some worlds reworked

System: Starlight Hollow

Galactic Position: Cloudburst Sector, Celeste Subsector

System Overlord: None

Planets: Seven, one habitable

Feral World: Dawn-Break

Satelites: One uninhabitable moon

Tropospheric Composition: Nitrogen 74.1%, Oxygen 24%, Argon 1%, Water .9%, Carbon gasses .01%

Religion: Holy Emperor Star Cult

Government Type: Primitive

Planetary Governor: No

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

Climate: Dawn-break has widely varying climates by continent, with each continent having distinct ecosystems and temperatures

Geography: .88 times the size of Terra, seven continents, deep oceans with frequent earthquakes

Gravity: .86 Terra gravity

Economy: None

Principle Exports: None
Principle Imports: Soldiers, Weapons, Vehicles, Satellites, Fixed Defenses

Countries and Continents: No national borders or divisions to speak of

Military: Varied Imperial Guard barracks

Contact with Other Worlds: Frequent

Tithe Grade: Aptus Non

Population: 19,000,000

Description:

Of all of the words in the Cloudburst Sector, Cloudburst Circuit, and Northern Oldlight Exo-zone, there are none with a past more mysterious than Dawn-break.  Its oddly poetic name (for an Explorator, anyway) and impenetrable orbital security cordon bespeak the oddity of its origins, and the potential value of its hidden treasure.

The humans of the world know nothing of this, or don’t care.  Dawn-break is a Feral World by only the barest definition.  Its standards of living are increasing faster than the standards of any other world for a hundred fifty light years in every direction, and its defenses swell larger every day.  The planet may not be large, but its people benefit from constant Missionary work from the Ministorum, and extensive technological relief and improvement from the Mechanicus.

Adding millions of people to the Imperium is its own reward, of course, but there are other advantages to be found in the world’s colonization and exploitation by the Imperium.  Nearly the moment Justin MacDonald, legendary Explorator of Cognomen, settled into orbit over the planet, his sensors lit up with a massive return of heat and metal on the planet below.  He set his scanners to detect the source, and to hear his second tell it, his metal jaw dropped at the sight.

Dawn-break was once a colony of Terran Federation humans, as most Imperial worlds outside Cloudburst are, but it had a potent treasure that few others had.  At one point, Dawn-break was named Frilante, and was a potent agricultural breadbasket for the Federation, but that was the case only thanks to a massive satellite in orbit over the world.  MacDonald was detecting its remains on the planet below, and to his shock and joy, it still worked (to an extent).  The satellite was nothing less than a Martian artificial sun, a Heliopolis-class Pseudostar Harness.  These mechanically complex and staggeringly expensive mirror and laser arrays collect the radiation and particles ejected by a stellar body and process them to specific power, wavelength, and range, then beam them towards a target – a solar power plant, a weapon capacitor, or in this world’s case: an ice cap, which rendered the otherwise uninhabitable northern polar continent habitable.  MacDonald was detecting the Thermal Wave Containment Projector, still fitfully firing off random blasts of heat into the atmosphere.

As far as subsequent research can discern, the planet was once a barren ice ball, with hugely useful organic compounds trapped under miles of ice and snow on the surface.  The Terran Federation and Martians had worked together to turn the world into a colony of their ancient alliance, and had lost control of the satellite during the chaos of the Psychic Awakening.  When MacDonald found the world, it had been slowly sliding back into an ice age.

The Mechanuicus’ first priority was finding out whether the natives, which numbered no more than a few million at the time, knew of the artificial sun.  It was a fair guess that any that lived within a hundred miles knew, given that it loomed over the nearby mountains, but beyond that, it was anybody’s guess.  After a few decades of invisible surveys, the Mechanicus concluded that they did not, and in fact kept away from the region where its occasional red blasts were visible out of superstitious fear.  That meant that it likely had not been subject to tampering in the past.  That, in turn, suggested that the Harness fell after the world’s civilization collapsed from the Psychic Awakening.

The Mechanicus sent parties down to the surface, accompanied by Administratum and Ministorum officials, to begin the process of examining the Harness up close and converting the locals.  Unlike some other Feral and Feudal worlds of the Imperium, Dawn-break’s people were eager to become Imperial, but the very real problems of the world’s climate prevented much headway.  Although the conversion of the primitives to the Holy Emperor Star Cult – the easy-to-swallow variant of the larger Imperial Cult – has gone smoothly, the cultural and climatological differences between the various continents has also slowed progress.  Thousands of Missionaries have come down gravely ill or even died from virulent local pathogens that the Mechanicus missed when they were supposed to be looking for them in their initial scans.  Earthquakes have levelled temples and apartment buildings, from fault lines the Mecahnicus also missed.

Overall, the lack of attention paid to the world’s endemic conditions by the Mechanicus during their initial scramble to stake a claim on the Harness has reflected poorly on their image and slowed their ability to examine the ancient tech.  The Administratum and Ecclesiarchy have rightly pointed out that the Mechanicus was derelict in their duties, and the Arbites are coming to the same conclusion.
This has happened at the worst possible time, as far as the Mechanicus is concerned.  After thousands of years of painstakingly pulling away the super-fine sand that has almost buried the artificial sun, of careful digging, cleaning, examining, analyzing, and protecting, the Harness is almost ready to be relaunched.  The Imperial Navy has already set aside an orbital slot for its use, and the Imperial Adepts on the world have been claiming to the locals that the world will have two suns soon enough for years.
Now, however, the Mechanicus mission is under scrutiny for their failures, sometimes hundreds of years after they were reported.  The fact that the Cognomen Mechanicus is ill-regarded in the eyes of senior Forge Worlds at the best of times means that the Magos assigned to the Harness project is scrambling to keep up appearances and appear helpful, even while his resources dwindle as assets are called to ABX202020 and Foraldshold.
The Harness sits now in a large steel cradle, cut off from the sun that powers it.  A garrison of Skitarii from Cognomen guard it now around the clock, protected by five Legio Cybernetica Robots from Legio Solstice.  None of the locals dare go near, of course, but the Mechanicus is terrified that something may go wrong now, so close to the end that Magos Ellison can nearly taste it.

The rest of the planet is embracing the Imperium at a pace that delights Lord Cloudburst Quintus.  Temples, warehouses, marketplaces, and even schools rise from the dirt and sand of the planet every day.  Soon, the planet will be formally reclassified as a Civilized World, probably either a Paradise World or an Agri-World, depending on how effective Heliopolis is at preventing the ice age.  Part of the reason that progress was so slow for the first few hundred years was simple logistics: the world was getting cold and losing ocean as the ice caps expanded and expanded without slowing.  As the ice levels have risen, the oceans lowered, and so a city that was an oceanic port one decade may not have been the next decade.  The tribes of locals were used to it, but it was a major problem for the tropical paradise-dwelling Missionaries of Celeste.
Over time, the progress of the ice has slowed considerably, as Imperial efforts and local population growth have increased the volume of carbon and ozone in the air, but the desert continent that the artificial sun baked dry with its heat blasts has changed most of all.  Since the Mechanicus held off blocking the solar panels of the fifty kilometer wide satellite for as long as possible, the continent on which it landed grew hotter and hotter even as the rest of the world froze.  As soon as its blasts ceased, however, the resultant lack of constant and unnatural heat had a catastrophic effect of local weather, with month-long monsoons and floods becoming commonplace in under a decade.

Meanwhile, the local tribes of the world have taken to the Imperial Creed with commendable vigor and acceptance, though it has not been universal nor without hiccups.  The lack of an Arbites presence on the world will not be tolerable in the eyes of the Arbites themselves much longer, though the perpetually understaffed Cloudburst Adeptus might simply have to swallow their objections until they can shake loose some Judges to move in.  Likewise, the concept of an Imperial Tithe was very difficult for the locals to swallow, given the brutal poverty in which they dwelled for so many thousands of years.
However, the process of integration has pressed on, overcoming plagues, cataclysmic earthquakes, floods, cultural misunderstandings, and lawlessness in slow but relentless fashion.  Shrines to the Emperor in his true guise as the Immortal Emperor of Man instead of the primitive Star God of the current cult will rise soon.  The presence of a small Imperial Navy depot in orbit delighted locals who saw it and mistook it for a new star, given to them by the Holy Emperor as a gift for their patience.  This was not the plan of the Missionaries, but they were happy to spread the rumor and take some credit for it.

The problem, as is always the case in Cloudburst, is the Glasians.  The Tzeentchian scum may not even know of the world’s artificial sun, nor would Tzeentch especially care if he did.  The fact is that they are attacking the world anyway.  According to projections by Rogue Traders, Sanctionites, and Inquisitors assigned to the topic by Lord Quintus, the Glasians will hit Dawn-break like a tsunami as soon as the end of the year, and only a massive Navy force holds even a slight chance of stopping them.  Terrified of losing their ancient project and desperate to boost their reputation, Cognomen has ‘graciously’ dispatched nine Cruisers and twenty eight Escorts of the Basilikon Astra Cognomen to aid in the local defense, which the Navy is too relieved to question.  The orbitals are reinforcing as fast as they can, with pre-fab and self-assembling satellites and minefields popping up on radar maps like flowers in a field.

After months of debate, the local Missionaries have decided to inform the populace of the coming war.  They may have to fight it themselves if the Navy screws up, and it’s not like the situation in the general galaxy is much better.  To their immense relief, over a hundred thousand Dawn-breakers elected to join a PDV, or Planetary Defense Volunteer group, and have pledged their swords and cudgels to the defense of their homes.  This will not avail them against hovertanks and Ruin Guns, naturally, but it’s better than panicking or losing their faith.
Meanwhile, the Rogue Traders of the Cloudburst Sector are making a killing.  Unlike Cygnmo, Triune, and Fathon, the people of this world desire to become proper Imperials, and where the citizenry is expanding, there is money to be made.  Rogue Traders who pass the world on their route in and out of the capital subsector have made a habit of swinging slowly through the system on their way to the Citcuit, sending shuttles ahead of their ship, laden with books and exotic foods.  They sell them to the Adepts working to convert and prepare the locals, and sometimes to the locals themselves, then fly to the other side of the system to rendezvoux with their Trader and offload their money.

Of course, some have more than a purely financial interest in the system.  Rogue Trader Lord Gwiddon Thomas Walsh, the second most powerful person in Cloudburst and the Circuit, has taken a personal interest in the world’s defense.  Something of an expert on pre-Imperial terraforming technology like the Harnesses and Maskos machines, he would very much like to see the world preserved for the Imperium.  The idea of the technology of those two devices being used to make more Imperial colonies in the Circuit appeals to him at a very strong level, since he would be in perfect position to ensure that the pilot colonist groups would be of proper levels of piety and loyalty.  That would make his job as an Ordo Hereticus Inquisitor much easier, and increase the Imperium’s wealth at once – what Inquisitor wouldn’t want that?  His rival, Lady Trader Admiral Madeline Prinz has also quite publicly and pompously announced her support of the venture, and sent five frigates in her house’s colors to the defense of the world for pennies.  Why, none but she can say, but she rarely misses a chance to show up her rival, despite the inherent danger in provoking the Ordo Hereticus.

