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Like the subject says. It seems an obvious question but I don't remember anything that even hints at hit.

Of course an easy answer might be it depends.

There's the Holy Ordos of the Imperial Inquisition who have absolute power up to and including exterminus. They can call on Imperial battle fleets, armies, whole space marines chapters, they can carry out summary executions of nobles, generals and governors etc, etc, etc

I would say there's maybe a few thousand of them and they answer only to each other and the Emperor.

But that's not nearly enough to police the Imperium.

So there's more...

The Eccleistacy has Witch Hunters who do everything from burning whole colonies of mutants, finding minor psykers for the black ships, to reading through a bishop's sermons for hints of blasphemy. There's probably thousands of them on every world answering to the Cardinal. In theory they have the full authority of the church, in practice, it's a question of how much they can get away with.

The Adeptus Mech would have agents checking for Techno Heresy.

The IG have commissars who fill a similar role.

The Administrum has Inspectors General looking for malfesiance.

Arbites enforce Imperial-level laws on each world.

And so on, all of whom could be mistaken for Inquisitors since they have similar warrants and powers (though more limited).

And the Inquisition itself will have Interrogators who can have field commissions so they have some authority behind them as they do the leg work for the more senior Inquisitors. They might be allowed to call themselves Inquisitors, though they may not have the full planet-killing powers the name implies. A busy Inquisitor might have dozens of Interrogators running around acting in his name or calling on him when they get other their heads.

AND THEN you have local worlds. Governors have no interest in seeing their world eaten by demons and are almost as afraid of attracting Imperial attention. So their local security forces will have similar organizations trying to find and eliminate threats before the Imperium gets involved. So imagine there's the Necromunda Inquisition who operate below, alongside or against the Imperial Inquisition depending on the situation.

The advantage of this disorganized idea is it leaves a lot of room for stories. You can have people claiming to be Inquisitors but with much more limited (or no) authority. You have people answering to different masters who might be working together or at cross purposes. And it raises 'real' Inquisitors back up to the scary level while explaining how they possibly police millions of worlds each with thousands of cities.

How does that sound?

I agree with pretty much everything here.

Remember that each 'official' Inquisitor may have dozens, hundreds or even thousands of acolytes working for him (Coteaz is famous for this); varying from networks of 'informers' with no formal ID or authority, up to Interrogators with their own sigils of authority who might be trusted to lead a purge-mission on their own.

Taking your example of Necromunda, for instance, it's widely rumoured that the head of House Delaque works for the Inquisition.

There really aren't many inquisitors. The Codex: Inquisition suggests the minor Ordos are only a few hundred, a few thousand at most, whilst taking Dark Heresy as an example, the Calixis Sector (which is supposed to be a hotbed of heresy and shenanigans) has two hundred recognised Inquisitors operating out of the Tricorn fortress on the sector capital - meaning that even in a sector littered with cults and secrets, one Inquisitor per world is the most you ever really get.


And yes, pretty much any organisation will have its own 'police' of some kind.

A generic Imperial world will have Magistratum as 'local police', Arbites as 'federal police', and roving Confessors whipping up anti-mutant and anti-psyker lynch mobs at random intervals. I think Ecclesiarch Witch-Hunters are more 'enthusiastic amateurs' than a formal organisation - because giving them any officially recognised authority would risk tripping over the Decree Passive; given their job they can hardly help being 'men under arms'.




And yes, pushing actual inquisitors back into the shadows and up into the spires helps make them feel 'special'. I run a lot of Dark Heresy games, and the players (who are Inquisitorial Acolytes) get their limited resources and authorities passed on from other agents and contacts, with occasional sights of Explicators and Interrogators when serious things are occurring.

Nothing, in a game like that, causes the players to crap themselves like finding out that "The Inquisitor will be accompanying you personally" on this mission.

