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Here's the thing about Disciples of the Dark Gods: you can get better material, barring the stats, for Dark Heresy online. Its purpose is to describe a variety of cults for your Dark Heresy characters to fight, but the majority of them are pretty much about as bog-standard as you can get. The art is amazingly pretty, but the content just isn't there. Or, to put it another way, Disciples of the Dark Gods is $50; Principia Infecta, Reason's WH40K website, won't cost you a dime, and it's so jam-packed with interesting material that you can take a single entry and skate for miles with it, as well as being atmospheric as hell. Apparently the guys at Fantasy Flight agreed, as they snapped him up for Creatures Anathema without much hesitation. That's a good idea. Keep doing that. (Also, read Reason's discussion of running Dark Heresy games here.)

So let me tell you about the book itself: There's a ton of cults in here, broken down according to which Ordos handles them. There's approximately five to six cults per Ordos, mostly covering the bog-standard elements of 40K - mutant uprisings, evil trading cabals, sinister aliens, and daemon-worshipping cults.

At the end of each chapter, we get a variety of stats for the various creatures related to that particular cult - and we get a look at the Dark Heresy stats for an Arco-Flagellant, which I'm kind of surprised wasn't in the core book. (Now you can play Meatbot Massacre using the Dark Heresy system. There's a lot of stuff statted up here; while I can't testify for the way that they'll play out in the game, I can say that there's a nice, comfortable range of weird shit to throw at your players. (I liked the Twist Hulks, which are essentially mutant Ogryns. The name is evocative.) Besides just the usual array of odd monsters, there's also a lot of equipment that Acolytes and cultists can use on each other - I like the Maiden of Pain, which traps a psyker and essentially aims their psychic attacks whenever the visor is raised.

And they're perfectly standard - I mean, try to imagine the most generic cult that you can fight, default textures still on 'em, and you'll find it statted up here. Almost all of them are being run by a shadowy cabal of backers whom the Inquisitors must find and destroy. Most of them hew very closely to the standard Chaos cults that we've seen over the years, without any real development done.

For instance: The Ordos Hereticus section details organizations that are pretty much the Imperium turned inside out; renegade technologists led by shadowy masters, a resurrection of the Ecclesiarchy from when it was under Gregor Vandire led by shadowy masters, the Pale Throng consists of a mutant uprising led by shadowy masters, a resurrectionist cult led by - you can guess by now. (The whole pyramid structure of Dark Heresy, where a single mastermind and/or group of masterminds control a much larger organization, starts to break down when you use it over and over and over again.) The Ordos Xenos consists of some interesting alien artifacts, a shadowy cabal of infiltrating aliens, a race of bodiless creatures who possess human beings and who plot sinister conspiracies, an organization that pits alien beasts against each other in gladitorial arenas, Halo Devices - described below - and a mysterious beast that lives in the depths of a hive which has freaked the local hivers out. The Ordos Malleus is pretty much a succession of fairly standard Chaos cults, with the exception of the Pilgrims of Hayte, who think of Chaos as a tool to be exploited rather than worshipped, and the Vile Savants, who essentially turn planets into a funky remix of Night of the Living Dead.

Some of them are ideas that just aren't fleshed out enough. For instance, a Halo Device is a mechanism that, over time, turns you into an immortal, blood-drinking, cannibalistic feed. That's pretty much the entirety of the information that you need to run it, minus the stats. (I'm also really reminded of Guillermo Del Toro's Kronos, which is worth a viewing.) The spooky thing about the Warhammer 40K universe is that in the right place, or if you turn up the GrimDark enough, you can be a blood-drinking, cannibalistic fiend with full public knowledge, and still receive Imperial sanction. I'm not just talking about Inquisitors, who buck the rules; I'm talking about particularly feral Imperial Guardsmen, death cultists, particularly decadent nobles or the more experimental Adeptus Mechancius. You can be somebody who turns normal human beings into lobotomized monsters and that's a normal punishment for heresy in this world. The human race is as much a monster as anything else in 40K. In fact, you could easily make a campaign where the fight is less about fighting obviously corrupting elements of the 40K world, and just make it about preventing the Adeptus Mechanicus from gaining benefit from some monstrous, but practical, act. A little bit like Dogs in the Vineyard, except with headtubes. Lots and lots of headtubes.