Not all of the world’s defenders are motivated purely by selfishness or politics, either.  Half of Battlefleet Celeste and one fifth of Battlefleet Cloudburst are already present, as are two ECAFs.  They are under strict orders to prevent any Glasian landings on the valuable world, and to contain them with orbital fire and heavy artillery if they manage to land anyway.  Three Imperial Guard regiments are slated to arrive, but the sheer drain on the Cloudburst Sector’s resources that the other Migration sites, Oglith, and Foradshold represent mean that they will be both late and unreinforced.  They are, in no order, the Celestial Guard 901st Rifles, the Maskos Argent Sword 421st Guerillas, and the Delving Field Guard 43rd Armored Regiment.  Supreme command of the world’s defenses falls now to Admiral Connor Liamsson, a decorated veteran of the Sixth Migration.  Gound command falls to Major General Kramer of the Celestial Guard.

The notable absence of any Space Marine defenders is a sore point among some of the Astra Militarum forces present.  Where are the Daggers, here to execute their remit to shield Cloudburst from its invaders?  Where are the Deathwatch, here to target and kill alien leaders in their insane Migrations?
En route, as fate would have it.  The surge in turbulence from the Ork and Glasian invaders’ psychic spoor has slowed both the Deathwatch frigate and Blue Dagger Strike Cruiser on their way to Starlight Hollow.  There is every chance that they will arrive only after the invasion has begun, but neither ship will stop or slow until their duty is done.


System: Gorum’s Lands

Galactic Position: Cloudburst Sector, Maskos Subsector

System Overlord: Lady Mirya Ahuja

Planets: Seventeen, one inhabitable

Feudal World: Gorum’s Folly

Satellite: Two moons

Tropospheric Composition: Gorum’s Folly has Nitrogen 75.5%, Oxygen 20.6%, Krypton 2.5%, Water 1.4%, Carbon Dioxide 0.01%

Religion: Imperial Cult

Government Type: Local Peerage

Planetary Governor: No

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

Climate: Broad and extensive hurricanes, lighter rainstorms, and miles-thick polar ice caps

Geography: Gorum’s Folly has several landlocked inner seas with low saline, and thirty two landmasses connected by seasonal landbridges, roughly the size of Terra

Gravity: Gorum’s Folly has 1.09 Terran Gravity

Economy: None

Principle Exports: Copper Ore, Platinum Ore, Unrefined Uranium, Salt
Principle Imports: Food, Solders, Clothing, Equipment, Climate Control Devices

Countries and Continents: Foraldshold has ten continents, with extensive state borders

Military: Gorum’s Guards (low quality PDF), various Imperial Guard garrisons

Contact with Other Worlds: Weekly

Tithe Grade: Solutio Tertius

Population: 198,187,000

Description:
As with so many worlds in Cloudburst, this world was once the discovery of an ambitious Rogue Trader.  Gorum Rowsdower found the planet during the Gold Rush Two, and named it after himself.  After verifying his findings with his Fabique Clock, Rowsdower promptly sold the world, earning the planet its name.  Gorum’s Folly is horrible.

Of all the worlds in the Sector and Circuit, Gorum’s Folly has by far the worst hurricane activity.  Storm after storm wracks the surface, rips topsoil up from the ground, flattens scrubby trees and bushes, and rips rooftops from buildings.
The coastlines of the planet’s many islands and small continents change constantly as the storms rearrange them.  Even when it’s not stormy, the planet is usually still rainy.  In some places, rainstorms last for as much as a month.  The plant life of Gorum’s Folly has evolved deep roots and the ability to process water flow quickly to compensate for the constant rainfall and wind, which makes it at best hard to use in agriculture.

A local peerage system rules over much of the planet, save for a few islands under direct Imperial control.  The peerage ultimately draws their authority from the right to rule bestowed on them by the System Overlord, whom the Subsector Overlord appoints.  However, the System Overlord is not a member of the peers, and therefore the de facto rulership of the world often defaults to whichever noble has the most land when hurricane season ends.  With each island far enough apart that huge investments in ship construction and maintenance are needed to establish trade and travel between them, this means that rulership of each island usually falls to the nobles wealthy enough to build ships.  The scarcity of good timber on the planet exacerbates this situation.

Unlike some other Feudal Worlds, however, Gorum’s Folly can raise its own PDF: the Gorum’s Guards.  The individual noble households are permitted by ancient decree to raise professional defenders for their estates, but wars between households come down to which can hire more mercenaries.

Culturally, Gorum’s Folly is a world of strict hierarchy, with no social movement outside the fringes of society.  The landed peers of the world’s nobility sit at the top, with landless nobles and certain Ecclesiarchial figures standing below them.  Next, come the Households, the collections of knights, baronets, and lesser lordlings who rule small estates on the islands shared by multiple families or monopolized by the Imperium.  Next, come the artisans and patronates, the families who craft complex goods and teach the children of the nobles.  Next, come the Swains, a unique feature of Gorum’s Folly, that consist of those who crew the boats and ships owned by the nobles, who are siolely responsible for inter-island trade.  Next are the PDF, and finally the peasants, who labor in the millions to produce ores and salt for the tithe, and food for the markets.

The Imperium is able to collect a tithe from this world, despite its uncooperative weather and feuding rulers.  It produces ores and salt, both of which are in high demand on Solstice.  The world’s resource output is enough, when combined with the rest of the Septiim system, to fuel Solstice without any additional income for that world.  Gorum’s Folly has an abundance of valuable ores, and can easily keep its own limited industry fueled with the leftovers from its tithe payments.
In exchange for its tithe payments, the world receives several key benefits from the Imperium.  It is the only Feudal World in the Cloudburst Sector and Circuit to have a Scholam Progenium, and the only one to have a Defense Laser of which the natives are aware.  Furthermore, the world can theoretically tithe up a Guard regiment now that its population is large enough and well educated enough to fulfil its training requirements without depleting its workforce.

However, Gorum’s Folly is a world that is in dire need of Imperial order.  If the world’s standards of living were higher, its residents would no doubt be less willing to live by the Imperium’s rules.  As it stands, though, there are several cities near the tropics of the world that have had to rebuild so many times that any assistance from the Imperium is welcome.  The nobles who rule these cities usually obey Imperial edicts without being told, if only to keep the peasantry in line.  It is not a coincidence these are the islands that promptest pay their tithes.  The planet does enjoy a few other benefits, like an active and philanthropically minded Ecclesiarchial presence and considerable orbital defenses for a world with M1.600s era technology.  Several of the feudal cities openly ignore Imperial orders until either the military or Arbites force them to comply, which opportunistic peers exploit for all it’s worth.

The Gorum Guards are understandably of lower quality than the average Imperial Guard or even PDF of the Cloudburst Sector, but the levels of readiness in their ranks must now increase dramatically if they want to have any hope of survival.  At present, the world is in a panic.  The Tarot has revealed that the Glasians have targeted the world in the next Migration, and there is no real chance that the defenses of the world can withstand them on their own.  Lady Ahuja has been sending couriers and Astropathic messages to beg for aid from every Imperial institution and Rogue Trader she can think of, and the few mercenaries that Cardinal Drake has not recruited.  Some Imperial Navy assets are on the way from Battlefleet Maskos, but the best news for her is that elements of the Second and Tenth companies of the Blue Daggers have responded to her calls, and are bringing approximately one hundred Marines to her defense.  As to whether that will be enough, she is unsure, and so she is also pleading with the Rogue Traders who sometimes pass by her world to aid Gorum’s Folly.  So far, none have acceded to her requests.


Subsector Capital System: Hapster

Galactic Position: Cloudburst Sector, Hapster Subsector

System Overlord: Lady Subsector Hapster Astrid Oskoldr

Planets: 10, 1 inhabitable, 1 undergoing terraforming

Civilized World: Hapster

Tropospheric Composition: Hapster has Nitrogen 75%, Oxygen 22%, Argon 1%, Water .95%, Carbon Dioxide 0.05%

Religion: Imperial Cult

Government Type: Adeptus Terra

Planetary Governor: Yes

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

Climate: Thanks to extreme axis tilt, Hapster has extensive climatological differences by location

Geography: Hapster has heavy tectonic activity around fault lines, and thick mountains rising from its seabed in volcanic ranges; it is half again the size of Terra, with a weak magnetic field

Gravity: Hapster has 1.1 Terran gravity

Economy: Gelt Thrones and Silver Thrones

Principle Exports: Concrete Mix, Timber, Fish, Plastic, Ammunition, Soldiers
Principle Imports: Clothing, Fertilizer, Maskos Machines, Construction Equipment, Medicines

Countries and Continents: Hapster has no national divisions, and eight continents

Military: Hapster Bronze Legionnaires (high quality Guard), Hapster Shields (medium quality PDF)

Contact with Other Worlds: Extensive

Tithe Grade: Decuma Particular

Population: 6,970,000,000

Description:
Hapster holds the distinction of being the oldest continually Imperial world in the entire Cloudburst Sector, by virtue of having not started in the Cloudburst Sector.  This is an ancient world, one of the very first settled in the Long March Colony Fleet’s efforts in the region over twenty thousand years before.  Once, it was a coniferous forest world of evergreen trees and abundant, house-sized fern clusters.  Vast herbivores slowly trawled the planet’s endless tropical forests, while darting lizards chased each other around its few open clearings.  The great volcano chains in the seas produced new, barren islands, fresh for vegetation to sprout up and take root on its black soil, while the frigid polar ice caps sheltered huge predatory shark analogues that hunted pseudo-cetaceans the size of aircraft carriers.

A few millennia of peaceful inhabitation by Terran Federation citizens didn’t damage the world overmuch, but during its time of Old Night, Hapster went through rapid-fire cataclysms that destroyed whole ecosystems and depopulated the cities.  First came the robots, then the onslaught of psykers, then a massive civil war that left the world vulnerable to alien enslavers.  By the time the Emperor’s Legions – the 18th, specifically – finally found the world, its population was begging to integrate into a stable, safe government once more.  A savage battle erupted between the Dragon Warriors and the unnamed aliens that had occupied Hapster.  By the time the battle was over, five cities lay in ruins, beyond the ones that had already been unpeopled by the occupiers, but the aliens had been driven off, never to return.

