This sourcebook is inspired by my playthrough of Cubicle 7’s absurdly good Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 4e The Enemy Within. In all my life, very few things have ever brought me as much joy as the weird twists and turns of that ribald adventure and watching my players squirm and grow and fight and laugh and drink and commiserate and ultimately defeat me, their Changer of Ways. It is no overstatement to say that it is one of the best things we ever did and made the Great Nurglation of 2021 that much more tolerable.
Anyway, in the course of the game we ran upon a snag. After the events of Power Behind the Throne, we were waiting for the release of The Horned Rat and needed to kill some time. The months-long home-brewed episode that ensued was later known to my group as Middenheim Vice; a farcical caper through the City of the White Wolf fuelled by white powder. The reason for the name, in brief, ran thus: early on in the game, I mistakenly told my players that Ranald’s Delight (cocaine) was around 20% of its actual price and my players thereafter insisted it stay so because “it’s canon now” (fair enough). This was one of the best mistakes we ever stuck to because it was a crucial narrative that rang alongside the characters’ own personal lives and adventures and eventually led them to try to take over the entire drug trade of Ulric’s city by launching a coup against one of its Low Kings, The Big Cheese.
We talk about that episode fondly all the time, in particular because the city of Middenheim itself really came to life as we tramped along its homely streets. I had the help of the amazing sourcebook Middenheim: City of the White Wolf, we invented a bunch of locations and NPCs, and found vast corners of the map through the ingenious misadventures of a party who kept pushing for deeper, darker, weirder, funnier, and bloodier pastimes. By the time The Horned Rat came out, we all felt like we had actually lived in Middenheim. We had soundtracks for different locations, lighting cues, and my players developed a heartfelt fondness for certain pubs, sports, beers, mates, and even two goodly Skaven friends (shout out to Kakl Wartfur and Ratrick von Rattensberg).
Running a silly, violent, boozy, dingy, drugged-out, thoroughly weirdly Warhammer noir city crawler was such fun that when Imperium Maledictum came out, I decided to write a setting to see if I could port some of the magic of our Old World over to the grim darkness of the 41st Millennium. To that end, I decided to start writing Sethis in the hopes of making another city feel like home and to give others the same experience. Anyone who reads this sourcebook will see that I have borrowed liberally from the Old World and other fictional universes; this is a deliberate choice because this world should have vibes to suit any kind of session - as long as there’s a bit of Blood Red over the top (or Khorne Red as it is now known). I hope this sourcebook gives your party a real home and I encourage everyone to home-brew and expand it to their heart’s content.
Make your Middenheim.
Writing a hive world for 40k has one major advantage over Old World cities: with billions of people in one location, it’s basically impossible to map the whole thing. For this reason, I have subtitled Sethis “the Infinite System” and invite anyone and everyone to submit ideas and artworks that can expand Sethis, Omin, the moons, write quests, invent equipment, maladies, NPCs, and everything else that can bring this world to life. Should you wish to add something to the Administratum logs, just email [email protected].