'In a fantasy realm shattered by the zombie apocalypse, a bold Knight must enlist unlikely allies while discovering the source of undead corruption, in this darkly humorous adventure from the bestselling game range, Zombicide: Black Plague.
'When Knight Alaric von Mertz loses his family to a ravenous zombie horde, he swears revenge on the necromancer responsible. But a quest for vengeance is no easy matter in a world overrun by the walking dead. Joined by a sharp-tongued rogue, a witch hunter with secret knowledge, a novice wizard, and a dwarf demolition master, Alaric’s journey leads him from magical fire moats to the zombie-ridden catacombs of the witch hunters to uncover a spell book of insurmountable power. As zombies claw and bite, Alaric fears he will never avenge his family. For in this age of the undead, betrayal and magic lurk around every corner, spelling either doom or salvation for them all.'
Zombie stories aren't given the fantasy treatment enough. Yes, we have things like the undead in the occasional stories based off things like Dungeons and Dragons and Warhammer, but thanks to the prevalence of zombie viruses the stories of the undead have moved from the realm of the mystical into one more of science. And that's a big shame. Well, Zombicide is joining other illustrious fantasy stories by adding zombies into tales of swords and sorcery.
Age of the Undead takes readers to a kingdom already in the clutches of a plague of undeath that has been sweeping the lands. In the books prologue we see a practitioner of the dark arts watching on as events unfold, seeing the spread of the plague, the king and his armies marching out to face the monsters rising from the grave, and their ultimate defeat. Rather than leading us through the outbreak of this zombie menace we skip over a lot of the early days of the plague, catching up with things when the armies have fallen, the defences have failed, and only a handful of survivors are all that's left in a nation now ruled by the dead.
We meet Alaric von Mertz, a young knight who has travelled from the failed battle against the undead to his family castle in the small town of Mertz. By the time he has arrived the town has already fallen, the streets silent, the houses empty, and no sign of any survivors. Upon investigating the castle he grew up in he does manage to find a lone survivor, the thief Gaiseric, who was locked up in the castle dungeon when the undead swept through Mertz. Whilst Alaric is at first unsure whether or not to trust this rogue, when the two of them have to work together to overcome the undead a bond of trust begins to form between them.
Unfortunately for Alaric, Gasieric seems to be the only survivor that he's going to find, and he soon discovers that his family did not survive the zombies. Worse still, he learns that they're being controlled by a necromancer; a local wizard named Gogol, whom Alaric had convinced his father to save from execution. Feeling in part responsible for what has happened, and desperately wanting revenge, Alaric and Gaiseric decide to travel to Singerva, a walled city close to Mertz where they believe that they might be able to find safe haven, as well as help to return to Mertz to kill Gogol.
Along the way the two of them find more survivors, a witch hunter named Helchen, and the wizard Hulmul. Despite having two members in their party who should hate each other, due to witch hunters often killing wizards they suspect could have anything to do with necromancy, the four of them head into the ruined Singerva hoping to find whatever help they can. Unfortunately for them, they will have to fight their way through hordes of monstrous undead before they can find any safe haven.
One of the things that I really liked about Age of the Undead is that despite being in an amazing fantasy world filled with other races, amazing creatures, and literal magic, it never felt too big or too fantastical. This isn't Game of Thrones by any means, it's not gritty fantasy that feels more like a historical, because there are so many high fantasy elements here, but it did feel like this was the kind of story that would be going on in the background whilst other heroes went out and saved the world. This isn't a quest to stop this zombie plague, or to kill the leader of the undead army, nothing here is going to save the world; it was was simply a group of survivors trying to stay alive as long as possible. And I loved that.
Werner is no stranger to fantasy world, having written books set within the Warhammer universe, and you can really see that experience coming through here. He knows how to make a world that feels lived in and real (even if it's currently in ruin), and is able to make the action jump off the page thanks to precise, descriptive language. There were times where it felt like I was creeping through the ruined streets of Singerva alongside out heroes, trying to find the next safe-haven as they fought their way from one desperate confrontation to the next. Werner was able to make it all feel real in a way that some fantasy stories lack.
