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System: Elumanie

Galactic Position: Cloudburst Sector, Celeste Subsector

System Overlord: None

Planets: Eight, all uninhabitable

Planet Elumanie 5
Satellite: Moon – Lossos

Tropospheric Composition: Nitrogen 88%, Carbon Dioxide 12%

Religion: N/A

Government Type: Astra Militarum

Planetary Governor: N/A

Adept Presence: Adeptus Astra Telepathica

Climate: Thin, dry gasses, uneven ground, no tectonics

Geography: Lossos is a barren, stable rock, with what once was a network of mining tunnels

Gravity: Lossos has .42 Terran Gravity

Economy: Gelt Thrones and Silver Thrones

Principle Exports: Watch Components, Nitrogenous Gasses, Carbon Nanofibres
Principle Imports: Food, Soldiers

Countries and Continents: N/A

Military: Celestial Guard, Inquisitorial Stormtrooper Detachment

Contact with Other Worlds: None yet

Tithe Grade: [REDACTED]

Population: 200 humans, unknown number of xenos

Description:
Lossos was once a world of productive mining.  A peaceful, if boring, life of mining, harvesting, and processing was once all the people who lived here, descendants of a former Arbites prison colony, had to look forward to on Lossos.

That changed, when the Space Hulk Predator slammed into the world in M41.999.  The Hulk, a five-kilometer-wide agglomeration of several wrecked starships and small asteroids, fell from the heavens and flattened a small Imperial mining camp.  Hours later, the shockwave blew the walls off buildings around the tiny globe.  Panicked Astropathic signals for evacuation followed minutes after.

When Astra Militarum Search and Rescue teams arrived eight weeks later, when the message finally arrived at Celeste, they reported the Hulk was surprisingly intact, and appeared uncontaminated.  However, the only active electronic signal on the planet came from a mining truck radio, four kilometers from the impact crater.  All contact was subsequently lost with the Search and Rescue team, despite orbital cameras making it clear that they were still active and moving on the surface below, looking for survivors.  There was no response, no matter how often the ship in orbit hailed them.

Next to arrive was the Inquisition, responding to the Navy request for aid.  Inquisitor Afiram Proterr of Celeste, an Ordo Xenos Inquisitor of 80 years’ experience, led his force of 400 Stormtroopers and 9 Throne Agents down to the world below.  They were approached first by a pair of starved-looking Techpriests, who begged on bent knees for food and shelter.  Proterr promptly shot them both and searched them, and what he found confirmed his worst fears.  Both men had been implanted with Genestealer nerve bundles.  His Stormtroopers prepared a defensive perimeter, but it was far too late.  Mining trucks and Guard vehicles surged to life all around them, driving towards the Stormtroopers with murderous intent.  The jig was up, and the bundle-implanted Guard and miners slaughtered over half of Proterr’s men before the canny Inquisitor managed to evacuate his surviving Stormtroopers into the Hulk.

Inside, they encountered something worse.  Thousands of Genestealers sat in biostasis in the hold of one of the freighters.  The shock of the crash had awakened their steward organisms, but it would only be a matter of time before the horde outside came to awaken the one inside.

The surviving Genestealers and Implants outside mustered for a suicide charge.  They needed only to kill the landed Imperials or reach their slumbering kin to escape, since one of the freshly implanted Guardsmen was a pilot.  The hive mind drove them on, into the teeth of the surviving troops’ Hellguns.  Hundreds of miners and Guards died in minutes, their souls freed of the Hive taint.

Still, numbers proved telling, and the surviving Stormtroopers were forced back, deeper into the Hulk.  At last, Proterr realized what needed to be done.  The Stormtroopers formed a cordon around him as he knelt and dedicated his soul to the Emperor.  Abruptly, the Genestealers nearest him stumbled and fell, their minds wracked with toxic confusion – Proterr had used his mighty Warp powers to sever their link to the Hive Mind for precious seconds.  His Stormtroopers surged out into the corridors of the Hulk, desperately killing the aliens and their thralls.  This included their own, whom had been taken by the beasts.

After ten torturous minutes, the Genestealers had been pushed back out of the Hulk, and run headlong into the arms of the 150 troops Proterr had been smart enough to station at his landing site.  Pincered and unled, the surviving Genestealers and Implants were cut down in moments.

Proterr did not survive his sacrifice.  Now bereft of their Inquisitor, the surviving Stormtroopers rallied behind Throne Agent Illaten, his apprentice.  Illaten has frantically requested any reinforcements the Sector Conclave can send, to cordon off the Hulk and kill the remaining Genestealers.  What Illaten did not know is that several Stormtroopers who survived the final battle were already infested, and though they cannot break away from their guard duties to enter the Hulk and awaken their masters, a few creative accidents may be enough of a distraction to allow them to slip into the vast Hulk, unnoticed.


Xerxes Mark IV Naval platform: Thunderhead

Thunderhead Station is more than a template-copied Imperial Navy way-station.  Though externally identical to so many of its kind, Thunderhead is also the nexus of several crucial civilian merchant routes, and the closest Naval platform to Drimmerzole, Triune, and Coriolis.  Therefore, it is not only responsible for hosting the huge Imperial Creed missionary population needed to convert and tend to the two Feudal Worlds, but also sending supply ships and troop barques to the vast fortresses of Coriolis.  As a result, although its external defenses are no larger or heavier than those of an upgraded Battlecruiser, its internal spaces have been given over almost entirely to personnel and food storage.

The station’s external guns include several Weapons Batteries, a trio of Grand Cruiser-strength Lance Batteries, and several Attack Craft bays.  As with all Xerxes IVs, it also contains a variety of small refit bays, for vessels of Endurance class or smaller.  Internally, nearly everything that doesn’t serve the purpose of moving absurdly large amounts of people and cargo is gone.  Medical bays and recreation halls replaced luxury suites; barracks replaced fighter hangars, and even some of Thunderhead’s ammunition storage made way for refrigerated storage chambers.  To compensate for the slight loss in defensive capability, a larger-than-average number of Defense Monitors and a trio of Vipers were assigned to the station’s perimeter patrols, more than enough to bolster its protection.

Inside, the station is a warren of cabins, bays, and corridors.  Air recyclers chug and protein resolidifiers churn, and the business of housing tens of thousands of visitors goes on.  The Navy provosts and enlisted men who crew the huge station dislike the fact that the Guard and Ecclesiarchy have control over as much of the station as they do.  The vast metal construction is theoretically under total Navy control; however, the Ecclesiarchy has been ceded authority over one deck to serve as a community chapel of sorts.  Whole kilometer-long compartments ring with hymns and bellowed preaching.  Alms cups sit side by side for hundreds of meters, all ignored by the thousands of peasant pilgrims, Frateris Militia, and Ecclesiarchial Missionaries on their way to places far distant.  Adeptus Arbites watch over the whole procession, staring from under their identical masks, ready for any sign of lawbreaking.

At the theoretical peak of the capacity of the station, Thunderhead could support three million temporary passengers.  In practice, there are never more than eight hundred thousand at the most, and more commonly four hundred thousand.  Whole decks occasionally sit empty.  In the least-used decks, permanent residences have popped up like fungi.  These little slabs of metal and polymer are simple affairs, and house all sorts of indigent or runaway Imperial citizens.  Some may be people tithed up to fight for the Imperium’s wars; others are members of the Ecclesiarchy who were summoned to serve as Missionaries to tribes that were wiped out in the interim.  Some are less wholesome, like smugglers or tithe evaders.  The most common, however, are what local Arbites refer to with disgust as ‘dropouts.’  These sad souls, from over two dozen worlds and stations at least, number in the low thousands.  They are peasants and pressedmen, convicts and pilgrims, but each has two things in common: they cannot leave the station, and they would like nothing more than to leave at once and never come back.

The first dropouts were members of the crew of the Gaunt Lights, an Ecclesiarchy pilgrim ship from Hapster.  According to them, they had nothing in common at first, but all awoke one morning to find that they had been exposed to knockout gas, then rounded up to serve as crew for an Ecclesiarchy vessel.  This, as most of them knew, was both flagrantly illegal in the spirit of the Decree Ecclesiarch Passive, and crippling to Hapster’s economy, which is so tightly bound to its population and industry.  When the pressed citizens demanded that they be returned to their homes at once, the Archbishop of the Gaunt Lights calmly informed them that they were already in the Warp, and their alternatives were either to serve the Emperor or walk back home on foot.

With no choice, the pressedmen turned to the arduous labor of serving in the massive cathedral-ship, flying to Thunderhead on their way to the Feral and Feudal worlds of the sector.  As soon as the vessel docked on Thunderhead, however, they rose up as one, strangling their Ministorum owners and escaping en masse into the depths of the station.  When the Arbites, shocked by what appeared to be a simultaneous mass mutiny and mass evacuation, tried to corral the fleeing pressedmen, they were swamped and instantly overrun by the thousands of panicked ship crewers.  The Archbishop escaped a bloody death by seconds, leaping into a shuttle and flying directly to the Naval controller office of the station.  He then demanded that Naval Provosts and Arbitrators round up his wayward flock.  The pressedmen, however, had reached the vast staging areas for the Imperial Guard contingent of the station, and hurriedly explained what had happened.
Outraged and appalled by both the remorselessly illegal conduct of the Archbishop and the utter disregard the Archbishop had shown for Hapster, Colonel Regatz of the Celestial Guard 9th Heavy Rifles stormed his entire force into the docking area of the Gaunt Lights.  He demanded that the Archbishop present himself for punishment, or face the immediate capture and impoundment of his ship.  Meanwhile, the Arbitrator Senioris of the Arbites detachment the pressedmen had overrun on their way to the Guard was howling for blood; he ordered the entire Arbites contingent of the station to gear up for a massacre.