Joining the Imperium was an afterthought for the Hapsterians after that.  The world sided resolutely with the Imperium during the Heresy and Scouring, but contributed little to the war effort thanks to its crippled and rebuilding infrastructure.  By the time that Hapster was up to a mere shade of its former power, the Heresy and Scouring were over, and the Reconstruction had begun.  Hapster became the capital world of its own Subsector of nearby Agri-worlds and outposts, and the leaders of the planet’s Administratum knew they could hope for little more.  There was no way past the radioactive clouds of gas that separated the Naxos Sector from the Oldlight Proximate Circuit.

No way, of course, until the arrival of Magos Explorator Justin MacDonald.  His legendary excursions into the Oldlight Proximate Circuit produced safe Warp routes to worlds that Hapster and Cognomen had never known about, and brought two enormous gold rushes of exploration and colonization to the region.  Hapster’s Imperial Governor petitioned for his world to become the seat of government in the new Sector-to-be, but the Segmentum Command office overruled him, and Cloudburst was chosen instead.  Ultimately, Hapster was not as affected by the creation of a new Sector as they had hoped.  It retained control of its own Subsector, but aside from a slight uptick in sales of its goods to its new neighbors and a more powerful fleet to defend it, Hapster continued to exist as it always had.

Unfortunately, the way it had existed was deeply flawed.  For reasons that the administratum has been unable to define, and seem to shift and trace back through history as far back as the Great Reformation, the Adeptus Arbites presence on Hapster has been profoundly troubled.  No matter how many Judges and Marshals the Adeptus cycles through, no matter how many reforms and riots the people have had to endure, the interactions between the Arbites and the Menials of Hapster has always been contentious, hostile, and violent.

Fixing a date on the beginnings of this strife is impossible.  The historical records that exist from that long-gone era contain hints of the simmering resentment between the people of Hapster and their legal guardians as far back as detailed notes are kept.  Arbites records show hostile interactions between Hapsterites and Arbites over things as petty as littering and library book overdue fees.  Odder yet, those Arbites that have transferred to other Cloudburst worlds after one too many incidents rarely continue such behavior on other worlds.
Although Imperial history barely records the roots, there is no doubt that the bulk of the conflict between Hapster and its Arbites manifests in the extra-legal conduct of the population.  Hapster has a higher incidence rate of Arbites falling to corruption and graft than any other Cloudburst world by a factor of two, and entire Precincts have fallen to internal conflict in the past.  No other Cloudburst world can claim a fault with their Arbites to such an extent.  Lord Marshal Oolan has extended multiple inquests to the world’s leadership, attempting to find a cause for this.
He is not alone in his desire to know more.  The Ordo Hereticus has launched no fewer than five investigations of the poor behavior and interactions of the Hapster Arbites in the past six thousand years, and none of them have turned up anything concrete.  At times, it seems to stem from an indolent and lackadaisical populace that is unconcerned with law.  Other times, the Arbites are found to be at fault, having fallen from the path of righteousness despite their Chaplains’ best work.

Ultimately, there is no common thread connecting these thousands of incidents of distrust and violence.  While Arbites on Hapster seem to be perfectly capable of interacting with nobles and the upper classes without undue violence, interactions between Arbites and the middle to lower classes seem to end in violence far more often than needed.  Local Marshal C. Lumina Copperlain is at a loss to explain this phenomenon.  The Ordo Hereticus would surely have found something if the world were truly corrupted by Chaos or aliens, she insists, so the problem must be with the worlds from which Hapster draws its Arbites.
In reality, Oolan and Copperlain are in denial over the root of the problem.  The fact is that Hapster’s culture and economy are intricate, nuanced, and fragile, despite their age and power.  The brutality and arbitrary judgments of the Arbites simply do not mesh well with Hapster’s complex lifestyles, climate, and culture.  Unfortunately, despite the answer being so clear, Copperlain will almost certainly never see it.  Copperlain, and most of her predecessors, see the pressing need for the Arbites on Hapster as being the same as constant need for activity on Hapster, and behaves accordingly.  Hapster does have a history of small-scale brush wars, Tithe tardiness, and occasional misbehavior by the Subsector Overlord and their family.
Hapster’s culture orbits around a complex hierarchy of families, work, art, and piety, and the blanket approach of the Arbites to problem-solving produces great resentment among the people.  Hapster Bronze Legions rarely experience these problems thanks to the grim reality and pragmatism of war, and so the image of their culture rarely travels off world.  Arbites are expected to be as distant and unconcerned by the locales in which they ply the law as possible, to prevent playing favorites, or the worse crime of vigiliantism.  However, even if the Arbites were to finally learn of the true source of their common acrimony with the local population, little would change.  The Lex Imperia is unflinching, and so are its wardens.  If the Hapsterites have a culture that doesn’t mesh well with the Imperial Book of Judgment, the fault lies with the Hapsterites, not the Book, after all.

Hapster’s unique social structure has allowed it to develop its own culture, distinct from both the Naxos and Cloudburst norm.  The planet has rigid castes and no social movement to speak of, but because they are only peripherally tied to family and not at all to locale, racial or political lines do not fracture the populace.  Instead, its residents compete vigorously in athletics, or more specifically, turn out by the hundreds of thousands to watch athletes picked by lottery compete in tournaments for their entertainment.  Archery is the classic field, but scrumball and hockey are almost as popular.  Fans of specific teams may drive for ten hours to watch the team drawn from their caste compete with the same caste from another city, or watch players from noble families clash in their state-of-the-art arenas.  The worst sports riots in Cloudburst history have all happened on Hapster, sometimes with a violence and spread that would leave an Ork impressed.

Of course, the Arbites are not responsible for enforcing planetary laws.  The Arbites are supposed to constrain their enforcement activies specifically to enforcing the Common Imperial, the Lex Imperialis, the Book of Judgment.  Some worlds have domestic laws that infringe on the Book of Judgment more than others, of course, and if that were the case in Hapster, that would be an easy matter to fix.  A few Senioris Judges could simply sit down with the local jurists and put them on a more compliant path.  It’s Hapster’s culture itself that conflicts with the Imperial perception of law and propriety, not a specific precedent or stricture.

Hapster’s culture and its economy are closely tied, and vunerable to disruption.  Among the civilians of the world, social rank stems from birth and education, but mostly from the initial prospects of the civilian’s career.  After basic education, citizens are expected to report to one of several employment centers around the planet.  Each graduate undertakes various examinations to best determine their course in life, following arcane criteria on a listing as old as the planet.  Some of the criteria refer to cities or technologies that no longer exist, people covet others to the extent that bribing the examiners is expected and encouraged.  Regardless, the system does allow a semblance of order and productivity in the Hapster economy.
Hapster needs this direly, because the reliance on Dark Age technology in its economy crippled it for its absence.  Hapster was a world of manufacturing, experimentation, and testing.  After the initial human colonization, the planet served as a test bed for all manner of automated technologies, integrating with the world’s supply of Iron Men and other, simpler machines.  The loss of that technology forced the populace of Hapster to support itself in many ways, and it was far too small to do so efficiently.  The subsequent double blow of its psychic population going insane and the loss of its trading partners on Levitna crippled what was left.  The regimented survival protocols of the world’s shrinking government forced the population into its strict patterns for their own sake, and for better or worse.  When the aliens came, it was the last straw.  The planet collapsed into near-anarchy.  The alien occupiers co-opted Haspter’s venerable Civil Service tests as a means of controlling and brainwashing its citizens into compliance.  After the Dragon Warriors freed the world and welcomed it into the Imperium, the Administratum reincorporated the tests and put them back to work.  After ten thousand years of administrative ossification, the world’s economy has stratified into its current rigor, with no relief in sight.

The planet’s failing ecology is not helping matters.  Industrial pollution, atmospheric rebalancing, extensive ruins covering much of the planet, and even a few lingering contaminants from the Iron Men uprising have rendered whole regions of the planet functionally uninhabitable.  Ironicallly, the out-of-control plant life in many of these areas acts as a sponge for some of the pollution produced in the few, overcrowded cities that remain.  The world has carefully balanced agricultural zones that alleviate most of its food requirements, but any substantial disruptions to the planet’s workforce or ecoblanace will cripple Hapster.

Complicating things is the world’s proximity to several Feudal and Feral Worlds in need of Missionaries and workers.  Hapster’s Administratum generally does not rely on Hapster to meet the Cloudburst Sector’s need for such people when Jodhclan and Thimble are available, but the Ecclesiarchy pays less heed to such concerns, and in two incidents in the past have abducted whole populations for impressment or service.

The planet called Hapster is the fourth planet in the system, and there are plans to terraform the third planet to Hapster’s own ecology, though the Glasian Migrations have stalled those out.  The plan to terraform Cloithe, the almost Terra-sized moon of the brown dwarf Hapster 6, is proceeding slowly.

The world has another, far more recent problem that has all but paralyzed it.  The Glasians hit Hapster in both the Fifth and Sixth Migrations, and will hit it in the Seventh.  The Fifth and Sixth were barely dealt with by the Blue Daggers and Navy, as well as local PDF, but the Cloudburst forces are stretched to their very limit by the Oglith and Foraldshold problems this time (and the growing need to destroy the FCC).  The local Guard and PDF centers are desperately raising every soldier they can, regardless of criminal conduct, sex, or even age in some truly desperate regions.  This is already slowing the world’s economy, and if its ability to pay the tithe follows suit, the Arbites may step in, worsening the already precarious Hapster situation.  Hapster survived the Migrations, but they left even more of its surface uninhabitable.  Off-world teams of Mechanicus Biologis workers have begun restoring some of these areas after years of pleading by Hapster’s Overlord, but the work is slow and arduous at best.  Desperate reconstruction and defensive efforts have repaired the damage to Haspter’s infrastructure and provided fixed guns for the defense of several large cities, but there is a chance it won’t be enough to preserve Hapster’s fragile systems in the face of overwhelming attack.


Civilized Moon: Cloithe

Tropospheric Composition: Cloithe has Nitrogen 80%, Oxygen 18%, Various Noble Gasses .5%, Water.5%, Carbon Dioxide 1%

Religion: Imperial Cult

Government Type: Adeptus Terra

Planetary Governor: No

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

Climate: Boiling hot hair except in domes, exterior very slowly cooling

Geography: Cloithe is a moon of the gas giant Hapster 6, and has no tectonics; it has a monoclimate of boiling hot, still air, with no liquid water yet, roughly .88 Terra’s volume

Gravity: Cloithe has .82 Terran gravity

Economy: Gelt Thrones and Silver Thrones

Principle Exports: None yet
Principle Imports: Food, Soldiers, Climate Control Machines, Soil Deacidifiers

Countries and Continents: Cloithe has no countries or continents

Military: Hapster Shields

Contact with Other Worlds: Frequent

Tithe Grade: Aptus Non

Population: 400,000

Description:
Cloithe is an experiment.  Prior to the arrival of the Glasians, plans to terraform Cloithe and Hapster 4 to a level of habitability similar to Hapster 3 were well underway.  The arrival of the Glasians canceled plans to terraform Hapster 4 at any fast pace, but Cloithe’s atmospheric and gravitic terraforming had already begun.  The Cloithe project is less logistically demanding and some habitation domes are already in place.