A big part of this immersion comes from how tense the book is. It might be a fantasy story but it's also a horror, and Werner seems to excel at the horror elements. Because the characters of the book felt like skilled combatants, but never over-powered heroes, you were always a little worried for them, and any fight that they got into felt like it came with risk. Whether it's trying to make their way through tight, winding corridors, escaping from huge hulking monstrosities, or getting away from undead crows that could swarm from any direction, the action scenes always kept me on the edge of my seat.
Having not yet played Zombicide I was unfamiliar with what kind of creatures could appear in the book, other than having a vague idea from other novels in the range such as Last Resort or Planet Havoc. Werner seemed to stick to some of the more common types of zombies from the games, such as the regular zombies, faster runner zombies, and large brutes that cause more damage and are harder to take down. However, Werner was also able to throw in some other undead that I was not expecting, and managed to keep surprising me throughout the book whenever a new creature was introduced.
The real highlight, however, has to be the characters. The group of heroes of Age of the Undead aren't the kind of people that would go out saving the world, and some of them aren't even the kind of folks that you'd really want to be around if you had a choice. But, they proved to be an amazing cast of characters who I quickly came to care for and found that I wanted to read more from them. Alaric is the most stereotypical of the characters, a lordly knight who always tries to do the right thing. This was a good character to pick to lead the group, and to introduce readers to first, because he's the kind of archetype that you expect to find in this type of story. He's a stable, predictable character who feels like something of a comfort to have around.
Gaiseric, on the other hand, is the kind of character you wouldn't really trust to have around you. He's a thief, but seems to be a decent man. He's a great foil for Alaric, but also helps to temper the knight at times too. He's not a coward, but knows that sometimes it's better to run and live rather than make the big heroic sacrifice. He's also incredibly handy to have around, able to sneak his way in anywhere and to get past dangerous traps; something that proves to be surprisingly useful in this particular story. Helchen is the character I initially liked the least. She's a witch hunter, which means that its her job to find wizards who might be involved in the dark arts, and to stop them. She's close to what real world witch hunters were, and her organisation has a very Inquisition feel to it. She's hard, cold, and kind of untrustworthy to begin with. However, getting to see those qualities thaw over time, especially as she forms a friendship with a wizard, makes for some delightful characterisation.
Speaking of wizards, Hulmul is probably one of the characters that most people would want to spend the most time with. He's a kind, and decent sort of man, who's willing to help others and put himself at risk even when he's out of his depth. He knows that people like him are met with mistrust and disdain, and seems to know how to get around that by showing folks that he's really just a very kind man. It makes him a rather delightful breath of fresh air at times. The fact that he also has a small dragon as a familiar is also a big selling point for him. There are some other characters that join the team along the way, who are some very delightful characters, but I won't say too much about them so as not to spoil some of surprises of the book. One thing that I will say, however, is that with this being a book about trying to survive against the undead, not every character makes it out alive. So be careful who you get attached to along the way.
I had a lot of fun with Age of the Undead, and found myself feeling a bit disappointed once it came to a close. I wanted to spend more time with these characters, to see what happens to them next and if they can keep surviving. Hopefully this won't be the end for them, and we can find out what adventures await the survivors in the future. But if this is the only volume we get with these folks it was a hell of a fun ride.
I got the chance to ask author C.L. Werner some questions about what it was like writing Age of the Undead, and what we can hope to see from him in the future.
How did you end up writing Age of the Undead, was this a project that you pursued, or were you approached to write it?
Age of the Undead is a project that was brought to me by Aconyte when the decision was made to release novels set in CMON's Zombicide worlds. Based upon my previous work with Warhammer Fantasy, and my penchant for delving into Gothic horror, it was felt that I'd be a sound choice to plot and produce a novel for Zombicide: Black Plague.
Were you a fan of Zombicide before writing the book, and if not did you have to emerse yourself in the game universe much before writing Age of the Undead?
I first encountered Zombicide at Adepticon in Illinois one year. However, it wasn't until the release of a fantasy version of the game several years later that my interest went beyond the merely casual and became quite a bit more. I missed out on the Kickstarter for Zombicide: Black Plague, but managed to secure a set second-hand. There followed a lengthy hunt for all the artist guest boxes with additional survivors and some expensive arrangements to get my hands on a few of the more obscure exclusives. By the time the sequel game, Zombicide: Green Horde came up, I'd learned my lesson and was ready for the Kickstarter. So, yes, I was quite inundated with Zombicide before writing Age of the Undead. At this point, I think I'm only missing the exclusive Willow survivor and the Dice Tower necromancer Erik Summoner from my trove of material for the game. I even have the crossover components from other CMON boardgames like B. Sieged and Massive Darkness.