Left with three competing, bloodthirsty groups all demanding that he side with them, Navy Commander William Somerset commanded that the Guard, Ecclesiarchy, and Arbites stand down at once.  By sealing all of the vacuum-tight doors near the three groups, he was able to force them to halt their advances.  Addressing them over the station’s general public address system, he commanded Colonel Regatz, Arbitrator Senioris Vanamonde, and Archbishop Clement to report to his personal conference room at once, as well as a speaker for the pressedmen.

Once all parties were assembled, glaring daggers at each other over finger food and amasec, Somerset instructed each to tell their story in turn.  He listened patiently as Clement described the urgent and all-consuming need to move as many folk as possible to the Feudal worlds of the sector, and the need to save the souls of the heathens.  Next, he listened to the spokesman of the pressedmen, a construction foreman named Wallace Lornsby, who described his abduction in heart-wrenching terms.  Next came Arbitrator Vanamonde, who coldly laid out the penalty for killing an Arbitrator as one panicked pressedman had, and the costs of the various law and military works the stampede had interrupted.  Finally, he heard Colonel Regatz point out that the Guard was obligated to protect Imperial citizens from mass abduction by aliens; surely protecting them from criminals wearing Bishop’s hats was not so terribly different?

In the end, Somerset made his decision.  To the horror of Lornsby and suppressed delight of Clement and Vanamonde, he began by saying that he agreed with the lawman, saying that the unneeded death of an Arbitrator was tragic and that a demand for justice was totally fair.
He then turned to Regatz, and criticized his own decision.  Storming a sovereign ship of the Ecclesiarchy was well beyond his remit.  It would have been more appropriate to simply contact him, and notify him of an emergency.
However, he continued, the Archbishop was in violation of the spirit and letter of the Decree Passive, and responsible for both problems arising in the first place.  He instructed the Archbishop arrested, and instructed that the pressedmen were to produce the person responsible for killing the Arbitrator for punishment.  Until that time, the pressedmen were not to report for service on any vessel.

As the sputtering Archbishop was marched off by Provosts, and Colonel Regatz returned to his regiment, Lornsby pointed out the obvious flaw in the order.  Nobody knew which pressedman had been the one who had slain the Arbitrator, since it had happened in a panicked onrush.  Somerset, who had had entirely enough of the affair and simply wanted it over and done with, said that that was their problem.  No pressedman was to leave the station until a guilty party was identified.  The Gaunt Lights was to be given an emergency Navy crew and flown to Jodhclan’s Paradise, until a more law-abiding Archbishop could be found to command it.

Months later, the dropouts, protected by Naval law from Arbites brutality, had uncomfortably settled into an unused deck of Thunderhead.  Eighty years later, all of the original parties are long dead, but remain bound by the Navy’s ironclad demand for a guilty party to be found.  The ranks of the dropouts have swollen with similar escapees from the decadent and untrustworthy Jodhclan Ecclesiarchy, along with thousands of others who have escaped Imperial impressment.  That, or they simply do not want to be found.  So long as the Arbites maintain a bitter watch over the dropouts’ ranks, there is no leaving the station for them, no matter why they are there or how long they’ve been trapped.  There are bounty heads with local contracts, men drummed out of military service but undeserving of execution, descendants of the original pressedmen, and more.  These pitiful louts form the core of the station’s long-term population.  Commander Somerset has long since perished, and the time may someday come that either the Arbites or the Navy lose patience with the indigents and evict them.

Other residents of the station are less criminal in nature.  The families of lifer Navy personnel, they tend to be the operators of the various living facilities on the vast station.  They serve as maids, janitors, cooks, decorators, and even guides to help people navigate the largely identical galleries and docks of the station.  Others are families of long Imperial Navy tradition, who send their children off to earn officer commissions, then return to help run Thunderhead’s operations.

Thunderhead has a history of violence.  The station has come under attack four times in the past eight hundred years alone, each time from Ork raiders looking for a quick score after spending their teef at Gorkypark.  Time and again, the greenskins sweep in from the rapids of Vasari’s Cruelty and assault the Imperial station, and each time, the brutal creatures inflict savage battle on the Imperial defenders.  The concentration of Arbites, Navy, Guard, and Ecclesiarchy personnel present make it a tough target to attack and a harder one to destroy or board, however, and there are always ships ready to fight in its defense.  Twice, the Orks actually managed to board the station with their ramshackle boarding craft, and both times, vast groups of Imperial Guard staging there on their way to Coriolis drove them off.  Unable to field their vehicles inside a space station, the Guard would instead use the huge vacuum containment and atmospheric control plates the station employs to seal off damaged parts of the station.  The huge blast-proofed shields, usually used to block off compartments that had been exposed to vacuum, can be lowered to half-deployment, and used as excellent cover by the Guard.  When Orks drew close enough to vault the half-lowered doors and fight in hand-to-hand, the Guard would simply close the doors and vent all atmosphere on the other side, then reset the trap once the pounding stopped.

Only once, over two thousand years ago, was Thunderhead at any real risk of permanent loss to the Imperium.  That threat came not from Orks, but the perfidious Dark Eldar.  Night-black ships, shaped like needles and as fast as Fury fighters despite being eighty times the size, slid in from above the plane of the system and assaulted the Imperial station with a cold rage that caught the Navy off-guard.  Most of the defense ring platforms and ships of the station were too far away to make a difference, while the rest were quickly silenced with precision xeno weaponry.  The hull of the station ruptured in a hundred places, spilling thousands of hapless Guardsmen and Naval crew into the void.  Tiny ships swooped around, collecting the flailing victims, while hundreds more pierced the hull and landed inside the station.  With a speed and total silence that unnerved the defenders, the Dark Eldar invaders ripped their way through bulkheads, capturing thousands of prisoners.  A prize team made their way to the control office and shut down internal fire suppression and security systems, while squads of Grotesques tied up the Arbites and Navy garrison response.
After an hour of total chaos, the entire Eldar attack group abruptly retreated, even though the Naval reinforcements had been another hour away.  The aliens disappeared as suddenly as they had arrived, leaving twisted bodies and burning wreckage in their wake.
Though publicly claiming victory, the Navy was baffled.  Why had the Dark Eldar even bothered attacking them in the first place?  Had they been seeking something other than slaves?  For that matter, where had they come from?  Two years of frantic rebuilding and exploration followed, but even after Thunderhead was brought up to full readiness, the Inquisition still had no idea why the Dark Eldar had attacked them, and were quite certain that there were no Webway gates nearby.  That meant the Dark Eldar either had a completely stealth-cloaked Gate nearby large enough to transport a while raider fleet, which even the Dark Eldar would find pricy to attack one space station, or that they had arrived in the Materium somewhere else and flown there manually.  That seemed even less likely, given the huge risk that all Dark Eldar face while stuck in either realspace or Warp flight.  To this day, the Inquisition remains in the dark as to the slavers’ intention.


System: Drimmerzole

Galactic Position: Cloudburst Sector, Maskos Subsector

System Overlord: Grand Duke Emmanuel Voss

Planets: Two, one inhabitable

Feudal world: Drimmerzole Secundus
Satellite: Moon – Elcyros

Tropospheric Composition: Drimmerzole has Nitrogen 77%, Oxygen 20%, Krypton 2.5%, Water 1%, Carbon Dioxide 0.05%; Elcyros has no atmosphere

Religion: Imperial Cult

Government Type: Local Peerage

Planetary Governor: Yes

Adept Presence: Adeptus Ministorum, Adeptus Astra Telepathica, Adeptus Mechanicus, Administratum Tithe Collectors

Climate: Drimmerzole Secundus has lengthy grasslands, broken by low mountains and long rivers, with frequent light rain and the occasional catastrophic tornado.

Geography: Drimmerzole is smaller than Terra and has little tectonic activity, having 72.9 million mi² of surface; Elcyros is a barren, non-tectonic rock of little interest

Gravity: Drimmerzole has Terran Gravity

Economy: Local Gelt

Principle Exports: Antibiotics, Textiles, Sand, Salt, Oil
Principle Imports: Red Meat, Carbon Fuels, Laser Weapons, Processed Alloys, Agricultural Technology

Countries and Continents: Drimmerzole has nine continents, each connected by secret subsurface tunnels maintained by Mechanicus volunteers for emergency defense use.  The world is further subdivided by a massive peerage of local nobles.

Military: Drimmerzole Scarp-wrights (feudal PDF and brainwashed Guard)

Contact with Other Worlds: Minimal and purely economic

Tithe Grade: Solutio Prima

Population: 21,500,600

Description:
Drimmerzole is a small world, in terms of both its physical size and the role it plays in the sector.  Although it has deposits of gold, salt, and oil, which make it at least profitable to exploit for a colony, it is of no travel or strategic value beyond that.  The world is ruled over by roughly two thousand Dukes of the local peering, with the Imperial System Overlord serving as the Grand Duke.  Although elevation to this position is contingent on Adeptus Terra approval, ducal positions are not.  The peerage system is vicious, with lesser nobles competing to be the most successful, so that they can enjoy the patronage of the nearest Dukes.  Each Duke is allowed to raise some household defensive troops, equipped with black powder weapons.  The Imperial Governor alone may raise lasgun-equipped troops, and these are technically restrained from engaging in local political disputes.  Given that the incumbent Grand Duke detests his colleagues, and wouldn't allow himself to be involved in their petty squabbles if held at gunpoint to do so, it seems like an unlikely possibility.

In case of Glasian invasion, the main continents are connected by nine tunnels, all bored in secret by the Mechanicus.  These tunnels are where the Scarp-wrights, the Imperial Guard inductees, are trained and brainwashed into the service of the Imperium.  Here, they train in air-cycled underground chambers, overseen by bellowing Astra Militarum Drill Instructors and Commissarial Cadets from the Celeste Grand Scholam Progenium.  The brainwashed serfs and peasants are seen as a low-risk first assignment for these new Instructors and disciplinarians.

