he can find (and also shaving most of his hair, dyeing what’s left – his beard and a single tall crest – bright orange). Have a read of this if you’re keen to know more about Slayers in general. Where Gotrek differs from most Slayers, though, is that he never quite manages to die in battle, always surviving regardless of the crazy scale of enemy he faces.
Classic Mark Gibbons artwork depicting Gotrek and Felix
William King – the author who created the character – puts it like this: “He’s dour, determined and not someone you want to get on the wrong side of.” That sounds about right under the circumstances, but he’s also “the universe’s least successful Slayer – I mean how long is it going to take him to find his doom?” That indomitability is undoubtedly a big part of his appeal, as Nathan Long explains: “There is something in all of us, I think, that wants to be as badass and untouchable as Gotrek – that wants to be able to solve all our problems with the swipe of an axe, and keep our emotions at bay through sheer rage.”
That’s a big part of Gotrek’s appeal, the way his rage both draws upon and holds back his emotions, because beneath all the bluster there’s a character who never stops hurting. The awful, painful secret of what drove Gotrek to take the Slayer oath is eventually revealed as the series goes on, but it’s only touched upon lightly – there’s enough detail to understand, but not so much as to over-simplify or dilute the character. He’s both aspects at once, and it’s a huge amount of fun to read about him. According to Darius Hinks, it’s also “a vicarious thrill being in his head. Gotrek is pretty much the opposite of me. He says and does exactly what he likes and doesn’t give a damn what anyone thinks about him!”
Throughout his many adventures Gotrek is almost always accompanied by at least one companion, with the human poet Felix Jaeger by his side for the majority of the stories (at least, those set in the Old World). The focus of this article is Gotrek, but it’s enough at this point to say that Felix generally provides the viewpoint in the stories, showing Gotrek from a relatable perspective and usually somewhat underselling his own contributions. He’s a thoughtful, loyal companion, if prone to a little melancholy, and for a human he’s a strong and capable warrior…although his skills pale in comparison to the Slayer.
As King tells it, “I wasn’t really sure about my ability to portray the inhuman mindset of a dwarf, so Felix came along as the point of view character, the person through whose eyes you see the story. It also helped to have a character present who could be scared, intimidated, and experience the usual spectrum of human emotions. It’s kind of hard to build tension when your hero is fighting monsters if he’s actually looking forward to his heroic death.”
It’s an approach which all of the authors have stuck with, and for good reason. “To change that dynamic would break the series,” says Long. “You couldn’t make Gotrek the point of view character, because to know his thoughts would ruin his mystery.”
Slayer – the final Gotrek & Felix novel, as part of the Warhammer End Times
Felix is the main companion for most of the series (joined by various others over time), right up until the End Times at least, but whichever companions have been included, as Long puts it “they all serve as the way into the stories. They are the relatable characters – the ones who react positively or negatively to Gotrek’s exploits and who are emotionally affected by the situations Gotrek thrusts them into. They are the ones who are put in peril, or have a personal stake in the conflict. They let us know the human cost of the villain’s plan.”
They also provide most of the opportunities for emotion and relatability in these stories. Long continues: “Gotrek is an inherently tragic figure who wants to die but is never allowed to, but that’s not generally the focus of the story, and his taciturn nature means that moments when he reflects on it are few and fleeting. Instead, I drew emotion from the fates of the victims of the villains, and from the characters in his orbit, such as Felix, Snorri, Ulrika, and Max, and their unresolved conflicts and relationships.”
As Guymer puts it, “Gotrek’s is an essentially alien mindset. It’s right that after umpteen books we never get to go inside his head ourselves, and as a result his companions, whoever they may be, are essential as relatable narrators on his actions and a foil for his madder tendencies.”
Why is he so enduringly popular?
King is remarkably humble when asked to explain why these stories and characters appeal to so many readers. “I would guess the characters, the humour and the setting but I don’t really have any idea. I wrote them the way I did because they amused me and I really loved the Old World.” Considering how many stories Gotrek has been involved in, clearly King got something right!
I would suggest there are a few reasons, not least the contribution of Felix, as it’s safe to say that the relationship between Gotrek and Felix played a large part in the popularity of these stories. David Guymer agrees: “They are the classic odd couple, grudging friends and yet completely dissimilar in every sense. At the same time there’s nothing tropey about them, nothing you’ll find anywhere outside of the Warhammer World. As a pair, they bring a perfect blend of pathos and humour.”
