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Might be the problem of: if they do their job right, you never hear anything about it. If they dont, well just skip right to the cultist uprising or rebellion, which of course will soon be crushed in the course of this next novel.

I love the bits of fluff, they are always described as well equipped enough for small wars even with tanks sometimes. I hope they will write some books about them when they wind down the HH and move on to new projects. Better pray to Tzeentch or the God-Emperor that all those HH resources arent poured into even more space marines battle novels. Expanding on some other things might be nice, especially arbites or maybe traitor guard/world against the imperium.

Compel wrote:One thing that they seem to point out fairly often is that most of the time, any 'arbites' in stories not actually about them aren't actually 'Adeptus Arbites' - they are just instead more elite planetary policemen.
Actual Adeptus Arbites only tend to be found on the slightly more important imperial worlds. - Trade route centres, capital worlds, that sort of thing.

I think you're close, but at least in regards to GW that wasn't what I recall reading - not sure if licensed products may deviate from this.
Rather, there are some Arbites on each and every Imperial world (even if only a hundred) ... but they don't busy themselves with day-to-day crime. In essence, they're like the Imperium's FBI, existing next to and outside the locally limited regular police forces.

Here is some fluff I copied from the Codex Imperialis ... and a short story from the same book accompanying the article.

Yeah I'd definitely like to see more Arbitrator stories. Maybe even a series about their origins

The Judge Dredd/40k connection goes a good bit deeper than just having some of the same studio employees

Rick Priestly- "When I wrote Rogue Trader I’d only just done the Judge Dredd RPG, which had involved sitting down for many long evenings with all the 2000ADs printed up until that time, so if something of that rubbed off it’s hardly surprising! We were all great fans of 2000AD and in the mid 80’s we had a license to produce games and models. We worked quite closely with some of the writers and artists at the time – I have vague recollections of us all meeting up in the Salutation Inn (which was the usual watering hole for the GW studio staff in those days).

I don’t think we missed anything out – certainly not deliberately! In the early days Citadel made figures for lots of current role-playing games as well as for LOTR and 2000AD under license. Part of the design brief was that we had to have rules in RT that enabled people to use all their collections. In the end players were asking us to make the things that we had put in to allow them to use the models they already had… ah well. The only reason I put Jokaero in was because we made a model Orang-utan in the 2000AD range (Dave the Mayor of Mega-City 1). "

I'm a big fan of the Arbites though, and I'm working on making up about 40 of them to use as Inquisitorial henchmen.

http://www.dakkadakka.com/dakkaforum/posts/list/508400.page

lol @ Jokaero

That design process explains a lot.

(also, cool idea @ Henchmen )

@Compel

One of the Cain novels had the Inquisitor lady once mentioning that at least a single Arbitrator oversees Imperial Law on any Imperial world. So, yes, while significant Arbites presence would be expected on key worlds, most would probably have a representative or a few enforcers to ensure Imperial Law is upheld.