Imperium Maledictum is a Warhammer 40K TTRPG that’s all about the little guys

polygon.com:

The Imperium of Man is the closest thing that Warhammer 40,000 has to protagonists, although they are certainly not the good guys. Humanity rules the stars, and the galaxy in this far future isn’t exactly better for it. Life sucks, but at least humanity hasn’t been devoured by bugs or subsumed by the eldritch forces of Chaos. In Imperium Maledictum, a tabletop RPG from Cubicle 7 games, it’s your job to keep things that way. Polygon sat down with the game’s senior producer to talk about the setting, factions, and hitting the right level of grimdark.

In the world of Imperium Maledictum, quadrillions of people are held together under the fascist state of the Imperium, their lives grist for an endless war machine. The vast scale of human capability has led to the creation of dense hive cities, which are full of cartels, criminal organizations, highborn courts, cultist lairs, and crime scenes. Maledictum in particular is set in the Macharian Sector, on worlds less imperiled by the Great Rift that has torn the galaxy in two.

“Imperium Maledictum was a certain type of story we wanted to tell, which was very much from the Imperium-side point of view. It’s very heavily war inspired — lots of intrigue and investigations and betrayals. It’s a grim and treacherous adventure,” says Pádraig Murphy, senior producer on the Warhammer role-playing games at Cubicle 7, in a call with Polygon. The game is similar in vibe to Dan Abnett’s Inquisitor novels, the Warhammer Crime novel line, and the environments depicted in co-op shooter Warhammer 40,000: Darktide.

When you bring up Warhammer 40K as a setting, most people think of Space Marines, boltguns, and massive voidships traversing the nightmare extradimensional realm known as the Warp.