I'd think there would be more than a few thousand Inquisitors, but relatively few of them would be working independently like we see Eisinhorn and Ravenor. They seem fond of working in packs, so you'd have a particularly well known inquisitor have several less experienced inquisitors working under him. These groups would make up the bulk of the inquisition, investigating issues the independent inquisitors can't handle.

Also a pack as it where can police it self to some degree. Les sodds on someone going rougue when you have someone watching for the traitors within and without.

A pack under a senior lord seems to be a way they might prefer.
Elishorn with minimal oversight went, well, pretty far from his own orders rules. For a good while he was renegagde.

A thing that might cause a favour to a pack system under a senior member of group.

In the aspects of fluff we see, Inquisitors are seen as primary investigators into heresy, corruption, or treason. I think that makes it seem interesting.

In practice, I'd imagine that Inquisitors play the role of the watchers of the watchmen. Nearly anything Inquisitors investigate are also monitored by local and planetary police and security, Arbites, the ecclesiarachy, etc.as Kyoto mentioned. I would think that Inquistiors play two major roles: investigate where the primary watchers have themselves become corrupted or disabled, and to bring resources to bear on a problem that's expanded too far.

I mean, if you look at how the 40k universe is presented, it seems that if you looked hard enough at any given world, you'd find rogue psychers, heretics, chaos cults, genestealers, etc. The question becomes if the incidence is above background noise, and who is being affected.

I also imagine that the Inquisition generates an obscene amount of paperwork that needs to be tended to, but also is highly sensitive so you also need an Inquisitor to handle it. So maybe a lot of them get tied up in desk jobs so to speak for a large amount of the time. So you don't have all of them working in the field either.

"Inqusitor, that's the last of the cultists sir!"

"Excellent Acolyte. But this is going to be a major pain. Its gonna take me 18 months to file all the paperwork on this one, and 3 months extra just because of that blasted tome we found!"

You can also consider the different factions of the inquisition. Ordo Hereticus, Ordo Malleus and Ordo Xenos plus all the minor Ordos may increase those numbers a bit

 Grey Templar wrote:
I also imagine that the Inquisition generates an obscene amount of paperwork that needs to be tended to, but also is highly sensitive so you also need an Inquisitor to handle it. So maybe a lot of them get tied up in desk jobs so to speak for a large amount of the time. So you don't have all of them working in the field either.

"Inqusitor, that's the last of the cultists sir!"

"Excellent Acolyte. But this is going to be a major pain. Its gonna take me 18 months to file all the paperwork on this one, and 3 months extra just because of that blasted tome we found!"

Actually, I'd imagine that no answering to any higher authority means a lack of paperwork.

I'd view them less like cops, or even FBI agents, and more like superheroes, vigilantes. Batman doesn't file a report after breaking up a robbery, he just cracks some heads. Neither does an inquisitor.

 Polonius wrote:

 Grey Templar wrote:
I also imagine that the Inquisition generates an obscene amount of paperwork that needs to be tended to, but also is highly sensitive so you also need an Inquisitor to handle it. So maybe a lot of them get tied up in desk jobs so to speak for a large amount of the time. So you don't have all of them working in the field either.

"Inqusitor, that's the last of the cultists sir!"

"Excellent Acolyte. But this is going to be a major pain. Its gonna take me 18 months to file all the paperwork on this one, and 3 months extra just because of that blasted tome we found!"

Actually, I'd imagine that no answering to any higher authority means a lack of paperwork.

I'd view them less like cops, or even FBI agents, and more like superheroes, vigilantes. Batman doesn't file a report after breaking up a robbery, he just cracks some heads. Neither does an inquisitor.

They'll definitely generate paperwork. And they do answer to a higher authority, other Inquisitors. Proper paperwork would be essential, and the Eisinhorn and Ravenor books did show a fair bit of that.

Though you may be correct, the paperwork might not strictly be required, but I'll bet they do it anyway because good records are essential(though there will of course be edits and redactions, and most of it will just get stuffed in a storage facility somewhere and never get seen again).