Having pointed out that we all really want to be Gotrek, Long continues: “At the same time, there is something in all of us that knows we’re actually Felix – fallible, uncertain, human in both the best and worst ways. That means the series is at all times both aspirational and relatable, as we charge into the scrum with Gotrek, reveling in the power fantasy of slaughtering hordes of daemons without breaking a sweat, and at the same time hang back with Felix, trying to figure out how we’re going to get through the next five minutes alive and with our skin intact.”
One of several shorter Gotrek stories in the Age of Sigmar setting
Especially now that Gotrek has entered the Mortal Realms with a few stories set in the Age of Sigmar, it’s also clear that these stories aren’t just about great characters but they also provide a way for authors to explore the Old World. As Hinks points out, “the Warhammer settings are loads of fun but they can (especially Age of Sigmar) be so out there it’s hard to latch onto them. Gotrek and his various companions are a way to show these wars and locations from the ground-level. I suppose Gotrek himself is almost a kind of demi-god by now but he’s still interacting with ‘normal’ people who have to try and carve out a life in the Mortal Realms, so he gets us away from the grand, mythical scale of some of the other characters.”
So these stories feature great characters and offer the opportunity to explore and understand the Warhammer settings – but the other reason they’ve been so successful is, I think, the variety within the series. On the one hand Gotrek doesn’t change very much (more on this in part two) and the stories do tend to follow a fairly straightforward formula, but on the other hand there’s been a real mix of authorial voices with five different writers contributing novels (the four I’ve spoken to plus Josh Reynolds, who wrote Road of Skulls and The Serpent Queen) and loads more chipping in with shorter stories.
I’m concentrating in this article on just these four authors, as they have all written what are colloquially known as ‘Nounslayer’ stories. See the next section for what that actually means, but whether you concentrate on just these stories or check out the series in its entirety, there’s scope for a range of different voices and approaches to writing about the same character(s). That can only be a good thing, right?!
Nounslayer – the history of a Slayer
So you might be wondering why this article is called Nounslayer, and what that name means. It comes from the naming convention which applies across most of the Gotrek novels (and two of the audio dramas), in which the titles are all variations on the original Trollslayer. There are a few exceptions – City of the Damned, Road of Skulls and The Serpent Queen, for example – but most stories tend to follow the same pattern: Trollslayer, Skavenslayer, Orcslayer, Kinslayer, Ghoulslayer, and so on.
The original (1999) Trollslayer cover art by John Gravato
Presumably this pattern came into being quite naturally after Trollslayer was followed by Skavenslayer, as the first few stories – including Geheimnisnacht and The Mutant Master – clearly weren’t going in that direction. While it’s easy to look back now and see the theme, and comment on how popular these stories have been, at the time there appears to have been no overriding goal beyond telling good stories. Let’s take a look at how Gotrek and his first few stories came to be, followed by the subsequent stages of his varied history – we’ll cover the first two authors’ contributions here, before looking at the later volumes in the series in part two.
The King years
According to King, Gotrek’s conception was all down to playing the first edition of Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay. “I noticed that Slayers were pretty much the favourite character type among my players so when I came to writing about the Old World, they were my first choice. Mostly the stories wrote themselves. One thing led to another, one situation suggested another, stuff happened. I had no master plan for any of it.”
That’s perhaps reflected in the fact that the first two Nounslayer books – Trollslayer and Skavenslayer – are actually collections of linked short stories rather than true novels. The component short stories were collected from a variety of sources, as King recalls.
“The first three stories were published by GW Books (BL’s far less successful precursor) sometime around 1990 [Geheimnisnacht was included in Ignorant Armies in 1989, in fact]. Some of the stories eventually published in Trollslayer had been published by GW Books; some had been written for a book for GW Books which never saw print. The rest of the stories came from Inferno!. The only bits that were new in Trollslayer were the little linking pieces of text from Felix’s memoires which were put there to join the stories into some semblance of a coherent narrative.”
King mentions Inferno!, which was Black Library’s debut publication, a bi-monthly magazine which would go on to introduce us to all manner of future classic Warhammer characters. King’s short story The Mutant Master was the opening story in the first issue of that magazine, and the first of several Gotrek stories to be featured over the years. You can check out my quick review of The Mutant Master right here.
The first issue of Inferno!, featuring cover art by Kev Walker
Book two, Skavenslayer, was another collection of short stories. “The first story Skaven’s Claw, the one about the sewer watch, came from the aforementioned unpublished early 90s pre-BL book. It also appeared in White Dwarf if I recall correctly. The rest were to basically illustrate the various skaven clans, which suggested a collection of short stories and novellas all linked together by a sort of meta-narrative.”
