Imperium is a weekly hobby magazine from Hachette Partworks. In this 90-week series, our intrepid magazine-receiver will be reviewing each individual issue, its included models, and gaming materials. A Premium subscription was provided to Goonhammer for review purposes.
We are nearing the end of Imperium‘s initial run, but in truth merely entering this magazine’s November – earlier this year, Imperium was extended from 80 to 90 issues, and I’ll keep reviewing em as long as I keep getting em. Will this mean reviewing Imperium and the upcoming Age of Sigmar equivalent magazine Stormbringer at the same time? Potentially! It’s dropping at the end of this month, so if you want to follow along at home you can head over to their website and sign up.
The Magazine
We get a new unit, and with it, a new Battle Record. This week’s entry is a Catacomb Command Barge, a mobile Necron command platform on which an overlord can lord over his underlings. Curiously, as per the presented lore, the pilot and gunner are permanently wired into the vehicle, so I don’t know why they would still have legs and arms and such, but sometimes the narrative comes after the model is designed. Personally, I always thought it looked like a mobile DJ booth.
Radiant Palanquin glided over the killing fields of Derek’s Mom’s Dining Table IV. With a chop of his Warscythe, Ptonakh the Herald signaled his gunner to fire the vessel’s Gauss Cannon at the Imperial fortification. Rockcrete exploded and bodies disintegrated as the Command Barge slowly hovered towards the breach in the defenses, a quiet ‘wub wub wub’ barely audible over the din of battle.
If that wasn’t enough xenos action for you, we pivot to a report on everybody’s favorite insane clown posse, the Aeldari Harlequins. I remember when I first faced these jolly jesters in 2005, when my friend Austin informed me they had flip belts and could ignore difficult terrain. This shocked me. How humble that all seems now. If you thought Eldar were already tricksy and perfidious, Harlequins are tricksier and perfidious-er than even your garden varietal knife-eared weirdo. Our Inquisitor narrator admits she doesn’t really understand what the Harlequins’ role is in Aeldari society, but that they travel around doing some kind of performance and likely protect their species as a whole. Despite saying she doesn’t really understand the Harlequins, everything from the Harlequin trickster god Cegorach to the specifics of each Harlequin varietal are laid out in at least some detail. She even knows that Death Jesters have a cruel sense of humor, which makes me think less about battlefield sadism and more about watching nutshot compilation videos online.
We pivot away from clowntown and head instead for Obolis and Lirac, a pair of sub-sectors around the forge world Metalica. During the opening of the Great Rift, water turned to gore, plagues started to spread, and the dead adopted a nasty habit of getting back up – Nurgle was here to party. Typhus himself was leading the charge, as he’d been told the Metalicans had said some nasty stuff about “metal being superior to flesh” and he took that personally. I’m not even editorializing here, that’s literally his reason for trying to kill them. I get his notion is to punish their arrogance, but by making their fleshy bits all plague-touched, he’s honestly just proving their point. He brought along his own supernatural plague called the Nemesis Wurm, but how exactly that panned out isn’t detailed in this little overview. That stuff is in War Zone Charadon: The Book of Rust if you’re curious to learn more.
I hope you weren’t done clowning around, because we’re back to the Harlequins with The Last Laugh (emphasis theirs), where a bunch of Imperial Guard get confused by those most perfidious of elves. Right off the bat, there’s a great typo where the main character, Commissar Grak, is given “a wide birth” which sounds like a case for a C-section. He leads his section of 30ish bedraggled, malnourished, too young and too old troopers around a battlefield where they encounter several environmental storytelling skeletons. Amongst the bones are the odd Saim-Hann Aeldari, and after two pages of bone pokin’, a Harlequin teleports behind the lead man, stabs him, does a theatrical bow, and splits. A group of Harlequins clown on these Guardsmen, murdering the lot of them with no small amount of flourish. I don’t think it’s a great story, but a few moments like that Harlequin taking a bow give some flavor to the faction and show how outclassed your average joes are against them.
Heading back towards the Imperial side of things, we get some Space Wolves character profiles. First is Njal Stormcaller, High Rune Priest. He’s a storm wizard! He has a chooser of the slain raven buddy named Nightwing! His wolf stick growls at nearby threats! Space Wolves are wary of psychic powers and other supernatural trickery, but even they are pretty stoked when Njal shows up. Next is Lukas the Trickster, canonically the only Space Wolf who fucks. Because he’s very good at killing things that the Space Wolves want dead, the chapter decides to put up with his bullshit and let him keep on spiking drinks and playing pranks. The only time he’s ever been outwitted was by a Dark Eldar Hamonculus who stole one of his hearts, and Lukas replaced it with a stasis bomb so he could have the last laugh when someone finally kills him. He’s an over the top character, very much in line with the Space Wolves whole steez. In as many ways as Njal, Ulrik the Slayer, and Logan Grimnar draw on aspects of Odin, and Arjac Rockfist is just Thor, Lukas is straight up Loki. Let no one ever say GW writers don’t wear their influences on their sleeves.
Lastly, we have a foldout on the battle in the Ardis System. Located in the Quartz Stars (assumedly near the Zirconium Stars) the world of Lythis has been dealing with Chaos renegade fleets, and our recurring Rogue Trader crew is tasked with salvage operations above. There’s some great art here; old Codex: Cityfight art appearing next to art I’ve never seen of work crews in space. There’s even a map of a city where you can see, street by street, who is fighting where. It’s really cool to see something drill down to this level – getting this sort of macro lens view of a theater of battle is rare in a setting as huge as 40k. Some funny notes from the Rogue Trader themselves imply that they’re probably taking just a little more than they probably should from this salvage operation, but who’s really going to miss a couple abandoned starships?
The Hobby Materials
This week we find ourselves with fully half of the Catacomb Command Barge/Annihilation Barge kit. Instructions are only provided for the former, but by gum are they thorough. Subassembly after subassembly is presented, inviting us to an altogether more pleasant painting experience next week. Many specific pieces are marked out as candidates for adhesive putty, all the better to mask now and build later. The instructions are a tad intimidating, and this will prove to be the most challenging model yet for the intrepid Imperium reader. It’s one of the centerpieces of their 5th edition revamp, and I still think it holds up beautifully.
The Gaming Materials
This week it’s finally time to Breach the Bastion. An Imperial recon force is going to break into the Necron tomb complex and seal the Dolmen Gate, halting Necron reinforcements. Naturally, our roboner robuddies don’t want this to happen. This mission has a staggering 8 objectives, 4 of which are included as helpful little cutouts – ask your parents for help! Players are awarded points for having 2 objectives, 3 or more, and more than their opponent. As objectives stay captured after moving off, this might actually be pretty doable. The twist here is that the Imperial player can search the central area of the board to find the portal they need to close, which will give them even more points for each objective they hold in the center. It’s kind of a funky mission, but suitable for a grand engagement.
Final Verdict 77/90:
When you combine the prices of this issue and the next, you’ll still come in at less than half of a Catacomb Command Barge’s asking price. That alone is a good start. The dense amount of narrative material this week will give readers enough to chew on until the next issue, and the mission is just interesting enough to set it apart.
See you next issue, warhams.
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