No one may ever read it but the inquisition wants to know what its members are up to. The books show they do have some admin trail and they have to prove certain actions where justified to senior inquisitors.

 Polonius wrote:

 Grey Templar wrote:
I also imagine that the Inquisition generates an obscene amount of paperwork that needs to be tended to, but also is highly sensitive so you also need an Inquisitor to handle it. So maybe a lot of them get tied up in desk jobs so to speak for a large amount of the time. So you don't have all of them working in the field either.

"Inqusitor, that's the last of the cultists sir!"

"Excellent Acolyte. But this is going to be a major pain. Its gonna take me 18 months to file all the paperwork on this one, and 3 months extra just because of that blasted tome we found!"

Actually, I'd imagine that no answering to any higher authority means a lack of paperwork.

I'd view them less like cops, or even FBI agents, and more like superheroes, vigilantes. Batman doesn't file a report after breaking up a robbery, he just cracks some heads. Neither does an inquisitor.

There is an Ordo Minoris known as the Ordo Scriptorum . And their main job is cutting through as much Administratum red tape as possible, plus ensure that the amount of errors in data and communiques are kept to a minimum.


The Inquisition has to deal with it's share of bureaucracy as much as the other Adepta.

According to Rogue Trader, a typical Imperial sector is a cube roughly 200 lightyears on each side.

That means if divided equally, the entire galaxy would comprise 250,000 sectors.

So I think you're looking at several million full Inquisitors as a bare minimum.

The Imperium can best be described as a web of tiny "islands" in a vast expanse of wild space that they arbitrarily claimed are within their "borders". A million worlds is peanuts compared to the Milky Way. So the actual amount of sectors is probably a lot smaller than that.

 TheCustomLime wrote:
The Imperium can best be described as a web of tiny "islands" in a vast expanse of wild space that they arbitrarily claimed are within their "borders". A million worlds is peanuts compared to the Milky Way. So the actual amount of sectors is probably a lot smaller than that.

No, it doesn't matter how many worlds are inhabited inside it: a sector is a unit of space. Inside every sector there are numerous wilderness zones, unexplored regions, xeno empires, etc. A sector may be 99% uninhabited star systems but it's still a sector.

You are both correct, sort of.

The Imperium has not mapped out the entire galaxy, there are still large areas which are unknown(and thus not sectors). However, every area they have mapped does contain sectors. Some may only have a single Imperial world, others may have thousands. My conservative guess is that the Imperium has 10% of the Milky Way mapped out with sectors and occupied with Imperial worlds. So roughly 25,000 sectors, ranging from single world sectors to sectors teeming with thousands of inhabited worlds.

This was in the codex harlequins.
Shows the locations of some of those sectors

Ah, so Sectors are more partitions of a map than they are groupings of worlds. Got it.

 TheCustomLime wrote:
Ah, so Sectors are more partitions of a map than they are groupings of worlds. Got it.

Yup, subsectors are groupings of worlds, sectors are just a grid on the galactic map.

 Grey Templar wrote:
You are both correct, sort of.

The Imperium has not mapped out the entire galaxy, there are still large areas which are unknown(and thus not sectors). However, every area they have mapped does contain sectors. Some may only have a single Imperial world, others may have thousands. My conservative guess is that the Imperium has 10% of the Milky Way mapped out with sectors and occupied with Imperial worlds. So roughly 25,000 sectors, ranging from single world sectors to sectors teeming with thousands of inhabited worlds.

Do you have a source for this? I've never heard of a single-world sector. And it seems that if 90% of the galaxy is unmapped, the Imperium may not even be the largest empire for all we know.

They are and they aren't. There are more Ork worlds in the galaxy than Human ones, but the Orks aren't a unified political body, so cannot claim to be the biggest empire in space. The Eldar don't have an empire any more, the Dark Eldar don't live in reality, the Tau Empire is tiny, the Necron Empire is quite large, but shattered, and Tyranids don't hold territory.

Xenoesis wrote:

 Grey Templar wrote:
You are both correct, sort of.

