Trollslayer by William King is where Warhammer Fantasy's most famous double act begins. Published as a novel in 1999, it gathers and builds on the episodic tales King had been writing since the late 1980s — the earliest Gotrek & Felix stories predate Black Library itself, appearing in Games Workshop's first fiction anthologies — into the opening volume of a saga that would run for decades. The premise is elegantly doomed: Gotrek Gurnisson, a dwarf Slayer sworn to atone for an unspoken shame by dying gloriously in battle, and Felix Jaeger, a well-born poet who drunkenly pledged to follow the Slayer and immortalise his end, only to discover that Gotrek is infuriatingly hard to kill.
The book's episodic structure — a chain of self-contained adventures rather than one continuous plot — takes the pair through the dark corners of the Empire and beyond: cursed manors on Geheimnisnacht, doomed caravans in the Border Princes, horrors beneath the earth, and the everyday grimness of a world where Chaos gnaws at everything. Framed as extracts from Felix's journals, the stories fix the saga's voice early: dry, weary, human. Felix's perspective is the reader's — a civilised man perpetually appalled by the violence his oath drags him through — while Gotrek remains a magnificent, half-comic, half-tragic enigma at the story's centre.
Trollslayer matters because it effectively invented the template for Warhammer fiction from the ground floor: ground-level protagonists, gallows humour, and a setting where heroism means surviving with your soul intact. Nearly everything Black Library later became owes something to these stories, and the saga they launch — continued in Skavenslayer and beyond, and eventually into the Age of Sigmar era — starts here, with an oath sworn in a tavern that neither party could take back.
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