Also - and this is an aside - the Pale Throng has the belief that the human race is slowly turning into a psychic race, which is an idea apparently unique to it and it alone. The odd thing - and I'm sure that this was intentional - is that in the first edition of 40K, that was exactly what the Imperium was all about: the Emperor created it with the intention of shepherding the human race into its transition into a new psychic race, like the Eldar. I'm not even sure if this idea is canon any more, but it's interesting to see the canon of yesteryear becoming the heretical notion of today. Perhaps the Squats and Zoats can fill us in, while they're hanging with the Star Child and the Sensei.

Let's take, just for example, the book's take on a Chaos cult of Khorne: The Murder Room. Khorne is pretty much the least subtle of all the Chaos Gods, which is saying something. The Khornate cult here is the Murder Room, which sounds really evocative - until you read through it, and realize that it's basically just a portal into the Warp that creates serial killers. Even when the time comes to describe the Murder Room itself, it's basically described as a portal into the warp that leads you into some vaguely defined Hellraiser II-style deathspace - only one of which actualy allows you to really do anything with it, by stepping into Khorne's murderworld. And even then, you come out twisted and insane, so forget about being able to see what a manifestation of Khorne's architectural skills look like.

Another major problem is the prose. My god, is it purple. It's not purple in a good way, it's purple in the way that people write when they're trying to convince you that something has a particularly awful quality without being able to actually describe what those properties are. Consider:

The stories speak of a terrifying and secret place, a room drenched in the blood of countless victims, a place where a thousand screams linger and the air is heavy with the scent of acrid copper and sharp as a razor's kiss. It is said that every room there has ever been where blood has drenched the walls, every home whose safety was shattered by terror in the night, or defiled by murder from within - all are caught forever, remembered in this one red room, the Murder Room. It is a place built from betrayal and malice, fed by blood and death, furnished by unreasoning slaughter and echoing with the unheeded pleas of the lost. More terrible yet, this Murder Room lives, it thirsts, and it waits.

So keep in mind that if you're in the Murder Room, and you need to sit down, you're going to be sitting down on unreasoning slaughter. Hope you brought a doily to prevent your pants from getting stained, 'cause Khorne probably won't have one.

Also: If you're reminded of the description of the Broodwich from the Aqua Teen Hunger Force episode of the same name, you're not the only one.

Look: understatement carries you much further than overstatement ever will. Some of the most stunning scenes I've ever read have been the ones that were completely underplayed; Cherubael's entrance in Hereticus, for instance, is utterly stunning because it comes out of nowhere and the implications of his presence - and what he does right after that - change the entire scenario.

It also breaks one of the most core rules of writing: if Khorne has a murderworld, show us, don't tell us. Tell us about its aftermath, tell us about the evidence it leaves, tell us the interesting ways that it leaves its victims; if you're short on inspiration, watch late-night TV and take special note of the various cooking preparation implements they sell. Not the knives, that's too easy, the other stuff.

Plus, the cults themselves basically look like three variations on this: Its cultists run around murdering people (duh) and they have a room where they commune with Khorne. Let me summarize it: Serial killers of Khorne. I have now saved you the trouble of reading the Murder Room entry.

You could go in another direction with it. Maybe the cult never murders until it can murder everybody. It creates hundreds of small shrines to Khorne, waits until enough psychic energy has been drawn from the people who see them - and the few who fall to Khornate worship as a result - then pops open a gate between the Warp and the real world, allowing hundreds of Bloodletters to pour through and drag everybody around into the Murder Room. All that you'd find as evidence are hundreds of bloody drag marks, including fingernails embedded at the ends of long claw-marks, or torn-off arms where somebody got a better grip than a Bloodletter liked.

