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Mining World: Underbar

Galactic Position: Cloudburst Sector, Delving Subsector

System: Remenanos

System Overlord: Overlady Santher Liminiel 3rd

Planets: 4, 2 habitable (1 uncolonized)

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, 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, no nations to speak of

Military: Celestial Guard barracks

Contact with Other Worlds: Frequent

Tithe Grade: Exactus Tertius

Population: 2,000,000

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 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.

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, as a result of Thimble’s vigorous crime rate and the needs 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 volumes of rare metals it produces entitles it to a small, permanent garrison of Celestial Guard.

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 Inquisitor 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 Thantos concern.


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, whole 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 unhole monsters.  The cameras on the hull of the ship he had flown through the Melta hole had shown crew members fused to each others’ 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 Magi, 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.


Civilization World: Maskos – Inquisitorial Palace Cloudburst present, planet has great love of theater, Guards are sapper and tunneler specialists thanks to terraforming archaeotech allowing underground living (which has spread to other worlds)
Maskos is not named after a Rogue Trader, nor 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 its greatest oversight in the Sector’s history.

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 to survive many centuries deeper into the Age of Strife than the majority of the worlds of the later Cloudburst Sector.





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Circuit.  He achieved phenomenal success, ultimately categorizing twenty more systems in a mere decade.  Eventually, his stellar rise to glory landed him a position as the Archmagos Explorator of the sector, and a permanent posting on Cognomen proper.

Eight Subsectors, each named for an inhabited world around which their Control Fortress orbits, were created once the size of the Sector became clear.  They are, in rough order from galactic east to galactic west (spinward to trailing): Hapster (by far the oldest), Cognomen, Oglith, Celeste (the capital), Delving, Maskos, Thimble, and Nauphry.  The world now known as Brotherhood was once considered for a Subsector capital, but the decision ultimately favored Nauphry; this may have been a factor in the tragedy that befell Brotherhood.  To compensate for the lengthy travel times between systems and the fact that several systems of the young Sector had multiple habitable bodies, System Overlords are generally installed instead of individual Planetary Governors, and the Order Famulous is given the chance to render commentary on all high-profile Overlordship appointments.  Overlordship is revocable only by unanimous consent of the Subsector and Sector Masters Administratum, and is therefore a rare event, if the Ordo Hereticus doesn’t take matters into its own hands.

Today, Cloudburst is a triumphal example of the latter-day Imperial ability to keep expanding, despite every reason to stop.  Though its defenses were not particularly important prior to the arrival of the Glasians, it is now fortifying at a dizzying pace.  Missionaries and Techpriests rush to worlds on the slightest hint of archaeotech or un-converted primitive humans.  The stronger the Imperium’s arms and more thorough its faith, they preach, the better the odds that the Emperor will smile on them, and the Sector will survive another Glasian Migration.  Rogue Traders and Explorators, rivals at the best of times elsewhere in the galaxy, work together to find more worlds and treasure for the sector.  A full Space Marine Chapter digs in, deep in the sector’s heart, preparing for the worst, while ruthless armies of Astra Militarum and Skitarii ferret out enemies of the sector, within its borders and beyond them.  The vast Forge World of Cognomen is now remorselessly disregarding stricture against Titan and Knight manufacture, while the Ecclesiarchy Cloudburst arms its Sisters on their beachfront palace.  PDFs across the sector kiss their Aquila pendants and pray for mercy, while furious Nurglite Cultists strive mightily to break Tzeentch’s stranglehold on cult activity nearby.  The Inquisition and Arbites burn all sign of corruption or heresy from the overtaxed populace of Cloudburst, even while fresh worlds are brought into compliance by the high-tech armies of Solstice and Septiim.
All the while, vile alien beasts stare unblinkingly at the stars of Cloudburst from their time-stasis prisons; their very cells realigning to the dark curiosity of foul Tzeentch.  Cloudburst is a place of dynamism, violence, and perfidious hope.  None know its fate, none but Tzeentch know when Tzeentch’s experiment shall end, and even he does not know what he will do with the sector after he is finally done.




