Final planets

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: 4,120,000,000

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.  The very name of the system bespeaks the intent of the Navy to defend it more heavily in the future.
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 CChapter 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.


System: Freehold

Galactic Position: Cloudburst Sector, Uncategorized Region

System Overlord: N/A

Planets: Ten, one habitable

Pirate World: Zlodiei

Satelites: None

Tropospheric Composition: Nitrogen 76.4%, Oxygen 22%, Argon .9%, Water .68%, Carbon dioxide .02%

Religion: Mixed

Government Type: Junta

Planetary Governor: N/A

Adept Presence: None

Climate: Zlodziei has extensive, slow-moving bands of light rain that periodically soak the ground beneath them and replenish local wildlife

Geography: 1.02 times the size of Terra, with extensive fault lines and tectonic upthrusts

Gravity: Terran Gravity

Economy: Local Scrip, Thrones

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

Countries and Continents: Twelve continents, no national divisions

Military: Free Corsair Coalition

Contact with Other Worlds: Rare

Tithe Grade: Aptus Non

Population: 2,000,000 (local humans), 2,090,000 (human pirates), 491 (known alien pirates)

Description:
Zlodiei is a textbook example of what happens when humans try to make their way in life unaccompanied by the Emperor’s love.  The humans of Zlodziei made the error of attempting to escape the wholly reasonable edicts and costs of the Adeptus Terra, and now they’re paying for it every day.

Two hundred fifty years before the Seventh Glasian Migration, the people of the Mercad Hive of Thimble decided that they had had enough of the Imperium’s taxes and closeted mindsets.  Pooling their money to buy second-hand ships and basic survival gear, the hivers took flight into the darkness.  Two years later, out of food and desperate, the Thimblans stumbled across the planet Zlodziei.
The Thimblans settled down on the rocky planet, and quickly set about beginning basic agriculture and construction.  The Thimblans, now Zlodiein, refused all offers to become a new Imperial world, and the Imperium, deeply annoyed but unable to do much about it, cut off their supply lines.
The new colony struggled to find its footing.  Deaths from starvation and riots (and covert Imperial action) cost the planet three quarters of its population within the first fifteen years.  However, after a few more years of hard work, the capital city and some simple manufacturing infrastructure completed, and the colony began to reverse its fortunes.  Constant and focused terraforming of the planet’s soil and purification of its water ended the starvation, while a small force of public enforcers elected by their constituents ended lawlessness.  To the Imperium’s irritation, the colony began to prosper.
The manufacturing consortium that controlled most industry on the world rationed their materials carefully.  The Zlodziein did not manufacture one shirt or dataslate they didn’t need.  To the Imperium’s slight surprise, the people of Zlodziei were wholly uninterested in trade, either with the Imperium or with other factions.  Occasionally, a Rogue Trader would pop into the system to purchase or sell something, but beyond that, the people of the new colony refused any formal contact with the Imperium.

However, the Zlodziein were not foolish enough to think that they could spit on the Throne forever.  Knowing full well that the Ordo Hereticus was watching them remotely, and sometimes from closer, the Zlodziein manufactured great temples to the Emperor, to show their faith had not wavered, and that an Ecclesiarchial retribution for their separation was not needed.  They also began building a small defense militia, enough to fend off attackers from pirates or the occasional gutsy Ork.
So they imagined, at least.  Elsewhere in the Cloudburst Sector and Circuit, other factors were in play of which the Zlodziein were unaware.  The Cloudburst Sector has been, since the first day of its existence, more fluid than most.  The patchy and disjointed nature of local Warp routes and habitable star clusters is the natural byproduct of the metal-rich supernova that birthed the region millions of years ago, and colonization efforts in the Cloudburst Circuit are often limited by the distances a ship needs to travel in the Warp without stopping to get anywhere.  However, some expansion into the region does occur.  The border of the Cloudburst Sector has crept spinward and trailing, and so has the reach of its Navy.  Over time, Battlefleet Cloudburst has successfully pushed pirates and other undesirables out of its territory and into the darkness, only to run into them again later when they push into that very darkness.
One such group is the Free Corsair Coalition.  The FCC is more than a mere band of thugs and desperados, however.  The FCC is a self-contained, moble, heavily armed civilization, one of millions of people and dozens of warships.  The Coalition has raided targets as far apart as Nauphry and the Naxos border forts, and even stolen one of the few remaining Styx-class heavy cruisers.