These first two books are really all about establishing the characters – not just Gotrek and Felix, either. “By the time the Inferno! stories came around, the characters were a bit more developed because there had been a fair amount of stuff written by then although some of it had not published. That said, I think they just became more like themselves. Or maybe Gotrek did. Felix was in the process of shifting from callow student to hard-bitten adventurer – even by that point Gotrek was more or less fixed as a character while Felix was still developing as a person.”
No history of Gotrek would be complete, however, without mentioning his adversaries – with the longest-serving and most-loved unquestionably being Grey Seer Thanquol, who first appeared in Skavenslayer. I asked King what Thanquol brings to these stories:
“You mean aside from his unparalleled genius, awesome power and gigantic charisma? (Sorry, I was channeling the Grey Seer there for a moment.) Humour is the simple answer. He’s also a fitting long-term antagonist for the pair. Gotrek and Felix are not exactly typical fantasy heroes, and Thanquol is not a typical fantasy villain.”
Ralph Horsley’s cover art for Grey Seer by CL Werner – Thanquol’s first spin-off novel
Long agrees, when asked about who his favourite villain is from the series: “How can it be anybody other than Thanquol? I didn’t get to do much with him, but he is so much fun to read and write. The perfect comic villain.” Guymer perhaps puts it best though, when asked the same question: “You forgot to say ‘other than Thanquol’.”
It might have taken Gotrek ten years to get his debut novel, after his early appearance in Ignorant Armies, but once Trollslayer, Skavenslayer and Daemonslayer (all three published in 1999) launched, he quickly caught the imagination of countless Warhammer fans and the rest is history. King went on to write four more novels – Dragonslayer, Beastslayer, Vampireslayer and Giantslayer – to bring his tally up to seven, taking Gotrek and Felix all across the Old World.
To the Chaos Wastes and back to the Empire, to Kislev, Sylvania and even the mist-shrouded Albion, Gotrek’s been there, done that, and killed every enemy he could find. I asked King if he had a favourite adventure from amongst all of these stories: “Daemonslayer. Kharag Dum. This was the first real novel I wrote about the pair. It was actually written before most of Skavenslayer. I’ve always loved the Chaos Wastes although I did not create them.”
Gotrek also met a whole raft of other companions over the course of those seven books, some of whom only stuck around for a short time while others became firm favourites. When asked about his personal favourite, King picks out the tragic figure of Snorri, another Slayer and one of Gotrek’s oldest friends. “He always made me laugh. He grew out of a throwaway line in one of my early drafts – a hungover Gotrek mentions that the last time his head felt this bad was when he’d lost a head-butting contest to Snorri Nosebiter on a technicality. There was the name and the character all summed up in a sentence. I mean who gets into a headbutting contest with Gotrek?”
The Long years
After 2003’s Giantslayer, there was a three year gap before Nathan Long picked up the baton and brought Gotrek and Felix back in Orcslayer, the first of his five novels in the series (he also wrote the audio Slayer of the Storm God).
“At the time Marc Gascoigne [BL’s head honcho back then] asked me if I wanted to write Orcslayer, I had only one series under my belt – the Blackhearts – and Gotrek and Felix were the top of the fantasy line. I was flabbergasted. It was an opportunity to explore and expand the relationship between Gotrek and Felix, and then through them, explore the world of the Empire and beyond. Those guys went everywhere, which meant I got to too.”
Orcslayer did something new that the series hadn’t seen before – it moved the timeline on by twenty years. “That was a decision dictated to me by my editors, because they wanted the books I was writing to take place at the same time as the Storm of Chaos campaign that Games Workshop was selling that year. I didn’t mind that much, because it allowed there to be a clean break between Bill King’s books and mine, and it allowed me to make Gotrek and Felix slightly older, wearier characters.”
Orcslayer, with cover art by Geoff Taylor
That advancement of the timeline did more than just age the characters though – it fundamentally changed their dynamic. “I think it made Gotrek even more bitter,” says Long, “as he expected to be dead long ago, and he’s come to believe that he’s cursed never to achieve his doom. For Felix, coming back to the Empire after 20 years sparks a reassessment of his life. While he was off traipsing the world with Gotrek, he was wrapped up in the adventure and didn’t think about it much, but once he’s back where he grew up, he starts to think about what he’s done with his life, and if he wants to keep doing it, which is a thread I kept weaving through the story.”
