One of my favourite hero archetypes is Joan of Arc. Speaking of her as a figure of myth rather than history, she's the perfect mix of chivalrous honour, unstoppable willpower, pervasive charisma, and toxic fanaticism. As a fictional trope, dystopian heroism lets fans embrace success as its own ethic, while ignoring moral failure as an acceptable loss. In many ways, her myth is the very embodiment of Warhammer 40,000 itself, and if any Warhammer 40,000 faction embodies, in turn, the Joan of Arc mythos, it's the Adepta Sororitas. I recently bought a box of Battle Sisters miniatures, and the codex that defines them, and this is my review of that book.
Before talking specifics though, it's worth explaining what a Codex is in Warhammer 40,000.
In Warhammer, a codex is a subset of rules and lore for a specific faction. A codex contains the in-world history of the faction, as well as the game specifications ("datasheets") for the plastic miniatures you use to play the game.
If you're buying the Adepta Sororitas Codex for the rules, then this book is absolutely worth the cover price.
If you're buying it for the lore, then this book is also a good buy. Only 43 pages out of 120 pages are lore, so this book qualifies as an overview. It neatly summarises a lot of what you'll glean from Black Library novels and other sources, but it adds in a lot of specifics about characters and orders you might have missed.
Even if you don't use the datasheets for a game, they do at least give numbers to the relative strengths of different battle units and vehicles and so on. In other words, even datasheets can be lore when you look at them through a sufficiently geeky lens.
This is the 10th edition of the game, and fortunately the game world's lore doesn't change that much between editions.
If you already basically know what the Adepta Sororitas are, then you basically know much of the lore from this book.
However, there's a difference between knowing that the army is "women in power armour" and understanding why Saint Celestine has wings (and why she's a saint, for that matter), and why some of the women are in warsuits, and why still others are driving penitent engines.
The devil holy light of the Emperor is in the details.
Included within the 43 pages of lore is an overview of the faction's history, beginning with a group of women now known as the Matriarchs (which admittedly I knew nothing about, despite having read several books featuring Adepta Sororitas.) This is followed by a thorough explanation of the different ranks and units within the army, from repentia to canoness. There's a 2-page spread showing the organizational chart, and a feature page each on Morvenn Vahl, Saint Celestine, Ephrael Stern and Kyganil, and Junith Eruita. Then there's a good 10 pages on the different orders within the Adepta Sororitas, both militant and non-militant.
In addition to that, there are a few 2-page short stories about Adepta Sororitas scattered throughout, which makes for great reading and makes the whole book feel like a White Dwarf.
The book also features 8 pages of photography so you can see what a painted miniature is meant to look like. When you buy a Warhammer 40,000 miniature, you get some great shots of what it's supposed to look like after painting, but this photo spread has a few alternative colour schemes, additional detail, and some pretty stunning atmosphere.
In fact, the photos are so evocative that you have to wonder whether the photos are meant to help guide your painting or just reinforce your imagination while you're playing games of 40k. None of my battlefields look half as impressive as the ones in this book, but if I look at this book before playing I can pretend they are.
At this point, the rules section of the codex begins.
The first rules section is for a Combat Patrol army list. I don't know that Combat Patrol works exactly like Games Workshop intended for it to work, and that's in part because Games Workshop seems to enjoy swapping out what comes in a Combat Patrol box.
The true power of Combat Patrol isn't the Combat Patrol product line, but the idea that a small and easy army build ought to exist. In practice, what I've found is that a Combat Patrol provides fun detachment rules and stratagems for an army. I approximate an army list inspired by a Combat Patrol and play it, and it usually works well enough.
In short, Warhammer 40,000 has too many rules, and I think Games Workshop overthinks what makes an army unique. However, they've designed a beautifully modular system with Warhammer 40,000 10th Edtion, and I'm happy for Combat Patrol to be an avenue for rules to overlay onto an army list. That's basically how army building ought to work, in my opinion. You build an army with the miniatures you own (because most people don't own literally all miniatures), and then you select a few cards with special rules for your army. Easy and fun, and Combat Patrol and detachments make it possible.
The next rules section are detachment rules. Each detachment boosts a specific attribute of an Adepta Sororitas army. The detachments aren't equally useful for every army build. In real life, assuming you don't have endless finances and space, the troops you deploy probably depends on what you own rather than on the rules you like the most. For example, if you happen to have a bunch of Penitent (or are keen to buy some), then you'll likely appreciate the Penitent Host detachment, and if you don't then you won't.
Then again, the thing about detachments is that they're just rules written down. If you really like the idea of a Penitent Host detachment, then you can just decide that your Battle Sisters Squad units have the Penitent keyword, and use the detachment anyway. It might tip the scales of theoretical balance, but you play a few games, observe how the battles go, and adjust as needed. I do it all the time with my Adeptus Mechanicus codex, and it works a treat.
Because I always complain about how hard it is to tell one weapon from another in Warhammer 40,000, I feel like I have to specifically praise page 108 and 109. This 2-page spread features pictures of many of the weapons available in Adepta Sororitas kits so you can start to learn what your Battle Sisters are wielding.
Is it everything? Not strictly. I don't know what the difference between a Condemnor Boltgun and a Boltgun is because there's only a picture of a boltgun. But once I started building my Battle Sisters Squad, I discovered that a boltgun is considered a Condemnor Boltgun when it is wielded by the Sister Superiour. In other words, in terms of modeling it's not the look of the gun but who carries it that boosts its profile. As long as I remember to paint that boltgun different to the other boltguns as a visual reminder to myself, the weapons in this army seem pretty manageable.
In other words, I think understanding the nuances of weaponry in Warhammer 40,000 is definitely an acquired skill. I don't know why Games Workshop doesn't provide better guidance on this. They ought to explain to new players what to consider when building models. Don't build Skitarii Vanguards with Galvanic Rifles, and also this is what a Galvanic Rifle is. That would have been hugely helpful to me, back when I was just starting out.
I basically only play "narrative" games, so the Crusade section is one of the big selling points of a codex for me. My friends and I don't tend to use all the Crusade rules available, but I definitely use the ones that work in our games. Battle Traits and Battle Scars are one of the most fun mechanics Crusade has to offer, so I track that diligently throughout a campaign. I sometimes use faction-specific rules, and sometimes ignore them.
For Adepta Sororitas, the faction minigame is the Trials of a Saint. It's a way for you to track a character model's progress, giving her a chance at sainthood or martyrdom. It's not a very complex subsystem, and I anticipate I'll use it in some Crusade.
The Crusade sections of the codices have been good so far, in my experience, and I'm happy with this one, as with all the others I've read.
The main mechanic that sets Adepta Sororitas apart from other factions is Miracle Dice. These are pre-determined dice rolls that you can choose to use for rolls you feel are important. It's a powerful mechanic that Games Workshop has had to adjust several times, but it's undeniably fun. Battle Sisters are relatively powerful, and in some ways I'm a little annoyed that Battle Sisters often hit on 3+ while my cyborg martian tech-priests only hit on 4+. Warhammer 40,000 is a weird rule system, but it's a lot of fun. If you want to field a bunch of Joan of Arcs in the dystopian far future, Adepta Sororitas is the answer, the light, and the way.