I've often thought that, to an outside observer, the concept of a "tabletop miniatures game novel" must seem like a random collection of words with no business being next to each other. If your parents saw you and a pal playing Infinity or Warhammer 40k, they'd generally understand what was going on: it's a game played with toy soldiers and dice.
The idea that the storyline behind said game fills entire series of books and that people make a living off writing them would, I think, cause more severe discombobulation. It'd be like them hearing that there's a Chutes and Ladders Netflix series, or a run of Monopoly graphic novels (don't get any ideas, Hasbro).
Nevertheless, toy soldier novels are most certainly a thing, whatever your uncool hypothetical parents may claim. Dungeons & Dragons got there first (obviously) with Andre Norton's 1978 paperback Quag Keep, although the trend didn't really get going until Weis and Hickman's Dragonlance series kicked off in 1984.
More recently, Games Workshop has become the unquestioned master of novelizing its toys. Since GW's Black Library publishing arm started printing Warhammer books in 1999, it's released well over a thousand of them, to growing interest and commercial success. The biggest titles are so popular these days that, when the firm publishes a new special edition of one of the Horus Heresy books, the website explodes.
In an age where our attention spans have been eroded by enshittified social media slop, and AI is stealing every word ever written by human hand so that billionaires get richer and grade schoolers can cheat on their homework, it's kind of surprising that paper books about goblins and laser wizards still sell.
From another angle, though, the more immediate question is: if Games Workshop can make bank year after year releasing novel length fiction about Space Marines, why are their competitors not doing the same? That's what former US Army recon specialist Gabriel Miller asked himself about his favorite miniature wargame: Corvus Belli's aggressively cyberpunk flavored skirmisher Infinity.
He fell hard for the game and its lore, but could find only three published novels, and wanted more books to read about its complex, highly political, AI ridden near future setting. As fate would have it, he ended up writing one.
"I kind of fell into writing for Infinity during the pandemic," Gabriel tells Wargamer. "At the time, I was in between jobs and not really sure what direction I was going to go." Like in all the good stories, his inciting incident came almost entirely by chance. "I was at Adepticon in Chicago, and I happened to sit down next to another fellow nerd and said, Man, I wish they'd write more books. And he said, well, write one!
"It turned out that fellow nerd was Brandon Rospond, the editor for Winged Hussar Publishing, who does all the publishing for the Infinity novels. He asked me to put my money where my mouth was, essentially."
The result is Miller's debut novel Death Song, published in late 2025. Like many of the best Warhammer 40k books, it's military adjacent, and some of the main POV characters are soldiers, but it's not a plain old war story. Instead, it's a multi threaded thriller that's more interested in secret missions and mysterious conspiracies than pitched battles.
While I confess I'm barely halfway through reading it, it's already introduced me to the messy conflict and political intrigues between two of Infinity's playable factions (the Japanese Secessionist Army, and the pan-Asian StateEmpire of Yu Jing), and woven in influences from other game factions, including the neo-Muslim power bloc, Haqqislam.
Miller says he was particularly drawn to writing about Infinity's unusual setting: a near(ish) future in which humanity has expanded into space and met aliens, but is still organized around hegemonic powers that developed from present day cultures.
"For me, it was liberating," he tells me. "There is so much that you can draw from that they've written already, the bits of lore that are out there." Miller positively buzzes with enthusiasm about Infinity's weirdly twisted, futuristic human factions, and pays particular tribute to Gutier Lusquiños, the main writer at Corvus Belli behind their invention.
"Let's say I'm working on the character Takeshi," he offers as an example, referring to Death Song's main protagonist, a legendary Japanese swordsman. "Okay, so he follows Bushido Code. Well, I can look back at historical references to that and inform how that might be in the future.
"You know, they're not exactly Shogun or Edo Period Samurai, by any means. But there are mirrors, there are parallels to the way that that society has evolved." Infinity's version of Japan, he says, maintains a falsified façade of nationalist tradition (including reviving the Imperial government), but it's truly run by the 'Kugai', a clique of "elite industry tycoons… your Bezos, your Gates, your people who practically rule the world". Say what you want about it, but it makes an excellent vehicle for cool cyberpunk vibes.
Miller also revels in the smaller scale and tighter focus of storytelling this setting engenders. Death Song's regular human heroes usually act alone or in small groups - mirroring the Infinity tabletop game, where battles often feature only a handful of individual fighters on each side, rather than the dozens-strong armies you see in 40k matches.
"Instead of this transhuman Super Soldier that's 10 feet tall, we have normal people," he tells me, adding that those people's missions can feel more tangible to the reader, because their scale and stakes aren't always absurdly out of proportion.
"They're clandestine," he explains. "I'm trying to get one up on my opponent. I'm trying to get one up on this other country, this other superpower, so that I can manipulate and control them."
"Not every problem is the end of the world. Not every problem causes, you know, 500 worlds to go away."
"Infinity," he says, "is about small teams in these make or break moments where everything could break out to a war, and everyone's trying to prevent it, but still accomplish all their goals. It's a different promise from what Warhammer promises to be."
