An Inquisitor uncovers an alien plot to break into the Emperor’s palace on Terra. He pulls together other Inquisitors, psykers and Navigators, and they stop it. Somewhere along the way he gets to look at a detailed plan of the Imperial Palace. The plan is destroyed straight away. He might still remember part of it, so the Officio Assassinorum is sent to kill him and anyone who tries to help him.
That story is in Rogue Trader, the 1987 rulebook, or at least that’s where Lexicanum sources it. I’ve never owned a copy. It’s thirty-nine years old, a few years older than I am, and it’s been rattling round my head since this morning’s Sunday Preview, because Games Workshop is about to sell a map of the Imperial Palace to anyone who gets to the checkout quickly enough.
It’s in the Limited Edition of Codex: Adeptus Custodes. The listing reads like someone emptied the Custodes’ sock drawer into a box: a gilded faux leather hardback, a little metal Custodian vexilla, a lapel pin, ten dice in a hinged wooden dice vault, six art prints, the full Custodes Command Pack, and “an A2-sized cloth map of the Imperial Palace.” It’s only available while stocks last. The Codex goes up for pre-order next week alongside the Aquilon Terminators, Gyrfalcons, Telemon and Pallas.
What the Imperial Palace map actually shows
Not much yet, because the only picture is one 1,000-pixel product shot with a dice box parked on top of the interesting bit. I’ve spent an embarrassing part of my Sunday zoomed in on it anyway.
There’s a parchment cartouche in the corner titled The Imperial Palace, with a line under it that seems to begin “Being a cartographic representation of the most holy domains” before the resolution gives up. The map is done in a mottled grey-green, like an old aerial photo left in the damp. Two labels are legible, just. One ends in “Administratum” and another starts “The V”, with “Orbital” underneath it. My guess is the Nexus Administrata and the Vigilatum Orbital Battery. Lexicanum sources both names to the 2017 Custodes codex, the one that came out with Guilliman’s return, and that book had a double-page Palace spread. I think. I remember the aerial look more than the labels, and I’ve gone through two boxes in the loft without finding my mate’s copy that I definitely never gave back.
The codex itself has a page open in the same shot, headed Seat of the Imperium, which I also can’t read. So what you’re getting is probably the codex’s own map at poster size, printed on fabric so it can live on a wall or a table.
The Imperial Palace is supposed to be unmappable
GW’s own lore keeps saying this, which is why the product made me laugh. The 2017 codex (again via Lexicanum) says the Palace’s vaults, corridors, plazas and chambers are so numerous that no single record remains to list them all. Its sub-levels go hundreds of miles down into the rock. Its spaceports poke out of the atmosphere. The people living inside the walls, the serf tribes and clan holdings, could populate whole star systems.
The Golden Throne is worse. White Dwarf #519’s piece on the Sanctum Imperialis says no blueprints, specifications or maintenance rituals survive for the Throne, so the Mechanicus maintain it by guesswork and prayer. The throne room is almost four miles long and half a mile high, and WD says some of the Throne’s faults are already beyond the Mechanicus to repair.
So the setting has three positions on Palace maps. They don’t exist. If one does exist, it gets burned. If you’ve seen one, the Assassins come for you. And from next week, the Custodes codex has one folded up in the box, next to the dice.
The Custodes are also exactly who you’d expect to have one, and I’ve been going back and forth on this all afternoon. If any group in the Imperium keeps a floor plan, it’s the ten thousand guys who’ve paced every corridor of the Inner Palace for ten millennia. Maybe the map belongs in their codex precisely because they’re the only ones allowed to own it… except the Rogue Trader Inquisitor was on the Emperor’s side too, and look where that got him. I keep landing back on the funny reading, and I still want one.
Four decades of naming the Imperial Palace one gate at a time
When WarCom previewed the Saturnine boxed set back in 2022, it wrote that the Palace “has been hinted at in illustrations and text over nearly four decades” while authors and artists “wrestled with the overwhelming majesty” of the thing. That’s fair. The article was promoting a cinematic where Malcador looks out over the Palace from a tower balcony.
