INFERNO!

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INFERNO! was a magazine published by Games Workshop's publishing division, The Black Library, from 1997 to 2005, presenting fiction, artwork and comics set in the fictional worlds that had grown up around Games Workshop's fantasy and science fiction games. These initially included Warhammer, Warhammer 40,000 and Necromunda, and later extended to the Mordheim and GorkaMorka settings also.

INFERNO! was launched with a trial "issue zero" as a section in the Games Workshop house magazine White Dwarf, and responses were positive enough that issue 1 of the actual magazine was launched shortly afterwards under the editorship of Games Workshop staffer Andy Jones. The magazine rapidly settled into a standard format of two fantasy and two science fiction stories, with ancillary features such as standalone artwork, comics, and various features such as cutaway diagrams of fictional machines from the stories, maps of "historical" battles from the settings, or mocked-up books, dossiers or correspondence by characters in the settings. With the exception of one early comic series the magazine never serialised its stories - all were self-contained pieces.

The magazine was popular enough with the Games Workshop audience that the Black Library imprint gradually grew up around it, a separate bimonthly comic (Warhammer Monthly, later Warhammer Comic), and then lines of original novels, some featuring characters from INFERNO! such as Gaunt's Ghosts or Zavant Konniger, as well as anthologies collecting INFERNO! stories, and reprints of most of the novels from GW's previous fiction line. During this time the magazine passed to the editorship of Marc Gascoigne, previously the magazine's designer and assistant editor and now BL's publisher and general manager, and later Christian Dunn, now editor for Solaris Books.

Although its publishers did approach established writers such as Dan Abnett and Gordon Rennie to write for early issues, from its inception INFERNO! had a policy of accepting unsolicited submissions and publishing new authors, and many writers now regularly publishing novels for the Black Library (such as C.L. Werner and Ben Counter) had their first professional publications with short stories in INFERNO! During its time the magazine also published stories by noted SF authors such as Barrington Bayley and Brian Stableford (who wrote for the Black Library as Brian Craig).

Paradoxically, although INFERNO! was in great demand among Games Workshop fans as a publishing vehicle for stories, its sales suffered by comparison with the full-sized books with which it shared a publishing stable. Both INFERNO! and Warhammer Comic were wound up at the beginning of 2005. BL now runs twice-yearly short story competitions for new writers instead, through its website's forums.