The planet raises Imperial Guard regiments from the ducal armies, though generally only to engage threats in neighboring inhabited systems.  Regiments favor infantry and rough riders, both biological and mounted on all-terrain vehicles.  The local Ecclesiarchy often assigns Chaplains from the populations of larger worlds in the sector, to prevent political ties.  This rises above habit and becomes law with the assignment of other Adepts.  Service in any Adeptus Terra or Commissarial duty in the system is forbidden outright for people born in the system, or their descendants for three generations.  The contempt the Grand Duke feels for his peers, the distance between Drimmerzole and any other Imperial system, and the harsh rules against local employment for Adepts add up to a situation in which the population and supreme government want nothing to do with each other, which suits the only real winners of that affair: the merchant houses.

Vast farms, operated by a mixture of servitors and serfs and owned by one of five Cloudburst Mercantile Noble Houses, grow the rare Red Lilac flower for interplanetary sale.  Too delicate to be harvested by combine, but too short-lived to be harvested by hand, the serfs instead use great slashing machetes and scythes, made of Mechanicus carbon steel and lethal in close quarters.  Baskets made of local wicker and freezers provided by Cognomen, in exchange for small cuts of the flowers’ profit, store the plants.  Once harvested and dried in very low temperatures, the flowers’ unique proteins can be rendered loose from the flower husks and made into a dazzlingly effective antibiotic; one that is effective against all known Human-pathogenic gram-positive bacteria.  Useful for trauma hospitals, military Field Chirurgia, and augmetic implantation clinics, this antibiotic (formally called P-n-benzene-triarsenolysitide and informally called Petals) is worth ten times its weight in platinum, and every flower collected is wrung clean of its protein before being mulched.  Despite the backbreaking labor and monotonous life of harvesting, the position of a Harvest Serf is actually sought-after by many Drimmerzole peasants.  This is thanks to its quite high-paying compensation, the free medical care its holders receive, and a hard exemption from all military levies by anybody short of the Sector Overlord himself.

The other major advantage of living and working on the huge farms is the view.  Red Lilac (which is only distantly derived from the ancient Terran plant of the same name, thanks to an error in a Diaspora seed ship) grows best in wet, elevated terrain with clay-thin soil, and therefore only grows on Drimmerzole’s picturesque mountain plateaus.  From the plateaus, workers can gaze down on the petty, squabbling Dukes, Counts, Earls, Barons, Lords, and other well-to-do, and reflect on how it sucks to be them, before returning to a life of picking flowers.


Drimmerzole’s single moon is, if it’s even possible, less interesting.  Having nothing more remarkable than the local Mechanicus command post and a single Defense Laser, the Techpriests here have made the best of their mind-numbingly boring post.  They work on large farms of servers and cogitators, sequencing the DNA of Drimmerzole plants and looking at the world through hand-made telescopes, having essentially nothing else to do.  Rarely, however, a priest will actually request assignment to the Elcyros station, as it does provide excellent meditative opportunities for those who best contemplate the Omnissiah in the absence of complex work.


System: Clegran

Galactic Position: Cloudburst Sector, Nauphry Subsector

System Overlord: None

Planets: Five, one inhabitable

Civilized World: Clegran Tertius

Satelites: None

Tropospheric Composition: Nitrogen 78%, Oxygen 21%, Krypton .2%, Water .7%, Carbon Dioxide 0.01%

Religion: Imperial Cult

Government Type: Local Kingdoms

Planetary Governor: No

Adept Presence: Adeptus Ministorum, Adeptus Astra Telepathica, Adeptus Mechanicus, Adeptus Administratum, Adeptus Arbites

Climate: Broad, wet bands of thick clouds, punctuated by snowstorms and occasional yearlong hot streaks at the extremes

Geography: 79.9 million mi² of surface and heavy plate tectonics

Gravity: 1.08 Terran Gravity

Economy: Gelt Thrones and Silver Thrones

Principle Exports: Clay, Boron, Imperial Guardsmen
Principle Imports: Iron, Oil, Water Filters, Clothing and Shoes, Timber, Poultry, Ammunition, Weapons, Construction Equipment

Countries and Continents: Eleven local Kingdoms, all answering unofficially to the Minister of Industry for the Administratum.  Four continents.

Military: Clegran Hunters (medium quality PDF and Guard)

Contact with Other Worlds: Frequent, as an Imperial Guard staging world

Tithe Grade: Decuma Particular

Population: 1,209,290,000

Description:
This is the only habitable body in the system, or indeed for fifteen light years in any direction.  The planet is large as Terran worlds go, but it is resource-poor for its size.  Though it has enough soil and water for its agricultural needs, it does not have sufficient iron for most Imperial-style basic manufacturing, and little petrochemical resource.  It has no Imperial Governor, though the Minister of Industry holds the title de facto.
Clegran’s vast plains house millions of Imperial citizens in tightly packed cities, to shelter from the ripping wind.  Agriculture on the plains is difficult, to say the least.  The winds whip any usable minerals from the topsoil, thick plant roots hold scraggly grasses in place to resist the wind and must be cut through, and the high winds prevent any large river convergences except near the coasts.  Power is abundant despite the lack of oil, thanks to the wind turbines with which the planet has been gifted by the Mechanicus.  Additionally, the high tectonic activity of the planet allows for common geothermal taps, and the clear, windy sky easily accommodates solar panels.  Larger cities cannot be walled, and have their outer faces directed towards the wind; some large buildings make use of overlapping plates of synthetic rock and pressure-molded metal to prevent too much wind damage.  Some buildings go the opposite way, and make use of highly flexible materials for walls, with elastic cables carrying power and internal communications from floor to floor.

Outside the cities, there is some agriculture in the rich valleys that cut through the hardpack dirt and gritty plants.  Some valleys are shallower, with slower water movement, and tend to have rich soil along the banks.  Others are nearly vertical and very deep, cut by thin, fast rivers.  The former have some textile farming, but most employ grain and fruit vine farms.  The vertical valleys generally have no agriculture, and are instead left intact for their water supply.

Hereditary Kingdoms rule the continents, with each King serving as a combination regional governor and Internal Tithemaster.  Ecclesiarchial input for King selection is roundly ignored, though the Ministorum does preside over many other affairs of state and soul.  The Arbites have at least one full-size Precinct Fortress in every city, complete with Rhinos, combat Servitors, and even Leman Russ tanks.  This, plus the heavily centralized force of government in the Kingdoms, usually ensures a relatively low-crime environment despite the population density of the cities.

However, not all Imperial citizens on Clegran live in the cities.  In fact, tens of millions eke out a living in the great mountains at the higher latitudes of the planet, or in the wind-farms of the plains.  Additionally, there are dozens of military bases, including a landside Naval listening post connected to telescopes and sensor arrays in orbit.  Nomadic tribes of barbarians on the plains used to be common features, but these tribes have gradually moved to the cities as time goes by.

The Hunters are the Guard regiments of the Clegran system.  They largely base their designs, tactics, and techniques on Septiim, though at a far smaller scale.  They make use of both conscripts and volunteers.
The Clegran Hunters specialize in the use of plains-warfare tactics, with line-of-sight guns and tanks being their preferred combat platforms.  Flamers and plasma weapons are their favored non-conventional weapons.  However, the scavenger conditions of their cities make for an odd quirk in combat: the Clegran practice of collecting random weapons.  Clegran troops augment their wargear with whatever sanctified equipment they can find.  There is no pattern to this.  Clegran spotters may collect shotguns, an artillery crewer may take a liking to a sword, or a tank commander may affix a door breacher to his pistol.  Though permissible by the Mechanicus, many of their number find this trait annoying, as it could be interpreted as an affront to the Machine God and the forges that produced the perfectly serviceable gear the troops are normally issued.

Clegrans also have one common formation that the more generalized Septiim regiments lack: Rough Riders.  Whether on horseback or employing motorized mounts, Clegrans use a combination of Hotshot weapons and Explosive Lances to use while riding to corral enemies.  A particularly effective combination they have discovered is that of the Mobile Grenadier and the Waffen-Werfer, as it is nicknamed by Clegran Artillery Masters.  Small groups of Rough Riders with grenade launchers, rifle grenades, and flare guns encircle and harass enemy formations or fortresses, firing explosives and flares to mark the target and distract defenders, while spotters from the Mobile Artillery use those flares as target indicators for artillery batteries in the rear park.  Though this tactic is obviously more useful for nighttime bombardments, it is excellent for shattering enemy morale and forcing them to either relocate or hunker down - both of which would open them up to other approaches.  The Clegran artillery preferences trend towards mortars and rocket artillery, such as the Wyvern and Manticore batteries.

Clegrans avoid the use of paratroopers and gliders, but show surprising aptitude for trench and sapper war for a people of steppes and plateaus.  The great flats of their worlds, dotted with close-built cities and threadbare industry, breed Clegrans tough and stocky, and more than able to hold their own in pits and trenches, perhaps somewhat less than Kreigers or Catachans.  The venerable and battle-honored First Clegran Hunter Regiment has the rarest of prizes for a frontier planet: a Stormhammer Super-Heavy Assault Tank.  Outfitted with the massive Stormhammer Cannon with coaxial multilaser, two Battle Cannons, six sponson multilasers, a pintle-mount heavy stubber, three hunter-killer missiles, and a fore-firing Lascannon, the tank is configured like those of the Solar Auxilia armies of old, and is outfitted specifically to engage and destroy huge Ork mobz.  The regiment is currently leading the charge against the sudden Ork invasion of Oglith, where they are in the van of over two hundred other regiments from across the Sector and beyond.