Focusing on small, sneaky squads doing small, sneaky jobs also taps into inspiration from Miller's time in active service in the US military, something that's had rather a complex influence on his relationship with wargaming.
"I was an infantryman, on the front lines," he tells me. "I participated in the invasion of Iraq, and of the five-ish years I was in, in total, I spent more time in the sand than in the states."
"I wasn't Special Forces or anything crazy like that, but within my unit I was particularly tasked with reconnaissance and surveillance operations, and spent a lot of time sneaking around and looking down the scope of a weapon." After his five years of service, Miller tells me the experience informs his hobby, and his "approach to fiction and media in general."
"I do not enjoy Battlefield or Call of Duty or any of those properties, I'm not a Bolt Action fan, not Flames of War or World of Tanks or any of those," he says. "My combat needs an edge of the fantastical for me to enjoy it."
His first wargame, prior to joining the army, was Battletech ("the old click-based ones that WizKids did in the early 2000s"). After leaving the military, he came back to tabletop wargaming and, inevitably, found Warhammer 40k first. "The shop I discovered it in was very historical focused," he says. "I knew the people there, I loved them, they were great - but I just could not bring myself to engage in the games they were playing."
It was after his Space Wolves phase ("everybody goes through a Space Wolves phase," he tells me) that Miller finally alighted on Infinity, and discovered the body of lore that catapulted him into a writing career. Among the signs that Miller was indeed a keen Infinity player first, and an author second, is the bewildering fact that he's written every single character and fight scene to be mechanically accurate to the tabletop game.
"I built the team [on the Infinity app]," he tells me. "What does the team have? Which weapon profiles do they have? That team is actually available, I can send it to you if you're interested."
"Every character they fight, every unit they fight, every anything that pops up is accurate to the tabletop game," Miller tells me proudly. As a certified Warhammer fanboy used to Book Space Marines being apocalyptically powerful and Game Space Marines being just kind of OK, this level of designed parity between written fiction and gameplay is pretty astonishing.
I'm not certain it makes books better (and I can't cast overall judgement on this one until I've finished it). But, at the very least, it's bound to be satisfying for Infinity mega fans to read the book and think 'yeah, that's how that would play out'.
Towards the end of our chat, I ask Miller about his advice for would-be writers of novels in their favorite tabletop wargame universes. He's clear-minded enough about his own good fortune to know that most budding writers aren't likely to get their start by accidentally meeting a willing publisher at a game convention.
Happily, he has more workable advice for readers who'd love to see their name on the cover of a wargaming novel. "The best advice in the world is just to start writing," he says. "It doesn't matter what it is. Doesn't matter what you write about. It doesn't matter if you write about the same thing every day.
"I understand the privileged position that I'm in with being able to approach creativity from a full time perspective - if you have a job, if you have family, things that occupy your time, give yourself 10, 15 minutes [each day] to just write."
Committing to tiny snippets of daily writing is the best mental exercise to prepare for longer stories, he says - especially from handy 'microfiction' prompts, which have you write a super short story based on a one-sentence setup. "Make it a part of your routine to just write, let the creative juices flow."
Ordinarily, getting a book published means completing the final draft of your full novel (called a manuscript), taking it to a publisher, and getting them to agree to buy it from you. From Miller's experience working with Corvus Belli and Winged Hussar, wargame novels can be a little different, with publishers more open to contracting you based on a detailed pitch including character profiles and sample scenes, even if the book isn't done yet.
But that doesn't mean it's easy, and a key ingredient is humility and willingness to adapt. "Smaller companies are willing to work with new authors," he explains, "but if you come in swinging, they may not be willing to work with you… that relationship matters with small companies and with wargaming".
"If you, as the average Wargamer reader are reaching out for advice, we're going to start the habit of writing every day, and we're going to start developing the seed of our story and the characters, and start writing about them," says Miller.
"Make that writing habit focused on what it is you're trying to develop, and grow the seed of that story, then use that seed as your writing samples and your outlines and things that you submit."
Gabriel Miller's now working on a new novel about the Infinity Next Wave subfaction, and writing oodles of lore articles for Corvus Belli's blog - but his authoring ambitions extend much further. "I still have that goal of writing a Black Library novel eventually," he admits. "I'd love to write for Weird and the game Malifaux; I'd love to write for Warcrow, Corvus Belli's new fantasy setting."
"It's just a matter of having enough time, and along the way, the connections and meeting people," he says. "So another great piece of advice I could give aspiring authors is: don't be afraid to walk up and shake someone's hand and introduce yourself."
"Reach out to Wargamer.com and say hey, you want to do an interview?" Fine advice, indeed.
If you're bursting with ideas for stories about your favorite tabletop games, you could do far worse than coming into the free Wargamer Discord community and chatting to us about them! At the very least, we're a friendly, fairly expert bunch, and our criticism is always constructive. And if you're very lucky, you might run into Gabriel on there, and get to pick his brains for more expert titbits. Maybe you can trade stories about your Space Wolf phases.