The Zombicide games are pretty new, and don’t have a huge amount of lore to draw upon. How much of Age of the Undead was constrained to things already established, and how much freedom did you have to create new things?
There are several aspects of the setting that were already clearly defined, such as the different kinds of zombies and how they act (and what you need to do to destroy them). So in the sense of that subject, I already had a framework to build off. The world itself, however, needed some fleshing out as only a few things had been defined and even those were of a hazy nature. For instance, there's a king and the kingdom shares a frontier with a wild region inhabited by orcs, but the exact nature of what that kingdom is like and the fine details of mankind's hostile history with the orcs required some back and forth to create precisely what would be agreeable to CMON's vision of the game.
I had quite a bit of freedom though, and was able to refine the concept of witch hunters in Zombicide, create several gods that are worshipped by the inhabitants of the kingdom, explore a bit of how that society functions (even if only by showing what happens to it as an undead cataclysm lays waste to its provinces). In the end, it was a very different feeling from writing Warhammer where I had decades of source material written by hundreds of different designers to go through in an effort to maintain coherency (which sometimes became impossible where contradictions couldn't be resolved).
You introduce a whole new group of characters for the book that don’t appear in the game, how did you go about choosing what type of characters would become the heroes of the book, and were there any that were favourites of yours?
From the start, I wanted to avoid using the survivors from the core set of Zombicide: Black Plague such as Ann and Baldric. Not because they're bad characters (far from it) but because of the narrative restriction using them would impose. It is a reason the cast in a Warhammer novel is largely not individuals represented on the tabletop as a miniature – when you use such characters, the reader knows they will enjoy an amount of plot armour and so it becomes difficult to provoke genuine concern for the welfare of such characters. By employing new characters like Alaric and Helchen, I was able to steer the story where I wanted without worrying about how I was going to keep readers from thinking 'well, they'll be alright because they're in the game'.
I did have several archetypes, as it were, in mind when choosing the sort of characters I wanted to use. Mostly these were the sorts of characters I most felt I'd like to see in the game as survivors. As a result I proposed a dwarf 'demolitionist', an orc renegade, a witch hunter, and a displaced samurai among the cast. The samurai didn't fit (which might be for the best as he might have ended up as a clone of my Shintaro Oba character I've used in many short stories over the years) but I was able to develop the rest into, what I hope, are interesting heroes.
As far as favourites go, it is a little hard to choose. I can say I was surprised by how much Gaiseric grew on me, and he seemed to keep getting more and more scenes from his perspective as a result. Hulmul and his reptilian familiar Malicious were also a lot of fun to write and the wizard provided a nice counter-point to Helchen's witch hunter training.
Your book features a few different types of zombies and infected beyond the regular shambling zombie, did you find it difficult to make zombies feel new and interesting, or was it easy to do new things with the monsters?
I think with any type of monster, the best way to do new things with it is to show the emotional impact its presence makes on the people who encounter it. We've all grown up with these legends and folklore, all seen zombies and werewolves lurching their way through movies, but too often we let that familiarity dull our appreciation of how horrible such things would be if we were to meet up with them ourselves. Because reading is a more intimate experience between audience and creator than other forms of entertainment, the writer can drive directly at the reader's innermost mind and try to rekindle the buried horror that, perhaps, over-exposure has numbed. At least that's what I've tried to do.
Zombicide has a LOT of different zombies, and that's one of the things that makes the game so unpredictable (especially if some lunatic has decided to put every card in the deck to see what new zombies will show up). Pretty much all of the undead that appear in the novel are representations of those that show up in the game and its expansions. It was quite a bit of fun to figure out how to represent these monsters in the novel while also making sure they felt like the adversaries you meet in the game. Indeed, I kept finding excuses to introduce as many types of zombies as I could over the course of the novel. I'll admit, there's a bit of a cheat in one spot, but otherwise I resisted the temptation to create new monsters and instead tried my utmost to make those develop by CMON and Guillotine Games really shine. At least if anything steeped in black magic as the undead are can really be said to shine. Maybe 'un-shine' is an appropriate term.