System: Fathon

Galactic Position: Cloudburst Sector, Delving Subsector

System Overlord: None

Planets: Four, one habitable

Feral World: Fathon Prime

Satelites: None

Tropospheric Composition: Nitrogen 73%, Oxygen 25%, Argon 1%, Water 1%, Carbon gasses .01%

Religion: Holy Emperor Star Cult

Government Type: Primitive

Planetary Governor: Yes

Adept Presence: Adeptus Administratum, Adeptus Ministorum, Adeptus Mechanicus

Climate: Fathon Prime is an arboreal paradise, with polar ice caps and vast oceans

Geography: .9 times the size of Terra, with only one large continent taking up one quarter of the surface of the planet, and two floating ice caps, seasonally present

Gravity: .83 Terra gravity

Economy: None

Principle Exports: None
Principle Imports: Weapons, Luxury Items, Cogitator Parts

Countries and Continents: One continent, no nations to speak of

Military: Celestial Guard barracks

Contact with Other Worlds: Almost none

Tithe Grade: Aptus Non

Population: 7,000,000

Description:
Fathon Prime is a curious combination of historical mistake and the Emperor’s luck.  Once, well over nine thousand years ago, the world was a resort and getaway world for members of the Imperial Army and Flotilla.  A single, tiny city held sway over the world’s vast, awe-inspiring forests; peace and tranquility reigned over the world.
Then Horus claimed ambitions above his station, and all hell broke loose.
The world declared for the Warmaster, to the resounding indifference of all Imperial authorities of note.  Cut off from Terra by the Ruinstorm and deep in Heretic territory, Fathon accomplished nothing of note in that time.  A few thousand residents volunteered for Horus’ militaries, but in seven years, the Heresy was over, the Scouring began, and Fathon Prime was overlooked by the reprisal fleets.  Fathon cut off all ties to the greater galaxy and went dark, hoping to be forgotten by the Imperium.

Nine thousand years later, Cloudburst Explorators found the planet in a state of barbarism.  All technology or knowledge of the greater world was long gone from the degenerated minds of the few hundred thousand surviving humans on the planet.  The wrecked shell of their city had dissolved to scrap and sand; all knowledge of the Heresy, or indeed other planets at all, had long been forgotten.  The Ministorum, unaware of the world’s history, began the laborious process of converting the locals to the Imperial Cult.
The Inquisition, however, was able to discover the world’s true roots from the extensive records of tax and tithe income from the Crusade, which of course predate the Ecclesiarchy substantially.  To this day, a small cell of Ordo Hereticus spies operate from a concealed bunker on the planet’s equator, using psychic screening and an occasional population infiltrator to keep an eye on the planet for any signs of recidivism, even as the world slowly crawls back towards proper technological integration into the Imperium.  A small militia of Celestial Guard keeps watch on the world from high orbit, along with the planet’s few administrators, who stave off terminal ennui by spending all their money on imported luxuries.  The Glasians have not yet targeted the world.  If they do, evacuation will be the planet’s only recourse, as there is no way to defend it.


System: Remenanos

Galactic Position: Cloudburst Sector, Delving Subsector

System Overlord: Overlady Santher Liminiel 3rd

Planets: 4, 2 habitable (1 uncolonized)

Mining World: Underbar

Satelites: One moon, uninhabitable

Tropospheric Composition: Nitrogen 77%, Oxygen 2%, Water 1%, Carbon gasses 20%

Religion: Imperial Cult

Government Type: Adeptus Terra

Planetary Governor: No

Adept Presence: Adeptus Administratum, Adeptus Ministorum, Adeptus Mechanicus, Adeptus Arbites

Climate: Boiling hot, dangerous metal gas storms

Geography: 1.4 times the size of Terra, with five continents and a slurry of metallic oceans

Gravity: 1.15 Terra gravity

Economy: Gelt Thrones and Silver Thrones

Principle Exports: Stone, Iron, Manganese, Copper, Xenon, Uranium, Promethium, Salt, Zinc, Tungsten, Gravel, Nitrogen, Mercury, Cesium, Gallium, Bromide
Principle Imports: Food, Luxuries, Nickel, Paper, Air Filters, Clothes

Countries and Continents: One continent

Military: Celestial Guard barracks

Contact with Other Worlds: Frequent

Tithe Grade: Exactis Tertius

Population: 2,000,000 humans; 900,000 servitors

Description:
Underbar is a gleaming ball of silver in the black void of space.  Toxic, dangerous, lightly defended, and utterly inimical to life, Underbar remains a prize for the Imperium.  Its oceans are a mixture of metal, bromine, and horrifically polluted water.  Its air is a morass of nitrogen, carbon, and metal molecules, and it has no native life.  The Imperium, however, has aggressively colonized the world, and uses mighty Mechanicus machines to extract the precious elements from the glittering oceans.
The history of Underbar is unremarkable.  Mechanicus Explorator Dammelvine discovered it in M41.201, and promptly wrote it off as a potential fourth-string mining site.  It was only after a coincidental visit by a Chartered Captain performing a routine navigation check that what Dammelvine had thought to be rock formations were actually pools of liquid metal, floating under skies of carbon gas and nitrogen-filled storm clouds.
The Mechanicus ordered the phenomenon investigated, and soon enough, the world was categorized for a colony.  Shortly thereafter, the problems of such a colony became clear.  Though filtering the air is not so hard, the incredibly corrosive and hot oceans of liquid metal eat through the aluminum hulls of typical Mechanicus ocean mining barges.  This, combined with the relatively small infrastructure for permanent support of industrially demanding colonies outside the immediate area of Cognomen, made the colony unsustainable for the Mechanicus alone.  Free chartered merchant houses began competing for mining rights, which the Mechanicus stubbornly refused to give up.

Eventually, a compromise was reached with the Administratum.  The labor forces and funding for the colony would come from Thimble, while the special alloy-hulled mining equipment needed to harvest the precious metals of the world would come from the Mechanicus.  Though most labor here is compelled, because of Thimble’s vigorous crime rate and the need to do something with the convicts, there is a core of specialized, well-trained, and very well paid professional miners on the planet.  These veteran workers direct the convicts, operate the great mineral separators, and if need be, fill the first seats on the evacuation lifters when waves in the metal seas threaten to capsize the vast processing stations that float over those same seas.
As the world is unable to spare what little manpower it has, Underbar does not raise Imperial Guard forces.  However, the vast volume of rare metals it produces entitles it to a small, permanent garrison of Celestial Guard.  Additionally, overused convicts can always be returned to employment as Servitors elsewhere on the planet.

There is another planet in the Remananos system that could potentially be colonized.  It is a planet of steep, alpine mountains and churning oceans.  With only a few decades of work by the Mechanicus, it could be rendered a viable human colony.  However, the Mechanicus presently has far larger concerns on its hands, and there are no attempts to build a colony underway until after the next Glasian Migration.

Warp Storm: Hell’s Vortex, Nauphry Subsector
An apt name if ever there was one, Hell’s Vortex is speculated by Imperial Ordo Malleus experts to be the reason that the Dark God Tzeentch – ever obsessed with prophecy and foretelling – had originally focused their attention on Cloudburst, before the pleasant diversion of the Glasians came along.  This relatively small but non-navigable Warp Storm centers around a binary star system that orbits in the opposite direction of the galaxy’s spin.  The binary stars, however, are nearly invisible behind a dense cloud of radioactive gas and Warp-stuff that constantly spews from inside the roiling Warp Rift between the two stars.  There, like batteries feeding a dynamo, stellar material streams from the surfaces of the two stars in perfect symmetry, and disappear into the Rift.  What lies on the other side, none know for sure.  What matters to the Imperium and Chaos, however, is the effect of the gasses.
When the first Imperial Rogue Traders and Explorators flew into the region, many thousands of years ago, Hell’s Vortex was much larger, in both physical dimensions and total energetic discharge.  Mechanicus Astral Savants suspect this to be the result of the stars shrinking.  Easily mistaken for a black hole at a distance, it is only at the very edge of the Storm that the true, barely-comprehensible horror of the Vortex becomes clear.
Anomalous behavior of time-space near Warp Storms is quite common.  Near Hadex, for instance, ships may suddenly corrode as if oxidizing in an atmosphere like that where their raw materials are mined.  Near van Goethe’s Rapidity, ships suddenly move faster.  Near the Damocles Veil, time slows, and people may even stop aging temporarily while in Warp-flight.  Hell’s Vortex, however, is so far the only Warp Storm known to the Imperium where time actually flows backwards, and in quantifiable amounts.  Experiments carried out by the Ordo Chronos and Ordo Thanatos established this after tests carried out in M41.007.
To confirm their suspicions of the nature of the Vortex, subjects were chosen from a convenient Penal Legion.  Subjects were strapped to life-support machines and given a simple series of numbers and colors to memorize.  Their memories were then erased completely, and they were shown a new set of colors and numbers.  The subjects were then flung into the Storm in surplus Lightning Fighters.  When the Lightnings returned from the other side of the storm, some years later, their ships were stripped clean of all paint, as if the metal of their hulls had aged backwards.  More shockingly, the surviving test subjects were all much younger than they had been, and remembered no sequences of colors and numbers.  Some did not even remember committing crimes against the Emperor worthy of sentencing to a Penal Legion.  Three fighters simply disappeared.
When the results of these tests were relayed to the Sector Conclave in orbit about Maskos, however, the true horror of the Vortex manifested.  As the Inquisitors Chronos in charge of the experiment regaled the outcomes of the test to the listening audience of Inquisitors, the Inquisitors Thanatos that had accompanied them activated pict-screens on the walls of the audience chamber.  Displayed on the walls, the Inquisitors present saw the contents of three vaults that had stayed unopened in the guts of the station for as long as any living Inquisitor had been aware.  The vaults contained the three missing Lightning Fighters, perfectly intact.  Inside their cockpits, the Inquisitors saw the remains of the three missing Legionnaires, their faces twisted into expressions of animal terror.
The Thanatos Inquisitors present then explained that the three fighters had been found, drifting through space some half light-year from the edge of the Vortex, by Inquisitor Berlenstein of the Ordo Malleus, over four thousand years ago, while pursuing a group of Khornate pirates.  Berlenstein saw, after taking the fighters aboard, that they had come from the far future, and had given them over to the Ordo Thanatos to establish how this could be possible.  The fighters had stayed in the Ordo Thanatos’ care, until a hunch had led to their secret transfer to the Maskos station after its construction.

