Imperium Maledictum

Imperium Maledictum
RPG published by Cubicle 7
Rule System	d%
No. of Players	2-7
Session Time	1-4+ hours
Authors	Emmet Byrne, Cody Faulk, Elaine Lithgow, TS Luikart, Dominic McDowall, Pádraig Murphy
First Publication	2023

Imperium Maledictum is the newest Warhammer 40,000 Roleplaying game created by Cubicle 7.

While it was only just announced during Gencon 2022, people have plenty of hope for it. It also has had some question how it's older half-sibling Wrath and Glory has been faring, considering its rather stark content drip when compared to both WFRP and Age of Sigmar Roleplay's more robust lists of content.

Just like its forbears, it went back to the classic d% system started by Dark Heresy (and they do mention it...but only that it was started by Black Industries and skipping over the stewardship that Fantasy Flight Games held for the near-decade since that first book) and their own work on Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 4th Edition. For the most part this game does channel the same feel of DH, an investigation-centric game with the players acting as lackeys for some higher power in the Imperium, though not always the Inquisition.

With the reveal of the character sheet, we can see that the similarities to the older FFG line is a lot clearer, though the skills list have been condensed to a degree and the inclusion of Specialties (Maybe for something like advanced skills). Influence is no longer some currency stat either, instead being converted into a friendliness chart between the various factions you'll run into.

Setting

Rather than making up their own sector as was done with the previous 40k-based RP games, this one's taking place in the Macharian Sector - that's right, a canon setting.

Patrons

One of the big pulls for the game, the party can be employed to the service of one of any number of potential patrons, which range from old faves like the Inquisition and Adeptus Mechanicus, with promises for patrons from various political factions in the sector. This can potentially make for more variety in games, especially if you can easily build your own patrons, adding in things like underhive gang bosses, Rogue Traders, and maybe even heretical cults...

While it sounds like the custom regiment creation from Only War, it seems that there's some unique stats for each patron.

• Boons & Liabilities: The actual mechanical perks and penalties the patron provides.
• Influence: Essentially represents how all the factions interact with each other and with your Patron. You also have your own influence, which is determined by your faction as well as what friends/foes you make in-game.

Factions

Your Patron's faction serves to also give you a choice between two different patrons to work with. Alongside a default perk they give, they also have a set of extra boons that they can provide and a set of liabilities to offset them.

