Customer Reviews

The Konrad Saga (Warhammer Novels)

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

This omnibus is a collection of three Black Library novels (Konrad, Shadowbreed and Warblade) which follows the life of the eponymous protagonist. Our hero starts the story as a teenage servent of an innkeeper in a small village in the Empire. He has no family and no real memory of his past. He befriends the daughter of a local noble after he saves her life and she gives him a bow and arrows marked with a strange heraldric symbol. Konrad senses that the symbol is part of his destiny and for the remainder of the book tries to figure out why.

In the meantime, all sorts of bad stuff happens to Konrad- his village is destroyed by beastmen, his girlfriend disappears in the attack, he almost gets himself killed by more beastmen and later some goblins, he falls in with some Khorne worshipping marauders, gets stuck in evil Chaos armor, gets forcibly removed from said armor, crosses swords with some skaven, battles Slaaneshi cultists, fights more skaven again and saves the Empire in the process.

The problem is that in between all of the battling, the characters in the book just aren't very well developed. Konrad has this mysterious past that never really gets explained (I guess you need to save stuff for the next books in the series) and he has so many run-ins with different bad guys who are inter-related that even he thinks he's being manipulated by somebody for some reason. Because of this, you the reader feel like you are being led through the story on a rail. When you finally find out who is doing the manipulating and why, it turns out to be really anticlimatic and it isn't really resolved. After 600 odd pages you still don't find out much about Konrad's past either.

Some of Konrad's partners-in-crime, such as the warrior Wolf, the mage Litzenreich and a few dwarves are so underdeveloped that you never really understand why they continue to support our hero. Konrad's childhood sweetheart is so thinly developed in the front-end of the book that you wonder why he spends much of the final third of the book determined to find out what happened to her. Then when they do cross paths again, things are resolved so quickly and without emotion that it makes you scratch your head.

To sum up, Konrad is 600+ pages of combat stories with an enigmatic character who is on a quest that he doesn't understand and who hangs out with people that you never really get to know. By the time the third book in the collection draws to a close, Konrad is on his own, with most of his questions still unanswered and you the reader couldn't care less.

I know that the reviewers here gave this omnibus a poor rating, but I, on the other hand, enjoyed this book immensely. I am not going to say too much here! In any case, novels based around a series of games like Warhammer and Warhammer 40,000 are supposed to support the promotion of the hobby. The current Black Library novels that most people read and like are typically Gaunt's Ghosts and the Gotrek and Felix adventures; however, these novels get caught up in their own seriousness. The Konrad saga is not in the least comparable to the great fantasy epics -- and it does not have to be! It is fun and does not take itself too seriously. The point is to just support the hobby in the most enjoyable way possible, and not try to teach existential philosophy and add unneccessary literary flourish like some Black Library authors attempt to do. Bye

While browsing for a book to read on my off time at work I mistakenly purchased this book thinking that I was getting a deal in that there were three books already combined into one.
I play Games Workshop minature games and enjoy the rich world that these stories come from but Konrad is a collection to be avoided.
The storyline seems to skip with giant leaps of coincidence that the author offhandedly tries to patch into a weak "guided by sigmar" web of events excuse, Konrad just chops and chops everything in sight and has no control over his life.
The whole book is just annoyingly lacking of substance or description of characters or events.
grab your sword and just hack away and oh wow we saved to world on accident.
I have seen better stories from High school students