Or what about a room where every murder in the history of the world has occurred? What if you could watch the Emperor strike Horus down? Or use it to solve murders? I mean, yeah, it belongs to Khorne, but surely you can use it for some good, right?) Or the Chaotic influence slowly warps people's bodies until they've speciated into murders and murder victims, with the influence of Khorne warping their bodies appropriately? I'm not going to flatter myself or bullshit you by saying that these are the greatest ideas in the world, but there's at least two dozen people on rpg.net who could invent and develop better ideas than mine. They lie thick upon the ground.

And there's opportunities missed. The book's examples are mostly focused around the most obviously villanous aspects of the setting, but there's still room for some moral ambiguity. There's rules for Eldar weapons - shuriken pistols and rifles - but I wish that they'd gone with the idea that any contact with an alien race is corrupting, even one as relatively benign as the Eldar. Imagine what a human cult aping the Eldar could do, clumsily yanking on the strings of fate in order to get what they want. Or an Ork cult, which would involve a bunch of guys whaling the shit out of each other with rusty pipes until they're all dead from brain trauma. I had to look up whether it was whaling or wailing, incidentally, and Merriam-Webster agrees with whaling as the proper term.

I think that the book has a variety of major problems. One of them is that it feels like it was written in a hurry in order to ensure that people who had bought Dark Heresy would have something to use, because most of the cults could be created by anybody who's even casually familiar with the Warhammer 40,000 universe. There's no real sense of taking a basic premise and then twisting into something interesting; just a decent portrayal of a bog-standard cult. It's possible that I'm utterly misjudging the content of the book; maybe it's about laying down the basic groundwork of cults so that people who aren't familiar with the Warhammer universe have some basic material to work with. But who isn't familiar with the WH40K universe at this point?

Their writing feels like a lot of D&D supplements, where the authors feel like they're using the bland writing style of most D&D supplements - lots of tail-chasing to fill up space, no particular authorial voice that might say something interesting, and a focus on stuff that most people already know rather than doing something unique. They feel like they're being paid by the word.

Warhammer has survived as long as it has because the setting is so...baroque. The best writing conveys the sheer age of the Imperium, like the Gormenghast novels - an Imperium so old that stuff that used to serve a specific purpose has become calcified into meaningless ritual, a pointless, senile version of what it was supposed to be. The Adeptus Mechanicus is unable to deal with the technology of yesterday except through a filter of superstitious fear. The Ecclesiarchy sacrifices to a dead god. The Inquisition has true freedom of thought, but they're only picking the nits off of the hide of the decaying leviathan that the Imperium has become, and the true irony is that they're the only ones able to realize the scope of just how far that decay has gotten. The writing does not convey that, or, for that matter, any real perspective on the 40K universe. I would also suggest that much of 40K's early appeal was the fact that it condensed a lot of British sci-fi and comics - Judge Dredd, Nemesis: The Warlock, Rogue Trooper, a little Doctor Who - and sold it to an American audience that wasn't familiar with the original source, thereby creating something that felt truly unique to American audiences; at least, at the time.

Insofar as I can tell, a lot of the authors of this book are writing in the industry for the first time. Good for them, that's a great first step - but do you really want first-timers working on a setting this lucrative? The tentative, hesitant tone in the writing, feels like the product of contract work - flesh out these generic cults a little, get in fifteen thousand words a month from now - that hurts the book's tone. It feels plasticky and pastichy, like the illustrations for Arkham Horror. (They're very pretty - and they're meant to be - but they lack a sense of actual, you know, horror. Which is understandable, given as they're meant to attract customers and not horror nerds like me.)

Speaking of Lovecraft, there's some Lovecraftian influence in the book, but only the surface elements - an alien race composed of a green gas which is able to possess humans reminds one of The Colour out of Space. The alien menace of the Slaught are a mass of worms that walk in a humanoid form, much like the Worm that Walks from Shadows of Yog-Sothoth. There's an entire cult that just about seethes with references to the King in Yellow, although it's ultimately about Tzeentch. (That's pretty appropriate, really.) Dark Heresy is essentially Call of Cthulhu's bastard techno son, so I can't complain about the Mythos influence. I can, however, point out that if you're going to use it, it would be nice to try to evoke some of the terrifying atmosphere that goes along with it. The gaseous aliens get close, as they're fleeing from some unknown race that lives in the vast spaces between galaxies - not the Tyranids - and that's a pretty cool idea. 