The Siege of Terra novels provided most of those pieces. That’s where the Palace stopped being “a big castle with a gold chair in it” and became real geography. The Lion’s Gate spaceport. The Eternity Wall. The Gorgon Bar, which was a civilian gate until Dorn reinforced it and renamed it for the Siege. The Palatine Arc, a posh Administratum district that the Death Guard gassed until the defenders started calling it Poxville. The Bhab Bastion, where Dorn ran the defence. Lexicanum even cites a map from the Saturnine limited edition for some of these locations, and that edition was capped at 2,500 copies, so most of us never saw it either.
Being an Imperial Fists player, I have a soft spot for the bits of the Palace that are missing on purpose. Dorn had the Annapurna Gate taken out ahead of the Siege. It was famous for its craftsmanship, which to Dorn probably just meant more joins to put a melta charge in. The Lion’s Gate is named for two enormous lion statues he had removed to make room for guns. He cut the Celestial Citadel, a spire that reached past the atmosphere, down to a few hundred metres so it sat under the void shields. My Fists’ primarch spent the Heresy editing the Palace with a crowbar, and I’d love to know whether the new map marks where the lions used to stand.
The M41 Palace has its own additions. There’s a causeway called the Avenue of Eternal Remembrance, about 100 kilometres long, built from the wrecks of Chaos Titans from the Siege, and it leads up to the Eternity Gate. Debris fell on the Palace during the War of the Beast. The Eldar raided it at some point. In the Indomitus era the Khornate hordes that came through the Rift got close enough that Guilliman turned them back short of the Eternity Gate. I’d bet a fair amount that the Avenue is on the cloth map somewhere, since it’s the one road in the Palace built for showing off.
The night I read about the Mars rover
When Saturnine came out I did the thing you shouldn’t do on a work night. I opened the Lexicanum page for the Lion’s Gate at about half ten, just to check where the Gorgon Bar was in relation to it. Then the Colossi Gate. Then the Aurum Bar, which is somehow a different fortress from the Aurum Gard. Then Blackstone Prison, a psyker jail built from Cadian blackstone, which got me onto Cadia, which got me onto the pylons, which is its own three-hour hole. By two in the morning I was on the Hall of Victories, a private museum in the Sanctum where, according to Gav Thorpe’s Deliverance Lost, the Emperor keeps a shard of the first clay pot, a circuit board from the first warp drive, and a Mars rover. An actual NASA rover. I assume it’s Pathfinder’s Sojourner, since that’s the page Lexicanum links to.
I got up for the school run on four hours’ sleep and spent the morning telling a spreadsheet about the rover.
So yeah. A map. Cloth. A2, which is, what, bigger than a Combat Patrol board is wide? No, smaller. It’s about the size of a big poster. I don’t know why I thought that was a gaming mat. Point is, GW gave us all those names over forty-odd years and we’ve been building the Palace in our heads, and I’m curious how close mine gets. Mine has the rover in it, for a start.
Where does a Palace map even go?
I asked Pete this afternoon whether he’d bother, and he said he’d hang it over his Salamanders cabinet. He’s never owned a Custodian in his life, he just likes things in frames. He’ll have that map up by Wednesday, and I’ll still have a grey Land Raider on my desk that’s been grey since the Space Marines Limited Edition went up.
I’m a bit wary of Limited Editions after that one, if I’m honest. Last Saturday I saw it sitting behind the counter at my local store with a “RESERVED” post-it on the shrinkwrap and someone’s name on it in biro. It had been there for a week. I found that sadder than I should have.
If you’re a Custodes player, the map is the thing in this box with lore weight behind it. It’s GW committing to where things sit in a building its own fiction says can’t be charted, and I’d like to know where the Hall of Victories ended up. For the Heresy-side background on the Palace’s guardians, I went through the Judgement of Valdor last month, and the Siege of Terra overview covers the fighting that turned half those place names into ruins.
If I do get one, it’s going inside the lid of my paint station. The lid’s about A3, so it’ll need folding once, and knowing my luck the crease will run straight through the Sanctum Imperialis.
