Dark Heresy Double Bill Review!

[Cynical Cat]

On Friday I picked up my preorders of Purge the Unclean and the Inquisitor's Handbook. I'll be reviewing them both.

Format: Both books are glossy softbacks with nice cover art and black and white interior art. Some of the art is reused, but most of it is new to me.

Inquisitor's Handbook

This is essentially a player's guide type book with new career, career paths, gear, and backgrounds for players. The short version is that it is excellent.

Organization: The book is divided into chapters, starting with new starting backgrounds and starting packages and moving on into the careers and gear section. While there are nice and accessible summary tables, it can be difficult to find the full details on a piece of gear if you've forgotten on what kind of background it comes from. So the organization, while not terrible, is merely mediocre.

Quality of Content: From a games mechanics point of view, its great stuff. Hellguns, a variety of slug throwers and las weapons, survival gear, illicit gambling technology, heavy weapons, armour, knives made from Space Kraken Teeth, zip guns, drugs, force fields, and primitive medicine are all present in the second half of book. The new careers and backgrounds are fairly well balanced, with the cool stuff coming with liabilities. The new career options allow new skills and new directions to characters in a naturally flowing progression. The information also serves as a good template for GMs who want to create similar career paths or stat out new gear.

The career paths are taken instead of old career paths (although the missed advances are available for purchase as elite advances) and consist of things like bounty hunting careers for Assassins and Scum, militant careers for Tech Priests, investigators, psyker templars, and other exotic variants of mainstream careers. They are interesting and capable, but not over powered.

Quality of the Fluff: Everything is fitted in to the Warhammer 40K universe. Gear appears in fluff chapter of its origin, so Imperial Guard issue weapons appear in the Guard chapter and hive world improvised firearms in the hive worlds chapter. Not all of the gear is good, indeed some of it is trash used by the most desperate and cunning dregs of Imperial society. Some of it isn't stuff that an adventurer would particularly want but is useful for story purposes. No item is too minor not to have at least a piece of background information that relates to it directly.

Overall: Really, really good although finding things on the fly can be difficult.

Purge the Unclean

This book contains three large, related adventures and hooks for an extended campaign. Each one contains action, intrigue, and horror with one of the three being the central theme and the other two elements as support. It include stats for, among other things, a truly scary veteran Space Marine, warp beasts, and Dark Eldar Corsairs.

Its hard to say too much about it without giving away spoilers (I may have already said to much). In short the adventures are multiple session, they are good, and they capture the feel of the Warhammer universe. Purge the Unclean recommends giving out a large amount of experience to those that survive, which will mollify some of the players who have been dragged through hell.