The issue that has slowed progress to a crawl is money.  Terraforming is expensive, and with the sudden need for Hapster and the rest of Cloudburst to harden its defenses (and the extra cost of equipping a whole Chapter of Space Marines with no warning), Cloithe’s terraforming has slowed to a crawl.  The hab domes remain intact for now, but the program to make the planet’s surface habitable is three hundred years behind schedule.
Inside the hab domes, life is miserable.  Every colonist who can afford to leave has done so already, and those that remain squat in poverty, ennui, and fear of what is to come.  Every few decades, the Maskos machine that slowly digs out tunnels between the domes finishes its task, and the populace of each dome exchange a few thousand people desperate to see if the grass is greener on the other side.  Other than that, and a bare-bones manufacturing economy, there is nothing to do on Cloithe.  The Arbites have their hands full with the local Enforcers, who are just as unable to find things to occupy their time as everybody else, and have turned to brutality to relieve the boredom.
When the Glasians arrive, they rarely bother to send more than a token ship to harass Cloithe.  The moon has a small garrison of Hapster Shields to protect it, but even pirates have nothing to do here.  Locals have taken to essentially selling themselves as spouses to visiting Shields in the desperate hope that they will be allowed to emigrate to Hapster itself when the Shields’ unit is rotated back to home.


Hapster Military
The Hapster system, as a Subsector Capital for ten thousand years, has a long and storied military tradition.  For thousands of years, the Subsector wasn’t even part of the neighboring Naxos Sector thanks to distance.  The Subsector was independent from the larger Sector command structures and answered only to the Ultima Segmentum and the Throne.  That meant that Hapster shouldered the burden of defending the Subsector’s military infrastructure essentially alone for thousands of years.  Understandably, this has produced a culture of strict military construction.  The orbitals above Hapster are ancient and productive, and manufacture more warships by tonnage than any other system in Cloudburst outside direct Mechanicus control.  The yards themselves have small beams, and can build ships no more than four kilometers in any direction, but they have also rarely stopped.  Battlefleet Hapster is the largest Subsector battlefleet in Cloudburst by three capital vessels and two escorts.  The largest ship the Hapster yards regularly produce is the venerable Luna cruiser.
However, since Cognomen, Thimble, and Septiim are also now producing warships at a constant rate, the demand for more ships in the Hapster fleet has dropped significantly.  The sudden assaults of the Glasians have increased that demand once more, but for a period of several dozen centuries, Hapster’s yards turned to the manufacture of shuttles and freighters instead of combat vessels.
Hapster also manufactures the modular components for several variants of Navy void platforms, including some on Thunderhead and Clog.  The ever-growing need for more Naval stations and Rogue Trader anchorages in the region ensures that the Hapster yards never grow cold.

On the ground and on the seas, defense of the Hapster worlds falls to the Hapster Shields.  Hapster’s large oceans and long coasts demand a potent navy, and the Shields deply over three hundred warships to protect them.  These range from the Sanction-class superheavy ICBM submarines to the Mako-class stealth sub hunters, and include seven Supercarriers.  Most river mouths on Hapster are too ecologically fragile to support permanent fixed defenses, but several flotillas of Mechanicus-built hovercraft patrol the rivers and valleys that cut through the great pumace and volcanic obsidian islands.  Hapster tithes its Guard requirements directly from the Shields, and its SDF recruits on behalf of the Navy.  The Hapster Shields headquarter in a partially-submerged bunker complex built into an extinct volcano in the largest ocean of the planet, which itself is built under a sprawling complex of guns, barracks, office buildings, antennae, and armories over forty miles wide.

The Guard contingent of the entire system goes by the same name: The Bronze Legionnaires.  Nobody knows which came first: the name or the camoflauge, but soldiers in the bronze livery of the Legionnaires have been a common sight in the Hapster Subsector and Naxos Sector for over eight thousand years.  Because of the age and continual loyalty of the Hapster system, Bronze Legions have appeared on battlefields far from home.  A full seven brigades took part in the campaign to push the Khornate army of Bloodfume out of the Gothic Sector six millennia before the Gothic War, and twelve thousand Legionnaires fought alongside the Legio Congelatio against the Dark Eldar and Chaos in the war for the Corumbino Nebula.

However, Hapster regiments also differ from most Cloudburst regiments in ways other than their history.  Unlike nearly every other military force in the Astra Militarum Cloudburst, Hapster’s military bases hierarchy and tactics on neither Terra nor Septiim.  Instead, their deployments superficially resemble that of the ancient world they once were: that of the Pre–Imperial Hapster.  Bronze Legionnaires field in tight arrowhead formations, out of respect for how their ancestors fought with their personal energy shields and robot guards.  They employ artillery at the longest possible range, even though that range is continents less than the ranges that Dark Age Concatenation Shock Guns could fire.  The Bronze Legion drives their tanks down roads in staggered gap formations, as the Terran Federation Baneblade formations did long ago, even though the Hapsterites are lucky to get a single Baneblade per Brigade.

This is understandably a source of derision by other worlds’ Guardsmen and concern from the Commissariat.  To be sure, Bronze Legions are as able as any other backwater world when it comes to actually fighting, but their archaic and predictable formations and tactics do leave them somewhat less able to adapt to changing circumstances.  This is, of course, an apt complaint about Hapster itself.
Tactically, however, the Bronze Legions are able to bring war to the Emperor’s enemies with the same fervor and tireless zeal that has allowed them to stay safe and secure after ten thousand years of Imperial decay.  Armies of the Bronze Legions are among the few in the Cloudburst Sector who neither refuse to use any technologies or psionics in their tactics nor raise regiments solely by request from the Munitorum.  Soldiers chosen by the Civil Service aptitude tests report to duty without complaints, at least complaints on which they act.  When their unit gets tithed, they bid their families goodbye and board their ships, neat as you please.  Because of their lifelong impression of duty and uncomplaining traditionalism, the Bronze Legionnaires are rarely near the top of the worry list in joint action task forces with other Guard regiments.
When in battle, the Bronze Legions use a combination of unique radio codes, consisting of five words with no first or last letters in common, to relay sensitive tactical data to other soldiers.  This is derived from an ancient Terran combat signal countintelligence technique that hundreds of other Imperial worlds use to this day.  The Bronze Legion also employs the usual array of battle cants, hand signals, and color codes that all other modern regiments use to relay information in the heat of battle, but unlike some regiments, the Regimental Master Vox Operator and Master of Signals never take to the field in Bronze Legions under any circumstances.  Only when the enemy has overwhelmed all defenses and cut off all retreat do they lift their sidearms and sell their lives for Terra and Hapster.
This stems from yet another ancient tradition, one lost to the mists of time, but it can serve Hapster regiments well in battle.  The loss of a regiment’s principal communications personnel in a fight can cripple a regiment’s logistics and transportation.

Another quirk of Hapster’s ancient military traditions is their love of long-range artillery.  Although they make use of more or less any artillery they can get, Hapster regiments adore the super long ranges of Mechanicus siege guns.  A Bronze Legion with a Leviathan or Deathstrike is a happy Legion.
Of course, those are rare and expensive, and so shell artillery rules the day in the Bronze Legion.  The Earthshaker and Basilisk are timeless classics, but the Legion finds the limited range of the Basilisk irritating at times, and prefer the Hapster local product, the AM52 Projector cannon.  The cannon comes in 165mm and 210mm variants.  Although twice as costly as the Earthshaker and unable to mount on a mobile chassis smaller than a Stormblade, the Projector uses a rocket motor-assisted projectile to strike targets up to forty kilometers away with the 165, and seventy five kilometers away with the 210 cannon.  There is a third variant used for airburst anti-infantry duty and smoke dispersal, but its unconventional barrel caliber of 181mm allows it to be used for nothing else and renders its parts incompatible.  It can carry a Hunter-Killer missile, but only supports a six millimeter machine gun for close-in defense.
However, there are problems with the gun that prevent it from travelling to other worlds.  Hapster does not have Terran-standard gravity, and the targeting computer of the gun is primitive compared to the cogitators of STC cannons.  Whenever the gun ships offworld to a battlefield with different gravity levels, the weapon has to have extensive recalibrations and retargeting that wastes time and ammunition.  The Mechanicus could easily fix that, but they find it vaguely offensive that the Hapsterites would so eagerly deploy a non-hallowed weapon.

Hapster infantry prefer the use of autoguns to lasweapons, though they issue both when given them by the Mechanicus.  The default Hapaster infantry rifle is the Cognomen Razor, which was originally derived from the few surving examples of the world’s own Age of Strife-era Army weapons, given to Cognomen in exchange for infrastructural improvements.  The Razor complements the Hapster infantry tacticial mindset well.  The typical Hapster infantry unit deploys in units of seven and platoons of fifty six plus an officer, and can thus spread through a battlefield of uneven terrain without worrying about formations breaking up.  Hapster rifle teams often add light and medium machine guns to their units on a company basis, and make common use of combi-grenade attachments to augment their firepower.  This is not to say that all Hapster infantry eschew energy weapons.  Hapster Stormtrooper and Scion units use them exclusively, for their greater accuracy and stopping power, and some Bronze Legionnaires prefer them for their lightness and ease of reload.

The vehicle fleets of Hapster regiments tend towards artillery and heavy transports, usually those with integrated turrets like the Chimaera and Gorgon.  While these units do tend to have large profiles and can be mistaken for tanks at a distance, the extra firepower helps to make up for the relative paucity of tanks in Hapster formations.  The tanks they do have tend to be larger models, Superheavies and Malcadors, both because of their age and because the delicate Hapster environment doesn’t allow for much room to train with large fleets of smaller vehicles, but can support small fleets of individually big vehicles.  Hapster regiments stationed on other worlds with more robust vehicle manufacturing sometimes aquire Leman Russ and Salamander vehicles, which they eagerly add to their fleets.


Subsector Capital System: Rampart

Galactic Position: Cloudburst Sector, Oglith Subsector

System Overlord: Lord Subsector Oglith Darren Atongwë

Planets: Twelve, one inhabitable

War World (formerly Frontier World): Oglith

Satellites: Two moons, one inhabitable: Abris, one uninhabitable: Tremaine

Tropospheric Composition: Nitrogen 75%, Oxygen 22%, Argon 1%, Helium 1% Water .95%, Carbon Dioxide 0.05%.