There was nothing left to discuss.  The Conclave immediately set about the business of declaring the entire Warp Storm as Perdita Aeternus, and the Ordos Chronos and Thanatos destroyed what remained of the experimental equipment and Penal Legion.  What the Ordo Thanatos elected not to share with the greater Conclave Cloudburst is that only one thousand years later, a full Ecclesiarchial flotilla emerged from the same Warp Storm.  All of the people aboard, including five Ordo Hereticus Inquisitors, wore the garments of the Ecclesiarchial Palace of Celeste, numbering over four hundred thousand souls total.  Though the Ordo Thanatos concerns itself with life and death, they interpreted this to mean that the Ecclesiarchy would someday send a fleet – itself a violation of the Decree Passive – into the Warp Storm, apparently with the cooperation of the Ordo Hereticus, in an attempt to turn back time.  Quite how the Ordos Chronos and Astra would have allowed this is unknown, as is why the ships have extensive battle-scars on their broadsides, but not their engine blocks or armored prows.  All eighteen ships and their contents were disposed of in a nearby black hole, to prevent time paradoxes, after the Ordo Thanatos had surreptitiously downloaded the contents of the ships’ cogitators, which they have kept guarded and unread ever since.

As to what Hell’s Vortex actually is, nobody knows.  Eldar Corsairs in the region suspect it to be a damaged Webway Self-repair Ward Nexus.  If this is true, then the Inquisition has significantly underestimated the regional damage Hell’s Vortex could cause.  After all, the portions of the Webway made by the Old Ones had extensive magical self-repair wards, of greater complexity than the Eldar ever managed to duplicate.  The Eldar and Old Ones both knew how to displace stars into the Webway, however, and if what the Hell’s Vortex storm represents is what the Eldar suspect, then what is visible from the outside of the Storm is the opposite of what is actually happening.  Sometime soon, the Eldar predict, the buildup of stellar matter in the system, as a result of stellar material being ejected from a self-repairing section of the Webway, will result in a nova that will destroy both stars, and leave a permanent Webway portal in its place, at the heart of a radioactive Warp storm.  Whether these Eldar Corsairs are aware of the lost Ecclesiarchy fleet or not is unclear, and only adds to the Ordos Chronos and Thanatos concern.  The other issue is that it is not clear if the light being emitted from within the cloud is the product of reversed time flow, or if it is depicting things as they happen, which does not simplify things.

There is another possibility, which has occurred to neither Eldar nor Imperial military.  It is possible that the Warp Rift that birthed this chrono-displacement is not a product of the Webway, but the remains of a Warp Gate, like the Maw-Jericho Gate in the Segmentum Obscurus, and it is siphoning stellar material to repair itself.  If this is the case, however, it is of little benefit to the Warp-faring races of the galaxy, because the heat and radiation from the stars is more than enough to boil any ship that gets close.


Asteroid Cluster: Disaster, Thimble Subsector
Perhaps the name of the asteroid cluster came from the bad luck story that it hosted, or perhaps it was just a portent.  Either way, Disaster is a well-covered-up story of greed triumphing over self-preservation.
In M39.873, shortly after the formal declaration of the neighboring Celeste Subsector, a small convoy of Imperial ships crossed the Disaster area.  Consisting of four Explorator ships from Cognomen and one Rogue Trader ship from what is now known as Brotherhood, these five ships sought out unknown technology.  The Explorators and the Trader had a mutually beneficial arrangement in place.  Whenever caches of technology popped up in the path of the flotilla, the Explorators would pick it over for any signs of Omnissiah-blessed technology, while leaving the xenos junk for the Rogue Trader.  The Trader, in turn, would dispose of anything too heretical to be sold in the Imperium, while keeping a few choice trinkets for sale.  For a time, this worked well.  However, one day, while examining the remains of an unknown alien freighter, the Explorators discarded the remains of what they concluded was an alien robot.  The Rogue Trader, hungry for wealth, did not discard the machine, as they should have done.  The Trader kept it instead, and came to admire its beauty, its perfect proportions, and its clearly advanced nature.  Over time, the Trader came to hold more and more xenos relics.  The crew of the vessel noticed nothing, concerned as they were simply working and staying alive, and did not notice as they slowly lost their minds.  Over time, the power locked away in the robot spread through the ship.
Eventually, on a trip back to Disaster, the Explorators and Rogue Trader were met by an Inquisitor from the Ordo Malleus.  The Inquisitor, he proclaimed, had read a message from the Emperor in the Tarot.  He insisted on boarding each ship in turn, looking for what he sternly promised would be ‘immediately, obviously visible Warpcrimes.’
The Explorators blustered, but ultimately could not refuse.  One by one, the Inquisitor boarded each Explorator ship, declaring each in turn to be uncontaminated.  When the time came for the Inquisitor to board the Trader ship, however, the vessel stopped responding to all hails.  The Inquisitor demanded boarding.  Again, they were refused.  The Inquisitor finally forced their way in with a Melta torpedo.  The Inquisitor’s shuttle departed again, only forty seconds later, and commanded the Explorators to cast the ship into a nearby star.
The Explorators refused, shocked at the proceedings.  The Inquisitor transmitted two images to the lead Explorator, who commanded that the ships of the flotilla cast the ship into a nearby star.  Coming from one of their own, the order was obeyed at once.  After the vessel had been disabled and flung into a nearby white dwarf, the Inquisitor revealed that the entire crew had been replaced with unholy monsters.  The cameras on the hull of the ship he had flown through the Melta hole had shown crew members fused to each other’s bodies, pulsing with sick fluids, wrapped in metal cables and flailing in delight at scenes of carnal hell enacted on each other, and worse.  The Rogue Trader, the Inquisitor said grimly, had been infected with a Slaneeshi daemon’s powers, and sold their entire ship to Chaos.
Sickened, the Explorators related the tale of the smashed robot.  This left the Inquisitor with a tough choice.  The Explorators, after all, had managed to miss a daemon outbreak in their own flotilla, but had done so while doing their own jobs.  They had disposed of the robot, after all, and the Rogue Trader had had no obligation or order to collect it.  The Explorators, they argued, had missed something they should have caught, because they were just working that hard on their real job.
The Inquisitor eventually decided to remand the flotilla to the Cognomen Magos, and the five remaining vessels flew back to Cognomen, where the entire incident was covered up, and the Explorators responsible punished outside the sight of the Inquisition (partially because their transgressions included disobeying an Inquisitor, something Cognomen is sensitive about at the best of times).  The Rogue Trader’s Warrant of Trade had been on their ship at the time of its destruction, it transpired, and the House in question is now lost to history, like so many others who interpret their permission to entreat with xenotech as a right to ignore its risks.


System: Maskos

Galactic Position: Cloudburst Sector, Capital Maskos Subsector

Civilization World: Maskos; Agri-world: Grendel

System Overlord: Master of the Administratum Maskos Samantha Lowenthal

Planets: Twelve, two habitable

Satelites: Grendel has one, uninhabitable

Tropospheric Composition: Maskos has Nitrogen 77%, Oxygen 21%, Water .4%, various Noble Gasses 1%, Carbon Dioxide .06%; Grendel has Nitrogen 75%, Oxygen 23%, Water 1%, Carbon Dioxide .1%, Argon .9%

Religion: Imperial Cult

Government Type: Adeptus Terra

Planetary Governors: Yes

Adept Presence: Adeptus Administratum, Adeptus Ministorum, Adeptus Mechanicus, Adeptus Arbites, Adeptus Astra Telepathica

Climate: Maskos is a temperate world with arctic poles and supertropical equatorial zone, Grendel is a temperate world at the equator with ice storms at both poles

Geography: Maskos is .87 times the size of Terra, with lengthy flats and salt lands broken up by deep oceans; Grendel is .67 times the size of Terra, with massive polar ice caps and four relative flat zones for agriculture

Gravity: Maskos has .9 Terra gravity, Grendel has .7 Terra gravity

Economy: Gelt Thrones and Silver Thrones

Principle Exports: Food, ores, oil, Promethium, ammunition, cardboard, air filters, water, timber, Navy officers
Principle Imports: Fertilizers, farm laborers, aircars

Countries and Continents: Maskos has five continents, Grendel has three

Military: Maskos Warriors, Grendel Cleavers (High quality PDF, medium quality Guard)

Contact with Other Worlds: Constant

Tithe Grade: Decuma Particular (Maskos), Exactis Prima (Grendel)

Population: 6,000,000,000 humans (Maskos), 900,000,000 humans, unknown number of Servitors (Grendel)

Description:
Maskos is not named after a Rogue Trader, nor after the things one might wear on a stage.  Instead, Maskos is named after the Ecclesiarchy’s best and brightest Missionary.  They would just as soon it be named something else, however, given that the world later became the site of one of the Sector’s greatest oversights.

One of the first worlds of human population encountered after the rush to colonize the Oldlight-Proximate Circuit began, Maskos is now a typical Imperial Civilized World, with the various institutions one might expect from such a place.  However, the world’s roots lie far back in the ancient history of Mankind.  Colonized in the final years of relative stability before the collapse of the Terran Federation, Maskos benefited from two major advantages: no neighbors, and abundant natural gas.  These two factors allowed Maskos, then called Drolorium, to survive many centuries deeper into the Age of Strife than the majority of the worlds of the later Cloudburst Sector.  However, the Age of Strife and Old Night were relentless, and Drolorium collapsed as most others did.  The world barely scraped by, as its exports-based economy was suddenly flush with goods, lacking raw materials, and had no market.  Pollution and war erupted all across the planet.  For thousands of years, Drolorium was dominated by Godless warlords and rival scavenger gangs.

