Imperium Maledictum came on the scene three years ago and has sense had numerous supplements and adventures published for it. But now we have my favorite type of supplement: the bestiary. Cubicle 7 has some great bestiaries in their resume, including the Imperial Zoo for WFRP and the Soulbound Bestiary. Mecharian Adversary Guide continues this trend with a book that’s not just about monster stat-blocks, but one that brings new depth to the game.

The first thing we all look at in a bestiary is what kinds of enemies are included. For any 40K RPG, there is a huge wealth of options. The main archetypes of enemies included in this book are: Imperial Opposition, Daemons & Heretics (including Chaos Marines), Xenos Incursions (including Aeldari, Drukhari, Tyranids, Squats, Necrons, Orks, and T’au), and Miscellaneous Threats (ambulls!). First, it’s nice to see the game truly expanding beyond the boundaries of a Hive City. While that’s where you’re really going to have your bread and butter of intrigue and roleplay, not every campaign/player/GM is satisfied with fighting gangers and mutants all day. Now if there are some shadowy Aeldari in the works, they have official rules!

Not every unit from the miniatures game is represented- sad there’s no Striking Scorpions- but these new stat-blocks certainly make it easier to homebrew the few things that are missing.

One thing I really like about this book is the inclusion of many, many plot hooks and suggestions for reasons to include these disparate alien and daemon enemies in your game.

This said, [the T’au] are not naive, and recognise
the Imperium as the greatest threat to their fledgling
Empire, for its xenocidal ideology makes its subjects
impossible to fully trust. Even Gue’vesa, humans
who have defected to the T’au Empire seeking a
better life, are watched for signs of returning
to their violent faith.

Just this little snippet from the lore of the T’au gives ideas for games/campaigns. I love the idea of playing as a group of Gue’vesa and working against the Imperium in the name of the Greater Good. Guess I need to get writing that now…

I just counted at least 60 plot hooks! There are at least two for each type of enemy included. Here’s one of my favorites featuring Orks:

Hooks like this are great and open up additional uses for this book. Just reading this I want to start here, have PCs delve into the Ork mining and uncover a waking Necron tomb. Sounds awesome.

More Than Just Stat-Blocks

Other new additions with this book are Champion enemies, additional guidelines for building encounters (always appreciated by GMs), encounter complications, and a few new Patrons for the Party. Champion is a new Role for NPCs, bringing us bigger and more powerful enemies than Leaders. Champions are described as:

Champions are iconic, campaign-defining characters.
Uniquely legendary individuals, incredible warriors, or
baneful monsters who go beyond what an average human
could achieve at their peak, unaugmented potential. Their
Skill advances often go towards raising key abilities into
the highest percentile, making them unmatched except
in the face of opposing Champions.

Champions have stats and rules making them campaign-ending threats where the PCs have to use more than just brawn to bring down. In my gestating Gue’vesa campaign, actual Space Marines would be a terrifying enemy to face.

Four different Patrons are detailed focusing on Prefectus Liene Castel, an administrative official working directly for Sector Lord Aulus
Sejanus. Along with Castel, other Patron options are: Interrogator Vincento Arz, Seneschal Zadora Tirime, and Biologis Luminar Gant. Just with these four, GMs have a ton of options and different ways to run games. To continue my example of a Gue’vesa campaign, I plan on using the rules for a Water Caste Diplomat as the basis of the Patron for that game.

The final page of the book is novel and insanely helpful. A full page Appendix of the rest of the stat-blocks released so far for Imperium Maledictum. This is so handy and just nice to be included. If I need to know where to find the rules for a Drukhari Mandrake, the Appendix tells me they’re in the Inquisition GM Guide.

Overall, this book makes me want to dive back into Imperium Maledictum with tons of new ideas to build off of in here. My only real complaints is the usual lack of artwork for every entry- though with 40K that’s not as big of a deal with the amount of images out there you can find. Still, I firmly believe a bestiary needs an image of every entry. The only other negative is that this could be so much longer. 157 pages is already great for a bestiary, but I hope this is just the first of a few like this.

I’ll give this one 4/5 severed Gretchin heads.

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