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The Sanguine Convent is the Abbey from which the Sanguine Soul sisters set forth.  The building is a magnificent beachfront palace of the Ecclesiarchy.  The structure itself towers over the shores and rocky cliffs of the area.  The beach on which the Convent is built is the terminus of a mountain chain that stretches from deep within the continent to the edge of the water, and the Palace emerges from its end hills like a beacon.  Stained glass windows, soaring towers, and snapping banners throw bright colors on the rooftops of the building.  The air rings with the sound of crashing waves, singing choirs, and screaming Sarissae cutting through target dummies.  The enormous Convent is actually far larger than the current Order needs, but the Order is expanding at the insistence of the two Cardinals of the Sector.

The Order does not traditionally sustain a Templar Militia.  Since they were established after the Reign of Blood, the Sisters here have no history of using Frateris Templar, either.  As such, the extent of Templar forces in the system is a platoon of ceremonial guards, who oversee the personal quarters and starship of Cardinal Drake.  The Templars train with the Sisters to familiarize themselves with the battle callsigns and drills of the Sororitas.

Among the warriors of the Order, there number just over five thousand combatants in Celeste, with another thousand in the Maskos system.  The Batte Sisters here are defenders of Schola Progenia throughout the Sector and even in the few outposts of the Circuit.  The Convent palace also trains some of the Drill Abbots of the Schola, and more than a fifth of the Planetary High Priests of the Sector have studied here under the Abbess.
The Convent is more than a training facility or chapel, however.  It is a garage, a prison, a laboratory, a school, and a retreat, too.  All of these functions together may explain why it is so large, given the Sisterhood’s general disdain for the wealth-centric model of the Cloudburst Ecclesiarchy.
Within its ceramite and steel reinforcement and outer stonework, the building is a home to thousands of teachers, scholars, gene-techs, and guards, all of them drawn from the tens of thousands of Sisters of the Sector.  The teachers and scholars are a mix of all of the Orders of the Sisterhood, including the more obscure Dialogous.  Here, future members of the non-militant Orders train in their sacred duties, including translating odd dialects of Gothic, treating alien parasite infestations, interpreting the human genome, preventing forgery and counterfeiting, and even decommissioning heretic armaments.
Among the responsibilities of the Orders here are preserving the master templates of the genetic stock of the Subsector Overlord families, to ensure that the families that rule in the Emperor’s name are not inbred.  For this reason, water-tight and over-pressurized vaults sit below the ground level in the core of the huge Convent building.  The Order Famulous oversees the vaults, and trains the gene-techs who work here to predict strains of mutancy.  The gene-techs have another role: predicting the rise of a Living Saint of the Emperor.  So far, the Sector has produced none.
The Hospitallers of the Sanguine Soul are known as being unambiguously the best field chirurgia inithe Sector, eclipsing even the Astra Militarum Battle Surgeons and rivalling the Blue Dagger Apothecarion (who have understandably more specialized skills).  The Hospitallers of Celeste take just pride in this, and their skills in healing the wounded and curing the sick have even reached the Deathwatch, who have consulted with the Hospitallers of the Sanguine Soul when they have encountered odd alien diseases in the Circuit.  The Hospitallers enjoy a whole wing of the Convent to themselves, guarded around the clock by six Cryo-Shock Seraphim elites, wearing state of the art power armor with full environmental seals and liquid nitrogen sprayers.  The security measures ensure that no strange illnesses escape the wing, but also prevent any of the hundreds of daily visitors to the Convent from entering the Hospitaller quarter.
Among the non-militant orders, the Dialogous are the smallest in number, but the Ministorum regards them as no less holy or indispensable for it.  The Cloudburst Circuit still contains dozens of regressive human worlds, and many more that could be colonized; a Dialogous Sister is invaluable to a Missionary or Rogue Trader active in the region.  The Diologous Sisters of Celeste are also responsible for copying certain texts from religious thinkers and Missionaries of Cloudburst’s past, like the great Missionary Maskos or the Arch-Deacons of Jodhclan.  The sisters then send copies of the texts along with ships that travel into the Exo-zone or the Circuit, to spread the word of Cloudburst’s finest to the heathens and aliens beyond.