The FCC moved in and took Zlodziei, as if it had always been theirs.  To the interest of spying Ordo Hereticus operatives in the Coalition and Zlodziein population, the FCC simply arrived in-system with two dozen warships and nine transports, and began landing assets on the surface of the planet.
The Ordo Hereticus had previously focused its efforts on the recruitment and combat portions of the FCC, those dedicated to raiding Imperial shipping and pressing its crewers into service.  The idea that the raiders would annex a planet is bizarre, given the FCC’s previous focus on maintaining mobility at all costs.  Nothing is less mobile than a planet.

However, the FCC did not massacre the populace or even rob the planet.  Instead, the FCC senior leadership arrived on the surface of the world and installed themselves as the new government.  After rounding up the previous government and moving them into the mines, the leader of the FCC, its founder Admiral Reith, named himself Governor For Life, and proclaimed business as usual.
Military assets from the FCC and its tributaries have poured in since then, adding to its defense.  However, both Zlodziein and FCC operatives of the Ordos have concluded that Reith has moved fewer than twenty percent of his fleet into the system.  While the entire non-combatant population of the FCC has since moved into Zlodziei, usually displacing the natives into the wilderness to occupy their homes, the martial assets are still staging somewhere else.

Reith has proven a canny and dangerous leader since then.  He knew in advance, thanks to his own spies, that the planet’s economy had no room in it for a sudden upswing in new residents, and neither did its agriculture.  He has kept up raids on Imperial shipping concerns, stealing food and manufactured goods, to bring to the planet to keep the populace from starving while they slave away, expanding the farms and mines.
Meanwhile, the native Zlodziein have taken various approaches to the new reality of their servitude.  Most of the populace have now either bent the knee to the pirates or stifled their dreams of freedom.  The Imperium comes up in more hopeful terms than it used to, as well, although some cynical Zlodziein think the Imperium would treat them even worse than the pirates do.
Some welcome the FCC.  They think that the martial culture of the FCC is better than the Imperium’s, since the FCC, at least, do not cloak their brutality in the mantle of righteousness.  The fact that the FCC has not disallowed the practice of Emperor-worship is especially appealing to them.

The Ordo Hereticus is aware of this decision of the FCC, but they see it more as a cunning ploy to prevent an Ecclesiarchial War of Faith against the FCC than any actual expression of faith on their part.  Still, so long as the FCC permits the worship of the Emperor, the Ordo is less concerned with their conduct than they might have been.  The problem that truly concerns the Ordo Hereticus is twofold, and ironically has nothing to do with religion.
The twofold problem concerns another facet of the FCC’s unique culture: aliens.  The Ordo has observed that alien FCC members have stepped up raids on Imperial goods and ships since the Zlodziein invasion, and that the Eldar members of the Coalition specifically have been coaching Zlodziein psykers in their alien ways.

The former is concern because of the potential of Ork spores or Eldar cultural insidiousness infecting human thoughts or flesh, of course, but the latter is a potentially devastating heresy.  The idea that humans could learn true psychic control from the degenerate Eldar and still remain truly loyal and faithful to the will of Him On Terra is laughable.  What could it possibly benefit the Eldar race, or even specific corsairs, if they teach human psykers to think like they do?  What, indeed, besides a cadre of brainwashed witches, ready to slay their fellow man at the whims of evil aliens?

The Ordo Hereticus only learned of this psychic trickery weeks before the coming of the Seventh Glasian Migration, but the discovery by a small infiltration unit of the Ordo in the ranks of the FCC has set off alarm bells across the Conclave Cloudburst.  Ordo Xenos Inquisitors demand to know what the Eldar are teaching, while Ordo Hereticus Inquisitors are screaming for blood from the race-traitors responsible.  The Ordo Malleus representatives are disgusted, but have resolved only to step in if the human psykers show signs of losing control of their power and summoning something worse than tricky aliens.