All that changed when Rogue Trader and Missionary Lad’inbel Atongwë, accompanied by over two hundred thousand Ecclesiarchy preachers, Militia, Sisters, and Missionaries on a mission to convert the barbarians of the Oldlight-Proximate Circuit arrived in orbit over the world, then called Drolorium.  Drolorium was in poor shape.  Pollution, sin, and ignorance ruled the day, and Atongwë immediately recognized that this was a world that needed the God-Emperor’s light.  The problem was that the warlords had amassed enormous armies, and several were well fortified in abandoned Dark Age cities and factories that he very much wanted to take intact.  He asked the huge Adeptus Ministorum delegation present to assist him in bringing the world to Terra’s Glory, and one Missionary stepped forth with a cunning plan.
The Missionary, a charismatic and insightful lad named Maskos, proposed that the world be brought to worship of the Emperor through subtle means.  He proposed that the fleet drop pre-fabricated buildings of faith to the world below, in a place where the local warlords had no technological means to reach.  Then, Missionaries and lay folk of the clergy could go to the main populations and begin subtle re-education.  Maskos proposed that high-tech, productive, and beautiful vegetable farms, environmental cleaning sites, flower gardens, pastoral getaways, and other places of serene and idyllic beauty surround the pre-fab buildings.  Then, when the people in the main populations started showing interest in the words the Ministorum had sown in secret, the Ministorum could ferry those faithful ones to the retreat, and let them stay there for a set term.  Then, the Missionaries could promise them they could live there forever if they spent the next few years preaching the gospel to the miserable barbarians of the world, overseen by Atongwë’s Missionaries, of course.  Eventually, as the population of the safe zone grew large enough, the descendants of the first wave of pilgrims could be trained to use the same technology.  The Drolorians, Maskos said, would trip over each other to serve the Ecclesiarchy.
Atongwë thought the plan over, and found the obvious flaw.  What, he asked, of the warlords?  Surely, they would not tolerate the best and brightest of their population disappearing to some holy land beyond their control.
Maskos smiled.  “Promote them,” he said.  “Who wouldn’t want to rule paradise?”

Atongwë gave approval to the plan, and great pre-fab buildings were dropped to a remote island.  Detoxifying and environmental repair operations began at once, and by the time Atongwë had left to continue his campaign of soul-saving, the farms were seeded, the Missionaries briefed and language-trained, and the discreet security militia ready to deploy.
Maskos led the first wave of Missionaries in person.  For years, living as a barbarian in the hollow remains of a long-dead hive at the world’s equator, he preached in the dark and quiet, bringing a few thousand interested souls to the word of the Throne.  When he gauged his stay in the Hive had gone on long enough to annoy the local barbarian warlord with his proselytizing, he signaled for pickup.  To the shock and terror of the other barbarians, a great troopship of the Frateris Militia soared in from the heavens, deploying flares and firing lasers for maximum effect.  Maskos led his eager pilgrims into the ship and took off.
Shepherding the new converts to the paradisiacal monastery he had created, Maskos told the flock that they would live there for two local years.  There, they would have the very best of healthcare, the best food, clothes, education.  They would live like the warlords themselves, and want for nothing.  When two years were done, they would return to their homes, and they would preach the Emperor’s word far and wide.  If they did so, they could return at the end of their careers, and retire to the monastery with their families.

Needless to say, the pilgrims took to the pledge work with gusto.  While the first group relaxed and enjoyed the paradise Maskos had ordered built, he returned to another city, and repeated the process, while over two hundred Missionaries did the same, around the globe.  Within five years, Maskos’ planned monastery had grown from a mere six hundred pilgrims and local workers to over twenty thousand.
Inevitably, the warlords took notice.  Most regarded the charismatic young clergyman as a clear and present danger to their rule.  They restrained their armies and assassins solely because they had heard of warrior women with great chainsaw swords attacking warlord troops who had waylaid other preachers, and levelling their holdings with fire.  Finally, Maskos personally approached the most powerful warlord of the world, and told him the truth.  The world was going to become part of the great congregation of the stars, he said, and a piece of the Emperor’s Imperium.  The warlord, the Missionary said simply, could rule the whole planet from the monastery in the Emperor’s name, or he could wake up one morning with no ribcage, and a more pliant inferior in the world’s throne.
Understandably, the warlord took the offer, and only ten more years of hard work and preaching followed.  When Adeptus Administratum and Adeptus Arbites vessels arrived with Atongwë, forty-five Terran years to the day after Maskos opened the door to the monastery in person, they found an orderly, rapidly cleaning, pious world, ready to become loyally Imperial.

Maskos was made the world’s Archbishop and Deacon Extraordinary, and refused juvenat treatments to allow him to repeat the trick on another world – the vast force of eager pilgrims and preachers he had trained were more than capable of undertaking their own efforts in the Circuit.  He lived long enough to see the Mechanicus finish Terraforming the small world Grendel, at the outskirts of the system, then died peacefully.
By unanimous assent of the world’s thousands of Sub-Prelates, the world was renamed in his honor.  Great factories, cathedrals, offices, and residence towers rose from the ashes of twelve thousand years of internecine wars, Grendel began churning out food by the teraton for Cognomen, and all seemed well.


One thousand years later, a preacher, wearing robes identical to those that Maskos himself had worn during his time as a Missionary, appeared in one of the many new cities of Maskos.  The preacher, who named himself only Ritorum the Humble, spoke glowingly of Maskos’ legacy, and disparagingly of the now long-dead warlord to whom Maskos had offered the throne of the world.  The warlord-cum-governor, Ritorum proclaimed, had deeply insulted the Ecclesiarchy with his materialism, his cowardice, and his pride.  The actual events were so long ago, most of the people of Maskos didn’t know better.  Ritorum went on to claim that the Ecclesiarchy was doing an insult of its own to the people of the world, by not building for them the same paradises that Maskos had built for their ancestors, a thousand years ago.
Initially, the preacher made little headway, but in time, his charisma, his persuasive speaking style, and the growing underclass of the planet had combined to build himself a sturdy congregation, one that exulted in hard work and enjoying the pleasures of life.  The Ecclesiarchy of the planet, unsure of Ritorum’s intentions, discreetly demanded an explanation for his unorthodox preaching, but Ritorum simply pointed out the facts: the Ecclesiarchy was losing its touch with the underclasses, and they were a potent breeding ground for sedition if ever they strayed from the Throne.  Though this did not calm the Ecclesiarchy much, they were forced to admit that it was not so terribly far from the general Cult Imperator in Cloudburst: that of happiness and holiness stemming from giving one’s all in the Emperor’s name, usually to the Ecclesiarchy itself.
Ritorum directed his flock to build a great monastery, one akin to the one that now served as the headquarters for the Ministorum and Administratum, only even grander.  This, he proclaimed, would be for the people, and like the pilgrims of old, any who pleased him could retire here after a lifetime of hard work.
Soon enough, Ritorum had his monastery.  Built into a mountainside known for its scenic views and isolation, Ritorum began using the same tactics that Maskos had; he took the downtrodden, promised them paradise, and then actually sent them there.  After disappearing for only a few months, the pilgrims who came to Ritorum’s monastery would return to civilization, eager to spread the good word.  Homes became galleries, workplaces became faith houses, and for a time, even the Ecclesiarchy had to admit that all seemed well.  Ritorum’s love of beauty and hard work were hardly inimical to Imperial virtues.

Some decades passed, and the first of Ritorum’s flock reached retirement age.  One by one, they collected their families and travelled to the monastery, whereupon they were never seen again.  Initially, the local law enforcement agencies of the world could write that off as a simple retirement home, far from the cities, but as thousands of people vanished from the population centers of Maskos, the Arbites grew suspicious.  They dispatched a plainclothes team to the monastery in the guise of pilgrims, seeking to infiltrate.  The team returned two months later, eagerly reporting that Ritorum was exactly what he seemed to be, and claiming that there was a real chance he had been blessed by the Emperor himself.  Sharp-eyed Arbitrators, however, immediately noticed two things.  First, that had not been what the plainclothes team had been sent to establish.  Second, one of the Arbites dispatched to the monastery had not returned with the others, but had come back later, with signs of a concussion, which no other team member remembered him getting.

Fed up with secrets and inconsistencies, the Arbites assembled a full Suppression Force and concealed them in the rocks around the monastery one night.  A volunteer from the Judges was sent in, in the guise of an inspector, looking for a missing person.  Under his armor, he wore a vox-wire and a heartbeat monitor.  After a few minutes of talking, the rest of the Suppression Force heard the Judge enter the building and begin looking around, at which time the vox-wire abruptly shut off.  The heartbeat monitor did not, perhaps because the Judge had concealed it elsewhere on his person.  The alarmed Arbitrators saw the Judge’s heart rate climb from 60 BPM to 140 BPM in under a minute.
The Marshal on site ordered an immediate Omega Crash, Arbites terminology for armed raid.  The entire Arbites force charged the monastery and attacked with suppressed guns and stunners, web guns and non-lethal needlers.  Hundreds of startled pilgrims fell in seconds to the massive assault, through windows and doors that faced out onto the plains of Maskos from their cliffside retreat.
In minutes, it became obvious that something was badly wrong.  Though the entry rooms were perfectly normal Ecclesiarchial material, with the usual devotions and icons of the Throne and Primarchs, the rooms deeper in, past the first group of residential halls, had far more disturbing iconography, of things that were not quite human doing things that were not quite legal, or anatomically possible, to various human heroes of ages past.  Their hearts gripped by sudden knowledge of what was happening, the Arbites switched to lethal weapons and charged deeper.