Of course, when the average citizen thinks of Battle Sisters, he thinks of lethal warriors in power armor, burning heretics and hedge witches with holy flame and hate.  True enough, the Battle Sisters of the Convent are the most highly trained mortal soldiers in the Sector (with the possible exception of the Night Slaughter).  The Sisters would reject the word ‘soldier’ as a description, though.  Nobody could mistake them for unfit fighters, of course, but soldiers are professional military and nothing more, the Sisters here claim, while they have responsibilities most soldiers never will, and they also do not follow a traditional Astra Militarum hierarchy.  The Battle Order of the Sanguine Soul are ruthless, potent, and awe-inspiring warriors and paramilitary enforcers of the Ecclesiarchy’s will, and the Chamber Militant of the Ordo Hereticus Cloudburst.  On no fewer than fifteen occasions, the Ordo Hereticus has mobilized over one thousand Sisters from Celeste or Maskos to engage and destroy heretics and witches in the Sector, once destroying an entire planet in the process during the scouring of Brotherhood.
An entire wing of the building holds the vast fleet of vehicles and spare power armor the Sisters here deploy.  The garage holds Immolaters, Incarcerators, and Repressors, as well as the dedicated Rhino and Penitent Engine fleets of the Sisterhood.  Unfortunately, the Sisters do not have the means of making Exorcists, as Cognomen was not issued a copy of the STC before Mars lost it.  However, the Sisters here do sometimes work alongside the Inquisition, which fields the comparable Whirlwind Artillery Tank.
The land outside the Convent is a training field for the Sisters.  Girls as young as twelve and women in their nineties after juvenat spar, shoot, and exercise, under the frosty eye of Celestian trainers and Retributor practice leaders.  The training ground is as much a punishment field as it is a practice one, however.  After daily drills have concluded, Sisters and Initiates who have failed in some duty are sent out into the field with magnetic combs, and tasked with picked up every shard of metal scrap and shell casing they can.  The next day, if the penance for their failures are deemed insufficient, the penitent Sisters must practice barefoot, so that if they missed a shard, they will be the first to know, a practice that visiting Celestial Guard drill instructors have noted is intimidatingly hardcore.
More experienced Sisters train on elevated platforms, reinforced with steel lattices.  The platforms hold grav-plates manufactured in nearby cities and operated by Mechanicus-blessed servitors, and simulate the differing gravities of alien planets.  On the plantforms’ surfaces, target dummies and ambulatory sparring machines attempt to block Sister trainees from crossing pre-determined pathways to the other side, by either physically blocking them or setting them on fire.  Other platforms have rope assault courses, environmental hazards like whirling blades and electric prongs, or hidden spring panels that can send inattentive Sisters flying back to the start of their courses.
Specialists practice in their own areas of the training fields.  Retributors use their heavy weapons in an area cordoned off from the rest of the fields, to prevent friendly fire.  Jump pack equipped Sisters train inside a hollow tower of the Convent itself, flying from spar to spar and girder to girder in a simulated construction area, firing their bolt, flame, and limited Inferno weapons in training mode at holographic targets.

Even the most relentless and faith-fuelled warrior of the Emperor needs to rest their bodies after days of nonstop training.  The beaches of the Convent are blocked from nearby observation by holo-field projectors.  On the mile-wide stretch of sand, Sisters meditate on emblems of the Emperor and Terra that Initiates painstakingly sketch into the sand every sunrise.  With the tides from Cloudburst overhead, the emblems erode, in an object lesson about the impermanence of labor unless it is life-long.  At the edge of the water, Sisters practice swimming, for either training or recreation, one of the precious few forms permitted at the Convent.  Naturally, the presence of a mile-wide stretch of unobservable tropical beaches filled with thousands of athletic women has intrigued many a paparazzi or salubrious neighbor, who are invariably captured and given bone-chilling punishments for trying to peek on their spiritual betters.

Unlike certain other branches of the Ministorum, the Sanguine Soul Order members are given sets of prohibitions against conduct that the Convent Abbess deems inappropriate.  Some Orders are simply held to such a high standard (and drilled to such a high standard) that inappropriate conduct is unthinkable to them, but the Sanguine Soul Sisters have these strictures enforced, thanks to the past misconduct of a few who ruined things for all their successors.  The partaking of intoxicant chemicals besides alcohol and prescription medication is outright forbidden, as is gambling at a house-cut establishment, and private ownership of a vehicle.  The vehicle restriction stems from some highly embarrassing and public incidents of sector noble families from Thimble gifting their skycars to Sisters in thanks for resolving family disputes, and the untrained Sisters promptly crashing them.
Starting families is not forbidden to the Sisters, though of course few ever find the time.  The few Sisters who do usually raise their children within the Schola Progenium of nearby Civitavecchia until the girls are old enough to train in the Convent and the boys are old enough to do something witrh their lives.  Notably, the present Canoness Superior, Monica Lanbrie, is a grandmother, which some of her critics use as a point against her spiritual purity, but most see as being a piece of trivia at best.  Labrie is no common Canoness, either, for she is by the direct order of Cardinal Drake, the Canoness Extraordinary of the Celeste system, and even visiting Sisters from other Orders must answer to her while present in the Diocese Celeste.

The Convent has two other facilities that set it apart from a typical Ecclesiarchial facility.  The first is the prison.  Deep below the waves, under two hundred feet of sand and rock and another hundred twenty feet of salt water, the Sisters stand guard over dark secrets of Mankind.  In a field of humming capacitors and silent Multi-lasers and Multimeltas, fifty Celestians of the Order keep grim vigil over four hundred stasis, cryo, and immersion cells.  These cells host the worst heretics, recidivists, and Traitors in the Sector, captured by the Ordo Hereticus and Malleus and sent to the Convent for eventual interrogation.  Inquisitors sometimes arrive by stealth shuttle in the dead of night, having transferred to the fleet of matte-painted Aquila shuttles the Convent maintains in a space station in orbit if they didn’t bring their own.  The Inquisitors have delivered such prisoners as the Arch-Heretic Deacon Woldenbar, who led a billion souls to damnation with the whispers of Chaos, the wicked Soul-Shrivener of Clegran, who found xenotech that let him part a body from its spirit, and even Renel Abbas, a former Thousand Sons Marine, captured alive on Oglith eight hundred years ago leading a cult of ritualists.  Other cells contain Chaos-tainted pirates the Navy captured leading Traitor raider fleets, Glasian officers captured alive during Migrations, and the one Primary of the Cult of Unbound Good ever taken sane.

