Minireview: The Inquisitor's Handbook (Dark Heresy)
The Inquisitor’s Handbook claims to be “The Ultimate Player’s Guide” (for the Dark Heresy game). Well, I don’t know about that, but it’s pretty nice and seems useful. Like most books titled as “player’s guides”, it’s more a collection of character creation and advancement options, equipment, and suchlike crunch to decorate your PC with. Oh, there is a section at the end which actually tries to describe day-to-day life in the Dark Heresy world and gives some overview of what’s what and who’s who… but the bulk of the book is “crunch” for tweaking player characters and their gear.
The book introduces one completely new career option, the Adepta Sororitas “Sisters of Battle”, open only to female characters (obviously). In addtion, the existing careers are expanded a bit with various optional advancement paths, giving some extra variablity to the as such quite fixed career progressions. Some specialist subgroups are also introduced which your PC might be a member of, these seem to work a bit like “prestige classes” in D&D 3e do – they have various sorts of prerequisites, and confer some extra benefits. Nothing to complain of in all of this; the quite static character progression was one of the complaints leveled at the core rulebook.
A big section of the book is devoted to gear. It’s nicely organized, being first divided by origin world type (hive world, feral world, etc), and then subdivided by gear type within each section. This makes it a lot nicer for figuring out character gear based on their locale and/or origins than one humongous equipment list would be. The downside is, of course, that in order to scan through, say, all the armor options, you have to do some back-and-forth skipping through the book. Not a problem in my mind, but something to be aware of.
As noted, the book ends with a section that’s more of an actual “player’s guide”, giving some PC-centric overview of how things work in the game world, and some tips on how Acolytes would usually approach problems. There is some especially nice stuff here about using contacts and alter-egos to help with investigations.
While it’s somewhat of a grab bag of character options and game world tips, it’s a good one. Were I to run a game of Dark Heresy, I’d use this book to flesh out character creation – no question of that. There is nothing here that really complicates the game, and having extra options is usually a good thing.
Wed, 25 Feb 2009 14:30 Posted in Books, Games
Tags black library, dark heresy, fantasy flight games, warhammer 40k
