BL: Dynasty of Nightmares (spoilers)

[Sception]

I finally got around to reading the black library book, dynasty of nightmares. Definitely mixed quality.

Basic premise: a massive beast herd is moving towards a city in Ghur, forcing an alliance between the Sigmarites and the Avengori. But a sigmarite bard, eager for social advancement and repulsed by the vampires, takes advantage of the city's division to undermine that alliance.

Strengths

• the depiction of the sigmarite city, held aloft above the surging land and feral predators of ghur on giant columns, while the poor and disenfranchised are forced to live in a lightless undercity hanging beneath, was both impressively mythic in scope and compellingly relatable.
• The book does a decent job characterizing the avengori, showing what they're about and how they think, portraying Lauka Vai as a badass, etc. The bpok spends less time in the avengori's home city, but the bits we see are neat.
• The main viewpoint characters - a Vengorian Lord, a Sigmarite noblewoman, and the human bard, are all pretty solid. Up there with characters like Tamra ven Drak from Undying King, though none of them really get to do as much as she does. Still, they all have interesting and paralleled family dynamics so there's that at least.
• The vengorian lord and the noblewoman make out, if that's a selling point for you. I'd assume so, if you're interested in an avengori book to begin with.

Weaknesses:

• No twist. Early on, I thought the alliance was going to last long enough to defeat the beasts, only for the bard to start a riot, leading to the mortals destroying their own city in a "who's the real monster" twist, but the betrayal comes first, the humans delaying their participation by days.
• Then I thought the avengori would quit the battle when they realized they were betrayed, leaving the sigmarite army to finish off the weakened beasts while the remains of the avengori circled around to take their vengeance on the undefended city, rendering the betrayal meaningless, but the avengorii beat the beasts all by themselves and just waited for the sigmarite army.
• There was a subplot earlier of the avengori turning oppressed citizens of the beneath into vampires, so here I thought the Avengori would wait at the bartlefield only long enough to taunt the sigmarites before flying away, only to reveal that the now supernaturally powered poor and oppressed had, again, destroyed the undefended city. But no, when the sigmarite army finally arrive there's no taunt or reveal or flight.
• The mortals charge the 'weakened' vampires while their stormcast chamber were for a moment caught in the middle, and I thought the sigmarites would kill each other, again in a "the real monster was man all along" deal.
• But no, the sigmarines join the mortals against the vampires, and the avengori, despite being supposedly weakened by their supposedly impossible victory over the supposedly invincible beast horde, just beat them both, letting the survivors go back to defend the city only to show they can beat them there too.
• No stakes: unfortunately the book ends on the worst kind of gw pandering. This is the avengori book, so the avengori just beat everybody everywhere.
• The supposedly unstoppable beast herd, again, is a breathtaking non-entity with no characters and no characterization, just random lists some of some of their gw kits you can buy at your local hobby store. the sigmarite city at least has characters, but they didn't matter in the end either.
• The avengori were more than a match for every other faction in the book put together, so retroactively there was never any danger, which sucks a lot of the wind out of it.
• No affect on the wider narrative, not even retroactively. Undying king told the story of how nagash was awakened at the dawn of the age of sigmar. Before the events of that book, he was an ill wind blowing through shyish, afterword he was an active will plotting the recapture of his realm and hunting the soul thieves draining his resources. Dominion of bones tells the story of Neverata reclaiming the greater part of what was once her dominion. Before the events of this book most of nefertaria is held by chaos and afterwords it is not. Dominion of bones tells the story of the avengori wiping out a beast herd and sigmarite city that, afaik, no body had ever heard of before, and now nobody will ever hear of again. Might as well never have happened.

...

So yeah, some decent faction characterization for a couple factions at least. It's worth reading if you're interested in depictions of the Avengori or the Cities of Sigmar, though sincere condolances for any beastmen fan who picked this one up after hearing they were in it.

But the book undercuts its own stakes, and you don't even really get any cunning from the vampires. They don't need any cunning since they're just that much stronger than everybody else... at least here in their own book. You just know that, however invincible as they are here, they'll be equally cartoon villain impotent the moment they accidentally flap their way into somebody else's book.

Definitely no Undying King - where victory feels particularly hard won and costs the protagonist everything. Or Dominion of Bones - where victory is never in doubt but seeing Neferata's plan come together is quite spectacular. Notably, in both of those books the chaos hordes have actual characters and characterization, including internal tensions and just, you know, anything going on at all to make them feel like a credible threat.

 

[Count CocoFang]

That's too bad. I just picked this up recently because I was in the mood for a vampire novel. Going in with adjusted expectations will probably help me enjoy it more, though. Thanks for the review.

 

[Sception]

Lauka didn't even have a plan or anything. She was a badass in the sense of beating up a bunch of other dudes, but her 'plan' for sticking it to the mortal city that had insulted her was literally just to get them to accept a vampire diplomat in their city purely to annoy them - no extended strategy, no real meaning, just nothing there. The alliance falling apart was a surprise to her, albeit not one that meant anything, and even that she would have shrugged at had the humans not physically attacked her. The whole class warfare / underclass oppression angle is brought up and then in the end it doesn't go anywhere and didn't actually matter at all.

It's frustrating, because the premise and set up were actually really good. The city was set up well, it's cool mythic fantasy premise, the class stuff, the arrogant belief that they could literally rise above the brutality of Ghur, the Avengori as a literal and metaphorical opposite embracing the monstrosity of ghur and leaving in caverns beneath the surface. The set up of the beastmen was lacking, but everything else really felt like it was going somewhere, and then it just kind of bungles the landing.

Especially the subplot of avengori turning members of the absolute bottom of the underclass - the people even the underclass look down on, those without even the false desperate hope of social advancement, the used up and abandoned. That subplot probably had the very most potential out of anything in the book, and also most clearly differentiated Avengori from other bloodlines who are usually depicted as infiltrating decadent noble classes. Avengori starting from the bottom up instead, forcing forcing a society to confront its sins by giving its lost and forgotten the power to tear down their oppressors - going to those that the rest of society refuses to even acknowledge as human and saying 'they already won't let you be human, you might as well join us and be monsters'.

The seeds of an amazing book are there, but they're stamped to pieces in an ending that just degenerates into a bunch of arbitrary battle scenes without any real tension or meaning.