With your Patron created or chosen, it is now time to create your own character for Imperium Maledictum.  There are eight steps to follow, and you’ll record your choices on your character sheet. Remember to ask the other Players what sort of Character they are considering, and what sort of group you want to create together!

In some sections, you can either choose an option or accept the result of a dice roll. Doing the latter may grant Experience Points (XP) — as though the Emperor Himself is applauding your acceptance of His unseen guiding hand. See  Advancement for more information.

Some parts of this process might direct you elsewhere or provide aids to creating a
character you’ll enjoy playing, but don’t worry about getting it ‘right’ — figuring out the exact specifics of your character isn’t necessary right now, and you can always make changes after you start playing.

The Imperium would not survive without the endless toil of countless billions, all struggling to fill the bottomless needs of a galaxy spanning empire. This condemns most citizens to a life of endless toil and struggle. Only the truly exceptional can escape this fate, those with the Skills and Talents to rise above the teeming hordes and contribute something more. Luckily, your character is just such an individual.

Broadly speaking, Skills describe your character’s basic capabilities, such as climbing or firing a gun, while Talents are unique abilities and traits that only a select few possess.

The 41st Millennium is a time of ever present violence and danger. The demands of your Patron must be met, and skill alone is insufficient to overcoming the perils of the Askellon Sector. Those investigating conspiracies, fighting heretics, and delving into the shadows of the Sector in search of centuries-old secrets must be adequately equipped for the task. This chapter presents a wide range of wargear, from common autopistols to arcane devices that call upon the Warp. It also includes details on transportation and provisions, as well as a range of augmetics, for when the flesh proves itself weak.

Port Aquila is not a single world, but a belt of asteroids orbiting the star Diomedea Stella. The largest of the rocks are almost planets in their own right, and many host a wide range of shipyards, docks, and storage facilities. Many smaller asteroids are also inhabited, forming the private fiefdoms of numerous trading concerns, Chartist Captains, shipwrights, and others. While many of these groups compete against one another, they are surprisingly adept at cooperating for the mutual benefit of all. It is common for the different bodies to ally with one another in the defence of Port Aquila, but their cooperation goes much further than self-preservation. When acting in concert, this Greater Askellon Trade Combine has interests in markets across the length and breadth of the sector, and has of late cast its acquisitive eyes still farther afield.

While Port Aquila has existed for many centuries, it has not always been the centre of commerce it is today. In earlier times, when grand Terminus Prime ruled commerce across Askellon, the system served as a den of pirates, slavers, and renegades. Some claim that the stain of recidivism still lurks, and that any who settle there soon succumb to sin and damnation. Certainly, even the many outwardly respectable trade concerns that have sprung up in recent decades are especially brutal in their dealings with those outside of the Combine, employing mercenaries and assassins at a whim. Newly-minted merchant princelings along the belt adorn their strongholds with crude grandeur in an effort to emulate how they imagine the palaces of the great houses of Terminus might have appeared in ages past. They amass signifiers of their imagined status, quaff rare amasec vintages, and hunt xenos species to extinction, all to prove their newfound pedigree.

Many of Askellon’s noble houses, especially those claiming descent from the original settlers, regard the commerce-lords of Port Aquila with undisguised disgust. They refuse to deal with them openly, though with the decline of the great houses of Terminus, they increasingly have little choice but to do so. It is now said that the majority of vessels plying the trade routes within the sector do so under the flag of the Combine, the power of Port Aquila insinuating itself into ever more markets.

Other factions, including the House of Roth, have insinuated themselves into the Combine, joining the numerous princelings who have enjoyed a meteoric rise to wealth and power thanks to membership. Amongst these are several secret pleasure sects and xenos-worshipping cults, as well as a great many individuals willing to use such groups to grow unfathomably wealthy. The latter use their new connections to gain access to the Faceless Trade in smuggled alien artefacts, selling on what they can to those members of the nobility with illicit and unconventional tastes.