Inside the central gallery of the monastery, the Arbites team encountered a scene from a fever dream.  A monstrous, pulsating ball of flesh and Warp-stuff hung in the air above the floor, surrounded by thousands of chanting Slaneeshi cultists.  The Arbites, seeing no sign of either their missing Judge or Ritorum, opened fire at once, cutting down the oblivious cultists by the hundreds.  In the carnage, cultists rose from their chants and threw themselves at the Arbites as if possessed, and at least some were.  Arbitrators began to fall, outnumbered as they were by over a hundred to one.  An emergency reinforcement request went out to the nearby Inquisitorial Palace Cloudburst, but the team had to press on in the meantime.
At the heart of the chamber, something reacted to the presence of the Arbites team.  The murders of its cultists called a mighty daemon forth, inhabiting the body of the daemonhost Ritorum, who swatted the first wave of Judges with Shock Mauls and Power Cudgels aside.  As cultists died, the bond between the Immaterium and the daemon faded, and it began to shrink and falter as the Warp-conduit it had made of the pilgrim’s families’ flesh started to disappear.  Sensing possible defeat, the daemon called for something in Ritorum’s voice.
If the daemon had spoken in a language other than Gothic, if the Tech-Arbitrator covering the door hadn’t heard it, if the cultist manning the hidden vox-controller wired to the concealed radio dish on the roof of the monastery had been a microsecond faster, or if the Arbites tech crew outside hadn’t had a radio jammer on hand, the entire world of Maskos would have fallen into the Warp.  As it was, the Tech-Arbitrator recognized the coded order and signaled for a local radio blackout, the cultist had been too busy staring hungrily at his soul’s owner to respond at once, and the team outside was quick on their feet.  The jammer engaged, and whatever signal the cultists had arranged did not broadcast.
The daemon was forced, screaming, back into the Warp, as the number of cultists in the room fell below critical mass for the summoning.  The surviving Arbites fought their way back out of the room.  The Arbitrator Senioris gave the order, and the team flooded the room with their guns, cutting down every single member of the pilgrimage.

Outside, the team regrouped.  The body of the missing Judge was never found, though the heartrate monitor kept going at over 140 BPM for the following six years before cutting off.  It transpired, according to the team outside, that the cultist signal had been an activation order, for over two thousand cultists in the cities of Maskos to begin indiscriminate murder of everybody near them, to offset the deaths of the cultists in the monastery itself.  The planet had been literally seconds from becoming a daemon world, right under the Ecclesiarchy’s nose.  Stopping the incursion had cost the Arbites 40% of their manpower in the first half an hour.  An Inquisitorial taskforce of Ordos Malleus and Hereticus specialists arrived minutes later, to find a charnel house of a temple and an army of enraged Arbitrators, looking for somebody to blame.

As might be expected, the following two years were the bloodiest in Maskos’ history, with savage purges of the cities and local Ecclesiarchy every week.  The Ordo Hereticus eventually declared the world clean of heresy, but the damage was done.  No longer, the Arbites declared, would the Ecclesiarchy be able to wield such power over Maskos.  Instead, the Subsector Administratum Master would control the world directly, and all domestic Ecclesiarchial Missionary activities would have to be cleared with the planetary Archbishop first.

One thousand four hundred years later, the careful vigilance of the Archbishop and Arbites have successfully prevented any resurgence of cult activity on the planet, though it has faced sporadic pirate and Dark Eldar raids in the interim.  Now, Maskos is a local Imperial strongpoint, with a potent military, loyal citizens, and a bustling trade economy, and over it all, the Arbites must keep sharp watch, in case other foes of Mankind attempt to emulate their founder’s methods.  Fortunately for them, the system now houses a small convent of Battle Sisters of the Sanguine Soul Order, which hosts a permanent force of one thousand Battle Sisters.  The majority of the Order is of the Famulous and Hospitaller disposition, but the Battle Sisters here (established in the wake of the Ritorum incident) often fly to other systems to aid in Missionary work or to fight off the Glasians.  The Sisters keep a careful eye on the populace for any sign of further corruption.


The people of Maskos have the same diversity of most Imperial worlds.  One thing that binds Maskos together is its love of the arts, which may well have been why the world was so receptive to Slaanesh.  State-sanctioned artworks, however, are often on display around most of the cities.  Theater is especially popular, and free performances of various stage plays are common in larger communities.  The world is also the sector’s leading manufacturer of tunneling and mining technology, thanks to its last operational Standard Template Constructor, which creates sub-surface terraforming engines.  Once Mars had copied the blueprints and determined that the machine was in too poor a shape to move, the local Mechanicus shrine was allowed to take it over.  Every day, a hundred Techpriests swarm over the machine as it operates, keeping the machine spirits placated with ritual and maintenance, which are indistinguishable at a distance.  The machines the STC produces are mass converter burrowers, which collect all metallic and oxidative-gas atoms encountered in the substance through which it is burrowing, and deposits them inside internal containers, which they periodically extrude for easy collection.  The miner’s best friend and a Mechanicus dream come true; these marvelous machines have made their way as far as Bekke and Hydraphur.  Mars itself may build them someday, which would delight the Maskos Mechanicus to no end.  Were the machines only cheaper, or the blueprints simple enough to allow non-STC manufacture, surely they would have already.


Grendel has a less Chaos-influenced history.  Throughout its time post-terraforming, Grendel has been a great breadbasket for the Imperium.  Protected by its own military forces, Maskos Warriors on rural and agrarian combat training missions, and the occasional Skitarii army picking up supplies or dropping off servitors, Grendel is a safe and secure world.  Its primary products are barley, wheat, various corns and grains, grox, leather, and beef, along with assorted poultries, feathers, and what very little mining there is to do on the silicate rock.  The Grendel Ecclesiarchy was vigorously examined for signs of heresy after the Slaneeshi infiltration of Maskos, and though several priests were found to be deficient in their understanding of the Imperial Cult, no sign of infiltration was found.  The capital city of Grendel is a starport with a shantytown, or so it looks from a distance.  It’s only after drawing closer that the sheer scale of the port becomes clear.  The city, named after the planet (itself named after a Cloudburst war hero), is the size of any other Imperial capital city that isn’t a hive.  The starport is simply so large, and moves so much cargo, that it dwarfs the city itself.  The cloud of Mechanicus and Chartist Captain vessels that rises and falls from the port every day, laden with goods or emptied of fertilizers and organics for composting, looks like nothing more than a swarm of insects flying around a spotlight.


Maskos Warriors make greater use of local-variant armaments than any other civilized population in the Cloudburst Sector.  Though they have the means to make more Martian models of military hardware than they do, the Maskos population made a conscious choice long ago not to depend too much on Cognomen or any other Forge World for its defenses.  The Maskos A12 Assault Tank, roughly comparable to an up-gunned Salamander, is one such example.  The B1 Artillery, a 203mm monster, is another local variety.  Though a Maskos war-artisan would admit under duress that Mechanicus equipment is generally superior, the Maskos armies are able to field these weapons in profusion.  The most common local design is the D4 Kukol rocket SAM.  Armed with a rack of anti-air, ultraviolet-seeking missiles, with a pair of heavy stubbers for defense, the Kukol finds common use protecting headquarters detachments of Maskos field deployments.  Furthermore, Maskos regiments are able to field their own logistical assets for their initial deployments, thanks to the troopship-manufacturing berth in orbit, and Grendel’s massive farms.  Maskos regiments specialize in urban, alpine, and amphibious assaults.  Grendel Cleavers use the same equipment as Maskos Warriors, but their focus is on breachers, close assault, and plains warfare.  Grendel officers are also unable to choose their issued weapons, though they may buy their own.  They may carry the mandatory weapons alongside whatever they buy, and have similar restrictions on trophy taking and plunder to those of the Septiim regiments.  This stems from past issues; Ork Kommandos successfully slaughtered a Grendel regiment’s officer corps when they were caught off-guard behind what was thought to be secure territory.  Every officer is issued a .45 caliber revolver and a combat knife.  They may augment their loadout with whatever they wish to buy.


Maskos Inquisitorial Palace

Maskos has another honor, in that it is the host of the Cloudburst Inquisitorial PalaceSticking up from the planet’s crust, nearly six hundred miles from the nearest city, near the northern polar ice cap, the Inquisitorial Palace lurks.  Its defenses are stealth and the difficulty of approach, plus various concealed weapons.  Under normal circumstances, the number of Inquisitors in the Palace is stable, or even growing, as more worlds become a part of Cloudburst.  Recently, in anticipation of the Glasian Migration and the uptick in Ork and pirate activity, the halls of the Palace are emptying.  Ordo Xenos Inquisitors especially have been busy lately, as their tireless consultations of the Tarot have revealed which systems shall next be hit by the Glasians, and are scrambling their assets to counter them.  The Palace proper is a structure that its neighbors fear and respect, and its architecture drives home the point.  The structure is the center of a small community, which consists exclusively of the menials and Adepts that work within its black walls.  Tall slabs of stone and metal circle the top of the building like a crown, and hide the radomes, antennae, and telescopes on its rooftop.  The building looms over the nearby town, by enforced law; no building in the nameless town may come within one hundred feet of its walls, or come within eighty feet of its principal height.  A single spire of grey metal juts from the top of the building by another two hundred feet.  The spire contains the apartments, equipment, and choir chamber of the Palace’s Astropaths.  Currently, there are nine Astropaths in residence, led by Adept Choirmaster Emilie Rastimos.
Armies of Servitors and mind-wiped volunteer Maskos Warriors protect the facility, though in practice, it has never been attacked on such a scale as to require Guard defense.  The nearby town appears on no official maps of the planet, and its presence on Imperially produced holo-globe navigation devices is conspicuously blurry.  The Palace draws its power from a geothermal plant in its basement, solar panels on its roof, and a huge plasma reactor in the nearby mountain, connected to the Palace by underground cables.  In the event of a catastrophic loss of power in the Palace, the building can also siphon energy from the nearby town, or the wind turbines erected nearby to power the small farms that feed the area.
The nameless town also contains a local Psychic Relay station, where psychics are rounded up and sent to Terra for sanctioning.  Given the long distance and slow travel between Maskos and Terra, as much as seven months’ time may pass between a psychic entering a Black Ship in orbit over Maskos and arriving at the Throneworld.
Over two hundred Inquisitors call Cloudburst home, far more than a Sector so lightly populated would traditionally demand.  However, the Conclave Cloudburst is not solely concerned with Cloudburst.  As the largest Inquisitorial Palace by far for over one hundred light years in most directions (and anywhere near the Cloudburst Circuit or the north half of the Oldlight Exo-zone), whole flotillas of Inquisitorial vessels may stage here before proceeding out into the darkness beyond the Emperor’s sight.  It is not even rare for small Space Marine groups to congregate here if tasked with the assistance of an Inquisitor in pacifying an alien empire in the Circuit, the Halo, or the Oldlight Exo-zone.
The sprawling Palace contains nearly everything an Inquisitorial warband or Throne Agent crew could need, from comfortable lodgings to torture chambers.  The sound- and radiation- damped rooms in the heart of the building allow for the interrogation of species that communicate by means humans cannot directly interpret.  The Ordo Malleus even maintains a small psy-shielded vault in the basement of the power plant, conveniently in the place that will be vaporized first if something were to escape containment and necessitate local annihilation.
One thing the Palace does not permit, ever, is the disposal of Glasian relics, or storage, or use.  Their disposal is instead carried out in Cognomen’s satellite structures of the Holy Ordos; in a true emergency, any black hole or star will do.  The Lady Inquisitrix Cloudburst, venerable Ordo Xenos High Inquisitor Lerica, enforces this policy with an iron fist and Gamma-level psychic power, and so far, even the rogue Inquisitor Rothschilde has not dared defy her on this point.