After Orcslayer came Manslayer, Elfslayer, Shamanslayer and Zombieslayer, once again sending Gotrek and Felix out across the Old World and interacting with friends and enemies new and old. I asked Long to pick out some favourite moments: “I think, as a pure story, I like Shamanslayer best” – in which Gotrek and Felix brave the Drakwald in search of the Order of the Fiery Heart, linking this back to events in Trollslayer. “I felt like I was able to create some compelling characters and situations in that book, and get a lot of emotion out of them. As for setting, I think the Black Ark in Elfslayer was my favorite. It was a lot of work figuring it all out. I drew maps and everything! But making it feel like a believable, workable city, and then setting Gotrek and Felix loose in it to wreck it was a lot of fun.”
And in terms of favourite characters? “It’s probably no surprise that it’s Ulrika [who first appears in King’s Daemonslayer], since I wrote a trilogy about her. I’ve always loved tough women characters, and I thought she made a great foil for Felix. That made it a lot of fun for me to bring her back in Manslayer and torment him with her again.” If you’d like to know more about Nathan’s Ulrika stories, have a read of this Rapid Fire interview in which Nathan discusses the series off the back of its reprint in the Warhammer Chronicles range.
After the Long years came several novels from David Guymer, culminating in Gotrek finally finding his doom…but not really, as he eventually made it into the Mortal Realms. Click here for the second part of this article, to read about the Guymer novels, Darius Hinks’ introduction to the series, the authors’ thoughts on the challenges of writing about Gotrek, and a quick look at the future of this most enduring character.
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Many thanks to our four authors – William King, Nathan Long, David Guymer and Darius Hinks – for taking the time to contribute to this article! Make sure you check out part two as well, for loads more about this brilliant character!
If you’d like to check out some of the many Gotrek stories, here are a few links to where to start:
Click here to buy Gotrek & Felix: The First Omnibus, featuring William King’s first three novels.
Click here to buy Kinslayer by David Guymer, or here for the audiobook edition.
Click here to buy Realmslayer by David Guymer.
Click here to buy Ghoulslayer by Darius Hinks, or here for the audiobook edition.
Are you a big fan of Gotrek and Felix? Is this the first you’re hearing about the series? If you have any questions or comments, I’d love to hear them – please do get in touch either in the comments section below or by finding me over on Twitter!
For the Gotrek completist, he also makes a guest appearance in one of the Kim Newman Genevieve novels, I think Silver Nails. Characters popping up in each other’s stories like that happened a lot in the early, pre-BL Warhammer fantasy stories.
I think it’s testament to king’s ability that there were 2 spinoff trilogies.
There’s also a great gotrek short story in the fantastic lost and the damned chaos book
For sure – King’s stories laid the blueprints for all of Gotrek’s tales to follow, not to mention the spinoffs, as you say! Absolute classics 🙂
There is no Gotrek without Felix. Don’t get me wrong, I love Brian Blessed, in fact he has always been the person I thought who should play the voice of Gotrek if ever there was a series. I love the Gotrek and Felix Novels, they are my go-to when I’m depressed, or just need a break from all the non-fiction I have to read. But the new stories are lacking. I’m not blaming the writers for this issue; I’m blaming the world. The characters are so hyper focused now they lack depth, and without Felix there is no bridge from our world to the Old World. Felix was the connective tissue we needed and the lens in which we could digest the fantasy. To be honest, as much as I love Gotrek and Old World Dwarf Culture (I literally own thousands of dwarf miniatures) Felix was the real hero of the story. The best way I can explain the issues with the AOS world is to relate it to a Michael Bay film, it is full of beautiful imagery, great action, and unique creatures, but it lacks substance. Even the world itself lacks true definition, unlike the Old World which was more tangible and relatable. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a purist, as much as I think William King is the man, I really like how each of the authors over the years have added their own flair to the G&F stores, but there is no amount of flair that can truly revive the Gotrek story given the new constraints. I’m sorry to say, but the only satisfying way to present Gotrek and Felix is to return to the old world.
Well you are of course entitled to your opinion…but I don’t agree at all. I’m a pretty vocal fan of the Age of Sigmar setting, and in fact I would say Gotrek offers a uniquely interesting viewpoint on the Mortal Realms. I hope most people who read this interview will keep an open mind and appreciate the AoS-set stories for the great tales that I personally think they are.
I’m joining late to the party and therefore I really wonder why was there an change in the authors at all? I was completely confused when I noticed a new name on the title after giant slayer.
I don’t know the specific reason why Bill King stopped writing the Gotrek and Felix stories (and seemed to stop writing for BL entirely), but I assume once he did the editors at BL just decided it was worth asking another author to pick up the characters and the series.