Religion: Imperial Cult

Government Type: Adeptus Terra (officially), presently Astra Militarum Emergency Law

Planetary Governor: Yes

Adept Presence: Adeptus Administratum, Adeptus Ministorum, Adeptus Astra Telepathica, Adeptus Arbites, Adeptus Mechanicus, Adeptus Astartes, Officio Assassinorum, Templar Psychologis

Climate: Mostly temperate with bands of intense heat at equator and harsh sub-zero blizzards at the poles

Geography: Broad stretches of flat plains with extensive subterranean natural caverns, broken up by near-vertical mountains; deep ocean trenches that reach most of the way to the mantle; 1.05 times the size of Terra

Gravity: Oglith has Terran gravity

Economy: Gelt Thrones and Silver Thrones

Principle Exports: Stone, Ores, Food, Oil, Noble Gasses, (previously) Soldiers
Principle Imports: Finished Goods, Alloy Ingots, Ammunition, Weapons, Satellites, Hovercraft, Soldiers

Countries and Continents: Oglith has no national divisions, and nine continents

Military: Oglith Defenders (medium quality PDF), Oglith Warriors (medium quality Guard), Oglith Jaegers (high quality Scions), millions of others

Contact with Other Worlds: Daily

Tithe Grade: Decuma Particular

Population: 4,120,000

Description:
Oglith is a world of which Cloudburst is profoundly embarrassed.  This is a fresh development, but it will probably stain the world’s reputation forever.

Despite the rocky and unpleasant exterior of the planet, the Imperium colonized the world almost as soon as Explorators found it.  The lack of natural predators and the natively Terra-like atmosphere, plus enormous oil reserves, meant the Administratum pressed for a colony as soon as volunteers could be found in Naxos.

The initial scans of the surface revealed that the planet had no multicellular life at all, despite obvious signs of former human colonies, picked over by scavengers at some point.  The Explorators noted with interest that the planet had apparently been colonized by humanity, and that the world had fallen to Chaos or some other forces of the Warp, fewer than three thousand years before.  The Explorators took this as a personal shame.  This world, they knew, could have been saved from its horrible fate if the Explorators of the past had found it during the Crusade.
Regardless, the world’s total algae coverage was a clear sign that the planet was habitable at least.  The taint of Chaos seemed to linger on the eroded metal skeletons of the original human colony, to nobody’s surprise.  The Administratum insisted on a purge of the offending materials before any colony landed, and so the Mechanicus disposed of the tainted material by throwing it into the nearby star.

Two hundred years later, the minor terraforming needed to bring the algae in line with more oxygen-producing plants ended.  The Administratum had barely begun the speculation needed to outline the future colony site when panicked scouts returned to their camps, waving ground-penetrating radar charts about.
The charts revealed at once that the planet had a more immediate problem than long-dead Chaos-worshippers.  The Explorators had missed vast subterranean caverns, which the radar revealed to span the whole continent, and possibly others.  Subsequent scans revealed that all but one of the land continents had these cavern networks.  The Explorators and scouts revealed that they looked natural, though perhaps enlarged by the original colonists or somebody else.

Of course, huge caverns were no real problem by themselves, but if the Explorators missed that, what else had they missed?  The scouts began more thorough scans, hoping to at least see what was down there.  Initial returns puzzled them.  Surface-piercing scans revealed what looked like mobile heat sources, and small seismic events similar to avalanches.  Mineral scans later revealed that although the crust of the planet had abundant if slightly depleted metal deposits, all such deposits near the large caverns were gone.

A scout team eventually managed to penetrate into the cavern network by entering laterally through a deep fault line ravine.  The scouts advanced through the caverns in tracked vehicles, searching for their mysterious heat sources.
Within hours, the scouts detected footprints on the floor of their cavern, along with extensive impact damage from various weapons.  The scout team radioed their findings back to their breacher, reporting that they were not alone in the cavern.  Several minutes later, the team radioed back their screams, accompanied by one phrase, repeated three times: “Contact green!”

The scout breachers sealed the gap in the canyon wall and flew back to the Administratum camp in panic.  Within hours, word had reached every Imperial military asset in the system: Oglith had Feral Orks.

The colony administrator scoffed at the initial reports of the scouts and Mechanicus.  How, he asked, could an Ork infestation survive the ravagings of Chaos?  How had they fed themselves for two thousand years?  Where could they have found the technology and labor they would have needed to survive in an area with no self-replenishing oxygen?
Where the Mechanicus took these questions as a challenge, the administrator asked them out of disbelief.  It was impossible, he proclaimed, that the world could have had that many Orks.  Surely, somebody would have seen them, or they would have starved long ago.  Locked securely in his denial, the administrator began the colonization process.
As years went by with no sign of Orks, even in the young colony’s few surface mines, the administrator seemed vindicated.  Eventually, Oglith’s economy and military capability grew enough that it became the next Subsector Capital, and the seat of Battlefleet Rampart.  Shipyards sprouted in orbit, scavengers ripped the ancient ruins apart for materials and archaeotech, and cities rose from the plains.  Mechanicus terraforming efforts continued, despite their knowledge of the Orks below the surface.  First, they introduced Terran plants grown from genestocks of the pre-Unification genolabs of Luna.  Next came herbivores, given a few generations to reproduce in the abundant food supply.  Then came birds, then small land mammals and Grox.  After a few centuries of hard work, life on Oglith became bearably comfortable.

As time wore on, it became harder for the Administratum rulers of the world to ignore the truth.  Mechanicus surveyors and xenobiologists produced reams of data showing moving heat sources, depleted metal veins, and excess carbon gas production in places where there were no natural processes to yield such results.  After the entire initial Administratum detachment had died or retired, the world finally gained a Planetary Governor who could admit to the facts; at last, Oglith had a leader who could admit to reality he disliked.
The Astra Militarum was finally notified of the Orks, and their response was shocked disbelief.  They demanded to know how the Administratum had been so stupid, so appallingly unprepared.  The new administrators proclaimed their own innocence.  After all, they had turned to the Astra Militarum for aid, not denied the root of the problem like their predecessors.  Astra Militarum and Mechanicus joint scans and scouting missions revealed a horrifying fact: there were now over one hundred thousand Orks in the sub-terranean tunnel network, far more than there had been before.  As Oglith governmental tithes rose and the number of PDF and Imperial Guard rose commensurate to their new status as a Subsector Capital, the very real chance that Oglith would have to go to war with itself became more real by the month.

By M40.300, the reality of the situation was obvious to all but the most obstinate holdouts of the Oglith government.  For every attempt that they made to overcome the Ork problem, however, there seemed to be the perfect obstacle.  When the PDF began recruiting more heavily to prepare to invade the tunnels below, a gang of pirates assaulted the world’s outer orbitals for loot and bloodshed, which demanded higher defense in the future.  When a depleted salt mine’s owners offered to let the military use their mine as a staging area for an assault on the Orks below, a cave-in rendered its walls so unstable that staging an army there would have clued the Orks in on the impending invasion and let them prepare for it.
Even the Navy seemed unable to help.  The Navy began orbital scans in preparation for surgical strikes on the crust to collapse specific caves and allow the PDF and Guard rapid access.  However, they saw that several of the caverns that were close enough to the surface to hit with orbital weapons without destroying the planet’s atmosphere were broad enough that to puncture them would destroy several nearby cities, killing millions.

After centuries of dithering, the Astra Militarum threw up their hands.  Oglith would have to solve its own problems, they said angrily, because the Emperor needed His soldiers elsewhere.  Oglith’s Administratum ordered whole cities near potential egress sites to harden their defenses, even increasing taxes to do so.  Inevitably, the general populace learned of the Ork presence, which nearly drove the planet to civil war out of panic.  When the knowledge that several of the planet’s governmental, religious, and corporate leaders had known of the Orks for over a thousand years, the natural response was a sense of betrayal, which worsened the conflict.

Unrest erupted in a dozen cities and simmered in another hundred.  Arbites and PDF forces had to work together to suppress riots and looting across the planet.  The violence came to a skidding halt when Mechanicus Biologis surveyors hijacked public broadcast channels on every radio and holocast in the world to announce that the ambient violence had driven the Feral Orks into a frenzy, and if the populace didn’t get themselves under control, the Orks could breach the surface and attack.

The Subsector Overlord stepped in to declare martial law, and slowly, order returned to Oglith.  The planet’s civil populace did not adjust well to the reality of their alien neighbors.  Although the downswing in roiling emotion in the Warp prevented the Orks from detecting the humans above, the planet’s tension was still dangerously high.
It is possible that that unrest is what gave rise to the historic events of the following year.  While the occasional riot or killing still continued, there was no warning at all for the sudden arrival of the Chaos psyker Ludovic the Sorceror in the Oglith countryside.  A fleet of over eighty thousand raiders and cultists suddenly swept in through the outer system, engaging the startled Oglith SDF and a few ships from Battlefleet Rampart.  With the orbital defenses tied up, Ludovic’s army of fanatics assaulted Oglith, fueled by their master’s charisma and mind-twisting magic.  Oglith’s PDf, already fully engaged in suppression, reacted quickly, but were so exhausted by a year of martial law that they barely managed to hold back the tide.  The Chaos raid would have been far worse if the orbital defenses hadn’t managed to shoot down three of Ludovic’s twenty transports, but the eighty thousand men they did manage to land were enough to destroy an entire city.  The Arbites and PDF of the planet eventually contained Ludovic’s army, but they bought him enough time to destroy his objective, a buried artefact of lost Chaotic power.  A PDF Killteam sniped him as he rose, cackling and aglow with Warp energy, from the ruin of the Imperial bank underwhich the artifact had lain.  He died laughing.
Ludovic’s army eventually fell to the greater firepower of the Oglith forces.  Between the civil disorder and the Chaotic invasion, the damage to the world’s population was gruesome.  Four percent of Oglith’s civilian population died in the fighting and riots.  The world’s military and law enforcement were all but gone.  If the Orks below, fired up by the – to them inexplicable – increase in the ambient psychic turmoil of the planet, had breached the surface and attacked, Oglith would likely have fallen.

By a pair of miracles, this did not happen.  Although nervous Mechanicus scouts did report that the Orks of the world were growing more numerous as the psychic ripples imbued the Orkoid fungal pods with more energy, they did not make any moves towards the surface.  As Oglith rebuilt, however, the second miracle happened.  This one was more easily attributable to Tzeentch than the Emperor, however, as a horrible mutagen swept the planet, mutating and crippling millions, fifteen years to the second after Ludovic destroyed the artifact.  The mutagen was waterborne, and affected the Orks as well as it seeped through the soil and rock to the caverns below.  That may have been the world’s saving grace, as the mutagen claimed at least as many disorganized and violent Orks as it did orderly Imperial citizens, and the humans started with more people.