• Adeptus Administratum: Because what better bosses are there than the de-facto rulers of the Imperium short of the big bleu cheese himself? Expect to do a lot of investigating and lore-crunching.
  • Departmento Munitorum Ordinate: Your patron's part of the organization who are responsible for allocating resources for the Imperial Guard. Their basic boon lets you find things more easily and get more ammo with some boons that help you require more things.
  • Tithe Prefectus: Of course, all loyal planets must pay the Emperor His due, and your patron is part of the process of getting that due. Their base perk lets you call for a group of investigators to occupy a place for a while, with other boons giving you more contacts.
• Adeptus Astra Telepathica: The premier force for hunting and controlling psykers.
  • Astropath: Being a powerful psyker, your patron gives you access to your own Astropathic Choir for interplanetary communication. Other boons either make use of their needs as communicators or make use of their abilities as psykers.
  • Sister of Silence: Whether you're weird enough to be able to withstand a cute blank girl or a blooming blank yourself, you are in service to a high-ranking Silent Sister, usually a Knight-Centura. Their base perk gives you a psyker-proof prison with other perks providing more militant assets.
• Adeptus Mechanicus: Were you not expecting to have some red robot-men as bosses? That said, you're not necessarily Skitarii or menial techpriests of some sort.
  • Forge Lord: Your patron is one more focused on production and manufacturing. This gives a base perk to give a piece of scarce equipment, with other boons giving intel and contacts.
  • Magos Biologis: Your patron is obsessed with the purity of the human form and seeks to perfect it. Their base perk gives you easier access to augmetics and weapon mods, with other perks for more medical and augmetics access.
• Adeptus Ministorum: Of course, the Imperial Creed has much sway within the Imperium, with lots of faith-based boons.
  • Arch-Confessor: A crusty old codger with the church. Their basic boon gives you a room that makes Lore (Theology) checks easier, but their perks are a lot more social in nature.
  • Canoness: Three guesses why you went here. As befits a commander of the Bolter Bitches, their basic perk makes you more resistant to corruption while other boons make you more militant, especially since one gives you bolters, some of the most expensive and most powerful guns in the game.
• Astra Militarum: Naturally, the Wall of Guns™ give you the most combat-related boons such as the Martial Training Facility, hirelings with guns, and extra guns.
  • Lord-Commissar: Though they're technically separate from the typical Militarum structure, they're just as influential if not more so. Their basic perk gives you the ability to cow enemies just by using the Commissar's name, with other boons giving more of a morale bent.
  • Senior Officer: You're the agents of some bigwig in the Guard. Their basic boon lets you call in some extra guardsmen for warm bodies, with other perks being more overtly militant.
• Imperial Navy: Being in charge of the Imperial Battlefleets, you have plenty of access to military assets.
  • Port Commander: Your patron rules over a voidport, giving you access to that port as a base of operations as well as limited authority within it. The boons present work more on a social bent and allow you to gather some unlikely allies.
  • Voidship Captain: As someone in charge of their own voidship, you also get to use that ship as a base of operations. Other boons provide something more overtly military.
• Infractionists: The hive gangs are a very powerful lot despite looking less so. While they don't have official authority, no other faction has the sorts of deals they provide.
  • Criminal Mastermind: The traditional strongarming crime boss. Their basic perk gives you a once-per-mission ability to call upon a fall guy to go to jail on your behalf in order to throw off some unwanted attention. Other boons provide more passive assets or ways to earn more intel.
  • Guildmaster: Not necessarily a criminal, but they very much can be. Grants a discount on anything you buy as well as some chumminess with some other factions, while other boons let you forge some more contacts.
• Inquisition: What? Thought that you wouldn't be able to recreate the shit that the old DH did? Both Inquisitors have the same perk, which provides you the ability to flash your Rosette in order to cow people into obedience.
  • Ordo Hereticus Inquisitor: The Witch Hunters. Some of their boons are better suited for hunting down witches and heretics, though sometimes they do require discretion.
  • Ordo Xenos Inquisitor: The Alien Hunters. They're less inclined to be subtle about their methods and might even dabble in xenotech.
• Rogue Trader Dynasty: While you can't play as an actual Rogue Trader's retinue, you can now act as the armsmen of one. Both patrons come with a free Voidship that you can use as a base, though you have limited authority within it.
  • Diplomat: The social sort of Rogue Trader. This leads to getting boon options that work more on providing forms of communication and allies.
  • Trader Militant: A Rogue Trader with more of a military bent. More of their boons focus more on military assets and gear.

Player Choices

• Origin: Your homeworld doesn't really affect as much as it used to. Now all it provides is a +5 to one stat and another +5 in one in a set of three other stats, plus one minor piece of equipment.
  • Available Options: Agri World, Feudal World, Feral World, Forge World, Hive World, Shrine World, Schola Progenium, Void Born

• Faction: Not necessarily the same as your patron's faction. This provides not only additional stat boosts and a bonus point of influence with the faction in question, but also your first skill bumps as well as a relevant talent.
  • Adeptus Administratum: As befits a pencil pusher of the Imperium, you have training in a lot of smarts-based skills as well as the Data Delver talent to make it easier to study things.
  • Adeptus Astra Telepathica: While all Telepathica agents have the same skill focus on either resisting channeling psychic powers, the talents are the most divers from either being a sanctioned psyker, a Blank, or someone who's capable of resisting psychic powers thanks to stubborn faith.
  • Adeptus Mechanicus: Another absolute nerd with plenty of Intelligence based skills. Rather than weapons, you get two augmetics from two different lists.
  • Adeptus Ministorm: Can specialize more in lore, healing or resisting. Starts with the Faithful (Imperial Cult) talent to invoke the church's willpower for advantage.
  • Astra Militarum: The army-man with skills focused on fighting. Comes with the Drilled talent to resist feat alongside others with that talent and has the best choice of weapons.
  • Imperial Navy: Somewhat mobile, somewhat smart with the Void Legs talent to represent their training in low-gravity environments. Absolutely cheesetastic for getting access to Void Suits for an instant 3 AP in all locations. Stack with some robes for a walking tank.
  • Infractionists: Don't come here for Solars, you're getting the least of them here. You are however plenty sneaky with the Well-Prepared talent to grab random shit from hammerspace. You also have a free common weapon and tool, but both are shit on account of having the Ugly (Penalties for interacting people who care about appearances) and Shoddy (Penalties to SLs for hitting with weapons/skill tests on the item) qualities on them.
  • Inquisition: Plenty skilled with knowledge and spotting, with the Ever Vigilant talent even letting them spot hidden foes with ease.
  • Rogue Trader Dynasty: A lot more adept in social skills, with the Dealmaker talent to help with haggling. Comes with a shitton of Solars so you can buy a nice weapon on the outset.

