First Look: The Gates of Azyr & Assault on the Mandrake Bastion

My copy of The Gates of Azyr arrived. I decided to go for the Limited Edition because, why not?

It's got a dust jacket AND ribbon!

The Limited Edition adds the dust jacket, gold embossed page edge, it's numbered (I'm 124 out of 2000, damn those Brits getting first crack at it!), and it has a small color section in the middle.

Which has the cast of major characters and a few sentence bio for each. The characters are, of course, the ones from the box set, which makes sense given the tie-in status of this book. It's a nice sturdy hardcover at 124 pages and I should hopefully read through it swiftly. The novella is by Chris Wraight.

However, today Black Library announced they're released their first Quick Read for AoS. Think of these as serialized novel (or novella) that showed up in old magazines, but now in eBook form.

This first release is Assault on the Mandrake Bastion and is part 1 of The Black Rift of Klaxus. It's a $5 download and seems to be a fairly swift read. The author or this piece is Josh Reynolds.

I'll probably read through Gates first, as it was the initial release of the two. And because both of these are here before my copy of WD #75 and the box set, these will be my first look at the fiction for AoS besides the bits I've read online. This will be an interesting experiment to see if the fiction holds on it's own, without any knowledge of the backstory written in the game books. A good story should be able to pull that off, using descriptions and such to paint the world without thinking you've already read all the exposition in other products.

A review of each will be forthcoming when I'm done reading!