You’ve written books in the Warhammer Fantasy universe in addition to Age of the Undead, is fantasy a genre that particularly appeals to you?
Fantasy is a genre that has been very dear to me from the first time I watched The Hobbit, which would have been the original broadcast back in 1977. It wasn't too long after that and I'd read the book, and soon after followed on with The Lord of the Rings. When I'd go to the library, it was always books of folklore that I'd check out, tomes crammed full of fairy-tales of giants and sorcerers, witches and dragons. Surprisingly, I didn't really get a proper introduction to Dungeons & Dragons or Warhammer until I was in high school (this was the era of the Satanic Panic, after all), but once I did get exposed to the hobby, it redoubled my passion and spurred all the connected hobbies like painting miniatures, collecting books, and creative writing (it is a small step from plotting RPG adventures to plotting stories).
The thing that really spurred me to writing fantasy fiction was a much belated discover of Robert E. Howard and his Conan stories. While I knew of the character through things like the movie Conan the Barbarian and magazines like Savage Sword of Conan, it wasn't until I'd moved to Arizona after high school that I would read the real stories these works were based on. There's a deceptive ease about Howard's style that drew me in and made me think 'I can do that'. I say deceptive, because while Howard might not be so verbose as, say, JRR Tolkien or CL Moore, he shows an uncanny ability to know exactly the right words to use in that stingy economy of his. He might describe an entire city in just three sentences, but he knows precisely what needs to be done to make that city crackle in full-form through your imagination.
The appeal of fantasy? Well, aside from monsters (which I've always had an inordinate fondness for), I think it is the sheer freedom of such settings. These are places where, thanks to magic, anything truly can happen at any time. That has a very great allure to anyone who seeks escape from the perniciousness of the world around them. To slip, even for a few hours, into the great halls of Minas Tirith or to skulk about in a Stygian tomb seeking fabulous treasure, is a relief that I think goes unappreciated by those who lack the imagination to experience that solace.
The book seems to end hinting that these characters could be facing future adventures. Would this be a series that you’d want to return to in the future to tell more stories with?
I'd most certainly love to return to these characters. There's quite a bit more in Zombicide that I'd love to explore and, perhaps, if enough readers enjoy Age of the Undead, I'll be allowed the opportunity to take them on another adventure. Probably with even more heinous varieties of zombie featured in the proceedings.
If you had to be protected from zombies by one of the heroes of Age of Undead which one would you want to have the job?
Gogol. Oh, wait, he's not an option is he?
Seriously, I think each of the heroes has their own specific skills that make them shine in particular situations. The brute force of Ratbag is going to be an immense benefit, but so too are Hulmul's spells and Gaiseric's cunning. Overall though, I'd say that Helchen has the best amalgamation of abilities to operate in a solo capacity. She might not have the strength of Alaric or the dead-eye accuracy of Drahoslav, but at the same time she has more knowledge about the nature of the enemy than either of them. Gaiseric might be a bit more slippery, but a witch hunter has a craftiness that is essential to the profession. Hulmul is wise in the ways of magic, but he's not so ready with sword, mace, or crossbow. Helchen's the one who provides the best balance to draw upon, in my opinion.
Actually, scratch all that. Ursola. If things get too bad, she can just blow the whole place up. If I have to lose, I'd prefer that the zombies lose too.
Can you give us any hints for future projects that you’re working on that fans of the book can look forward to?
At the moment I am writing another novel for Aconyte which, I suspect, will be of interest to fans of Age of the Undead. There are two stories with my demon-hunting samurai Shintaro Oba that are slated for upcoming issues of Tales from the Magician's Skull, the fantasy magazine published by Goodman Games. I am currently in negotiations with both the Black Library and Winged Hussar about new novels. There's also a story of Lovecraftian horror I penned for Shadows Over Avalon that may be close to being released by 18th Wall, featuring one of the most unlikely heroes to come from my usually cynical and pragmatic pen – Sir Galahad!
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