The other unique facility is less grim, and unlike the prison, is common knowledge among the Sisters and Initiates.  Ironically, many also hold it in contempt; they see it as a sign of the Cloudburst Ecclesiarchy’s carnal corruption.  One wing of the ten-armed Convent fortress hosts a resort for the senior members of the Ministorum in the Sector and Circuit, who may come here free of charge to relax and meditate.  The wealth-obsessed Cloudburst Ministorum promptly turned the wing into a combination hotel and bar, to the displeasure of their subordinate Sororitas.  The suites in the wing are decorated to gaudy extremes, while the rectory kitchen more strongly resembles that of a Rogue Trader gourmand than a monastery.  While the Sisters were able to enforce successfully a prohibition on joygirls and joyboys in the building, some priests and Missionaries visiting the facility do insist on bringing rather larger and more youthful retinues than a meditative journey would strictly require.
The Inquisition is aware of this trend, and views it with equal disgust, but has yet to take action.  The possibility of Slaaneshi corruption in the beating heart of the Ministorum’s military headquarters, however, is not one they are willing to discount.  The Ministorum is unaware of how close to ordering a purge of the resort some Inquisitors have come, or how eagerly the Sisters would follow such an order.





System: Mendic

Galactic Position: Cloudburst Sector, Hapster Subsector

System Overlord: None

Planets: 6, 1 habitable

Dead World: Scalding

Satelites: None

Tropospheric Composition: N/A

Religion: N/A

Government Type: N/A

Planetary Governor: N/A

Adept Presence: N/A

Climate: N/A

Geography: The size of Terra, barren rock and open lava vents

Gravity: 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: N/A

Tithe Grade: N/A

Population: N/A

Description:
At one point, this world was a breadbasket of the Imperium.  Remarkably similar to ancient Terra in size and biosphere, it was a world of purers, massive grox herds that roamed over low hills and through shallow rivers, and cities of glass and stone.  The planet, then named Letrione, had over two hundred million Imperial souls, and aside from some common and annoying volcanism and diastrophism, the world was a perfectly unremarkable Agri-world of Imperial humanity.
This came to a horrific end thanks to the forces of Chaos.  The world played host to massive slaughterhouses for the grox and bovine herds that traveled its surface.  Within the slaughterhouses, a misread psyker aptitude test resulted in one young psyker escaping the Black Ships.  Unaware of their psychic power, they began to hear the prayers of their neighbors to escape the endless drudgery of the slaughterhouse life.  He took pity on them, and reached out to bestow upon them gifts of psychic power, which changed their lives in many ways.  The simple, superstitious people of Letrione took this as a miracle, and offered up prayers and sacrifices to the Emperor for granting them the powers.
This, in turn, attracted the attention of dark beings.  The sacrifices turned from small piles of money and burned paper offerings to bloody ritual and debasing human misery.  The psyker who began it all felt the pleadings for release in his mind once more.  Reaching out to grant that release, his body exploded as a Warp Rift opened in his corrupted soul.
Within two weeks, eighty percent of the world’s population was dead, and an army of daemons rampaged unchecked over the planet.  When an Inquisitorial response force arrived, they immediately recognized that the world was lost.  Consigning the world’s population to oblivion, they pelted the planet with Exterminatus-grade weapons from their Longstrike cruiser.  The world’s massive volcanoes erupted as the tectonic plates of the world sank into the mantle, and the Inquisition left it behind, leaving only some automated warning beacons and the world’s new name: Scalding.


System: Cygnmo

Galactic Position: Cloudburst Sector, Delving Subsector

System Overlord: None

Planets: 2, 1 habitable

Feral World: Cygnmo

Satelites: None

Tropospheric Composition: Nitrogen 78%, Oxygen 20%, Argon 1%, Water 1%, Carbon gasses .01%

Religion: Holy Emperor Star Cult

Government Type: Primitive

Planetary Governor: No

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

Climate: Cygnmo has periodic ice storms that follow the planet’s long day cycle, stretching from the equator to the polar circles, but is largely desert or pine forest

Geography: 1.9 times the size of Terra, with thin topsoil and rocky formations jutting from the oceans

Gravity: 1.11 Terra gravity

Economy: Local scrip

Principle Exports: Timber, gravel, textiles, natural gas
Principle Imports: Machined parts, plastic

Countries and Continents: Eight continents, roughly seven hundred small nations

Military: Celestial Guard barracks, Cygnmo Warbeasts (low quality PDF)

Contact with Other Worlds: Almost none

Tithe Grade: Aptus Non

Population: 11,000,000

Description:
As the fleets of Explorators and Rogue Traders aplenty scoured the worlds of the Oldlight-Proximate Circuit, patterns emerged at once.  Within solar months of the Gold Rush One beginning, these explorers found worlds with clear signs of human occupation in their past, or even some worlds that had whole populations that had since reverted to barbarism.  Cygnmo falls into the latter category.  Although there are some worlds in the Cloudburst Sector that have allowed their technology levels to rise since contacting the Imperium, Cygnmo has steadfastedly refused to allow modernity to pierce their traditionalism.  The onset of the Glasians may well bring about a change in this attitude, however.
The Cygnmen are a hardy and self-reliant force.  The Technofetishism and bland autocracy of the Imperium do not appeal to them in any way.  Although the population of the world has gained more Cloudburst-like traits over time, largely as a result of Celestial Guard barracks troops taking local spouses or going native, the hundreds of feral tribes of the world refuse over and over to be more active in the greater Imperium.  It is easy to understand why, looking at the world’s magnificent vistas, endless resources, and strong mystical traditions.  Cygnmo has withstood plagues, the passage of millennia, Imperial colonizations, and its own downfall, but their bone-deep stubbornness lingers.