• Role: What differentiates you from other schmucks, complete with more skill bumps (including specializations) as well as all the most relevant gear.
  • Interlocuter: The Face, as the name is an antiquated term for a person in a conversation. Of course, you get the most social skills available.
  • Mystic: The Psyker. Of course, taking Telepathica as a faction makes this way easier if you picked being a psyker there for instant sanctioning and instead get more powers.
  • Penumbra: The Rogue, as it were. Best suited for stealthy things and shooting, including starting with a goddamn sniper rifle.
  • Savant: The nerd. Whether it's medical know-how, academic knowledge or technology, you have the means to work with any of them.
  • Warrior: Your basic fighty dude, complete with all the gear needed to fight either up close or at range.
  • Zealot: Somewhat of a leader, somewhat of a frontline tank and frontline combatant.

Changes from DH

• Character Progression is now universal rather than mixing and matching using Aptitudes or a fixed career table. What you pay for something is the same as what everyone else pays. For example, all talents cost 100 XP for any of them.
  • Skill advances now only bump up your bonus by +5, making the cap a lot lower. To offset that, you can also buy specializations, which cost the same as the skill itself but are focused on a more specific area of expertise, similar to how WFRP 4E did it.
    • This also spares the pain of anyone focusing on lore of needing to spend all that XP for each and every lore when you can just buy some advances in the Lore skill so you get a decent roll and then buy specializations on the Lores you really want to do well.
  • Stat advances boost your stat by 1, but the cost is determined by how high your stat already is. Makes it a lot harder to focus on one particular thing, and that might not always be for the best.

• A lot of skills from DH have been collapsed into other skills or rendered into specializations. You also don't exactly need to buy an advance in a skill to roll it, which saves a lot of mandatory XP expenditures.
  • Fortitude gives you a Toughness-based skill to resist hazards like poison and extreme trauma.
  • Dexterity combines Sleight of Hand with the defusing part of Tech-Use (Now just Tech).
  • Discipline is a new Willpower-based skill to resist fear and psychic powers.
  • Lore now accounts for all Common, Scholastic and Forbidden Lores via specializations. That last one in particular requires a certain talent to learn them though.
  • Presence combines Command, Interrogate and Intimidate into one Willpower-based skill.
  • Psyniscience is now a specialization within Awareness.
  • Rapport combines Charm and Deceive.
  • Reflexes combines Acrobatics and Dodge.

• A lot of bonuses are axed thanks to things like range and RoF being gone, but rather than numerical bonuses to tests, you can score extra DOS (here called SLs)
  • Advantage and Disadvantage are new concepts. Advantage lets you roll a test and flip the result you roll if it's more advantageous to you (e.g. rolling an 81 and flipping it for an 18) while Disadvantage does forces you to flip the result if that roll's worse for you.
  • Critical Hits are revamped due to how weapons now base off DoS. Roll a double below your target number and you Critically succeed. Roll a double above that and you fumble.
    • As a result of this, your hit locations are now determined by the ones digit of whatever you roll, with Torso taking a majority of the digits while the rest of your body only has one digit.

• Combat is now stuck to Zones like Wrath and Glory and Soulbound. As a result, weapon ranges are now stuck to range bands (Immediate for melee and pistols, Short (or within your own zone but not engaged) for pistols, Medium (the next zone over) for most basic guns, Long for bigger guns, and Extreme for heavy weapons and rifles).

• Superiority is a group resource you can gain by killing key enemies or understanding their foes and surroundings, similar in intent to WFRP's Advantage. This can be spent for advantage and interacts with a new enemy stat called Resolve. If your Superiority is higher than their Resolve, the enemies become desperate and can either give up, run away, or become suicidally brave. That said, any of your guys getting critted will cost you Superiority.

• Insanity seems to be axed as a concept, while Corruption persists. That said, if you succumb to your Corruption, you have a chance to suffer either Mutations or Malignancies (which used to be done with Insanity). Your Toughness is your limit to mutations and your Willpower is your limit to malignancies and if you exceed either, you become something...else...

• Fate remains the same as ever, except that you can also burn fate for Superiority and to resist mutations. In addition, everyone starts with the same number of Fate Points short of a talent for an extra point you can only buy at creation.
  • If you have the ability to, you can buy Faithful (Imperial Creed) to gain some more overt miraculous powers using Fate, similar to how Book of Martyrs did Faith powers.

