Lex Ecclesiastica

Lex Ecclesiastica is a narrative tabletop RPG about the Adepta Sororitas on the far edges of the Imperium: women raised for war and worship, dropped into places where doctrine, survival, and human cost grind against each other.

You play a strike cell of Battle Sisters sent to purge heresy, investigate corruption, and impose the Emperor’s will across shrine worlds, hive slums, frontier stations, and half-ruined relic sites. On paper you are icons of faith in power armour. In practice you are exhausted, wounded, watched, and constantly forced to decide what obedience, mercy, and purity actually mean when everything is on fire.

The game is built on the Resistance system (in the lineage of Spire and Heart), focusing on stress, fallout, and consequences rather than hit points and turn order. Your characters are competent and deadly, but every success risks damage to their bodies, their faith, their standing with the Ecclesiarchy, or their souls. Character advancement and growth happens in Beats, specific actions and situations the players are encouraged to seek out and which illustrate the tripartite pull of dogmatic purity, compassionate humanity and brushes with heresy and corruption.

Lex Ecclesiastica is about:

• Faith that is real*, powerful and not always comforting.
• Authority that protects, crushes and compromises in equal measure.
• The lure of efficient yet nominally heretical solutions in a universe where "next week" is already suspect.
• Human beings trying to retain their humanity while being trained to become saints, martyrs or weapons.
• The Sisters of Battle being just fucking cool, man, but also being some of the Imperium's bluntest, most unsubtle and closed-minded zealots, almost completely lacking in independent thought.

Expect brutal firefights, quiet prayers in ruined chapels, tense political entanglements with priests and inquisitors, and the slow accumulation of scars—physical, spiritual, and political. Trad games for tactical simulation in the 41st millennium already exist (and I love Dark Heresy and Rogue Trader!) but for this game I wanted to built something more like a pressure cooker rather than something more wargamey. Lex Ecclesiastica is less about counting bullets, more about what it costs to pull the trigger.

In this game you'll find:

• Complete rules for roleplaying as Sisters of Battle
• Six complete classes: the groomed-for-leadership Canoness In Training, the fervently violent Sister Repentia, the unsettlingly cold torturer-healer Hospitaller, the elite Dominion fighter, the Sister Dialogous shaping material reality with words alone and the Reliquant at Arms anchoring her sisters through the power of holy relics
• Five Orders describing the background and overall disposition of each sister
• Rules for the holy wargear of the Adepta Sororitas
• A BUNCH of tables for quickly randomizing any given Mission, as well as ways to complicate it, introduce plot twists, establish characters in conflict with each other and describe the warp seeping through reality.

The game is provided totally free of charge, in due respect to Games Workshop's copyright policy regarding fan works. If you wish to support me, you can purchase a fully interactive Character Keeper for online play separately from the free PDF.

This is an unofficial, fan-made tabletop roleplaying game.

Warhammer 40,000, Warhammer, Games Workshop, and all associated names, logos, factions, characters, locations, and imagery are trademarks and/or copyrights of Games Workshop Limited.

This work is not affiliated with, endorsed, sponsored, or approved by Games Workshop. No challenge to Games Workshop’s intellectual property is intended.

This project is provided free of charge and is intended for personal, non-commercial use only.

*faith is real but miracles are psychic powers and I will not accept any arguing