For thousands of years, Adeptus Ministorum priests and Missionaries have pressured the world to adapt to the Imperial Cult, and eventually succeeded.  The ancient, variable mystical traditions of the people of Cygnmo faded in favor of Emperor-worship.  If the Ministorum had hoped that this would yield more Imperium-friendly conduct in the natives, however, they were sorely disappointed when the opposite occurred.
Cygnmen have a long history of valuing pride and military independence over cooperation.  Though avoiding inbreeding has necessitated some exchanges of clan grounds and women over the years, the individual clans, and the five or six individual tribes within each clan, would rather kill each other than work together.
Exceptions arise at times.  Chieftains of great charisma and willpower may forge multiple clans together into a proper warband.  These warbands may be allowed to run riot over the world by the Adepta, or they may be recruited into serving as the world’s PDF as needed.  Ultimately, the very mightiest of these warlords may even establish a kingdom among the clans, though these rarely outlive their first sons.

However, there is substantial evidence among the remains of these failed states that this was not always the case.  Imperial archaeologists, working in the zone the greater Imperium has claimed for itself on the surface for the Celestial Guard barracks, found architecture, coinage, art, and technology that the primitive clans of the worlds could not have possibly made for themselves in their current state.  Missionaries working with the nomadic tribes have also found evidence of complex religious hierarchies, a few scraps of working STC technology, and even complex sculptures of great formations of organized men in battle.
Any oral histories of what could have happened to break up this past triumph are long dead.  Physical evidence, however, suggests that this organization was not the result of purely local development.  To the surprise of the Missionaries and archaeologists, it was the Mechanicus who made the fateful discovery.  While excavating resource deposits in one of the great, uninhabited, rocky islands of the world’s oceans, the Mechanicus located what could only be a sign of past interplanetary presence.  To their shock, the Mechanicus unearthed a fully functioning Maskos mining machine, complete with an STC manufacturing serial number dating to the late Age of Apostasy.  All around it, the Mechanicus found more evidence of human work, including pre-fab housing units, laser guns, and mysterious powders in the refuse piles and trash heaps.  Spectroscopy revealed that this powder was dust from Maskos’ fine sandy shores.
Eventually, the Imperial colony concluded that the world had once been approached for trading rights by Drolorium, after the Age of Strife ended but before the Imperium recontacted Drolorium.  Preliminary dating work done on the remains of the ancient Cygnmo cultural artifacts suggests the timeline is accurate.  Why Drolorium left Cygnmo to its fate, nobody knows, but it clearly happened quickly, if the invaluable Maskos mining machines had to be left behind.

However, the presence of an interplanetary colony site on the planet does not, by itself, explain why the Cygnmen seem to have once had a world-spanning and successful culture of higher standards than it currently enjoys.  It would suggest how that culture was initially supported, perhaps, but given that Drolorium seems to have given nothing to Cygnmo in return for its resources, it could not have sustained it indefinitely.  Some newer dig sites have revealed that an even more advanced culture, with some parallels to early Imperial culture, may have once existed on the shores of the world’s great oceans, and traded with the ancient Cygnmen clans.  This one appears to have been of entirely local origin, and perhaps its own collapse accelerated the decline of the majority of the worlds’ clans, as a symbiotic ecosystem fails with the loss of the largest member.

Regardless of the ancient history of the world, it is clear that the previous efforts to civilize the Cygnmen had no more success than the current Imperial effort.  The Imperial Missionary and limited Administratum efforts to bring the Cygnmen into a more modern way of life have convinced only a few dozen clans of the many hundreds that existed on the world.  Some clans have even attacked the Imperium for the temerity of suggesting that they may enjoy living in places with clean water and impartial law enforcement.  Once the offending clans were exterminated, these raids ceased, but the underlying displeasure with the Imperial lifestyle has never gone away.

Those clans who have elected to become more normal Imperial citizens have enjoyed their decision’s fruits, at least for the most part.  A modern Imperial city has sprung up in the shadows of the world’s largest mountain, and its comforts are freely available to all who dwell there.  The high,tall electric fence that rings the city keeps out those who would not work for what they have, while a small Precinct Fortress of Arbites keeps order and trains the friendlier locals in Imperial law.  What defenses the world has are generally in the hands of the permanent Celestial Guard barracks on the planet, though it is not uncommon for a tribe of overly hostile Cygnmen to be snatched up in the night and taken as defenders of the world in its notional PDF.  There, they can look at great Imperial buildings and bases in astonishment and awe, and perhaps come to a better appreciation of its virtues.

To the interest of the Administratum, some of the more isolated populations of Cygnmo are developing along the same historical tracks as their ancestors.  Patrilineal kingdoms of warriors, organized around a small cadre of priests and sages and led by their greatest general, have started to conquer and absorbd neighboring migrant groups of similar linguistic character.  Some of these are now approaching the tens of thousands in number, with leadership castes too large for any one king to know them all.  These groups all seem to gradually migrate towards the world’s equator, despite the worsening weather.  Attempts to infiltrate and redirect these miniature kingdoms towards Imperial loyalty have thus far been unsuccessful.  The clans that evolve into kingdoms are generally those that have developed their own written language or adopted the Low Gothic one.  Eventually, the Imperium may well lose patience and declare one the legitimate rulers of the planet, and assist them in ‘pacifying’ the others.