“A fool and his sanity are soon parted, so I’ve often said...”

–Margrave Khoraliz, Faceless Trader and former Chartist Captain

Throughout the length and breadth of the Imperium are men and women who would possess that which is most forbidden to them, and there are men and women likewise determined to avail them of such items. While some collectors content themselves with objets d’art from Mankind’s distant antiquity, or tomes of ancient and often outlawed philosophies, others seek out items of spiritual significance. A few crave items wrought by the hands of heretics and blasphemers, while others desire the relics of long-lost alien empires. The more singular the artefact, the higher the price it can command, and the higher the risk in trading and possessing it, for to do so is to transgress against the most fundamental laws of the Imperium. In the Askellon Sector, there are many willing to break such laws, for the ruling families making up the Lords of Askellon have long considered themselves a class apart from the Imperium at large and only loosely subject to its laws. As the Pandaemonium closes ever tighter about the sector and the Adeptus Terra appear to abandon Askellon to its fate, even these ties grow ever less binding. It is perhaps an irony of the cruellest kind that even as the region’s damnation grows ever closer, its rulers seek to abandon themselves to ever greater transgression, as if deliberately averting their attentions from the horrifying fate closing inexorably around them.

The market in xenos artefacts is an especially illicit one, for any caught engaged in it in any capacity at all, whether buyer, seller, supplier, or broker, is guilty of a crime usually punishable by death or worse. The trade in these and other proscribed items is rarely spoken of openly, and so is known by a thousand euphemistic titles the galaxy over. In the Askellon Sector, it is known as the Faceless Trade, a reference to the fact that none ever admit to engaging in it, yet it continues nonetheless. The scale of the trade varies enormously, and Ordo Xenos Inquisitors have long suspected that the sector lies at the heart of a network that stretches far out into the trackless Wilderness Space surrounding it, exploiting stellar charts that may even pre-date the Imperium.

What abominable alien empires might be marked upon such charts remains a secret known only to the most senior of the Faceless Traders, and Ordo Xenos Inquisitors estimate from recovered examples that several dozen uncatalogued sources exist. These range from technological relics of unfathomable function wrought from gleaming alloys to primitive icons carved from stone and stained with the blood of aeons of sacrificial offering. Some are plainly mechanical, while others can only be appreciated as art. Some are clearly weapons, while others are imbued with
xenos-born psychic taint so heavy that to touch them is to invite insanity. Many are small in size and might even be worn openly as jewellery, eliciting a thrill of transgression in the wearer, although risking death should an agent of the Emperor knowledgeable in such matters lay eyes upon them. Others take the form of armaments of wildly exotic form and function, the wielding of which may be as dangerous to the bearer as to his enemies.

No Inquisitor can say how many private collections of xenos artefacts exist across the Askellon Sector, but some place it at several thousand at least. Such an estimate is based on a combination of pre-cognitive projection, readings of the Emperor’s Tarot, and evaluation of investigative archives. The majority of these collections are likely to be little more than a dozen objects secreted away and viewed only by the owner and his closest associates. Others, however, might be far larger, taking the form of vaulted mausoleums within which might be housed many hundreds of
utterly priceless and damnable objects. Access to such places is likely to be determined by status and bloodline, with only the most highly-ranked of the Lords of Askellon permitted even to know of their existence, let alone to view their contents.

Many such items might appear at first glance as entirely innocuous and harmless. A tiny bauble wrought in the form of some long-extinct alien beast once handled by a sentient being might function as a beacon which its creators can detect across light years of space, causing them to home in on a potential food source. Items worn as jewellery have on more than one occasion been known to meld with the wearer’s flesh, insinuating into the body before changing the wearer into some hideous simulacrum of the species that created it. Others might be hives for ravening alien viral strains that, when inadvertently activated, could wipe out entire planetary populations.

