Ultramarines

About the Ultramarines series

Officially titled The Chronicles of Uriel Ventris, this is Graham McNeill's flagship Warhammer 40,000 series and his first major Black Library work, following Uriel Ventris, a captain of the Ultramarines Space Marine chapter, across two decades of publication. It opens with Nightbringer, in which Uriel investigates a cult uprising on the world of Pavonis that turns out to be tangled up with a Necron threat far older and stranger than a simple insurrection, and continues through Warriors of Ultramar and Dead Sky, Black Sun, a duology that sees Uriel exiled from his own chapter after breaking one of the Ultramarines' core tenets and forced to earn his way back among savage alien Tyranid swarms and the daemon world of Medrengard itself.

The second trilogy -- The Killing Ground, Courage and Honour, and The Chapter's Due -- follows Uriel's return to grace and a war against the ork WAAAGH! of Warlord Snagrod, with real stakes for the Ultramarines' homeworld. McNeill returned to the character a decade later with The Swords of Calth (2021), which catches up with Uriel after his ascension to the ranks of the Primaris Space Marines, leading a company against the Necrons on a world haunted by an old enemy.

McNeill's background as a Games Workshop game designer shows throughout: battles are tactically legible, chapter politics and Codex Astartes doctrine are treated with real weight, and Uriel's central conflict -- a soldier who keeps bending the rules he's sworn to uphold because bending them is sometimes the only way to actually do right -- gives the series more character throughline than most Black Library tie-in fiction of its era.