Trollslayer

Trollslayer by William King is where Warhammer Fantasy's most famous double act begins. Published as a novel in 1999, it gathers and builds on the episodic tales King had been writing since the late 1980s (the earliest Gotrek & Felix stories predate Black Library itself, appearing in Games Workshop's first fiction anthologies) into the opening volume of a saga that would run for decades. The premise is elegantly doomed: Gotrek Gurnisson, a dwarf Slayer sworn to atone for an unspoken shame by dying gloriously in battle, and Felix Jaeger, a well-born poet who drunkenly pledged to follow the Slayer and immortalise his end, only to discover that Gotrek is infuriatingly hard to kill.

The book's episodic structure, a chain of self-contained adventures rather than one continuous plot, takes the pair through the dark corners of the Empire and beyond: cursed manors on Geheimnisnacht, doomed caravans in the Border Princes, horrors beneath the earth, and the everyday grimness of a world where Chaos gnaws at everything. Framed as extracts from Felix's journals, the stories fix the saga's voice early: dry, weary, human. Felix's perspective is the reader's (a civilised man perpetually appalled by the violence his oath drags him through), while Gotrek remains a magnificent, half-comic, half-tragic enigma at the story's centre.

Trollslayer matters because it effectively invented the template for Warhammer fiction from the ground floor: ground-level protagonists, gallows humour, and a setting where heroism means surviving with your soul intact. Nearly everything Black Library later became owes something to these stories, and the saga they launch (continued in Skavenslayer and beyond, and eventually into the Age of Sigmar era) starts here, with an oath sworn in a tavern that neither party could take back.