Posted on November 11, 2024
Imperium Maledictum Session 0
Warhammer 40,000: Imperium Maledictum is the new Warhammer 40,000 roleplaying game from Cubicle7. Unlike Cubicle7’s other Warhammer 40,000 RPG, Wrath & Glory, Imperium Maledictum (affiliate links) focuses on investigations by ordinary mortal human agents of a powerful patron. In this sense, the game is more of a spiritual successor to the popular Dark Heresy game published during the Fantasy Flight Games custodianship of the Warhammer RPG license than Wrath & Glory, which is more of a “40K in general” sort of game. Unlike Dark Heresy, which casts the player characters as agents of the Inquisition, Imperium Maledictum doesn’t focus just on one faction within the Imperium: the patron of the player characters could be drawn from a wide range of potential factions/organisations. Just as the Inquisitor was an important NPC in Dark Heresy, the patron is an important NPC in Imperium Maledictum. Generating this patron is not, however, left to the referee alone: creation of the patron is explicitly intended to be a group activity in which all the players are involved, conducted during session 0.
This session 0 patron creation is probably the most modern design element in Imperium Maledictum, which is otherwise a d100-based system, simplified somewhat from Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 4th Edition, with a very clear line of evolution from the original Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay from 1987. The players are encouraged to collectively decide, or roll, details of the patron. These details will define the campaign premise to an even greater extent than character creation, since the patron’s background and motivations will shape the sorts of missions the player characters will undertake, define the resources they have access to, and bind them together as a party. The players can also choose to roll up new boons they get from their patron – in exchange for which the GM secretly generates liabilities. The boons are benefits the players access via their patron, and the liabilities are problems their patron brings down on their unsuspecting heads! After the patron is created, traditional character creation begins, during which each player character also generates a relationship with their patron, and with two other player characters. This web of relationships combined with the boons and liabilities, along with downtime events and endeavors between sessions, collectively give the game lots of mechanics for emergent storytelling, with plenty of hooks for both players and GMs.
In the campaign we are playing at the moment, we played out session 0 just as the book intends. We rolled up our patron, a Voidship Captain from the Imperial Fleet. This gives us some influence with members of the Imperial Fleet faction. Our patron is sombre, and motivated primarily by enhancing his reputation and standing. The boons we get from him include access to a drop squad of voidsmen at arms once per mission, access to a munitorum depot for our ammunition needs, and an on-ship training facility. Oh, and we also get to ride on his spaceship. In exchange for this, there are a number of liabilities which we don’t know about yet – perhaps the captain has enemies we don’t know about, or perhaps his true motivations are not what they appear to be.
As a group we generally preferred to roll everything about our patron, but it’s perfectly allowable to choose options which are “most preferred” as well – so if we had really wanted to work for an Inquisitor, Dark Heresy-style, we could have done, for example. I suspect many groups will do just that as the first major supplement (not counting adventure and NPC profile PDFs) published for the game is the Inquisition Player’s Guide, which I’ve not had the chance to look at yet.
We’re a few sessions into the campaign and so far we’ve enjoyed ourselves a great deal. The patron generation mechanic and resulting support for a wide range of different patron types means that Imperium Maledictum takes a different direction from the Fantasy Flight Games Warhammer 40,000 RPGs, which used the same core system heavily customised towards particular patron and group concepts, and resulted in the separate game lines Rogue Trader, Dark Heresy (Inquisition), Only War (Imperial Guard), Deathwatch (Deathwatch Space Marines), and Black Crusade. Imperium Maledictum supports investigation-based campaigns in the service of similar patrons to the first three mentioned Fantasy Flight Games titles and more besides, with a familiar feeling (but simpler) d100-based system. Not that this article is intended as a review, but it’s a worthy successor to Dark Heresy which should appeal to fans of the Black Library novels which focus on ordinary humans in the Grim Darkness of the Far Future.
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