Adjusting to the world’s strange climate is an effort for new Imperial Adepts and menials in the population.  The planet has an eighty-four Terran hour day, a five hundred day year, and vicious storms that chase the terminator line around the world.  At the polar circles, this is means lingering, slow snowstorms, more pretty than obstructive.  At the equator, this means rapid and destructive gale-driven rain, propelled by the cycle of cold night air and hot day air in the atmosphere.
The local calendar is, obviously, not even slightly compatible with the Imperial Standard Dating System.  Instead, the local population keeps track of time by the passage of nights.  The migratory clans have no other means of keeping observations of the passage of time, since the world lacks recognizable seasons.

The world’s enormous size has allowed for some covert implementation of local Imperial colonization of a more useful sort.  In parts of the planet with no native human life, the Mechanicus and Administratum have organized surveys to establish the planet’s mineral wealth, and its defensibility against Glasian incursion.  The results have been uniform.  The planet has abundant, untapped mineral wealth, and nowhere near the defenses needed to drive off even the lightest Glasian attack thus far recorded.  The planet’s future hangs in the balance of the Administratum’s ledgers, then: to invest the resources needed to make the locals more pliable and the land more productive, or continue as they are, and simply resign the world to loss if the Glasians come?


System: Nauphry

Galactic Position: Cloudburst Sector, Capital Nauphry Subsector

System Overlord: Lord Subsector Nauphry Matheus Soldati

Planets: Seven, two inhabited

Industrial World: Nauphry IV

Satellites: Nauphry IV has two moons, both uninhabitable

Tropospheric Composition: Nitrogen 77%, Oxygen 21%, Argon 1%, Water 1%, Carbon Dioxide .04%

Religion: Imperial Cult

Government Type: Adeptus Terra

Planetary Governor: No

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

Climate: Temperate, formerly oceanic, becoming toxin seas

Geography: Active tectonics, landmasses occasionally damaged by catastrophic earthquakes, .92 times the size of Terra, large oceans

Gravity: 0.91 Terran Gravity

Economy: Gelt Thrones and Silver Thrones

Principle Exports: Cogitator Parts, Terraformation Starter Kits, Processed Metals, Fertilizers, Imperial Guard, Plastics, Starships
Principle Imports: Raw Resources, Food, Servitors

Countries and Continents: Two countries, one of which serves as the hub of Imperial government, spread out over three continents

Military: Nauphry Guard, Nauphry Ironclads, Nauphry Bastions (high quality Guards, high quality Navy, high quality PDF)

Contact with Other Worlds: Constant, as a Subsector Capital

Tithe Grade: Decuma Particular

Population: 9,090,000,000

Description:
The proud home of the Cloudburst Imperial Navy, a smog-choked hell, and the Imperial world most likely to dissolve into civil war, Nauphry is by any metric a fascinating world.  The planet’s lengthy day-night cycle and steep axial tilt makes most days recognizably different from the day before in weather, and its sky routinely darkens from the number of ships passing by in its orbit.

Nauphry IV – never Four – is an Industrial World.  These worlds tend to have been in the exact position between the number of people needed to make a Hive World and having the technology to actually do it at the time the Imperium contacts them first.  As a result, they also tend towards being polluted, heavily populated, and suffering from nationalistic fervor.  Of course, as long as the world continues to produce and refine minerals and goods for the Imperium, the Adepta generally do not care much about the specifics of each world’s environment and local governing.
Nauphry IV may be an exception to that trend.  The planet is not only a major Imperial Navy anchorage, but also a local hub of trade and travel thanks to its neighbor, Nauphry VII.  The world contributes a higher percentage of its population to the Adepta than any other world in the sector, including Celeste.  Cloudburst itself barely contributes less.  Consequently, the Imperium is more aware of local political rumblings on the planet, and the Inquision has at least two Inquisitors of the Ordo Hereticus and one of the Ordo Militarum present at all times.

The actual government of the planet is that of the Adeptus Terra itself, with the System Overlord serving as the Subsector Overlord, and with no Planetary Governor serving between them and the structure of the plantary administration.  This was an effort of necessity, stemming from the binary nature of the planet’s civil government.

Nauphry is a world divded.  At the moment, two countries, each controlling roughly half the planet’s population, sprawl over the surface of the world.  Neither is permitted to build up local militaries.  All defensive military assets on the planet stage from large bases under direct Imperial control.  This was a precaution, to prevent the two active nations from destroying each other.  While this has allowed for the local PDF to reach a level of preparedness and non-tribal mindset that few other PDFs reach, it has forced the governments to compete by other means.  At times, this competition has taken the form of friendly sporting events, building increasingly opulent cathedrals to the Emperor, or similarly good-natured efforts.  More recently, however, the competition has switched to rapid resource generation, to satisfy the planet’s tithing effort.

