Title: Living to die
Author: Vengeful Soldier
Rating: M
Genre: Adventure/Sci-Fi
Status: Complete
Fandom: Warhammer 40k
Summary: On Krieg you are born with sins already weighing you down and the only way to redeem yourself is death in the Emperors service. A young Krieg nobleman joins the Korps, not to atone, but for revenge.
Link: https://www.fanfiction.net/s/8467432/1/Living-to-die

Here's another Warhammer 40k story that caught my eye. It follows Erich Von Shreider of Krieg as he joins the Death Korps following the death of his father at the hands of the treacherous Eldar.

I found this story to be very enjoyable. As you read it, you can feel the grand aspirations the write had, and while I'm not sure they quite managed them (the story suffers from very obviously being the first entry in a series, setting up a number of plot points in the opening that are never really addressed), it still stands far above normal fan-fiction fare.

The beginning of the story really sets thing up, and I was really excited to follow Erich as he investigated just what his mother/father were up to, and what the Eldar had to do with it, but then it drops into a bit of a slog as Erich goes through training for the Korps. I'm not really one for military wank, and this story does tend to veer into that territory on occasion.

It really hits its stride when the shit hits the fan on Erich's transport ship while it is in the warp. The narrative does a very good job of communicating just how screwed up the Warp really is, and it becomes a very engrossing read.

Technical writing is top-notch, and the various characters feel distinct and with sufficient variation that they feel like they really can come from planets that are light-years apart.

There's a sequel which suddenly returned to life again in February after years of silence, so maybe some of the many hooks and hints laid out in this story actually have a chance of being seen through to fulfilment.

 

The problem (arguably) with W40k is that it has such a variety of levels in which to set a story; from the lowliest of civilian and the gruntiest of guardsmen performing tasks only locally useful and arguably pointless in the grand scheme, all the way to the mightiest Space Marine Chapter Masters performing 5D chess with xeno empires in a galaxy-wide Stellaris impression.

For me personally, I was never that interested in the nitty gritty part of W40k. I've no specific interest in seeing what a guardsman that won't affect anything beyond his immediate surroundings does for 200k words- I tried to do it before and couldn't stay engaged. Worst still, while I find Krieg interesting conceptually, it's not to the degree where I necessarily care about their day to day.

All this to say that I likely wouldn't read this, though in a moment of desperate boredom I might since Steelbadger rec'd it. But the main point is that few people read Warhammer, and even those that do might be more or less interested in whichever of the setting's many, many aspects said story is choosing to focus on.

 

I'm almost the complete opposite - due to the lack of named characters in close proximity to each other, and the sheer scale of the setting, near-any WH40k story is by necessity full of OCs for both characters and settings, so I would much rather read through a story of sheer human guts and courage (the planet broke before the Guard) , than a super-human mulching everything in his path.

I've not really touched the Space Marine books, but love Gaunt's Ghosts, Schaeffer's Second Chancers, and Ciaphas Cain for the human outlook. I'll add this to the pile, and give it a go when I get a chance.