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| Cubicle 7 |
Warhammer 40,000 Dark Heresy: Creatures Anathema
Published by Cubicle 7
Bestiaries have always been my favorite kind of RPG supplement. But the best ones don’t just endlessly list stat blocks, instead offering interesting, complex enemies and a meaningful context to employ them in. Bestiaries for licensed settings come with further problems. Plenty just settle for statting out iconic foes. Unoriginality aside, it feels like they're withholding the more identifiable parts of a setting to sell off later.
Dark Heresy: Creatures Anathema is thankfully not that kind of bestiary. The 145-page book offers nightmarish adversaries for the players’ Inquisitorial Acolytes to overcome or succumb to. It finds a nice balance between bringing in recognizable tabletop elements, some old favorites, and some entirely new additions. Everything is rooted in the game’s personal corner of the Dark Millennium, the Calixis Sector.
That's partially accomplished through the short diary entries given to each enemy. Every entry is accompanied with the insights of Inquisitor Felroth Gelt, who’s on the classic track of hardliner to radical. He’s about as compelling as he is original. Which is to say, not at all.
The Gelt passages are clumsy and repetitive, failing to define a descent we only catch glimpses of.
