Time of Legends: The Legend of Sigmar

About the Time of Legends: The Legend of Sigmar series

Graham McNeill's Legend of Sigmar trilogy is an origin story for the Warhammer Fantasy setting itself, dramatizing the founding of the Empire by the human tribal chieftain Sigmar Heldenhammer roughly two and a half thousand years before the setting's present day. Heldenhammer follows Sigmar uniting the fractious human tribes of the Empire's founding territories against orc invasion and forging the alliance with the dwarfs that becomes one of Warhammer Fantasy's defining relationships; Empire (which won the 2010 David Gemmell Legend Award) follows Sigmar consolidating and governing the nation he's built, against internal rebellion and external threat alike; God King closes the trilogy with Sigmar's final campaigns and his eventual, mysterious departure from the world he founded, ascending to become the Empire's patron god.

Because it's origin myth rather than a lone-hero adventure, the trilogy reads more like an early-medieval epic than typical Black Library military fantasy -- tribal politics, oath-taking, and nation-building carry as much weight as the battles, and McNeill takes real care establishing why the Empire's institutions (the Colleges of Magic, the alliance with the dwarfs, the reverence for Sigmar himself) exist the way they do in every other Warhammer Fantasy novel set centuries later.