The Imperium has not mapped out the entire galaxy, there are still large areas which are unknown(and thus not sectors). However, every area they have mapped does contain sectors. Some may only have a single Imperial world, others may have thousands. My conservative guess is that the Imperium has 10% of the Milky Way mapped out with sectors and occupied with Imperial worlds. So roughly 25,000 sectors, ranging from single world sectors to sectors teeming with thousands of inhabited worlds.

Do you have a source for this? I've never heard of a single-world sector. And it seems that if 90% of the galaxy is unmapped, the Imperium may not even be the largest empire for all we know.

By mapped out I mean completely explored and occupied. There will be areas they have explored but aren't occupied because its enemy territory.

We do know the Imperium is the largest entity in the galaxy because the fluff says it is. If anything occupied more territory it would have been discovered by now.

As for single world sector, go to Lexicanum and search Sector and look at the list of known sectors. I believe a couple of them are only 1-2 worlds.

 oldravenman3025 wrote:

 Polonius wrote:

 Grey Templar wrote:
I also imagine that the Inquisition generates an obscene amount of paperwork that needs to be tended to, but also is highly sensitive so you also need an Inquisitor to handle it. So maybe a lot of them get tied up in desk jobs so to speak for a large amount of the time. So you don't have all of them working in the field either.

"Inqusitor, that's the last of the cultists sir!"

"Excellent Acolyte. But this is going to be a major pain. Its gonna take me 18 months to file all the paperwork on this one, and 3 months extra just because of that blasted tome we found!"

Actually, I'd imagine that no answering to any higher authority means a lack of paperwork.

I'd view them less like cops, or even FBI agents, and more like superheroes, vigilantes. Batman doesn't file a report after breaking up a robbery, he just cracks some heads. Neither does an inquisitor.

There is an Ordo Minoris known as the Ordo Scriptorum . And their main job is cutting through as much Administratum red tape as possible, plus ensure that the amount of errors in data and communiques are kept to a minimum.


The Inquisition has to deal with it's share of bureaucracy as much as the other Adepta.

I could see an Inquisitor who, utterly sick of paperwork and perhaps suffers from constant migraines and carpal tunnel, regularly turns in stacks of black paper with a little note attached stating something along the lines of:

"Hey, I decided to save the interns the trouble of going through the paperwork so I took the liberty of redacting the necessary details myself. Signed Inquisitor Harry Torino"

I don't think there are that many Inquisitors within the 40k universe. They're definitely rarer than space marines.

There must be some inquisitors who mainly do paperwork as their methods of research and investigation. Silent rooms with thousands of scribes reading statistics over shipment manifests, census data and tithes to look for anomalies.

"Sir Interrogator. Second degree tome-reader Olexa at table 455 have noticed a 6% increase the Atkins systems import of compact foodstuffs with a potential storage time over 50 years. This trend is ongoing since 987.M41 and is not matched by a decrease in any other import of foodstuff. Third degree scribe Inox has matched this with anomalies in their tithes, where the metallic density of ore delivered have dropped from 4.1% to 3.6% since the last census at 982.M41. And most importantly: import of devotional artwork and educational texts regarding the Emperor (blessedbehisholysoulforeveralightinthedarkness) have decreased by roughly 1.8% per year running for at least three decades!"

The Inquisition is not any of the above forces. The Imperium is split into 2 branches, with the Emperor as Head of State and God. All power comes from him. On one of these branches is the Adeptus Terra and the High Lords, everyone underneath them. From therenit branches out. Everyone reports to the organisation above them (Chapter Masters the exception with power beyond that), and each man reporting to someone else all the way up to the High Lords.

