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In my first few mental drafts of The Inquisitor's Handbook, I was going to write it off as the Big Book of Guns for Dark Heresy - much of the book's page count is taken up with an exhaustive list of weapons and gear, broken up by the type of world that the weapon or equipment might be found on. That's far from the only thing that you can find in it, because it also has rules for Adeptus Sororitas characters - Sisters of Battle - a ton of different careers and background packages, discussions of the role of human religion in the 40K universe and some miscellany regarding contacts, alter egos and alternate skill uses - but the guns and equipment section takes up most of the middle of the book.

Something interesting happened when I was flipping through the book's gun section, though. The book's section is written so each gun, each piece of equipment has a history and a personality to go with it, a detail on the world where it came from and the role that it plays on that world. And something occurred to me as I was reading it: These guns aren't necessarily meant to be used by the player, although there's nothing stopping them from doing so. What they're meant for is to arm the various enemies of the Imperium that the players will be running up against. It's easy to give a group of Nurgle cultists access to Imperial-issue lasguns; it's more colorful, and adds an extra tactical level to the combat, to give them triple-barrelled Meat Hammer shotguns, or primitive bolt pistols that are basically modified flare guns. (Mind you that you should probably wait for your player's characters to gain a few Ranks before unleashing Meat Hammers on them, as they do pretty decent damge.)

Let me back up a little. The book opens up with options for advanced character creation. There's new origin types - I'm particularly fond of the Mind Cleansed origin, which has the character starting off knowing that his mind has been deliberately blanked by the Imperium, which is great for story hooks, provided that the GM and the player agree on what the character was before the mind-wipe. (The movie Angel Heart is good inspiration.) There's also background packages which allow for a sloght reshuffle of skills and talents in order to represent past traumas or triumphs - notorious cases for Arbitrators, assassin guilds for Assassins, war zones for Guardsmen and so forth. 

There's also rules for playing as Adeptus Sororitas, complete with advancement chart and Miracles. It's situations like this where I wish that I could do an actual playtest review of how they work in practice - in fact, if my group ever comes around to playing Dark Heresy, I may give it a try. Adeptus Sororitas characters don't necessarily have to be Battle Sisters; after making it through the initial novitiate stages, they can become quasi-Adepts (Diologous), healers (Hospitaller) or fighters (Militant). They also get access to Faith miracles, which essentially allow them to spend Fate points for a host of effects, including inflicting damage on daemons, healing the injured, even bringing the dead back to life if they happen to be close at the time.

The trick of it is that Sisters only have access to their divine powers as long as they have fewer than 10 corruption points. This is in keeping with the puritanical nature of the Sisters, but also presents the problem of what happens if the character happens to rack up a bunch of Corruption Points through no fault of th eir own; being present at a couple of warp ruptures can remove a lot of functionality from an otherwise decent character. As I'm to understand it, there's rules in the Ascension rulebook for removing Corruption Points in exchange for experience or insanity points, but I can't help but to think that there might have been a better system for handling it.

In any case, the book has a bunch of alternate career paths for the various core classes, allowing for "detours" from the standard character progression. A lot of them are fairly narrow, essentially acting as a skillset bonus for joining a particular organization rather than representing a career choice in itself - for instance, buying the Tyrantine Shadow Agent career doesn't allow you to become a generic Shadow Agent, but explicitly makes the character a member of the Tyrantine Cabal, including being allowed to buy the Cabal's secret tongue and ciphers. GMs may be interested in removing some of the specific stuff from each of the careers to create a more generic, less restricting way for characters to advance. I can't exactly place my finger on why I dislike the careers so - I think that it's because the people writing the game system had a different vision for how characters would advance than the guys at Fantasy Flight Games did. (My copy of the game is from Black Industries, you see, and was written for the original Dark Heresy)

So, in order:

• The Bonded Emissary allows an Adept or Tech-Priest to become more of a social character, acting as the representative of a larger organization. Unfortunately, I don't know how this would work out in an actual Dark Heresy game due to the problem of an Emissary serving two masters - the agency that he represents and the Inquisition. Perhaps through the alter-ego rules, contained in the back of the book? Perhaps.
• The Calixian Xeno-Arcanist allows Adepts to become specialists on aliens, including learning Xenos tongues. Most of Dark Heresy tends to focus on the threat within rather than the threat without - although I would love to see more Dark Eldar cults, as in the opening chapters of Malleus - so I'm not sure of the utility of this class.
• The Chaliced Commissariat Operative allows Guardsmen to become a sort of quasi-Commissar, a member of Lord Sector Hax's roaming persecution squad, not allowed near actual war zones and loathed by the actual Commissariat. It seems ill-suited to Dark Heresy due to its lack of focus on the traditional threats that the Inquisition faces.
• The Feral Warrior  is a bit of a puzzler, particularly as the first question that pops into mind is "What's the difference between the Feral Warrior career and a character with the Guardsman career who's from a feral world?" Apparently Guardsmen from feral worlds forget about getting a damage bonus against large creatures unless they specifically take the Feral Warrior career...at Rank 3, at which point they've already been a regular Guardsman for quite some time. In fact, I would go so far as to say that it doesn't make a whole hell of a lot of sense.
• The Legate Investigator is basically the Prosecuting Attorney of the Dark Heresy universe, sort of a low-grade Inquisitor - they're given an actual formal letter of inquiry and a specific case to investigate, so that they're publicly known to be investigating on behalf of the Inquisiton. The first thought that pops into my head is that these are the kind of guys who usually show up gutted at the beginning of the adventure to show that the enemy Means Business  - in fact, they're sometimes used as bait by the real Inquisitors - and that a public investigation kind of goes against Dark Heresy's secrets-and-shadows focus.
• The Malfian Bloodsworn offer the option to become a bounty hunter to Assassins, Scum, Guardsmen and Arbitrators, in case anybody feels like playing Boba Fett (and who doesn't?)
• The Mechanicus Secutor allows Adeptus Mechanicus players to go combat-heavy, with a host of different basic and exotic weapons training - everything from the Shock Blaster to the Rad Cleanser - and a Machinator Array option that allows them to kit out their mechadendrites with better weapons than the default. 
• The Metallican Gunslinger option, available at Rank 1 to Assassins and Scum, focuses around the art of the pistol and the quick-draw, at the cost of shutting off the possibility of Basic and Heavy weapons training - which seems like an awfully, awfully heavy price to pay.
• The Moritat Reaper is a character class that you've already seen in Inquisitor, the 54mm wargame; they focus entirely on close combat, to the point where they get the ability to attack multiple opponents in a single strike. However, annoyingly, you have to take the Moritat Assassin background package at character creation to take this Alternate Career, which means that you have to decide that you're going to become a Moritat Reaper at the start of your career, an arbitrary limit on a cool concept. I would ignore the restriction and just charge the characters however much the background package costs in order to become a Moritat Reaper. (In fact, Ascension makes this character class redundant with its Death Cult Assassin package.)
• The Reclaimator career allows...well, it's actually kind of a weak career, allowing Scum to take Tech Use skills at Rank One to represent a technological scavenger; unfortunately, Reclaimators aren't well-loved by the Mechanicus, which results in Reclaimator characters starting off with a powerful enemy. 
• The Sister Oblatia allows for Adeptus Sororitas characters to become a lot more focused on hand to hand combat than the standard Sister of Battle, with training available in various melee weapons and some nice melee-focused talents, including the ability to shrug off the effects of injury and fatigue during combat. 
• The Templar Calix of the Scholastica Psykana, besides being a tongue-twister, allows psykers to specialize in close-combat, which really just seems like a bad idea; however, it's possible to advance all the way up to Rank 8 as a Templar, and it has a meaty selection of talents to turn your frail and weak psyker into a dervish of weak and frail close combat fury. 
• The Tyrantine Shadow Agent, mentioned above, allows your character to officially join the Tyrantine Cabal, an Inquisitorial organization dedicated to investigating the Tyrant Star; I'd almost just give the whole career a pass and simply allow members of the Cabal to buy Cabal-specific talents with their regular career path. Tyrantine Shadow Agents do get Labyrinth Conditioning, which allows them to resist both regular interrogation and psychic probing.
• Finally, the Warden of the Divisio Immoralis allows Arbitrators to join the conspiracy-focused Divisio Immoralis, led by an Senior Arbiter who's under the impression that there's a massive conspiracy to undermine the Calixis Sector; the skill set suggests that the characters becomes self-destructive in pursuit of the truth (Flagellant, Decadence, Peer: The Insane).

Whew! The Elite Advance Packages follow; particularly notable are Cybernetic Resurrection, which allows a character to be saved from death with a complete cybernetic overhaul - shades of Darth Vader! - and Nascent Psyker, which marks the character as a psyker who hasn't become fully psychic yet. Puzzlingly, the book outright declares that becoming a Nascent Psyker is to "doom your character", and yet Eisenhorn had a nascent psyker ganger on his crew without ever feeling it necessary to shoot her in the back of the head or turn her over to the Black Ships. (Plus, how hard is it for an Inquisitor to fast-track somebody through sanctioning? Not that difficult, I'm sure.) It seems badly handled.

If you'll pardon me, I'll not go through the entirety of the weapons and equipment section gun by gun to preserve my sanity and the chances of this review coming in under a million words. As aforementioned, they're broken down by sector - Feral/Feudal, Hive/Forge, Frontier/Void, War Zones and the Holy Ordos. There's tons of background information scattered throughout the various weapon descriptions - a weapon isn't just a weapon; it's a brief glimpse into the circumstances that created it, like the bolt pistol that's actually a modified flare gun, or the ceramic shotgun that's been covered in scrimshaw. (The hive weapons are particularly evocative - I kept getting flashes back to Necromunda.) I'm also particularly fond of the way that the book stats out industrial cutters and such as weapons, like the Drive Nailer, or the Melta Cutter; I kept flashing on Dead Space and its repurposing of industrial machinery as weapons. (The world of Dead Space and the world of 40K do not seem to be that far apart.) 

There's other stuff besides just guns, though. There's stats for servo-skulls, those creepy little cherubim who seem to spawn whenever an Inquisitor's about, familiars, new cybernetics for Adeptus Mechanicus, various consumables (including drugs and alcohol, if you're getting tired of feeding your characters amasec), a variety of servitors, both combat and non-combat - one even holds your umbrella for you - costs for getting passage aboard a Warp-capable ship, stats for the horrible things that live in the darkest holds of those Warp-capable ships (the Ghilliam), the gear and rations of the Imperial Guard, and a selection of the elite gear that the Inquisiton gets to use - and understand that I'm brushing over the surface of this stuff. It's a meaty section, and it's got material for Dark Heresy for days. 

The book rounds out with a discussion of religion in the Imperium, which manages to do a decent job of exploring the role of religion in Imperial life but doesn't really say anything particulary insightful - it's good, but not particularly great. That seems like kind of a shame, considering that the 40K universe is essentially an extended parody/satire of Christianity, but you take whats you get. The book finishes out with rules for alter egos, some invaluable rules for developing contacts with experience points, alternate uses for skills and some simple rules for crafting.

Is the Inquisitor's Handbook worth buying? Yes, absolutely, if you're a GM; it's got game material for days and helps flesh out details of the Calixis Sector and its cultures. As a player - you'd be better off borrowing the GM's copy, or asking to page through it for ideas about what gun your characters wants to get next.

-Darren MacLennan

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