Obviously, this is of huge benefit to the Imperium, which has successfully built multiple starships from the resources raised on Nauphry and plans to build more.  However, the comparatively primitive technology of the planet is both inefficient and polluting.  The surge in huge manufacturing and mining efforts is now polluting the planet so heavily that one of the two nations of the world has calculated that the world‘s agriculture will fail within the century.
The nation intent on pillaging the planet’s resources without constraint, Emericos Federocracy, presently represents a majority of the world’s industrial base and tithe, and is thus favored by the Administratum.  The nation that has successfully predicted the planet’s economic failure, Barnap Federocracy, is physically larger, but its less productive and more efficient manufacturing systems produce about 40% of the planet’s tithe output.  It also plays host to the planet’s largest Scholam ProgenumProgenium, though its Abbot makes a conscious effort to stay detached from local politics.  The planet’s growing ecological problems are not the concern of the Adepta, though Barnap officials are appealing to them for aid in resolving this dispute.

The two nations are forced by system law to contribute identical tithes of troops for the PDF and other military, which they do on the surface military bases of the Officio .Munitorum.  The world’s military forces have allegiance to their home nation beaten out of them in training, thanks to previous incidents of friendly fire between PDF platoons of differing nationalities.  The PDF garrison in chains of partially-underground buildings, mass-built by the Mechanicus.  The structures usually have a surrounding maze of barbed wire coils and sentry towers.  Road access to these imposing bases is denied to all vehicles that can’t present identification for every passenger, and those who fail to provide it are turned away at the first checkpoint and vaporized at all checkpoints after that.
Nauphry PDF tithe their most skilled 10% of each rank and rating up to the Officio Munitorum, though not all up to the Guard.  Some are instead tithed up to the Imperial Navy, and do so at a higher rate than any other world in the Sector.

Nauphry IV also fields a wet navy, with aircraft carriers, submarines, and battleships.  It patrols the shores of the islands on which the world’s Mechanicus temples and Astropathic shrine are built, and also guard the gigatonnes of shipping that crosses the world’s increasingly polluted seaways.  The SDF of the system recruits heavily from the larger cities of the planet, so the surface and space defense fleets rarely draw from the same population.  This can create more of the sme rivalries that have all but paralyzed the PDF in the past.  For now, the planet’s government and defenses are just potent and functional enough that the Inquisition and Arbites have not stepped in, but they shall if things get any worse.

The Nauphry system also provides many of the colonists drawn from the Sector to colonize worlds beyond.  The Cloudburst Circuit is the largest destination, but is not the only one.  Worlds in the war-torn Naxos Sector and pirate-ravaged Drumnos Sector also sometimes require Cloudburst colonists, and Nauphry IV provides hundreds of thousands of them.  The ships upon which they fly are the product of Nauphry’s own shipyards, the unique Glowing Light colony barge.


High in orbit over Nauphry IV, the Deathwatch waits.  The space station known to planetside stargazers as ‘Object 1532,’ local government as ‘Death-posting,’ and the SDF as ‘stay the hell away,’ is actually Watch Station Discus.  The Station is the largest offshoot of Dascomb, and was built in place over Nauphry while Fabique assembled



Migration History

The Glasians do not select their targets, Tzeentch does.  The Mutant Liege selects the criteria by a method so arcane that the Inquisition has given up on trying prediction.  The one fact the Inquisition has determined beyond doubt is that Tzeentch views the Septiim system as a sort of control group for his enigmatic experiment.
The systems Tzeentch has targeted are listed below, in chronological order by Migration.
Event	Targets
Migration One	Septiim, Maskos, Drimmerzole
Migration Two	Septiim, Chlorit (DESTROYED), Coriolis (later), Celeste, Clegran
Migration Three	Septiim, Hangonne, Delving, Cognomen
Migration Four	Septiim, Thimble, Goldlight, Nauphry
Migration Five	Septiim, Hapster, Mendic
Migration Six	Septiim, Lordarine, Maskos, Hapster
Migration Seven	Septiim, Dawn-break, Gorum's Folly, Hapster, Oglith, Forender


The Free Corsairs Coalition

An overzealous name for an overzealous bunch, the Free Corsairs Coalition is the collective of pirates, raiders, smugglers, ship thieves, and outlaws that bedevil the Rogue Traders of the Cloudburst Circuit.  Though they number no more than a few hundred thousand humans, a few Eldar, and a few Orks, this collective has already achieved shocking gains against the Imperium, including the loss of an entire world in the Circuit.  This world, a tiny colony named Zlodziei, had never been a formal part of the Imperium of Man.  It was, instead, an outlaw world, populated by humans who had left the Imperium in disgust towards its draconian conduct.  This did not make them heretics, they insisted, and indeed shrines to Him On Terra exist in every major settlement.  They reject the Adeptus Terra, and live for themselves.
This, however, was a foolish move.  The first few centuries after the exodus from the greater Imperium were stable enough, if challenging.  Environmental conditions and isolation made survival a great concern.  After two hundred years of hard work, though, the Zlodziein had made great progress, carving farms, mines, factories, temples, offices, homes, and even a few small defensive structures from the rock.
Then, the pirates arrived.  Nobody came to save Zlodziei.
As far as they are from the core of Imperial space, pirates can go more or less unchallenged at the extreme edges of the Astronomican.  Pirate armies are rare, but fleet of thieves and killers looting Imperial shipping are both common and expected at the edges of Imperial territory.  When pirates do rise above survival and bloodlust and focus their efforts on conquest of territory and resources, they can be murderously effective, especially if they have a true Navigator at their disposal.  Unburdened by bureaucracy or the Ministorum, the Free Corsairs Coalition saw an opportunity in Zlodziei, and took it.  The residents of the world had no warning, as they might have had if the Mechanicus had provided them with telescopes and radar satelites.  The world had no sanctioned psychics, or psycrystal copies of the Tarot, and so had no means of predicting their problem or calling for help.  When the first Coalition ships appeared at the edge of the system and started landing rough-clad invaders with flamers and shotguns, the Zlodziein were taken wholly by surprise.  Beset by thousands of pirates, the planet fell within hours, and now serves as the capital of the Coalition.
The Coalition has elected to leave the population in place and put them to work.  After culling the leadership of the planet’s government from their positions and putting them to work in the mines, the pirates left the remainder of the Zlodziein where they were, with the instruction to simply live as life goes.  The Coalition did add new manufacturing and mining equipment to the planet, equipment they had stolen from the Mechanicus.  Now producing at a surplus, the planet’s industry fuels the Coalition.
The FCC did not arise from nothing, however.  The Coalition drew its members from dozens of smaller bands, from three different species.  The group has Eldar in its leadership and Orks in its boarding team, while the majority of the group and its present Admiral are human.
Its fleet is a large and diverse one, but consists almost exclusively of Escorts, with only freighters for cargo moving.  The flag vessel of Admiral Reith is a Styx-class Heavy Cruiser, however, and to the surprise of the Ordo Hereticus spies that have begun to infiltrate the FCC, it is completely uncorrupted by Chaos.  Precisely where Reith could have found the ship is unknown, but it has no stamps on its hull to indicate Cypra Mundi’s shipyards built it, as most were.  The fleet has a smattering of other ships of Light Cruiser tonnage or heavier, but over four fifths of its vessels are no larger than a heavy frigate, and most are much smaller.

