Filled with new rules, careers as well as all manner of essential gear, the "Inquisitor's Handbook" is perfect for players and game masters alike. Including advanced character generation, Calixian careers, the Adeptas Sororitas career path and detailed information on the weapons and gear to be found on Hive, Forge, Feral and Frontier worlds, plus an indepth commentary on the Calixis Sector, this tome covers everything you to create a completely unique character in the 41st millennium.

2008-04-20 Thought for the day: buy it!

The Inquisitor's Handbook delivers all it promises. Intriguing new career choices and a ton of equipment as well as more details on the Calixis sector, the area of space where all official adventures for Dark Heresy are supposed to take place.

Aside from some interesting new class variants such as the Feral Warrior, the Legate Investigator or the Chaliced Commissariat Operative as optional side-careers, the book also introduces a whole new career choice: that of the Adepta Sororitas.

The Adepta Sororitas career path, beginning at novice level, divides into three different branches (Dialogous/Famulous, Hospitaller and Militant) before joining again to culimate in the Legatine advance. The Inquisitor's Handbook provides all necessary information to play a Sisterhood character of each branch, although the famed Sisters of Battle will probably the most popular choice in your gaming group.

A possible issue with this new exciting career will be a Sister's desire to get power armor at rank 4 to stay true to the canon. However, clever GMs should have no problem with either working out a house-rule or explaining the need for secrecy (as the Sisterhood's Angel-pattern power armor is far too obvious for a covert investigation) to the player.

The zeal and fanatism of the Adepta Sororitas will surely be another challenge to all the players, depending on the group composition. Powerful Faith-based powers vaguely resembling the Sister's abilities from the Warhammer 40k tabletop make the game even more interesting, if used wisely and in the hands of an experienced player.

Aside from these new career options, the book also offers a few new origins for player characters, such as the Schola Progenum (very fitting for Sisterhood orphans) or Void-Born.

A very positive thing is the amount of background information ("fluff") which is provided in this book. This time, even all the weapons (and there are LOTS of them) get individual descriptions. Dozens of different stubber models appear next to new boltgun and lasgun patterns, accompanied by new armor and other useful gear. For convenience, all equipment is sorted into regions of appearance, such as "Hive" or "Warzone".

The only thing keeping me from awarding 5 stars to this book is the terrible amount of spelling and continuity errors throughout the book. Most times, these things don't bother at all, but there are a few instances when the book is actively irritating the reader - namely the visualized Adepta Sororitas career chart, which does not resemble the detailed description.

Despite the sour mass of typos, most of whom should easily have been detected during a proper spell-check, the Inquisitor's Handbook remains a solid expansion to the Dark Heresy game and should not be missed in any group roleplaying in the grim future of the 41st millennium.

Suffer not the witch to live!