The Ghostwolf
I am the Ghostwolf. The hunter in dark places. The eyes which pierce the night. No path remains barred to me. No river blocks my way. I know your scent, your tracks, your trail. No place will harbor you from me. No mercy will stay my hand. I will hunt you, I will find you, I will rend and tear you. I will leave a pile of your bones as a warning. Rest now, if you can. The Ghostwolf is coming.
Gene-sons of the Primarch Leman Russ, the Space Wolves are one of the twenty original Space Marine legions. If you're not familiar, think space vikings and you're pretty much there. Power battle-axes, ice blue armor, wolf cavalry. I'll say that last part again. Wolf. Cavalry. I want to go to there.
Lore for the Space Wolves tends to lean heavily into the viking and wolf themes. You're shocked, I know. Somewhere along the line someone at James Workshop said, "hey, what if werewolves?" Thus begat the Wulven, and he saw that they were good.
But you know me. I can't leave well enough alone. Why stop at a perfectly acceptable army with a perfectly acceptable backstory? No. It simply will not do. I need to invent my own successor chapter. And since that's not enough work, I need to paint it white. That definitely won't come back to haunt me later.
If you're familiar with the extended Wolfiverse, a word I just created, you're probably thinking "hey, that sounds like the Wolfspear." Okay. Well, yes. You got me.
See, here's the thing. I never expected to like the Space Marines. Admech? Absolutely. Sororitas? Yes. Xenos? Sign me up. Space Marines? Well...
Then someone introduced me to the Wolfspear, and it clicked. Solitary nomadic hunters among the stars. Vague Skyrim vibes. Armor that honestly shouldn't look as cool as it does. Okay so what if I do like the Space Marines? Only a little. Only this one little chapter.
So I got the Space Wolves codex supplement.
I'm not sure if this happens to other people, but every time I read a codex I fall in love with the army. It seems to be a foregone conclusion. Step one, buy codex. Step two, love army. So I fell in love with the Space Wolves. Maybe there's some part of me that wants to hang around a winter lodge, feast, and tell grand stories. Either that, or it's the wolf cavalry.
A reasonable person would have looked at the Wolfspear and said something like, "well cool, that's basically what I want, I'll do that." Unfortunately, I am not a reasonable person. I don't remember exactly when or why I decided to branch off, but somewhere along the line I did. I think, though this may be apocryphal, that I didn't like some of the canonical markings on Wolfspear units.
Regardless, I've continued to grow and adapt the Ghostwolf. Though they share some concepts with the Wolfspear, they're not a direct-to-DVD clone. Over the next few weeks I intend to reveal their secrets to you. Their juiciest loremeats.
Starting with why they're called The Ghostwolf. Singular.
Because nobody has ever seen more than one of them and lived to talk about it.
Programming Notes
I recently ran a series of polls to help determine what direction to take this newsletter. To those who responded, thank you! Everyone seems to love the essay. That's good, I love writing the essay. Some people loved the Games Workshop new releases. Almost nobody loved the other new releases.
It took quite a bit of effort each week to find all the new releases, understand them well enough to write about them, then try to write an interesting blurb for each. So it's actually pretty cool that people weren't interested in that, because it means I can just stop.
The weekly cadence of the newsletter is based on trying to ride that weekly hype cycle. That means it's another thing I can just stop.
I'm going to go on a bit of a hiatus. I expect it to last no more than a month. I plan to resume writing the newsletter with a longer cadence. Maybe once or twice a month. Time enough to plan out longer essays on more interesting topics. Thank you kindly for giving me the time to figure out what comes next.