If we can get a novel together by the time the game comes out, I’ll be able to get it past the people upstairs as part of an imaginary marketing strategy.’ And so I did, and basically just wrote the first Eisenhorn novel, Xenos, I just wrote it in the sheer white fun of just writing it. And I rang him straight back up and said ‘Can we not write a novel about this stuff rather than using it elsewhere because this is great!’ And he said ‘well, yeah, we can but we need to make it look deliberate rather than random. But at the time I looked at it and leafed through it – it was half complete, as I said photocopies and bits and pieces, brilliant spot illustrations and stuff like that. And it showed the detail – the elaborate detail – of imperial life. And he sent to me simply because he thought I might be interested in and inspired by the images in Gaunt. ' I think I was 3 or 4 books into the Gaunt's series and just writing those and the then-head of the Black Library sent me a portfolio of photocopies and rules from the Inquisitor game that was going to be produced.

As he explained in February 2016 to the Backwards Compatible podcast: The series was pitched by Abnett when he was given material from the game in-development as inspiration for his Gaunt's Ghosts series of novels. Over the course of the novels, Eisenhorn loses almost all his friends and allies by not only using the tools of Chaos to fight and defeat the forces of Chaos, but by becoming blind to the dangers of this use - seen in the change of his relationship to and ultimate dependence upon the Daemonhost Cherubael. It is not clear if the novels and stories are written in the same period, after Hereticus, or are, as may be more likely, written intermittently during and after the events of the series.ĭespite his protestations, arguably the primary story arc of the series is Eisenhorn's fall from maintaining a strictly Puritan outlook to that of a Radical and rogue element of the Inquisition. The series is predominantly written in the first person, resulting in an unreliable narrator: at certain points in his career, Eisenhorn sets down accounts of his life. Inspired by these and the content of the game, Abnett wrote the initial trilogy, with Xenos, the first novel, released at the same time as the game. No other characters from the game appear, but the types of characters in the game - Arbiters, Rogue Traders, Deathwatch Space Marines, savants, Adeptus Mechanicus magi and so on, are featured as key characters in the series.

It originally debuted in 2001 alongside the release of Games Workshop's 54 millimetre model specialty tabletop miniatures wargame, Inquisitor.Įisenhorn was a named character in the game with his own model, as was his antagonist and ally, the Daemonhost Cherubael. Eisenhorn is a series of novels and short stories by Dan Abnett, following the adventures of Inquisitor Gregor Eisenhorn.

Eisenhorn trilogy