Ultimately, the Mechanicus asserted that the Orks remained unaware of the presence of the humans on the surface.  Bolstered by the confidence that surviving a civil war, a Chaotic invasion, and a mutagenic plague brings, the new Governor and Overlord promptly settled into doing nothing about the Orks.  The complacency that brought ran deep in the people of Oglith.  As the planet crawled its way away from being a simple frontier world towards being a fully integrated and strategically important world of the Imperium, the knowledge of and concern about the Orks below faded, though it was never fully forgotten thanks to routine Mechanicus examinations.  Periodically, Overlords Sector of Cloudburst would inquire as to their status, but the Oglith Subsector Overlords have always waved off such concerns.

As centuries passed, Oglith grew.  Its percentage of developed land rose higher and higher, eventually pushing the limits of what the Administratum would classify as a Frontier World.  By M41.998, the planet had emerged as a bastion of Imperial power that was beginning to truly live up to its name.

Oglith culture had always been an odd mixture of ferocity, quiet, and expression.  Its status as a Frontier World lingered long after it had passed threshholds of population and industry that would have entitled it to a more informative title in the Administratum records.  It remains one of the scarce worlds in the Segmentum Ultima that is both a Frontier World and a Subsector Capital.  Unlike Hangonne and Lorelei, the other two Frontier Worlds in Cloudburst, Oglith does not have a rebellious streak against Imperial authority, it is its own local government it finds disappointing, never more than now.

Culturally, however, Oglith’s strength is evident.  Its military is diverse and well equipped for a Frontier, in line with its responsibilities as a Subsector Capital; it is a responsibility that the Oglithers have always taken seriously.  From its status comes responsibility, however, and its people are not always united in the carrying of the burdens of that task.  The leaders of Oglith communities are frequently merchants and religious spokesmen, not politicians and lawyers, or Administratum officers for that matter.  This means that the vested interests of the most active residents of a town are likely to be the ones most heavily supported by official policy, and they are not always for the greater good.
Those towns and cities under military jurisdiction are more orderly and disciplined in their conduct, though by little.  As host to numerous Imperial military institutions and recruitment centers, these towns are well defended, but they haven’t quite yet lost their Frontier spirit.  Several of the Imperial Astra Militarum bases are open-sided, without even trenches, much less walls or defense turrets.  Others have some combination of the three, or all three, but most have simple chain link fences and a few sentry turrets at most.  The towns themselves tend towards orderly and peaceful thanks to the presence of the base, but also grow the slowest.
Still, Oglith is not the archetypal Frontier World by any means.  Most Frontier Worlds are places of lawlessness, exploration, and isolation.  Oglith is a military hot spot, they have mapped every surface inch, and it’s a Subsector Capital.  The populace is solidly Imperial, if resentful of their inability to appoint or support local officials that can protect them from Orks.  Several towns had one hundred percent political turnover after the revelation of the Ork infestation.

Another way in which Oglith departs from the stereotypical Frontier World is its approach to industry.  Most Frontier Worlds have little industry simply because they can’t afford it or don’t need it.  Oglith has immense industry and a vast infrastructural base for manufacturing and shipping, but they are distributed over thousands of communities and work parks across the globe and its many orbitals.  On the surface, factories and mines churn out megatons of products, albeit mostly for domestic production.  In space, low-gravity metallurgic factories (mass-built in Cognomen plants) and customs and shipping platforms produce or sell more goods to passing freighters or warships, and help cover the world’s tithe costs.

Fortunately for both Oglith and the Imperium, Oglith also has some specific natural resources in fantastic abundance.  Ore and stone are easy to come by on a young world, of course, but the real breadwinners for Oglith’s tithe are noble gasses and silicon.  The planet has a highly radioactive core, and its crust is riddled with various natural isotopes of complex metals.  Not only are these metals crucial for advanced manufacturing and electronic engineering on Cognomen, but the decay of these isotopes releases staggering amounts of noble gasses like argon and helium.  Sophisticated mining machines under House Ritria control collect these gasses and ores and sell them in great armored tanks to Cognomen, covering more than three quarters of the world’s tithe costs by itself.
The rest of its tithe comes from various exports, including soldiers for the Astra Militarum (at least until the Ork invasion).  The planet’s colossal oil reserves are not easy to reach, since Orks have trapped some of it from the humans by simple virtue of being closer.  However, much of its oil is instead under the sea or locked under shale formations on the coastlines, which are nowhere near the Ork caverns, and relatively straightforward to harvest.

Oglith’s two moons play a small role in its defense and economy.  The first, Tremaine, is a dead ball of silicon and dust, of no value save for some simple mining.  The other, Abris, is barely inhabitable.  Its gravity is too low to allow unaided inhabitation for more than a few days at a time, and although its atmosphere is perfect for humans, the pressure would boil a person’s eyes in their sockets after minutes.  However, the low gravity makes it perfect for two things: staging defense missile silos, and lifting ore-heavy rocks on conveyor belts to drop them into transports for shipping and processing.


Oglith Military
For most of its history, Oglith exported soldiers to the Astra Militarum.  Its armored companies were never more than a token force, but its Warrior Guard and Defender PDF were competent and numerous.  Oglith regiments fought in the Gothic War, as well as some of the Wars of Faith that the Ecclesiarchy Ultima waged against heretics in nearby Sectors.

The Oglith Defenders are a capable if uninspired PDF.  As with many Frontier Worlds, it benefits from its members being fairly skilled with guns and self-preservation even before joining, though given Oglith’s lack of predators and other threats, most of that skill comes from self-granted self-defense training or scholastic Ork Preparedness drills.  Its members garrison in their own hometowns whenever possible, both to allow them to keep families intact and to ensure that they are properly motivated if the Orks ever breach the surface.  Members are encouraged to quarter with their own families.  If that is not an option, apartments and barracks are provided.  Weapon lockers and armory vaults dot several towns so that local Defenders can arm up and fight in no time, without leaving the confines of the city they are supposed to protect.  Vehicles usually cache in garages and tarmacs outside town airfields or VTOL ports, just in case.  Tanks and other valuable vehicles may park underground where possible, though these garages usually have thick metal braces on the floors to prevent Orks from burrowing up and stealing the vehicles from below.

The planet has severe shortcomings in one crucial field: surface-to-space weapons.  Some of the older cities have them, but newer ones universally do not.  The Astra Militarum realized that if the Orks ever took the surface, the last thing the Imperium wanted to worry about was being fired on by intact surface-to-space weaponry.  Normally, Ork invasions come from space, where their slow, ramshackle ships are vulnerable to surface Defense Lasers and Defense Silos, and if they capture said weapons, they usually dismantle them.  However, if Orks invading from below were to capture such weapons, they would surely salvage them to mount on ships.  The Navy and Mechanicus cannot stomach the idea of their own heavy weapons turning on them as such.  They instead have mounted many of the world’s defense weapons in space, either on void platforms drifting in far orbit around Oglith or on its Navy stations in medium orbit.  As a Subsector Capital, Oglith benefits from a Subsector Fortress, a modified Xerxes 3 that houses the Subsector Overlord when he isn’t in his mansion on the surface.  The modifications include larger administrative and life support areas, as well as a small shipbuilding cradle that can handle hulls up to Falchion size.  The Navy plans to manufacture far larger yards once the Ork problem resolves.
Other orbital defenses include the system’s SDF and Battlefleet Rampart.  The Battlefleet assigned to Oglith comes from its own small yards and Cognomen, but it also has several small ships taken from pirates over the years.  As a Subsector with two Frontier Worlds and as the outer border of the entire Imperium, the Oglith Subsector has had more than its fair share of pirates and raiders.
In fact and unbeknownst to the general populace, the Oglith fleet includes these pirate ships thanks to an unforeseen drop in Chaotic activity.  Prior to the arrival of the Glasians, the various Chaos pirate groups of the Cloudburt Sector and Circuit, and even those of the Oldlight Exo-zone, identified Oglith as a prime target for raids and theft.  The Cloudburst and Mechanicus fleets fielded against many such pirates, but the criminals were so numerous and so widespread that the local defenses strained trying to hold them back.  Then, roughly one century before the arrival of the First Glasian Migration, the Chaotic pirates simply vanished.  Investigations by the Inquisition and Arbites revealed that the ships had disappeared to other Sectors or wiped each other out, and had done so in an eerily coordinated way.

Of course, now the Inquisition knows that this happened because Tzeentch willed it to be so, and turned his own forces against those of his evil bretheren, but at the time, all the Navy knew was that its job had just become far easier.  Battlefleet Rampart immediately sortied against the pirates that had remained behind, those untainted or unaware of Chaos.  They were able to steal several ships from the pirates as prizes, and kept them all for the Subsector Flotilla.  These successes delighted Battlefleet Cloudburst; they have authorized Battlefleet Rampart to repeat this tactic whenever it is viable.

Oglith’s PDF have few of their spaceborne bretheren’s advantages beyond gumption and loyalty, however.  Their tank forces are a bit of a joke, given how underfunded they are, and their planetary Killteams are murderously effective, but the rank and file Defenders are hardly Guard grade, or even Septiim Defender quality.

However, the Oglith Warriors are another story.  Paid for by Oglith gasses and oil, the Warriors field the full array of Imperial Guard tanks and light vehicles, including a variety of Leman Russ tanks second only to Celeste’s.  The wide, sprawling, untamed fields of Oglith provide the perfect place for Rough Rider and artillery practice, and their snowmobile rapid cavalry teams are unquestionably the best in the Cloudburst Sector, surpassing even Loreliei’s and Clegran’s.  Oglith does not field a particularly large number of regiments, preferring instead to retire depleted ones and recycle their numbers, which at least allows them to ensure that most regiments remain near their optimal strength.  Oglith Paratroopers are unimpressive in most regards, even compared to Septiim’s, but they have successfully fielded regiments with full Venator and Sentinel support against aliens on campaigns under Segmentum authority before and can do so again.

The ultimate in Oglith force, however, is not its well-equipped Guard or gutsy Navy.  It is, instead, its cold-blooded and lauded Scion unit.  The Oglith Jaegers are a Scion force trained in the capital’s sprawling Schola Progenium, raised from the offspring of slain Adepts and veterans.  Like most Scions, they have few ties to their homeworld beyond having trained there, but the Jaegers are exceptional even among the ranks of the human race’s elite.  The Jaegers are field specialists without compare in Cloudburst, far surpassing even the Celeste and Septiim Scions.  Their standards of physical athleticism and marksmanship are high enough that the unaware might mistake them as Scout Marines.

