Black Crusade - Tome of Blood

40K haters look away now.

The latest Black Crusade sourcebook, Tome of Blood, arrived a wee while ago and, during our week under the covers, I've had a good thorough read.  Billed as a sourcebook for followers of Khorne, it actually has lots of content for all players and GMs.

Like the previous book, Tome of Fate, there are four new character types to chose from and, again like Tome of Fate, it's the human choices that really catch the eye.  The Chaos Marine archetypes are just as you'd expect with a Berzerker (melee) and a Night Lord (fear) on offer.  The human archetypes let the reader explore some frontier worlds of the 40K universe, Messia being my favourite with it's Dune/Arrakis feel.  Other than characters, there's a lot of background material here, rules for legacy weapons, massed combat, more rituals and investigations.  Lastly, there's another complete campaign using the newer rules.

A lot of new artwork is on show, most of it very atmospheric, some of my favourites are on this page.  And I'd also say the standard of writing here is pretty impressive, much more so than the early Dark Heresy/Rogue Trader games. FFG have pulled in a few new authors in their recent books and they have seem to have picked up the freshness of the writing (if that even makes sense?)

To be honest, ToB was the book I was least looking forward to, as just how much depth is there on offer to roleplay an uncontrollable frenzied killer.  Overall though, the rage/frenzy aspect isn't all that prevalent for the players (NPCs are another story) and the book is much more about new options and scales for combat.

I haven't managed to get a RPG session in for a few months now; we were running them over skype and, when my broadband went, that wasn't possible any more.  I think I'm going to try and find a group locally (it would be the first time since my uni days,) but not until later in the year; not feeling terribly sociable at the moment and can't see that changing in the near future!