Black Crusade! Finally arrived. . .

Just a quick post to say I've (finally) received my copy of Black Crusade from Fantasy Flight Games.  And well worth the wait it was. . .

I've never been that much of a role player - in fact, I've never actually ran or been involved in a campaign for more than two consecutive sessions!  But occasionally a few of us get together and run through some scenarios over a few beers.  After reading through the preview adventure for Black Crusade months ago, I knew I fancied running a game or two as the "bad guys" so preordered this in June.

Black Crusade follows the usual FFG formula for a 40K RPG; lots of rules, lots of background and lots of options.  Basically, if you've ever read through Dark Heresy or Deathwatch, you'll be familiar with the format here.

In keeping with the chaotic nature of this book, Black Crusade does away with all the separate advancement tables for each class.  Instead you pick a basic character type and the choices for advancement are guided by which Chaos God you're favoured by.

Other exciting additions include; the ability to recruit Minions (hired goons to follow you around and generally make you feel like a proper bad guy,) Compacts (basically missions designed to keep your heretics focused on something other than killing each other) and Daemon Weapons (these look much nastier than those originally available in Dark Heresy.)

New additions to the adversaries include the Dark Eldar (Warriors, Incubi and Mandrakes) and the Necrons (Warriors, Flayed Ones, Immortals and the massive Tomb Stalker.)  There is also a fair bit of guidance for mixing the four 40K rpgs, including the Hordes rules from Deathwatch and using Black Crusade as a source for villains in the other three systems.

The book itself is up to Fantasy Flight's usual high standard with lots of fluff and background material.  There is a mix of older and newer artwork, some of which looks absolutely lush!  

So, after my initial read through, this looks a great book to pick up. Even if you're not into RPG's, but just a 40K fan, there's plenty here to interest you.  For RPG fanatics, it looks like FFG have built on an already solid ruleset and added enough new flavour to keep it interesting.  Looking forward to getting this on the table.