Dark Heresy: Blood of Martyrs review

[Brother-Captain Gaius]

For those following 40kRP, you may know that Blood of Martyrs was recently released as a supplement for Dark Heresy. As advertised, it focuses heavily on the Ministorum and how it affects player characters.

Most of the 40kRP releases have been very strong, but unfortunately I don't think this is one of them. FFG missed the mark a bit here.

The alternate advance packages and new starting worlds seem pretty solid, with the possible exception of Monastic Upbringing -- it's literally just Imperial World but with more annoying disadvantages. Confessor in particular seems like a cool alternate advance for clerics, and Shrine World is a nice addition. The Famulous origin also provides a good alternative for those who want to play a noble-type character without some of the weirder baggage that origin normally entails (the vendetta, etc).

Unfortunately, it's a bit more hit and miss for the rest of the book. The confused, misprinted, much-errata'd and often muddied Adepta Sororitas career of the Inquisitor's Handbook has been split up into its component Holy Orders... except not really. Battle Sister gets solid treatment as its own, dedicated career path, but I'm a little on the fence about the specific implementation. I thought IH's version was a decent compromise, in that it was plausible that a very junior Battle Sister assigned to an Inquisitor didn't get all the fancy toys straight off the bat for balance and sanity reasons. BoM's version gives Battle Sisters free power armor and bolters (with continuous free ammo!) immediately at Rank 1, with further options for more free heavy duty weapons as the Sister ranks up. In DH, a bolter is like nuclear armageddon in relation to the game's power level and tone, kept in check mostly by its rarity and exorbitantly-priced ammunition, both of which are irrelevant in the Sister's case. Effectively, a Battle Sister plays much like a lower-power Deathwatch Space Marine in that she requisitions free high power equipment and doesn't really have to worry about ammo, gear, etc.

That leaves us with the non-militant Orders -- Dialogous, Famulous, and Hospitaller. I was excited to dive into them, because at least to me they are much more interesting conceptually than the Battle Sister. Imagine my disappointment when I find that the new rules for each are virtually non-existent. Dialogous and Hospitaller Sisters are... Adepts. Famulous are Clerics. Period. Each is effectively an alternate background package for the core Adept or Cleric career path, which gives slightly different starting gear, access to Pure Faith, and restricts the Adept from taking psychic powers later. That's it.

Cell Directives, the other big thing I was excited about, are likewise underwhelming. There are a grand total of four very short little things you can take as a group, all very Cleric-centric. The only really interesting one is an anti-Psyker one, which you can only take if there is a Psyker in your group. With it, you're allowed to take free attacks against your own group's Psyker if he rolls Perils of the Warp, letting you kill him and prevent the Peril from occurring.

None of the rest of the book really grabbed me. There's plenty of background lore and supporting information which is likely to be of use if you're interested in the Ecclesiarchy, but other than that there wasn't much more. There are tips for running an Ecclesiarchy based game as opposed to Inquisition, but it didn't strike me as very interesting gameplay.

All in all, a somewhat mediocre offering, an outlier next to FFG's normally solid product line. Useful if you really like Ecclesiarchy stuff in your Dark Heresies, but any existing Sororitas are likely better served by the IH rules and Clerics don't need much help as it is, so it's far from essential to any DH group. In terms of art, there are a few new pictures of Sororitas that help flesh out the relatively lacking Sororitas-themed body of artwork within the 40k franchise, so that is at least somewhat appreciated by this fan of nuns with guns.

[Feil]

I've only looked through it briefly, but my reaction was about the same. A big turn-off for me, which you didn't mention, was the use of repeated art from other books in the Dark Heresy line. Re-using art from other 40k books is understandable, but I expect more from books within a single series. The new art was all very nice, though.

The equipment list looked good to me, at a glance. I was pleased by the addition of a mechanical effect to going to a temple and getting your weapons blessed for battle.

[Broken]

Well, that's unfortunate that the book doesn't seem to be getting much praise. I'll flip through a copy if I see one at a bookstore, but won't order one myself from Amazon or the like. I've been overall impressed with the work FFG has done with their 40k lineup, so hopefully this is a rare dip in their work.

[Serafina]

Actually, i disagree here a lot.

Sure, the book only introduces one new class - and not a well-balanced one in my opinon. The Battle Sisters are too powerful in the beginning due to their equipment, but pay too much for their advances, which makes them weaker later on.

However, even tough the rest are only replacement ranks, they really change quite a lot. The key word here is "Faith Talents". We get 34 new talents with a nearly completely new mechanic and a good variety. The new replacement ranks thrive due to those and are really a lot more different from the standard careers than they might seem at first glance. An Adept/Cleric who invests in Emperors Sign talents will be severely different from one who didn't - a lot of XP will be spent on them, but they will grant pretty unique abilities as well.
Granted, those faith powers are only available to arbitrators, assassins, adepts (via Sororitas only), clerics and scum - but guardsmen will get a sourcebook on their own, and psykers already have a lot of variety.


That's the majority of the book - replacement ranks that grant faith powers. To me, that's okay - if one wants to use that, it grants a lot of new ways to play.

There isn't much else gameplay-wise - a bit of nice equipment, but nothing radically new. However, Clerics can now perform the work of the Emperor and act like clerics - bless things and the like, which is a nice toch (tough i would grant that to any appropriately faithful character). The relics are pretty powerful and can be nice centerpieces of a campaign, but i don't think they will be used all that often - they would pull a lot of focus towards a single character, often not a good thing.


I am somewhat unhappy with the presented background-infomation - it's not that new, most of it can be found elsewhere already. It's nice to have it all in one place, of course. The stuff on the Sororitas is good tough.


Generally, this is a theme book "Faithful of the Emperor". It works well as such, and covers classes that needed some love anyway. If you want to play such a campaign, grab it - if you don't, you won't need it.