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Saturday 29 August 2015

Oldhammer Bookclub: Re-Reading Brian Craig's Plague Daemon



For those of you who have not yet heard, we are continuing Brain Craig's Orfeo trilogy as part of the Oldhammer Bookclub. After the success of the first novel, we decided to continue through the sequence and finish Orfeo's tale. 

Now Plague Daemon was originally advertised as Ystareth, so suffered a name change somewhere along the way. The internal illustrations also changed tack, with character portraits replacing scenes from the story inside the book. I only discovered this when I got my hands on a first edition a few years back. My first encounter with the story was the Boxtree Edition in about 1999 - when I found a copy of the book in a library sale. 

Here's the front cover (below) to that edition if you are going to hunt for a copy yourself. 


Beware of the Black Library reprints as they were edited and as an Oldhammerer you may well prefer the tale as Brain Craig originally intended it. Chaos remains the central theme and this story is a little more action packed than Zaragoz was.

I hope you can join us! 


Shall we leave it until the end of September to get hold of the book and read through it?

11 comments:

  1. (Sorry if this appears twice; Google just threw a wobbly.)

    I may be misremembering but I recall an advert in White Dwarf in which the name "Ystareth" was crossed out and replaced with "Plague Daemon", suggesting that they made the name change part of the marketing.

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    1. I can recall something similar to this too. Though I pretty sure it was a black and white advert somewhere that listed the titles of all of the forthcoming books... I am sure we will find out one day!

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  2. Another one that has been festering on the book shelf. I'm in.

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  3. As I recall they published WFRP stats for the principle characters in an issue of White Dwarf

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    1. You are correct there, and I think they did most of the Novel characters at one point or another.

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    2. Characters from Drachenfels were published in White Dwarf #117, Ignorant Armies in #118, Zaragoz in #119, Wolf Riders -- including Gotrek and Felix -- in #120, Konrad in #122, Plague Daemon in #125, Storm Warriors in #137, and Beasts in Velvet in #140, the final WFRP article in the magazine.

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    3. Thank you Kevin for providing those issue numbers. Now just to find the articles!

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  4. This was probably my favourite WFB book and the only one that I still have a copy of. Haven't read it in probably two decades, though I think I'll actually pull it out for a second go-through now you mention it. :)

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  5. Ordered and looking forward to it. The first book was a rollicking ride, so excited to have another slice!

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  6. Any information on how the Black Library edition was edited?

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