Greetings, Deathwatch Fans!

Rites of Battle is the new, upcoming sourcebook for Deathwatch. This tome has a lot of great content for both players and Game Masters, a balance that the project team worked hard to achieve. For players, Rites of Battle has tons of exciting material, including a number of Advanced Specializations; new paths for your Deathwatch Space Marine to tread, from the mysterious Deathwatch Black Shield to the prestigious Deathwatch Champion.

The Advanced Specializations were created by Andy Chambers, and there’s a preview for one of these options found in Rites of Battle (the Deathwatch Chaplain) available on the Deathwatch Support Page.

Rites of Battle excerpt (pdf, 636 KB)

Watch Fortress Erioch

In addition, Andy also worked on a section of Rites of Battle aimed primarily at Game Masters; a detailed look at the “home base” for the Deathwatch in the Jericho Reach, a vast and enigmatic construction known as Watch Fortress Erioch. Below, Andy provides his perspective on this section of the book:

I was very lucky to get assigned some truly amazing sections for Rites of Battle. Most of them revolved around Watch Fortress Erioch and its inhabitants waaaay out in the Jericho Reach. The brief for the fortress itself was highly evocative - a gigantic, ancient place hanging in the wan light of a dead star, half forgotten by most but still faithfully manned by the grim and silent brethren of the Deathwatch. I drew additional inspiration from books like Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast and Lord Dunsany's In the Land of Time and Other Fantasy Tales. These feature vast, rambling fortresses and their equally rambling inhabitants and I wanted to evoke some of the same feel for Watch Fortress Erioch.

I wrote up several characters and locations for Watch Fortress Erioch, and adventure ideas for both that I thought would be fun to GM. I aimed to build up as much strangeness and intrigue as possible within the fortress itself so it wasn't merely a safe haven to run to between missions but a place with plenty of its own excitement and dangers. Probably my favourite section was the Xenos Bestiarium, a kind of alien zoo where all kinds of creatures are imprisoned, interrogated, tested and used for target practice by the Deathwatch. Several of its inhabitants are written up as characters with their own adventure seeds and a breakout of weird unknown aliens is always pending.

Beyond the fortress itself I also got to work with the other designers on creating new specializations for Deathwatch characters such as the highly anticipated Chaplain and Dreadnought. The latter might spoil your chances of pulling off a stealth mission but brings enough firepower that you probably won't care. We also introduced some new specializations unique to the Deathwatch itself, like the Watch Captain, Kill-Marine and Black Shields.

Thanks, Andy! Keep checking back for more on Rites of Battle, and look for on store shelves in the next few weeks!