Some of the cults seem less a job for the acolytes of an Inquisitor and more like the job of the Adeptus Arbites, Imperial Guard or local Space Marine Chapter. The Pale Throng, for instance, consists of a mutant army that comes together under the thrall of some shadowy cabal - left deliberately vague, because if the shadowy masters were ever to be pinned down and described in an interesting manner, the authors would immediately burst into flame and be no more. (They left it for you to decide. Do we really need the author's permission to alter the setting to our needs?) The aforementioned Vile Savants disgorges a plague of the living dead on a world, but as the book points out, there's not much more that the Acolytes can do other than escape. (I like the fact that its servants are essentially masses of writhing, pustulent decay held in a sealed biochemical suit. It's a pretty cool inversion.) Okay, scenarios like that are useful; how about some scenes we can use for the escape, like having to decide whether or not to aid a transport vehicle full of civilians at the risk of overloading their transport? Or trying to figure out which of the six people you just brought with you into space is hiding his symptoms so that he won't be incinerated on the spot?

That lack of detail bothers me. The surest mark of a bad product is when the authors give you a general framework, or a kernel of an idea, and then leave all of the important details for you to develop. It's utterly maddening. I'm paying you $50 to get your ideas, not to get your suggestions as to what an idea might be. Countdown worked so well because it went into specific illustrations of how stuff worked - the Army of the Third Eye had sample characters, explained its exact mythology and history, and gave you an idea of how to use it within a game. A lot of supplements seem more content to simply hint at some nebulous idea and then let you do the actual work of turning it into something useful. (NWoD, looking at you here.) I used to be able to pick up a book and wonder at the interesting ideas therein; now I pick them up and think "Okay, what the hell am I supposed to do with this?"

Even the "Most Wanted' portraits towards the back of the book are unsatisfying. Oh, the artwork is beautiful, evoking the medieval-gothic-techno atmosphere like nothing else, but the writeups are pretty bland. Pyrokinetic psyker. Baron Harkonnen-looking and -floating dude looking for an immortality device. Rogue Inquisitor, rogue Adeptus Mechanicus.  There's a psychotic noble who cribs a bit of Torchwood in her description - she kills people because it makes her "happy". While I really can't ding anybody for an in-joke - 'cause shit, everybody loves in-jokes, so do I - I dislike Torchwood, though, - I will mention that it doesn't really pass muster in a world where everybody is psychotic. and everybody loves faction-appropriate murder. But ultimately, there's nothing really inspiring in here. I will also note that they're not statted up, so GMs will have to do yet more legwork to make them usable.

The different outlooks of the Inquisitors are described in the book's second-to-last chapter, but if you've read the free version of Inquisitor - the crazy, attic-imprisoned grandparent of Dark Heresy - you've probably seen much of that material already. Sample Inquisitors are included for each Ordos, and there's new ones for the Callixian sector - one with a radical, pro-xenotech standpoint, another directly opposed to the influence of the Ecclesiarchy(!), and a third which focuses on that whole psyker-as-evolutionary-endpoint idea mentioned above. They're not bad, although an Inquisitor taking on the Ecclesiarchy seems more like a suicide cult less than a secondary Ordos. I hate to damn with faint praise; they didn't blow my skirt up, but they weren't bad.

The adventure that rounds the whole thing out is actually pretty good, although it does remind me a little of two Call of Cthulhu adventures in the Cthulhu Casebook; the shipboard adventure Mauretania, and, more importantly, The Auction. (In case you're wondering, yes, I can link anything in the known universe to Call of Cthulhu, because I am an obsessive-compulsive uber-nerd.) It's possible - not probable, but possible - that Disciple's adventure is a subtle tribute to that scenario, OR they just took inspiration from Dan Abnett's amazing Hereticus where a rogue psyker is auctioned off to a group of weirdos. (The auction really doesn't end well. At all.)