The Jaegers field in forces of no more than a few hundred at a time, usually as special operations support for Space Marine or Inquisitorial forces.  However, they have also served as the precision point of larger Guard invasions of Circuit worlds, in the retinues of Rogue Traders, or even as advance units for Imperial Crusades in other Segmentum Ultima Sectors.  Jaegers do not field tanks, relying instead on air units and the variable power of the Taurox.  The most successful Jaeger units have fought alongside forces as disparate as Lord Solar Macharius and the Ultramarines, and fought in the Imperial contingent for the Badab War on behalf of the Inquisition.
Jaegers also serve as part of the Cloudburst-unique ECAFs that dart across the Sector in modified Fast Clippers to provide leadership and reinforcement where needed, sometimes filling the entire infantry quotient.  Such is their reputation that they have served by invitation beside Blue Dagger and Deathwatch units in the field, against Glasians and Heretics alike.  The Jaegers personalize their equipment to a limited extent, usually including a feather tucked into the belt of their armor or the tightening strap of their Omni-helms.  Like many Scion units, they focus on laser weaponry, but augment it with a variety of other energetic weapons like plasma, meltas, and flamers.

Unlike many other worlds in the Cloudburst Sector, the Oglith military does not field any unique weapons.  However, Oglith does field some of its units out of the standard Imperial proportions, such as including armed Field Medics in units that traditionally not get them, or get fewer if they did.  This extends to the Jaegers, who frequently enjoy Field Medics or even Battlefield Surgeons attached as low are squad level.  This is thanks to the Oglith Medical College structure attached to one of its orbitals, where prospective medics train under Guard professionals and civilian doctors to administrate care to wounded soldiers.  Many systems in the Imperium have one of these, but they are expensive, and few Cloudburst systems construct them unless needed.  For a Frontier World to have one is rare in the extreme, not that anybody’s complaining.


The Invasion
In the years prior to the Seventh Glasian Migration, Oglith’s portentious role in the coming war came clearer and clearer.  Multiple Tarot readings and statistical projections pointed to the same thing, from the Deathwatch to the Guard to the Inquisition: Oglith would come under brutal assault in the Seventh Glasian Migration, far worse than any other system except Septiim.  Since the total number of systems hit by the enemy would be higher than any previous wave, and each wave had ten percent more Glasians in it than the one before, the Inquisition was able to calculate the number of defenses each of the six worlds in the aliens’ path would need to fend them off.  The Blue Daggers would hold the enemy at Septiim, of course, but to the Inquisiton’s disquiet, two of the worlds the Glasians were going to hit were not of modern tech levels, and two were Subsector Capitals.  The proportionate response needed to protect two targets of such vulnerability and two targets of strategic indispensability would be staggering, nearly as much as the Cloudburst Sector could afford to spend.  That meant there was no room for error.

As the Imperium began raising, arming, dispatching, and training troops, Oglith’s defenses hardened.  The Migrations are far enough apart that few humans alive for one would be alive for the next without extensive augmetics or juvenat.  Each world hit had to learn the lessons of the previous generation all over again.  Oglith, which had never been hit by a Migration, didn’t even have the advantage of second-hand experience for its own drills.  The populace had its own concerns for much of its history, with pirates and the ever-present subterranean Orks remaining a problem.  Privately, some Astra Militarum and Administratum officials wondered how in the world they were going to keep the natural emotional backswell of the Migration from driving the Orks below into a frenzy.

As of M41.998, that became a secondary concern.  Without warning, a vast flotilla of Ork ships arrived at the edge of the Rampart system Security Zone.  The Orks blew past the shocked defenders in the outer system, who had not expected a battle for another two years.  The greenskin flotilla managed to make it within four hundred thousand kilometers of the planet Oglith before the SDF and Navy intercepted them with anything heavier than a light gunboat.  Once the Orks had closed enough to come within range of the heavy guns of Oglith’s orbitals and defense fleet, however, the greenskins ran headlong into the teeth of Imperial weapons fire.  The cannonades of the Imperial warships hulled two Ork frigates before the core of the greenskin formation pushed past them into orbit.  Immediately, the ships in orbit started landing hundreds of shuttles and Roks, disgorging tens of thousands of Orks onto the planet below.  The trip they had taken from the edge of the system to the world was a long one, over three weeks of flight, but that was not even a fraction of the time the Astra Militarum below had needed to retool their anti-Glasian defenses for Ork-hunting.  Greenskins by the battalion spilled from huge landing Roks and looted Imperial shuttles, and from contraptions of their own.  Shuttles and Roks landed more and more boyz, and the shuttles returned for more.

In orbit, the Navy and SDF have managed to contain the Ork flotilla, and have sunk or captured sixty percent of their ships of half-kilometer beam or greater.  However, the remainder dumped greenskins on the planet below as fast as they could, and the surviving ships are uneasily standing off with the Navy.  Meanwhile, the situation below became untenable for the Imperium.  The un-walled cities, normally so secure, were easy prey for the Ork armies.  These were no un-equipped Ferals, with barely more than shotguns and knives, these were marauding Ork looters with ships they had built themselves.  The Oglith Warriors and Defenders fought bravely, but the sheer number of Orks overwhelmed the defense of several cities, until there was a pentagonal section of the planet approximately eleven hundred kilometers on a side in which the Imperium had lost all control.  Worse, individual towns and settlements including several PDF bases have fallen outside the cordon, which continued to expand for months after the initial landings.
The Sector Administratum had to make a choice.  Electing to strip nearly all defense from Septiim and send it where it was needed, the Astra Militarum Cloudburst sent over two million troops to Oglith, with more slated for departure as soon as the Migration ends.  The Blue Daggers now much defend their home system with little backup from the Guard.
If the Migration claims no worlds, then the Blue Daggers and the Guard will be able to send many of their forces to Oglith and Foraldshold, to help break the grasp of the greenskins on those indispensable worlds.  However, even through the pressure of a full-scale Ork invasion, the leaders of the Oglith defenses have not forgotten that their world is a Migration target too.  All told, the Guard and Inquisition have directed two million four hundred thousand troops to the site of the Ork attack, and although the number of Orks from the surface invasion has dropped somewhat, Orks are now appearing and attacking settlements on the other side of Oglith where there have been no recorded landings.

Subsector Command must now come to terms with the fact that the Orks below the surface may well have responded to the psychic backwell and joined the fray.  Pinning an exact number on the Ork horde below is impossible, but the Mechanicus’ most conservative estimate is one hundred seventeen thousand, with the most likely being one hundred thirty thousand and the worst-case scenario being one hundred forty seven thousand.

If one hundred forty seven thousand Orks join the battle for Oglith as things are, the planet is all but doomed, and its doom is sealed if the Migration hits before the Ork problem resolves.  The Subsector Command office under Lord Darren Atongwë, great-great-great-great-grandnephew of the brilliant Lord Trader Gomat Atongwë, has knelt and pled for backup from Segmentum and Sector command.  Battlefleet Rampart, fortunately, has no other demands on its forces at the moment, and so every ship in the fleet is either there already or on its way.  No fresh Ork ships have trailed in behind the initial surge, leading the Inquisition to suspect that the arrival of the Orks in Rampart may have been an accident, and their true objective was either Foraldshold or Gorkpypark, but there is no way to be sure until they capture the enemy flagship.  The current flagship of the Ork flotilla is a Killykrooza named Steel-Toof, under the command of Big Chief Squiggothrider.

Squiggothrider is a fierce and competitive Ork, who would very much like to make Gorkypark his own, but he sees the current war on Oglith as an even better use of his time.  Whatever his true objective had been when the Void Whale’s gravity shadow pulled his fleet from the Warp no longer matters.  The Ork is happier than a squig in mud, and the chance to rampage through an Imperial Subsector Capital delights him.
Imperial savants doubt that Squiggothrider even knows that there are Ferals on the planet.  Certainly, despite the potent reinforcements they represent, he doesn’t even seem to know that they’re there, or if he does, he doesn’t act like it.  Meanwhile, the horde he has is more than enough to justify additional reinforcements from Segmentum Command.  The Inquisition’s Ordo Xenos would very much like to put the huge potential threat of Squiggothrider becoming a true Warboss to bed, and if that prevents Oglith and Gorkypark from destabilizing any more than they already are, great.
As such, the Inquisition has requested and received from the Senate of the High Lords permission to field a duo of Officio Assassinorum specialists.  Designated with codenames “Civil” and “Mimic,” these two killers are under orders to kill Squiggothrider as soon as possible; preferably, where all of his subordinates can watch him die.

Other Imperial assets are flying to Oglith as well.  So far, four Oglith Jaeger regiments, nine regiments of Stormtroopers and Scions from other worlds, and two million non-Oglith Guardsmen have flown to Oglith.  The unrelated Ork invasion of Foraldshold has drawn off several hundred thousand more men, and Oglith’s commanders are desperately begging for more, but unless Cardinal Drake can be pled into parting with his own mercenary army, there is likely little else to send.  A Templar Psychologis team tasked with maintaining civilian morale is also on the way from Segmentum Command.

The fighting has spread across the globe, with little preference by its participants for locale.  From the frigid polar landmasses to the sprawling, airy cities of the tropics, the Orks and Imperiu have clashed.  The fighting has spread to the Mechanicus weather and terraforming control machines, which the Techpriests now defend with desperate vigor.  The mighty bastion fortress Lightwall has had its outer defenses challenged twice, and both times, it nearly fell to Ork kunnin’.  The fighting near the capital is now so intense that Cognomen advisors to the Astra Militarum defenders there under Lord General Halwart have quietly suggested that the time may have come for a visit from House Matraxia.
When the Glasians arrive, the entire scope of the war will shift in an instant.  The orbital battle will stay as a standoff no longer when the Glasian Sub-cylinder arrives, and the fate of the entire Rampart system will probably hinge on whether the Orks land closer to Imperial territory or Ork territory.


System: Forender

Galactic Position: Cloudburst Sector, Cognomen Subsector

System Overlord: Magos Lector Alexei

Planets: Four, three inhabitable

Agri-worlds: Forender (a,b,c)

Satellite: Each Forender has one uninhabitable moon

Tropospheric Composition: The three Forenders have different atmospheric compositions, but all range close to pre-Industrial Terran

Religion: Imperial Cult, Machine Cult

Government Type: Adeptus Mechanicus

Planetary Governor(s): No

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

Climate: All three Forenders have different climates, each suited to growing a different food type

Geography: Forender planets –a and –b are rocky worlds with fertile valleys and oceans, while Forender-c is a planet with intense heat and sand dunes at the equator with jungle conditions most other latitudes.