Psychic Powers

• While you still need to make WP checks, you now have Psychic Mastery as a skill to make those checks easier (plus whatever specializations you pick there).
  • Pushing lets you take a Mastery check with advantage, but now you must take 1d10 additional Warp Charge for it. Fumbling makes you auto-trigger Perils.

• Warp Charges is now a pool of psychic energy that builds with each power you cast, with failures building it up faster and a hard threshold of your Willpower bonus unless you have talents to boost that. Of course, a high Warp Charge lets you boost the damage Force weapons give.
  • You can spend an action to roll Mastery in order to purge the excess charges and then make it just trigger random minor spooky phenomena. Let it build up too much and you need to make an emergency Mastery check in order to rein the power in or else spill out the PERILS.

• Alongside the other major disciplines, you can also pick up Minor powers like back in 1E. Even better, You already know Smite as a default power alongside another minor power and a discipline. Taking the Psyker talent again lets you pick other disciplines.
  • While discipline powers cost the same as a talent, minor powers are actually a bit cheaper.

Equipment

• MONEY'S BACK BABY! Gone are the requisition tests, now you get paid a stipend of local currency (here referred to as Solars, two guesses why) each mission.
  • While rarity still exists, this only alters how likely you are to find it and how much it might be worth to get. The craftsmanship of an item is instead defined by certain traits - and some of this can be funny like a Master-Crafted Unreliable piece of flak armor (it's got good armor, but the moment you take a crit, it cracks like it's made of brittle gold.)

• Weapon categories are now shrunk down. Thanks to how weapons and specialization works, there's now only three for melee (Brawling, One-handed, or Two-handed) and more for ranged (Pistols, Long Guns, Ordnance, and Thrown). The weapon types matter less than you think since you don't need to buy weapons training.

• Similar to WFRP 4th Edition, Weapons no longer deal randomized damage. Instead, they deal a static amount of damage + the difference in DoS between your roll to hit and the enemy's roll to dodge (Melee (X) vs Melee (X) for melee, Ranged (X) vs Reflexes (Dodge) for shooting). Note that this does also mean that you'll be comparing DoF if you both fail.

• Ammo is...unusual, to say the least. While single-shot weapons are the same, anything that fires semi-auto (now the Burst trait) and full-auto (now the Rapid-Fire (X) trait) have seemingly miniscule clips...except not really. Using such weapons as single-shot weapons gives them seemingly infinite ammo, but using the Burst or Rapid-Fire guns is what eats up that clip. The former adds +1 DoS to your BS test to shoot, the latter makes it either deal extra damage or gain the Spread quality to hit multiple targets. This makes bolters in particular extremely powerful thanks to this and their high penetration value.
  • Technically, there's an alternate rule that expands clips for those guns to five times their listed size if you want to be tracking every single bolt shell and las-charge you spent.
  • All guns have standardized costs for their own ammo, which doesn't sound too bad, but this isn't quite so for something like a bolter, which costs 5000 Solars and thus a magazine of bolt-shells costs about as much as most guns. This also doesn't account for specialized ammo, which adds a multiplier to the clip's cost.

• Flamers are no longer auto-hitting death cones, though hitting has a chance of making the enemy catch fire. However, you now have the option to aim at the floor and turn a neighboring zone into a pool of raging fire. One of the best tools for this are the firebombs, as they're just dirt cheap molotovs you can lob around for burning funtimes.

• Armor Penetration is a lot less common, though the loss of Toughness as damage reduction and adding DoS to damage kind of offsets that.
  • The Rend trait lets certain weapons (chiefly chain and melta weapons) reduce enemy armor on a hit, making them way easier to hurt.
    • Shields get to act as a counter to Rend, as you can sacrifice that shield to prevent damage. While it makes sense for a shield to block a chainsword and jam it up enough to make the attack ineffective but now the shield has a massive gash on it, the idea that the shield manages to perfectly block a melta shot without suffering harm is less so short of some really specific cases (Dodging last-minute enough that the shield's now melted slag, throwing a shield as a decoy).

• Damage no longer has types, which sadly means that our beloved Critical Hit tables are now trimmed down significantly. This sadly also means that some results might not make sense, like how a flamer can cut a major artery on your leg.
  • Critical hits (that is, from rolling doubles to hit) deal a random result on a 1d10, though the fact that this can't be nullified by something like successfully dodging an hit. This can lead to asinine things like losing fingers or breaking your jaw despite suffering no damage from the initial hit.

• Force Fields are seriously overhauled. Now instead of a d100 test to hit a key range, you now roll a number of d10s to soak up damage with it overloading if the damage taken exceeds the max damage reduction.