Warhammer 40,000 Roleplay: Imperium Maledictum

Imperium Maledictum is Cubicle 7's Warhammer 40,000 tabletop RPG about a small team of ordinary Imperial citizens working for a powerful Patron in the Macharian Sector. It suits groups that want investigation, factional pressure, and short, lethal fights at human scale, with a d100 engine simpler than most of its predecessors. It does not give you Space Marines. It is also the line Cubicle 7 is still printing and expanding, which makes it the practical place to start if you were reading about Dark Heresy and wanted a game you can buy new.

What the game is

You are not an Inquisitor. You are a rag-tag team recruited by one, or by an Administratum official, a Navy officer, an Ecclesiarchy preacher, a Mechanicus magos, a Rogue Trader dynasty, or a crime boss, who sends you to do work they cannot do through official channels. Missions usually start as an investigation: a missing shipment, a dead tithe collector, a cult in the lower hive. Where they end depends on what the team finds and who it upsets. If you fail or die, no one in the Imperium much minds.

The default setting is the Macharian Sector, built on the legacy of Lord Solar Macharius's crusade and the civil wars that followed it. One reviewer counts about 50 pages on the sector alone, with noble houses, merchant cartels, and local governors alongside the major Imperial institutions. Xenos and Chaos appear, but the sector is set up so the usual threats are criminals, nobles, and officials with something to hide. You can run a game with no daemons in it at all.

Publication history and product line

Cubicle 7 Entertainment (the Warhammer licensee that also publishes Wrath & Glory and Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay) announced the game as a spiritual successor to Dark Heresy and Rogue Trader. The core rulebook went on sale as a PDF on DriveThruRPG on 23 March 2023, and the 352-page hardcover followed later that year. The publisher's page lists it at $59.99 with a PDF included, and the stand-alone PDF is $29.99. It won OnTableTop's Best Roleplaying Game of 2023, and the Collector's Edition was nominated for the 2024 ENNIE Award for Best Art, Interior.

The core book is a complete game and needs no other purchase. Around it, Cubicle 7 has published a GM Screen with a booklet of generators and three short adventures, the single-adventure Chemical Burn, and a Starter Set. The Starter Set contains The Blazing Seraph (an Inquisition adventure that teaches the rules as you play), Rokarth: A Guide to the Hive, six pregenerated characters, handouts, tokens, and a set of d10s. Later books include the Macharian Requisition Guide, Voll Adventures, the Inquisition Player's and GM's Guides, and the Adeptus Mechanicus Guides.

How it plays

Tests are d100 roll-under. You roll against a characteristic plus any skill advances, and each full ten points you roll under the target is a degree of success. Degrees add damage, trigger critical effects, and decide opposed tests. Weapon damage is usually a d10 or d5 plus modifiers, so the whole game runs on two d10s. If you have played Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay or Call of Cthulhu, the feel is familiar.

Patrons come first

Creating the Patron is the first step of the game, and the whole group does it together with the GM. You decide which faction the Patron serves, how senior they are, what motivates them, and which boons and liabilities come with them. A Patron from the Inquisition produces cult hunts. One from the Administratum can produce an audit that turns up something worse than missing paperwork. The Patron's reach also sets what the team can requisition and which factions are friendly or hostile.

Characters

A character combines an origin (usually a type of world), a faction, and one of six roles, plus characteristics and skill advances. You can pick everything or roll some or all of it for bonus starting XP. Advancement is point-based and has few restrictions. Gear matters a great deal to survival, because wounds grow slowly. A guardsman in flak armor and a veteran in power armor are very different people.

Fate

Every character has three Fate points. You can spend one during a session to reroll a test or clear a condition, and spent points refresh next session. You can also burn one permanently to escape a lethal blow, resist corruption, or choose the result of a test. Burning is permanent, so most tables treat it as a last resort.

Combat

Combat uses loose zones instead of a grid. Each turn a creature gets an action, a movement, and a reaction, and initiative is a fixed score rather than a roll. Leaving melee gives the other side a free attack. A party-wide Superiority score gives bonuses to everyone and can make enemies break and run, so planning, ambushes, and cover matter more than damage output. Critical injuries are the main danger: damage beyond zero wounds becomes a roll on location-based tables, and a typical starting character can die after two or three of them. Minor enemies fall after a single critical hit, so you do not track every cultist.