Oddly for pirates, the FCC also deploys a variety of weapons that do not suit its overall goal of expanding its fleet as much as possible.  Several smaller ships in the fleet mount potent plasma guns, which are possibly the worst deep-space weapon for taking something intact.  The Eldar ships of the fleet (of which there are only three) mount the longest-ranged guns their hulls can hold, and generally protect the Styx.  Reith’s name for the ship has not yet reached Imperial ears, but his followers know it to be the Inescapable.
The Orks of the FCC are an enigma to the Imperial Navy.  They have the same genetic obsession with bloodshed and looting as Orks elsewhere in the galaxy, but the instinct to join up with other Orks and form a Waaagh is lacking, or at least suppressed.  So long as the FCC keeps the Orks supplied with loot and targets, the Orks seem content to work for them.  The Eldar are equally confusing.  The Inquisition does not know why they are even willing to work with Reith.  So far, they have shown no connection with larger Corsair or Kabalite forces, and their ships have no hull markings.

What is not in question is the group’s inspiration.  Piracy is closely tied to the history of the Cloudburst Sector and its relationships with its neighbors.  Battlefleet Drumnos has often driven pirate forces from its own frontiers into the voids of space beyond, and since that territory was unexplored and unclaimed at the time, there was little trouble there.  However, now that void of space is the Cloudburst Sector, and Battlefleet Cloudburst does not appreciate that this slips the minds of their coreward bretheren at times.  As recently as M41.768, the Drumnos Sector Fleet has driven pirate groups out of their territory and into Cloudburst.  The FCC is not one of them, but they have observed carefully the failures of their southern bretheren, and are determined to avoid repeating their mistakes.
The most obvious direct inspiration for the FCC is the Dark Winds pirate group, but obvious does not mean accurate.  Dark Winds was more than a band of pirates and buccaneers, they were a revolutionary army, with worlds in their thrall and an STC.  The FCC are still very much mobile raiders in the majority.  Their population of ship crewers exceeds the population of Zlodziei by several thousand, and they recruit from the crews of the ships they conquer as often as they do recruiting stations.  Moreover, the FCC has very few assets under their control that the Adeptus Mechanicus covets, like a working Leman Russ Annihilator STC in perfect condition.
The FCC also avoided one mistake that wound up spelling death for the Dark Winds.  The Dark Winds were foolish enough to actually try attacking the Battlefleet Cloudburst directly after being driven from their ancestral home in Drumnos, and did so with their mobile shipbuilding yard and STC in formation with the rest of their fleet.  They also did so in a ground engagement, hoping to use their Leman Russes against the unprepared Cloudburst defenses.  This merely allowed the Mechanicus to field their own ground forces against them, and STC tanks driven by criminals cannot overcome Forge World tanks driven by Skitarii.
The Dark Winds also pressed their defenses against the Imperium, by repeatedly holding fixed territory against Imperial orbital forces and relying on terrestrial food production.  No human force can withstand an Imperial Sector Battlefleet, let alone two, and the Dark Winds were fools for thinking so, in the mind of the FCC leader.
Reith instead relies on Zlodziei as little as he can.  Having it is a great advantage for him, no question, and the occasional recruits he gets from their populace are a nice bonus.  The majority source of his fleet’s income, however, was and remains piracy.  Raiding and looting are more than a pastime or occupation for his forces: they are a lifestyle.  His fleet is growing slower than Battlefleet Cloudburst, but he has no intention to charge headlong into battle with them.  Reith knows about the Glasians, and suspects the hand of Chaos in their activity.  The canny old Admiral is perfectly capable of telling when he’s outgunned, and knows that a single Glasian Cylinder could punch through Zlodziei’s defenses as if they weren’t there.