Rangdan Xenocides: The Rangdan Xenocides were a war, spanning thirty years from M30.861, and a few skirmishes afterwards, between Imperial Humanity and the Rangda alien species.  The Rangda, made aware of the Imperium thanks to the Astronomican, were cerovores, and made a delight and a spectacle of harvesting the nerves and brains of thinking beings.  Humans, perhaps the most delicious after Eldar, were ideal prey for the beasts, and they launched a crippling assault against the Imperium as soon as they came within range of it.  The resultant slaughter saw the brains of over eighty nine billion humans eaten by the monstrous creatures from Old Night’s depths.  The 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 6th, 11th, and 20th Legions of the Astartes had committed their fullest strength to repelling the monsters, and only barely survived the attempt.  The 11th, it is whispered, did not.
The Rangda, it transpired, were not even the principal threat behind the wars.  Living weapons, deployed at the end of the war by Rangda with oddly shriveled skeletons, revealed that at least some of their technology, so much more destructive than that of the early Crusaders, actually came from the Slaugth.  This race of flesh-eaters were the stuff of the nightmares of the Age of Strife.  Their frighteningly advanced technology and nearly indestructible flesh-horrors proved to outmatch the Imperium in destructive power, the Emperor was forced to utilize His most powerful weapon to destroy the core of the Rangda race.  Unshackling a secret weapon known only as the Labyrinth of Night, and compelling it to serve him with pure psychic power, He turned the power of the Slaugth against their Rangda brain-slaves, killing them and destroying nearly all non-Martian technology for light-years in every direction.  Between the total devastation of all nearby habitable worlds, the loss of all archaeo- and xeno-tech caches for dozens of light years, and the fact that the Astronomican was barely visible in the area, the Imperium had abandoned the region to its fate.  The possibility that the Slaugth were controlling the Rangda, or the reverse, has been blocked from further investigation by Imperial decree.


Astrogeography: The Cloudburst Sector is a loose sector, with many large star clusters or nebulae.  The sector is on the east side of the Segmentum Ultima/extra-Obscurus border, at the extreme galactic north.  Large belts of asteroids drift through the void, with the occasional Space Hulk ejected from the Warp and skidding through the darkness.  There have never been any large incursions of Tyranids or Necrons in the sector, though there are some feral Orks here and there.  No Tau have reached the sector, and what few Demiurg, Thraxians, Vespids, and Kroot there are about are mere mercenaries, ultimately of no political consequence.  There are no Eldar Craftworlds or Exodite colonies about, and what Eldar are present in the sector are generally pirates, Dark Eldar raiders, or refugees fleeing the Necrons, never in one place for long.  Oddly, the sector appears to have been passed over for colonization by the ancient Eldar, the Slann, and the primeval Martian and Terran Empires.  This is especially strange in the case of the Septiim system itself, since it contains a shocking three shirtsleeves-habitable planets, which in any other sector would have been a prize of unfathomable value to the colonists of old.  No unique STC printouts or creations, or components, have ever been found within thirty lightyears of the Septiim system, and there are only four Webway gates within moderate Warp flight distance.  The Ork colonies in the area are small, feral, and of little threat, though the Navy has made a point of annihilating the ones it finds growing in size, generally with space-to-surface artillery or precision lances.  Were there more battleships in the sector, they may even try to destroy the greenskins entirely.  The principal consistent alien threat in the region is instead from Ork Freebooterz.
Cloudburst is centered around the Celeste system, which contains the moon after which the sector is named.  Celeste 3 itself is a planet, a verdant and beautiful paradise world, from which the Lord Sector Cloudburst reigns.  There are no peripheral sectors, as the Cloudburst Circuit is not a sector; the Drumnos Sector borders Cloudburst coreward.  To trailing, there is the Oldlight Exo-zone, spinward is the Naxos Sector.

The sector has a common trend among the names of its worlds and stars: they tend to be named after the first or middle names of the Rogue Traders who found them (if an Explorator didn’t get there first).  This stems from ancient conflicts among Rogue Trader houses of neighboring Naxos fleets.  The Naxos Trader houses competed viciously for naming rights on new Proximate Circuit systems and properties, and thanks to the unpredictable time effects of traveling uncharted Warp routes, sometimes Rogue Traders would arrive at Fabique having equally legitimate claims to having discovered a world.
To resolve this, the Administratum’s Departmento Astrocartigraphicae and the Mechanicus’ Basilikon Explorator stepped in.  They decreed that all Rogue Trader ships that were seeking new worlds in the Proximate Circuit would carry clocks, built to Forge World precision on Fabique itself, all set to the same time.  When a Rogue Trader came to a Forge World with a claim of discovery or conquest on a new world in the Circuit, and it was contested by another, the clocks would be compared, and the one with less time displayed on it would be judged accurate.  Tampering with the clocks would result in the striking of Colonization Rights from the Warrant of Trade or Writ of Marque the offending Trader Dynasty possessed, plus the less quantifiable scorn of the Machine God.
This new system was immediately put in place and uniformly enforced.  It became common practice among exploring Rogue Traders to find a world, perform the fastest possible scans of its atmospheric composition, officially name it after themselves, leave a beacon at the edge of the system declaring this to be the case, and then make a direct course for Fabique to lay staked claims.  Worlds with names like Gorum, Jodhclan, Foralds, Vasari, and Locke appeared on maps in the Fabique Astrocartigraphicae vault, each with bare minimum settlement data and a meticulously determined date attached.  Before long, between the relentless pace of Macdonald’s fleet and over two dozen Rogue Traders hard at work, the outline of the modern Cloudburst Sector formed.  Even the sector’s capital moon orbits a world named after a Rogue Trader, though the Capital was placed on the rainy moon instead of the magnificent paradise of the world itself – perhaps, some mutter, to prevent a Rogue Trader from getting too much credit for their lucky discovery.