Either way, it's a pretty good scenario. Most of it is going to be player-driven, as much of the action is going to be driven by the players interacting with various characters, all of whom want something and almost all of whom are concealing something. The Acolytes are dispatched by the Inquistor to investigate an auction held in a city that's essentially a giant crematorium and tomb complex, called the House of Dust and Ash. As most of the items being sold are heretical in nature, there's a lot of heretics converging on one spot to see what mischief they can buy; and, of course, there's somebody with a secret agenda behind the whole thing. I also should note that many of the heretics are connected to the cults described within the book, so we get a little better idea of how each fits contextually into the setting. I don't know why I like that so much, but I do.

The first part of the adventure lays out some interesting NPCs for the acolytes to encounter on the way there - not all of whom are cultists, fortunately, and some of whom could be allies with the Acolytes if they play their cards right, and are cautious. A pirate attack by some mutants feels a little too much like a standard D&D encounter, just to spice things up, but hey, I'm forgiving. Ish. There's also a couple of neat in-jokes in the adventure; Captain Haarlock is a reference to the anime hero Captain Harlock, and there's another Lovecraftian reference with a silver key with an inscription that suggests that it can open the gateway to dreams.

The auction itself is pretty good - in fact, many of the cults in the book have representatives showing up at the auction to bid for the assorted weird artifacts. There's two problems, one minor, one major. The minor complaint is that there's not enough NPCs - there are eight, and they're all very interesting, but as they're high quality, I wish that there were more. Another minor complaint is that the NPCs only have the amount of money that they'll spend at auction in their character profiles, when it would have better served as a separate text block in the body of the adventure, and it would have been nice to get more details on what each person at the auction is trying to lay hands on. (The Auction had this enormously complicated chart for who would bid on what and up to how much, but just a detail on what the heretic in question is trying to lay hands on would be helpful.) I also want to say that the map of the complex, as rendered in the back of the book, is just fucking terrible; a D&D dungeon rendered on graph paper. It's the 41st millenium, and most gothic architecture is entirely curves and empty spaces. Throw some circles in there, fachrissake.

It ends in a clusterfuck, and it's a big one. Essentially, the acolytes become trapped in a really ugly situation - think of The Posiedon Adventure - and have to make their way out while dealing with various threats. If they really fuck up, they'll be facing aliens, cultists, daemons, and another kind of alien all at the same time in a dangerous, decaying environment.

It doesn't get much more 40K than that.

I will say this: The book has a lot of stats for stuff that'll be useful for your game. Besides the aforementioned Arco-Flagellant 

I mentioned earlier that the book's tone feels plasticky and pastichy. The art is not, mostly because it draws from some twenty-two years of GW artwork, plus some really nice new stuff. There's artwork from the original Rogue Trader in here, in all of its grungy, dirty glory. (Even the amazingly detailed pen illustration of a trio of utterly horrific-looking Adeptus Mechanicus adepts is included.) It's awesome to see it reprinted, even if its original source material has long since vanished into the wind. So yeah, the art gets a ten out of ten, because if it's survived for twenty-two years, it can safely be said that it's good artwork.

So I guess, in the end, my question is this: The Warhammer 40K universe is filled with amazing things, a crossbreed that manages to take a wide variety of disparate elements and weld them into a fairly rich setting. Disciples of the Dark Gods takes that universe and puts forth an bland take on that same universe, only occasionally drifting off into territory that hasn't been explored. It plays its cards so closely to its chest that it forgets to play them. It feels deliberately unambitious in the scope and intent of what it was trying to do. It's got a pretty decent adventure, but that's not enough to redeem the rest of the book. If you're looking for a bunch of generic cults, some interesting stats and the occasional flash of inspiration, Disciples of the Dark Gods is what you're looking for. If you're looking for something more interesting, there's some excellent stuff on the Net, and it's entirely free.

-Darren MacLennan 

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