Gravity: Forender-a has 1.03 Terran gravity; Forender-b has .89 Terran gravity, Forender-c has .96 Terran gravity

Economy: Gelt Thrones and Silver Thrones

Principle Exports: Food, Salt, Spices, Dye, Raw Textiles, Ore
Principle Imports: Agricultural Machines, Mining Machines, Industrial Machines, Soldiers, Fuel, Climate Control Devices

Countries and Continents: Forender-a has eleven continents, Forender-b has no continents, and Forender-c has four continents; none have national divisions

Military: Skitarii, Forender Incursion Force (medium quality PDF), Basilikon Astra

Contact with Other Worlds: Intermittent

Tithe Grade: Aptus Non

Population (total): 783,592,000

Description:
The great triple Agri-world of Forender is the reason Cognomen is as powerful as it is today.  Without the immense resource income of Forender, it would be impossible for the Cognomen network of worlds to grow as quickly as they do.  Soon, Forender will feed Cognomen by itself, and the world can devote its little remaining agricultural land to industry, as a Forge World should.

Forender is another sign of the embarrassing lack of attention paid to the region during the history of the Oldlight Proximate Circuit.  The star Forender was visible from Cognomen since the first day of the Martian colony, but the fact that it had three planets that could be terraformed with minimal effort was a complete surprise.  To the Mechanicus’ relief, they reached the planet first, and were able to stake a claim before the Fabique Magos and the Departmento Astrocartigraphicae.  The system had no native life, but elementary terraforming could easily turn its three rocky planets into productive Terra-likes.

In Administratum parlance, Forender is a Pasture Gate system, thanks to having three shirtsleeves-habitable worlds, like Septiim.  Unlike Septiim, it is further subcategorized as an Artificial Pasture Gate, thanks to all three worlds being shirtsleeves-habitable solely thanks to extensive terraforming.  This is not a slight against the worlds, but rather an acknowledgement of how long it will take to make the system as agriculturally productive as Septiim or other natural systems.

In M40.038, the terraformation process on Forender-a had progressed enough that premilimary biosphere development began.  Mechanicus Magos Biologis imported thousands of artificially grown plants and animals to the planet, along with the rich soup of interdependent bacteria needed to process nutrients in the fresh soil.  Great climate and mining machines extracted and introduced the chemicals and water needed to turn the three worlds to breadbaskets.

From the very first day of the project, the Mechanicus knew what the Forender system had to be.  The Cognomen colony had not previously been an industry-focused world beyond the essentials.  Above all else, Cognomen had been a place of religious contemplation, voluntary isolation, and reverence for the Machine.  Now, it had to be a place of massive industrial growth, and that meant expanding its great Factory-Forges.  That, in turn, meant more metal and food for the new worker populations needed to run the Factory-Forges, and that meant new economies were needed.

Forender’s terraforming was not solitary.  All three worlds had the abundant water ice and oxygen-silicate crystals needed to create oceans, and the wispy nitrogen gasses in the atmosphere of Forender 4 could easily provide a base for the three terrestrial atmospheres.  The vast gas giant had enough hydrocarbons in its own atmosphere to coat each rocky Forender with its own global oil slick.  Even after the Mechanicus had siphoned enough gas from Forender 4 to create the atmospheres of the other three planets, the pumping stations lingered, to provide fuel for Cognomen freighters and terraformation barges.

If a resident of Forender today were to view how their world looked two thousand years in the past, they would see three fiery balls of rust and storms.  The zones under Terra-like ecological conditions were tiny, barely a few kilometers across, and had not one plant or animal.  By the turn of M41, however, Forenders –a and –b were done with their initial stabilization.  The Mechanicus had sunk billions of gallon of water into the deep places of all three worlds, most of it harvested from their own rock formations.  With the beginnings of true oceans and air, and genetically modified animals and plants on Forender-a, agriculture could finally begin.  One century later, Forender-a was producing simple grains and dyes for export, thanks to the population of several hundreds of thousands of pioneer colonists from Cognomen and Hapster.

By the year M41.923, all three worlds had farms that spanned nearly their entire surface areas.  Extensive oceanic harvest operations collected animals and plants from the seas, while billions of laborers harvested fields of grain, vegetables, and textiles that stretched from pole to pole on Forender-a.  Forender-b had rockier surface topography, and had directed its efforts more towards the growing of vine plants and livestock.  Forender-C was the slowest to develop thanks to the toxic metal traces in its sandy crust, but eventually, its non-equatorial regions developed enough to permit the growth of artificial jungles.  This climate allows for abundant growth of medicinal plants and chocolate, as well as a variety of exotic dyes.

Altogether, even though their terraformation is technically not concluded, the worlds of Forender produce more food than some far older Agri-worlds, and their output shall only climb.  Though reaching the lofty heights of Combine is something that will probably never happen, the Magos Biologis in charge of Forender’s output is determined to try.
Magos Alexei takes it personally that the farms and fisheries have produced as little as they have.  Though the food output of his system is high enough to feed fifteen billion mouths, the slow progress of the farm expansion has him driving the collectors harder and harder.
When his staff, many of whom have the same seminary and educational background as he does, point out that the planet’s ecosystem is fragile and small, and that overharvesting will destroy his worlds’ ability to accomplish anything, he retreats to his private shrine to fume.  He has done this even more since the discovery by the Inquisition that the Glasians have targeted Forender for invasion in the Seventh Migration.

Culturally, the worlds of Forender are both homogenous and precariously balanced.  The Mechanicus has done their best to ensure that the planets’ populaces are not in competition with each other,both because that would be inefficient and because of its history.  The planet’s population pilots were not all Cognomen lay-folk.  Much of the worlds’ population and most of its initial agricultural expertise came instead from the population of Hapster, which is devoutly religious in the same way that the Mechanicus is, just to a different religion.  Much of the populace of the worlds and orbitals of the system are public adherents to the Machine God or the God-Emperor, with no middle ground to speak of.  If the population of one worship rose statistically above the other, the Mechanicus and Ministorum both suspect that the productivity or loyalty of the worlds could suffer.  As such, while the populace of the three Agri-worlds goes about their business more or less peacefully, the Mechanicus and Ecclesiarchy warily eye each other from their compounds, distrusting but unmoving.
Beyond religious rivalries, life on the Forender worlds has some quirks that a traveler would find surprising.  Because of the fragility of their ecosystems, visitors to the Forenders are forced to undergo invasive searches of persons, garments, and cargo upon arrival, to prevent the spread of vermin.  One pregnant mouse could destroy a whole farm.  On the surface itself, most forms of expression and art are strictly forbidden by one or the other of the two religious authorities who rule the worlds, with the Administrators who actually govern the planet relegated to background duties at best.  Public displays of piety and adherence to one creed or another are as close as most Forender residents can enjoy to delight.  The religious figures make up for this with lavish parades and festivals paid for by their tithes, so at least the peasants aren’t driven to distraction by the stultifying nature of life on a world undergoing terraformation.

Life in Forender would no doubt have continued, ever so slightly improving here and there, had not a great heresy begun in the bored minds of the Forender-b paltry upper classes.  Only a few years before the outbreak of the 13th Black Crusade, a cabal of progressive heretics managed to convince the world’s Bishop of the inherent equality and capacity for self-determination of all humans.  The idea that non-Imperial humans are equal to Imperial humans is not by itself terribly out of line with Ecclesiarchial teachings, else there would be no point to converting them to Emperor-worship.  The idea that humans are ll equal, however, directly threatened the hierarchy of the Imperium, wherein the Highborn preside and the Lowborn labor.
The Bishop, a young and vigorous preacher by the name of Cladder, preached this heretical doctrine for nearly a year before a visiting Order Famulous sister noticed.  She made one attempt to show him the error of his ways, and when he refused, she notified Lord Inquisitor Havermann of the Ordo Hereticus.

Havermnn wasted no time in burning Cladder and his cabal at the stake, but the damage had been done.  The Mechanicus leadership of the Forenders had had quite enough of the Ecclesiarchial interference.  They almost certainly would have acted on this, had the Tarot not bespoke something an order of magnitude worse than a single Heretic.  Havermann, a potent psyker, foretold the Glasians assaulting Forender in seven years.  Havermann sounded the alarm at once, and forced the Mechanicus to put aside its righteous indignation and Ecclesiarchy its defensiveness.  A system was at stake.

Havermann was not of the Ordos that traditionally dealt with the Glasians, but he was no fool.  He understood that only a system united in its own defense would withstand the horrible aliens that were about to descend on it.  He sent for help from the Blue Daggers and the Astra Militarum before departing.  Havermann vowed to increase his pursuit of the Heretic and the Witch across the Subsector, such that there would be no distractions in the face of the coming onslaught.

However, the passing of time has been cruel to Forender.  In the seven years since the death of Cladder and his cabal, Forender’s interdepartmental trust has been slow to regenerate, and the extensive defensive preparations needed to shield the world from the coming onslaught have nearly bankrupted the farm worlds.  The Basilikon Astra has brought many ships to defend the planet, as well as a contingent of Skitarii to protect the farms, but the planets’ ecobalance is still fragile enough to necessitate caution.  The destructive weaponry of the Skitarii will damage the ecobalance of the planets enough that much of it, like Radium weapons and Transuranic weapons, can’t be used unless defeat is the alternative.

Moreover, the planetary populations are low enough that they cannot muster a large PDF in their own defense.  Although their equipment and training are adequate for small-scale defense of their homes and farms, the Incursion Force is simply not large enough to pick up the slack in defense of the cities against Glasian hovertanks.

However, the Forender populace does have one massive advantage.  The Celestial Knights chapter of the Space Marines has sent over a full Battle Company to help the Daggers and other Cloudburst forces in protecting the region from the Glasians.  The Mechanicus has accepted their help gladly, espite the Chapter’s odd beliefs.  The Captain who leads them, Irlain Ironhand of the Seventh, has directed his forces to serve as spaceborne relief for the worlds in the system.
Unlike Septiim, where having to defend three planets at once is a massive problem for the Daggers, the Forenders benefit from their dispersal.  This is because of the difference in transportation capacity between them.  The number of troops needed to protect each Septiim rocky planet is lrge enough to preclude transporting them en masse, but Forender’s population is small enough that moving its PDF and Skitarii contingent around is possible.  The aid of the Strike Cruiser Citadel of Stone will no doubt be invaluable in this.  Ironhand has been in the system for a year now, and lines of coordination between his own forces, the Mechanicus, and the PDF are settling in.

However, the other resource drains on the Cloudburst Sector have made defending Forender more difficult.  The assault of the Orks on Foraldshold, which is similarly underdefended, and Oglith, which has consumed most of the Sector’s free assets, mean that there is likely no more reinforcement coming to protect Forender until either the Glasians or the Orks have been driven off.  The Blue Daggers have committed to helping Forender if they can muster the troops, and so far have sent four squads on a Strike Cruiser to shore up the defenses.  These squads have brought a proportionate allotment of their motor pool with them, including two Whirlwinds and a Razorback, plus A Land Raider Helios.