This danger goes a long way to explaining something of the astronomical value certain individuals place on items brought before them by the Faceless Trade. Life at the highest echelons of the sector’s aristocracy can lead some especially bored noble scions to seek out the most outrageous pastimes; in many cases, the more dangerous to themselves and to others, the better and more valued it is. In many cases, however, it is the simple fact of transgression that makes such items so desirable. A noble scion might deliberately stand before a thousand lesser-ranked sons and daughters of the aristocracy openly carrying an item as valuable as some entire planets. Every noble in attendance would know of the
crime and be utterly stunned, even seduced by the display, yet none would utter a word, to the bearer or to any figure of authority.

Such things are part and parcel of life on the very edge of the Pandaemonium for the lords of the sector, and as long as they crave the fruits of the Faceless Trade, there will ever be smugglers, brokers, and traders willing to charge them for it. The Unknown, the Cerulean Pact, the Edge Syndicate, the Ivory Masks, and others groups deal in satisfying this craving. Bartering with alien races and excavating lost ruins, they make available many items that should have been safely lost and forgotten. Rivalries between these groups is intense and bloody, with new territories and specialities carved up between them like the carcass of some gigantic beast between voracious predators. From season to season, as new delights are uncovered and new fashions emerge, the power of these traders rises and falls, as each seeks to dominate the desire for the illicit taste of the alien.

It is not only nobles who covet such objects, although their wealth certainly grants them access to more than their share. Many walks of life host their own outcasts who would seek power in forbidden places and knowledge from hidden sources. From hereteks to fallen savants, many are the fools who would seek to gain possession of alien power, and who find that power possessing them.

Of the various strains of xenos active in the Askellon Sector, the Eldar and their various sub-strains are one of the most visible, to those who know where to look, at least. Many reasons have been posited as to why this might be so, with some of the most learned of savants committing their entire careers to further study into the matter. Over the millennia, a range of theories have risen to explain their continued presence and interest in the sector, with some theories being proved wrong or passing out of favour to be replaced with others as evidence shifts. Over recent years, much of the debate at the rarefied level of Inquisitorial circles has revolved around why the Eldar appear to have chosen to remain in a region of space so clearly and drastically afflicted by the Warp when, as a space-faring people, they need not do so. It has been noted again and again that the Eldar are, if anything, becoming ever more active in the region. As the Pandaemonium grows in turbulence, so the Eldar appear to grow more restless, even—so some have claimed—desperate, in their activities. These actions can vary greatly, but it has been noted how the Eldar frequently launch small, stealthy raids against key targets either just before, or just after, an increase in Warp storm activity. Sometimes they are clearly seeking to evacuate some object or some being, or to investigate what effects the Warp incursion might have inflicted on a world or region. Often, however, the Eldar have attacked seemingly at random, often with the apparent aim of dissuading human activity in an area they clearly regard as exclusive to themselves.

There are several different types of Eldar active in Askellian space, perhaps most numerous of which are the forces of Unknown . The existence of this gigantic, star-going ark is almost entirely unknown in the sector’s ranks of humanity, although its presence is suspected by a very small number of Inquisitors, in particular those of the Ordo Xenos. Only a handful of humans are aware of its actual existence, and many innocents have unwittingly gone to the grave to maintain this carefully guarded secret. Others, however, may yet have ascertained by study or observation that the Eldar maintain a strong and decisive presence in a region of space many humans would dearly love to abandon. What such agents intend to do with this information remains a mystery, and for many a deep cause for concern.

Far less predictable even than the mysterious activities of the Craftworld Eldar are those of the Corsairs of the so-called Unknown clan. These wild-hearted warriors range far and wide across the Askellon Sector and presumably beyond, utilising Warp routes and portals entirely unknown to human Navigators to strike from the least predictable quarter. The activities of these pirates and outcasts vary from outright and wanton raiding for resources to attacks that can only be described as sporting hunts. Those Inquisitors with any real knowledge of Eldar Corsairs know that they represent not a general type but a spectrum, and that each band, even each Corsair, can be wildly different from the next and motivated by entirely different drives. Some align themselves to their craftworld cousins and can act in a highly noble manner, while others are barely discernible from the raiders of Commorragh and are wicked, cruel, and intent only on inflicting pain and suffering on what they regard as lesser races.