M41.502: Reconclave – The remaining Exigent Task Force Marines and the Inquisitors of the Ordos Cloudburst assemble in the Inquisitorial Palace of Maskos.  The group deliberates for almost a year on the outcome of the second invasion, and eventually resolves to create a permanent garrison.
M41.519: Brotherhood – The planet Azure, once a logistical and governmental hub of the Nauphry Subsector, changes its name in Imperial records.  No other changes are noted by outside observers, and life appears to proceed as normal.  However, when an Inquisitorial vessel makes dock above the world to take on supplies some weeks later, it is captured by an unidentified force of raving cultists, who throw themselves on the Inquisitor with savage ferocity.  The Inquisitor barely has time to call for aid by Astropath before the ship is taken, and he is drawn and quartered by the lunatic mob.  Ordo Hereticus reinforcements arrive four months later to find that the world’s government has fallen to a collective of fanatical cultists named the True Brotherhood, who have fallen to the whispers of a recidivist Astropath.  The Astropath, the Inquisition learns, has gone utterly mad, and has declared that he can bestow psychic powers on his most devout worshippers.  He has turned the whole planet against the Imperium, and even changed the name of the world to better reflect ikts new station.  The Inquisition summons every Battle Sister in the Sector and Circuit to a Mechanicus refueling station at the edge of the system, and upon their assembly, descends on the world with four thousand Templar Militia and twelve thousand Guardsmen in tow.  Brotherhood burns as Inquisitorial and cultist forces battle In the streets, propelled by their clashing faiths to a battle of no quarter.  Finally, after suffering extensive losses, the Inquisition declares the world Perdita, and reluctantly calls in Exterminatus on the world.  Psychic scars on the population by the mad Astropath and his rogue psyker legions were great enough that the world could not be salvaged.  Brotherhood burns.  The Sisters of Cloudburst bear the incident as a mark of shame to this day.
M41.525: The Blue Daggers are Born – After decades of work and preparation, the Blue Daggers chapter of the Adeptus Astartes is formally Founded in the Septiim system.  Taking the hollow asteroid dubbed Gargantuan as its Fortress Monastery, the Daggers collect geneseeds and equipment from the Novamarines and Angels of Fury to establish their starter population of one hundred twenty Marines.  The Mechanicus of Cognomen are given the honor of building the additional equipment of the Daggers until they can get their own forges up and running.  The Daggers select Brother Lieutenant Augustus Alderoster as their new Chapter Master.  The Chapter begins busily expanding their assets and numbers.
M41.538: A Gang of Thugs – The absurdly overzealous collective of pirates named The Endless Party attack Watch Station Discus in the Nauphry system, hoping to steal the Inquisitorial armor and weapons within.  The Deathwatch slaughter them all in minutes by teleporting into their ships and sabotaging their life support systems.  The Nauphry SDF arrives to help, just in time to be handed the captured ships by the disinterested Deathwatch, who view the entire exercise as a distraction.
M41.589: The Peaceful Faith – The Abbey of the Martyred Emperor opens in the Septiim system, housing over a thousand priests and nuns of the Ecclesiarchy.  The tiny Battle Sister contingent of the abbey flies in from the Segmentum Solar to serve as its defenders, and quickly establish the tone of their relationship with the Daggers by refusing to allow a Dagger representative to attend the abbey’s consecration.
M41.600: The Third Glasian Migration – As predicted by the Ordos Xenos and Malleus, a third wave of Glasians, this one even larger, assaults the Cloudburst Sector.  This time, the Daggers stand ready.  Although the Glasians attack four disparate systems, the six hundred Battle Brothers of the Daggers work alongside over two million Guard and forty million PDF and sailors to drive the aliens back into space, where teleporting Dagger Terminators destroy them with sabotage.
M41.624: Mysterious Murder – The Lord Sector Cloudburst Roger Holdlt dies to an assassin’s bullet on the porch of his sprawling underground mansion in the caves of Cloudburst.  The assassin is captured alive by an Arbites bodyguard squad, and find him to be under the control of an unknown alien machine, embedded in his thyroid.
M41.669: Pox – Without warning, a massive fleet of Nurglite pirates, tainted aliens, and even a few Death Guard Marines surges from the tainted heart of the Naxos Sector.  The Daggers begin their first extra-Cloudburst mission, as they work alongside the Celestial Knights and their own parent Chapters the Novamarines and Angels of Fury.  The combined force of Marines and Imperial Navy beat the Nurglits back into the perimeter of the Corumbino Nebula, where vengeful Chaotic reinforcements fall on the Imperium’s fleets.  The Blue Daggers vessels take a savage pounding, and although they lose no ships larger than an Escort, their fleet is left at two thirds strength.  Eventually, the pirates are driven into the Warp Storms at the heart of the Nebula by Battlefleet Naxos and the Celestial Knights.
M41.688: Whiplash – On the Frontier world of Hangonne, scraps of an archaeotech cache are found by enterprising gold prospectors.  The Mechannicus snatches it up, and finds it to be leftover from an abortive colonization attempt by Terra, over eighteen thousand years before.  All usable technology has decayed beyond any use, save one: a shipping pallet of electric whips, apparently used for fighting off predators.  Cognomen Electro-Priests eagerly add the whips to their arsenals.
M41.700: The Fourth Glasian Migration – Again foretold by the Tarot, the Glasians strike Cloudburst Sector.  The expanding military forces of the Cloudburst Sector meet the aliens head-on, and although the Glasians came harrowingly close to destroying Nauphry VII, the Imperium again defeats them.