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some random photos showing how my army is coming along

Book review: Scourge the Heretic by Sandy Mitchell

Well, Since i'm unable to locate my camera cord, instead of this post being about the 12 storm troopers I'm stripping as my first real solid step back into the hobby, I'll enjoy you all with a book review.

Image taken from Black Library Publishing's website All copy Rights belong to them.

Well I was in B&N the other day, I decided to check out the sci fi section of the book store as I always tend to do when I go into one. Going over the Black Library Publications self I saw the font of Scourge the Heretic, which was facing out on the shelf and noticed it was the same as the Dark Heresy rule book's font. Picking it up, I read the back and remembered it was in a series of tie-in novels for the dark heresy game. And being that I'm running a DH game at my school, I picked it up to try to gain an expanded view of the Calixias Sector, as Lexicanum and wikipedia don't really have everything I would love to know about.

Well Anyways, Sandy Mitchell, as most of you know, Is famed in the 40K wold for his Commissar Cain novels, of which I've read the first three, being that I like to buy the omnibus's more than single books. I've just finished up the Eisenhorn trilogy and the Imperial Guard Omnibus, I've been in a very Pro-Imperial mood. And seeing as Sandy has a way of making me smile the whole way through his novels, I figured that this book would be a semi-light hearted, but good representation of what I could expect an actual Dark Heresy game to turn out like.

The Story follows the acolytes of Inquisitor Finurbi, which he has labelled as being park of of his Angalae, in the grand tradition of faux-latin terms GW uses. They are sent to Sepheris Secundus, Feudal shithole of the imperial World where the Guard Levies are limited to make sure the peasants don't get the idea that there's other worlds out there that could be better for them. They Are called there to help with a breakout of rogue psykers from some containment prison on world. Links to a organization of Xeno-tech users, yadda yadda Yadda. I'll leave the rest of the story for you to read.

What I loved about the novel was that every for being the grimdark 40K universe, the characters seemed to be lively, they had depth and you couldn't help but like some of them. The antagonist were exactly what you'd expect from a world like Sepheris Secundus, and the description of the world was mind blowingly awesome for those of us with vivid imaginations. A city of Glass over hanging a pit filled with so many workers so far down that it simply looked as if the ground was constantly moving.

The only problem for myself was I had to write down a list of characters due to forgetting who each person was and their rank. All of them tended to be modeled after classes in dark Heresy, and provide wonderful ways of describing to people who aren't very well versed in 40K a view of how characters should act and be like. Over all, I plan on passing this around to my dark heresy group as a primer to the campaign I will be running.

Rating 8/10