Those vile Eldar that live within the shadows of the Webway, known to xenos scholars as the Drukhari, are themselves active in the Askellon Sector, though their attacks are even less predictable than those of their craftworld and Corsair kin. This particular strain of the Eldar species is known by Ordo Xenos adepts to raid along a string of outlying systems within Askellian space, and all evidence shows they have been doing so as far back as records are kept. In particular, Dark Eldar raiders have plagued the outlying frontier systems rimward of the Thule Sub-Sector for
many generations. Most attacks have been limited to small-scale, targeted slave raids on the less populated worlds, and to the once-per-century incursions against the densely populated hive world of Hulee V. Unlike attacks by their craftworld or Corsair cousins, attacks by the Dark Eldar in Askellon tend to be launched towards a single, simple objective—the taking of slaves to be dragged back to the bleak pits of Commorragh. In the main, the Lords of Askellon have remained aloof and largely uncaring of the fate of these unfortunates, unless tithes and quotas should happen to be affected—in which case largely ineffectual precautionary patrols are often all they can do to deter them.

On several occasions, the Dark Eldar have appeared to launch targeted raids against specific members of the Askellon nobility, and several, largely inconclusive Inquisitorial investigations have been launched to establish just why. In 334.M40 for example, three minor ranked scions of House of Duss, a prominent line of civil administrators from the world of Juno, were taken in the midst of a grand banquet held in the then capital city of that world, Divinity Salvus. Witnesses described how the shadows beyond the guttering candle lights simply closed in about the noble scions, and
when they receded, all three were vanished. The guests panicked, many fleeing from the great hall, but Lord Duss remained in his seat, his expression downcast and evidently resigned to what had occurred. When pressed on the matter by his peers, Lord Duss would only state that the “shadowed ones” had “taken their due as their right,” and would brook no talk of rescue or recrimination.

When accounts later reached the ears of the Inquisition, an investigation was launched and some evidence was uncovered to suggest that Lord Duss had been involved in a long-running relationship with the Dark Eldar, a partnership of sorts, which had recently gone sour. The investigation team determined that the victims of the kidnapping were beyond aid, but that Duss should nonetheless pay properly for the crime of consorting with the alien. He was poisoned at the height of the next state banquet, and it is said that, after his cold form had collapsed into his Vanth squab, the meal continued in utter silence until all eleven courses had been consumed. The petrified guests were said to have glanced towards the shadows continuously, as if expecting that the fate of the Duss scions would befall them as well.

Of all the kin of the Eldar known to have a presence in Askellon, it is the Harlequins who are the most mysterious. Reports of small “troupes” of
Harlequins turn up rarely in the sector, but when they do, it is inevitably in connection to some matter of great import. Often, the aliens seem concerned with the threat of the Ruinous Powers, such as when a cursed artefact is uncovered or a site they deem forbidden is trespassed
upon. This linking of the two, existential threats to the Imperium—the alien and Chaos—is deemed by some as deserving of immediate intervention, though on what terms none seem to be able to agree. Some at the very highest levels of the Ordo Xenos, concerned with the fate of the Askellon Sector, have even proposed that contact should be made between the Eldar and themselves in order to explore the notion of cooperation against a common foe. They would follow the example of the notorious Inquisitor Czevak, who alone of all men appears to have gained the trust of
these inscrutable Eldar. Attempts have even been made to contact certain adepts amongst Czevak’s extended retinue in the hope that they might travel to Askellon and offer their counsel. To date, neither Czevak’s agents nor the Eldar have responded to attempts to establish contact, though it is unlikely that the minds behind such schemes would set their ambitions aside.