Influence, corruption, and the Warp

The group tracks Influence with factions, and its rise and fall changes how those factions treat the team. Psykers are a playable option, with a Psychic Phenomena table and a Perils of the Warp table for when things go wrong. Corruption can mutate or warp a character permanently. Between missions, characters choose Endeavours such as earning income, crafting, or seeking medical care.

Reception

On DriveThruRPG the core rulebook averages 4.7 from 82 ratings (65 five-star, 12 four-star, 2 three-star, 3 two-star, none at one star) with 17 written reviews, a mithral bestseller badge, and a human-created label. The RPGBot review called the rules well explained and approachable and preferred it to Dark Heresy for balance and clarity. A reviewer at Refereeing and Reflection described it as effectively a third edition of Dark Heresy that handles gritty street-level investigation better than Wrath & Glory does, and said it became his favorite Warhammer 40,000 RPG.

The criticisms are specific. Some Dark Heresy veterans find combat less lethal and less varied: more wounds, weaker automatic weapons, a flat cover bonus, and zones that leave grenade splash vague. A table that played a medium-length campaign (r/40krpg thread) reported that the psyker role pulled ahead of the rest of the party after a few sessions. The GM chapter is the most consistent complaint in the longer reviews. Ill Met by Morrslieb found it silent on how to structure a mission that is not an investigation, how to build a campaign, and how often a Patron should appear, and wanted a worked example mission. Fate burning also draws rules questions on forums, such as whether you can burn a point you already spent.

Where it is strongest

• Street-level 40K where the team is working for someone, not commanding anything.
• A Patron that changes the tone of the campaign, from Inquisition cult hunts to a Navy audit or an Administratum paper chase.
• Investigation that gives a mechanical edge in the fight that follows.
• A d100 engine that is easier to teach than Dark Heresy's, with a Starter Set to learn from.
• Groups that want a grim tone without needing to know much 40K lore.

Where it can frustrate groups

• GM preparation. The book gives little help with campaign structure, mission examples, or running the Patron.
• Combat that some Dark Heresy fans find simpler and more forgiving than they wanted.
• Psyker balance, which several tables have flagged and which a GM may need to manage.
• Characters that start fragile, and a Fate system that keeps them alive only if the table accepts permanent costs.
• No Space Marine characters, no outright heretic characters in the core book, and no cinematic mixed-faction parties.

Content and safety notes

This is high-intensity grimdark material. Published play includes lethal critical injuries and maiming, interrogation, religious and political persecution, mutation, corruption, and an Imperium whose default politics are authoritarian and xenophobic. Agree before the first session how directly you want to play civilian harm and body horror, and keep a way to cut or fade a scene.

Imperium Maledictum and Dark Heresy

If your group wants the older Inquisition-acolyte line with its large library of careers and campaigns, read the Dark Heresy page. Those books are PDF-only now. Pick Imperium Maledictum when you want a game you can buy new in print, a wider choice of Patrons, and a lighter rules load. Pick Wrath & Glory if you want Space Marines, Sisters of Battle, and Aeldari in the same party. For a side-by-side of Fantasy Roleplay, Wrath & Glory, and Imperium Maledictum, see Which Warhammer TTRPG Should You Play?.

Best starting path

1. Buy the core rulebook PDF or the print book with included PDF from Cubicle 7. It contains the full rules, the Macharian Sector, and a bestiary.
2. If your GM is new, add the Starter Set so the first session has a teaching adventure and pregenerated characters.
3. Build the Patron together before anyone makes a character. Cubicle 7 has a post on creating Patrons.
4. Tell the table how lethal it is and how Fate works before the first fight, and decide in advance whether spent points can be burned.

Research notes

Last checked 9 November 2026. Sources used for this page:

• DriveThruRPG core rulebook listing and public API: price, 352 pages, March 2023 listing date, ratings, reviews, human-created label.
• Cubicle 7's product page and Patron creation post: print price, page count, award, features. Cubicle 7's Starter Set announcement and OnTableTop's Starter Set preview for its contents.
• 2024 ENNIE Awards nominees for the Collector's Edition nomination.
• Reviews: RPGBot, Refereeing and Reflection, Ill Met by Morrslieb, and The Professional Casual Network.
• Community threads on r/40krpg and r/ImperiumMaledictum for the criticisms listed above.