The super-active Rogue Traders and Exporators of the region provide ample opportunities for an Inquisitor to pursue the foes of man.  Although the rate of discovery of new goods, old technology, and worlds to annex, obviously, has decreased significantly since the initial Fabique gold rush, there are still whole wedges of nominally Imperial space, some many light-years in dimension, well outside the Imperium’s control.  Of course, the Oldlight and Circuit regions also hang heavy with mystery.  This creates innumerable headaches for the Inquisition; regardless of political ideology, no Inquisitor likes having no control.  Lady Inquisitrix Lerica maintains careful neutrality in the squabbles and debates of protocol and procedure that fill the Palace, though she is not always present to do so.  She also serves as the Inquisitor of the Chamber at the great Watch Fortress Dascomb, and only spends approximately half her time in the Palace.  Her personal ship, the astonishingly heavily upgraded Fast Clipper Hornet’s Nest, can make the trip from Dascomb to Maskos in fewer than four days, and does so many times per year.

Maskos’ Inquisitorial Palace has been the site of disruptions in the past.  Built as it was sometime after the world was colonized, the site on which it was built was home to a small community of natives, which was displaced by the construction.  Politically, Cloudburst and Celeste have always resented that the Palace was built so far from the seat of sector power, and for reasons that the Inquisition doesn’t care to explain.

The proximity of four major Deathwatch Watch Fortresses ensures that the Ordo Xenos always has forces available for emergency missions or strategic target removal.  The small but very well trained forces of Adeptus Sororitas in the sector are the loyal servants of the Ordo Hereticus.  Malleus has trouble with manpower.  Though the Grey Knights Chapter is both far larger than a standard Chapter and possessing of high-tech, fast, precognitive-guided ships, they can’t be everywhere at once.  The power of the Ordo Malleus is somewhat blunted by this.  However, the Ordo does have a large all-volunteer force of Maskos Warriors ready to serve as its shock troops stationed in the nearby town; the many Scions of Cloudburst’s Schola Progenia can also serve as direct reinforcement for the Ordo Malleus if needed.  Cognomen builds the Holy Ordos their ships locally.  They are not, of course, up to the standards of the ancient Jovian War Yards, the Titan Shipbuilders of the Grey Knights, the Martian Ring of Iron, or the nearly thirty thousand year old Saturnyne Shipyard, but they are of Forge World quality, and ancient compacts ensure their Navigators are discreet and skilled.


System: Ghald

Galactic Position: Cloudburst Sector, Nauphry Subsector

System Overlord: None

Planets: Five, one hypothetically inhabitable

Death World: Ghald IV

Satelites: none

Tropospheric Composition: Nitrogen 80%, Oxygen 19%, Argon .2%, Water .6%, Unknown 0.1%

Religion: N/A

Government Type: N/A

Planetary Governor: No

Adept Presence: N/A

Climate: Thick, dry winds, heavy with chemicals and sand

Geography: 82 million mi² of surface and no (natural) plate tectonics

Gravity: 1.01 Terran Gravity

Economy: N/A

Principle Exports: N/A
Principle Imports: N/A

Countries and Continents: One supercontinent

Military: N/A

Contact with Other Worlds: Never

Tithe Grade: Aptus Non

Population: Unsaveable

Description:
Surely, if there were any evidence in the universe that all life is hostile to humanity until it is conquered, it is Ghald IV, among the most horrifying places in the Segmentum Ultima.  This rocky, mountainous planet has abundant and semi-sentient animal life.  Animals here trend towards vicious, clever, and fast.  This, however, is no real impediment to a determined Imperial colonization effort.  The real problem is that several of the mountains are nothing of the kind.  As Imperial second-wave colonists learned to their absolute terror, looking down from orbit at the remains of the first-wave colonists on the surface below, at least some mountains were actually living, monstrous creatures, some up to two miles tall.  They move so slowly that they may as well not move at all, but move they do, and every so often, a pocket of stone, indistinguishable from all others, will open on the surface of the beings.  From the holes emerge clouds of mind-control spores, which assume total and permanent control of all nearby animals, even those with different nervous systems.  The animals are then driven to attack, mindlessly and relentlessly, the animals of nearby mountain beasts.  The Inquisition is under orders to commit Exterminatus against the planet at the first sign of Tyranid attack on the world, as the thought of Tyranids having access to mind control is too horrible to contemplate.


System: Chlorit

Galactic Position: Cloudburst Sector, Celeste Subsector

System Overlord: None

Planets: Twelve, none inhabitable

Dead World: Chlorit (formerly Agri-world)

Satelites: Formerly one

Tropospheric Composition: N/A

Religion: N/A

Government Type: N/A

Planetary Governor: No

Adept Presence: N/A

Climate: N/A

Geography: Melted rock and stone

Gravity: .6 Terran Gravity, formerly 1 Terran Gravity

Economy: N/A

Principle Exports: N/A
Principle Imports: N/A

Countries and Continents: N/A

Military: N/A

Contact with Other Worlds: Never

Tithe Grade: N/A

Population: N/A

Description:
Before the arrival of the Glasian menace, the Agri-world of Chlorit was a planet of rolling green hills, artificial oceans, and thick polar ice.  The planet served as a breadbasket for the large needs of the Cloudburst Sector’s many Industrial and Forge worlds.  At one point, Chlorit was exporting twenty five billion meals’ worth of food, and importing around that much inactivated biomass and fertilizer.
At that point, the Glasians arrived to ruin everything.
One of the three Glasian Colony Cylinders that followed the much larger Colony Control Cylinder of the second invasion arrived in orbit over Chlorit.  The world was not wholly unprepared, thanks to its extensive orbital observation satellites, but knowing the Cylinder was coming did not make destroying it much easier.  Forty ships of the SDF and Navy sortied against it, to little effect.  The population of the world began frantically evacuating, cramming themselves and their families into the ships usually used to carry victuals.  The Glasian force overran and butchered the defenders in days, and the civilian population after that.  Frantic efforts by the Navy and Mechanicus to evacuate the people of the world ended in fiery failure; kilometer-long freighters and refridgeration barges fell through the skies and landed, liquefying continents.  When the last living humans on the planet were dead or gone, the Glasian Cylinder aligned its aft engine with the planet and engaged it.  An invisible discharge of strange xenos energy leaped to the planet behind them.  Chlorit cracked down the middle.  As the Glasian ship accelerated out into the Sector once more, Inquisitors of the Ordo Xenos watched in horror from the edge of the system.  The course of the Cylinder led the massive ship to Coriolis, where the colossal orbital fortress crushed it and its surviving forces with ease, but the damage was done: a world was gone forever.

However, Chlorit had not fallen unnoticed or unimpeded.  The eight hundred thousand Guard and PDF troops on the surface had held out for days.  The Glasians, the Inquisition noted grimly, had not tried destroying the world, even though they obviously could have, until after they had already won it.  Was this, perhaps, the original mission of the aliens?  Was this Migration a complex and demented selection process, to find a world of their own?  Was that why they hit Septiim every time?

Left with more questions than answers, the Inquisition gathered up the survivors of Chlorit (including the fourteen thousand Guardsmen who had been off-world at the time) and transplanted them to Foraldshold at the Mechanicus’s request.  Here, they could start building a new world, and also be examined discreetly for signs of Chaos contamination.

Chlorit Reapers
The Reapers were once the primary military force of Chlorit, and their heirs on Foraldshold maintain much of the old traditions of the family.  The Reapers employed plains and urban warfare tactics, as is so often the case with Agri-worlds.  Normally, the Reapers would pair up great Earthshaker platforms and their hauling vehicles with a Salamander or two, to gair recon and provide secure transport for the Earthshaker’s crew.  Their tactics work well on the massive Mechanicus satrap city of Foraldshold Prime, and they have taken well to employment by the Mechanicus.  The Reapers had previously specialized heir close combat weapons, preferring curved blade weapons called Harpes.  With the Mechanicus now sponsoring them directly, some have upgraded to a Power variant.  Now, Chlorit refugee descendents populate their regiments.  Their mettle is untested, but that is changing.  The green tide has fallen on Foraldshold.  An Ork Waaagh!, flying a wave of Fighta-Bommas built from the guts of a Space Hulk they found floating in the depths of space, has bulled its way out of the darkness.  They’ve come to loot the Reapers’ new home, and will stop at nothing to do it.