Imperial Armour: Volume Four - The Anphelion Project review

Forge World's Tau supplement by Tony Cottrell and Warwick Kinrade

by Dave McAwesome

Imperial Armour: Volume Four - The Anphelion Project review is, in some ways, the most ambitious yet in the series. At 173 pages, it comes no where near The Taros Campaign in shear size, but the tale of the Anphelion Incident is executed in a clever and gripping manner. The Taros Campaign detailed an entire war. The Imperium pitched whole regiments at its enemy. At Beta Anphelion IV, a small moon orbiting a gas giant, the battles are smaller and more intimate. They often take place in close quarters or in dense, tangled jungles. Gone are the open desert plains of Taros.

Anphelion moon is the site of highly classified research experiments to study Tyranid genes...and you know nothing could possibly go wrong with something like that, right? The base goes dark. An Inquisitor leads a military expedition to find out what happened. All hell breaks loose. You know the drill.

From page 37: "Cowards die many times, the brave die but once."

In Volume Three, Warwick Kinrade used the third person omniscient perspective to tell the story. It was largely impartial and clinical--a history textbook account, as it were. For The Anphelion Project, Kinrade relies largely on Inquisitorial Reports. The portions of narrative text are generally framed from the Imperial perspective with occasional jumps back to the omniscient to see what the alien Tyranid are up to. The result, particularly from the Inquisitorial Reports, is a claustrophobic and grim outlook on the overall mission. It's quite effective. It's so successful, in fact, that the twist at the end carries an added weight of macabre bleakness.

We must remember, of course, that the main thrust of the book is as a rules supplement. Volume Four focuses on the major Tyranid forces and variants. We see winged Tyranid warriors, massive Trygons and horrifying Harridans. Ordo Xenos documents show each of the creatures in scale with a standard Imperial Guardsman. On the Imperial side, we have an Index Astartes entry for the Red Scorpions Chapter plus Elysian Drop Troop Veterans. Kindrade and Cottrell provide WH40K scenarios for all the major events in the Anphelion Incident. The Anphelion Base itself is detailed and Appendix IV includes floorplans of standard rooms, corridors and intersections for photocopy goodness, in case the Forge World models are out of your price range or on hold 'til the holidays.

For more details on Forge World and Imperial Armour: Volume Four - The Anphelion Project check out the Forge World Web site.