The Inquisition is the other branch. They have unlimited power because they are the Right Arm of the Emperor and they speak with His voice. The difference between them and the other orgs listed is that the Inquisition don't have a jurisdiction or to answer to anyone but each other, and only on a political scale for 90% of the time. An Arbite needs permission of the Adeptus Terra, the Ad Mech need to sanction a tech retrieval mission and they all report to someone. An Inquisitor turns up and has total authority and only a much higher Inquisitor can overturn him, and usually don't. Furthermore, a Witch Hunter of the Ecclesiarchy can only hunt witches and do witchhunter things. On the other hand, a Hereticus Inquisitior, while taking special personal interest in witches and heretics, is equally able to switch focus to Daemons, Aliens or other Ordos. They have unlimited power, they are His voice

Paperwork is an interesting point (someone posting from work I guess ) and superheroes are a good model to think about.

Reports and notes are probably optional. Batman keeps obsessive notes so that if something happens to him Nightwing, Robin, Oracle etc can take over for him. Wolverine is more the wander around and stab people sort of guy.

So some Inquisitors will have scribes following them around recording their every utterance and forwarding copies to every Inquisition stronghold in the sector. Others will be secretive allowing only blind servants whose tongues have been cut out.

Suffice to say, it varies.

But most if not all would be swamped with forward looking information. Sorting through the mountain of intel coming in to determine is this graffiti that kind of looks like an 8 pointed star warrants:
Repainting the wall
Sending investigators
Sending the 23rd Cadian Rifles
Sending the Grey Knights
EXERMINUS

and doing that 100 times a day and always doing it right.

Mellon wrote:
There must be some inquisitors who mainly do paperwork as their methods of research and investigation. Silent rooms with thousands of scribes reading statistics over shipment manifests, census data and tithes to look for anomalies.

"Sir Interrogator. Second degree tome-reader Olexa at table 455 have noticed a 6% increase the Atkins systems import of compact foodstuffs with a potential storage time over 50 years. This trend is ongoing since 987.M41 and is not matched by a decrease in any other import of foodstuff. Third degree scribe Inox has matched this with anomalies in their tithes, where the metallic density of ore delivered have dropped from 4.1% to 3.6% since the last census at 982.M41. And most importantly: import of devotional artwork and educational texts regarding the Emperor (blessedbehisholysoulforeveralightinthedarkness) have decreased by roughly 1.8% per year running for at least three decades!"

Well, there are probably a lot of Adeptus Terra scribes passing this kind of information to the Inquisition - it's probably a standard part of Schola Progenum training actually, to recognise worrying data trends and pass them on to the appropriate authorities.

I imagine the Inquisition to be like the Gestapo of ww2.

The Imperium relies upon exaggerations of their numbers and ability, relying on its citizens to notify them of threats - though most of them are just petty disputes about over grown hedges or arguments over rations.

When you can pull Intel from the highest lords to lowest precint in a hive world or local priest who has a agreement to pass on info for a fee. A world has billions of intelligence sources they could use.

Inquisitor can pull so much info. Its a large force multiplier that can make them very dangerous enemies even without ultimate power.

Mellon wrote:
There must be some inquisitors who mainly do paperwork as their methods of research and investigation. Silent rooms with thousands of scribes reading statistics over shipment manifests, census data and tithes to look for anomalies.

"Sir Interrogator. Second degree tome-reader Olexa at table 455 have noticed a 6% increase the Atkins systems import of compact foodstuffs with a potential storage time over 50 years. This trend is ongoing since 987.M41 and is not matched by a decrease in any other import of foodstuff. Third degree scribe Inox has matched this with anomalies in their tithes, where the metallic density of ore delivered have dropped from 4.1% to 3.6% since the last census at 982.M41. And most importantly: import of devotional artwork and educational texts regarding the Emperor (blessedbehisholysoulforeveralightinthedarkness) have decreased by roughly 1.8% per year running for at least three decades!"

Very much so. 'Finding' the crimes that matter against the background noise of the Imperium is something of an art form.
If you've seen Dredd, I imagine an Inquisitor testing a potential Interrogator in a similar way:

"Acolyte, this is a hive of fourteen billion souls. More violent crimes occur per second than there are seconds in the day. What do you investigate?"