Imperium Maledictum – Macharian Miscellanea

No GM’s toolkit would be complete without a GM Screen, the perfect tool for a GM to hide all their secrets and machinations. Available now digitally and in print, the Warhammer 40,000 Roleplay: Imperium Maledictum GM Screen is just that! And like the GM Screens Cubicle 7 have provided in the past, it is accompanied by a 32-page booklet of content to further aid GMs in crafting and running their adventures that we called the Macharian Miscellanea.

Art by Sam Manly

In designing Macharian Miscellanea, we wanted to provide GMs with a wide range of content, all drawing upon the Macharian Sector setting. At first, a number of ‘Open Case Files’ provide great one-shot adventures that can easily slot into ongoing campaigns or be used to kick one off. Several ‘Sector Whispers’ Tables, based on a wide range of setting types, can quickly generate rumours and plot hooks, all written as if they’ve come straight from an NPC’s mouth. The eponymously named Macharian Miscellanea section itself, is filled with a wonderful collection of Tables that enables GMs to generate strings of Gothic Gibberish, densely named Administratum Paperwork, and a variety of Psychic Visions, to name but a few of its myriad of charts.

We also included a roster of Macharian Personae Tables, one for each of Imperium Maledictum’s playable factions, which we will share a sample with you today. These tables are perfect for quick-draw personality generation, for when parties turn down the wrong corner or go off-plot and their GM needs a rich and meaningful character at a moment’s notice. Take a look at our Astra Militarum Personae generator.

Say the party is snooping around an Astra Militarum barracks and is looking for someone to extract information from. With a few rolls of a d10, a new character can be generated, complete with their rank, appearance, attitude and mannerisms to aid the GM in acting this character out. Each Table can generate a character in the form of a sentence:

“An Astra Militarum (9) Veteran named Cutter, who has (8) a contorted smirk, caused by a nasty scar. They (4) sigh and roll their eyes at every request, clearly resigned to their lot in life whilst they (7) clean their nails with a vicious knife while talking.”

In this example, we also rolled an Informal Name from the Core Book’s Name Table, and we can use the Astra Militarum Trooper stat-block, also from the Core Book, to represent them if they need to make any Tests against the party. Each Personae table in the booklet is also accompanied by advice on where your party might run into such characters – in this case, they could encounter Cutter on the frontlines of Frontier Settlements, garrisoned in a Shrine City, or even en route to deployment on a Planetary Transport or Voidship. 

The Macharian Sector is a rich and extensive setting in the Warhammer 40,000 universe, and the Macharian Miscellanea booklet is there to help GMs draw on many aspects of their setting to enrich their games, making them just as profound and exciting.