Given the massive resource drains of the imminent Glasian Migration and already-present Ork invasions, there is no real chance that the Conclave will be able to muster troops in sufficient volume for a decisive conventional invasion of FCC territory to put a stop to this.  However, the Inquisition has means beyond mere ranks of men.  Four Ordo Hereticus Inquisitors, led by the murderous Jerome Paltmitier himself, have pooled their resources and amassed a respectable force of Scions, Stormtroopers, Guard, warships, and Throne Agents.  Not enough to win a war outright, but enough to heavily destabilize the Zlodziein defenses and allow a smaller conventional force to do damage out of proportion to their numbers.
All eyes now rest on Admiral Reith.  He has not yet made a statement, even on Zlodziei itself, about his intention regarding this education of human psykers by aliens.  Until the Ordos know precisely what he’s up to, and why he is allowing this, it will be difficult to create a means of stopping him without reliance on brute force or luck.
The Emperor’s Tarot has provided no guidance on the issue.  All portents point towards the Glasian Migration being a far greater threat, which even the most obsessive Ordo Hereticus Inquisitors must admit to probably being the case.  Still, until the resources needed to crush the FCC in open war become available, to take no action would simply be irresponsible, and the problem can only worsen with time.  The FCC’s pockets are growing deeper, their ranks swelling, and the Astronomican’s reach shrinking.

Outside the scope of the FCC, life on Zlodziei is not so different from life on some other Imperial worlds, namely the Prison Planet Craspian 5.  Zlodziei’s founding population of rich dissidents has long since passed away, and their descendents have attracted all manner of refugee or escapee Imperials to bolster their numbers.  Thus, the population of Zlodziei before their annexation was a mixed one, with no real pattern to ages, races, or even homeworlds outside the founding Thimblans.  Notably, Renegades and Traitors were generally received no more warmly than they would have been on an Imperial world.  The Zlodziein didn’t want a war, nor did they want the usual collection of Chaos-tainted scum and desperate criminals that Renegade and Traitor colonies usually attract.  Outside the towering cities of prefabricated concrete slabs and stone, life on Zlodziei was quiet and fairly calm.  Mines and farms, small factories and the occasional resort were all one would find more than a few miles from the two major spaceports.  A few small defense structures, mostly bunker networks with land cleared for VTOLs, dotted the countryside here and there.  Zlodziei had no orbitals and only a few satellites.

The world’s religious authority was decentralized and nearly powerless.  Worship consisted of a few small shrines and a single tiny chapel, with most people expected to practice their worship of the Emperor in their hearts and not with their wallets.  Ironically, this is closer in spirit to current Terran interpretations of the Holy Emperor Cult than that of Cardinals Drake and Lamarr.
Beyond such authority, paltry as it is, sits the government of the colony.  The current leadership consists of knifepoint compliance by puppets of the FCC, but prior to this, each of the fifteen major cities of the planet were expected to select a representative to attend a planetery Congress every six months, with the representative of the city with the largest population chairing meetings to establish legislation and execute governmental edicts.
Money on Zlodziei was not backed by the great trade cabals of the Imperium or the Mint of Terra, and so its valuation defaulted to a mixture of electronic bonds and gold-backed scrip.  When the pirates came, that system stayed in place, though the pirates prefer the use of Imperial currency instead, thanks to the fact that they can spend it off-world.

Today, however, life on Zlodziei is brutal and oppressive, worse than life on Thimble had been at the time by far.  The populace yearns for heroes, and whether those heroes come from the ranks of the FCC to lead them to a future free of the Imperium, from their own folk to cast off both of their enemies, or the Imperium, to shepherd the people back to the light, none yet know.


System: Oromet

Galactic Position: Cloudburst Sector, Thimble Subsector

System Overlord: Lord Dhaedrin Lombardi

Planets: 10, 2 habitable (1 undergoing final terraformation efforts)

Civilized World: Oromet

Satelites: None

Tropospheric Composition: Nitrogen 77%, Oxygen 21.96%, Argon 1%, Water .01%, Carbon gasses .02%

Religion: Imperial Cult

Government Type: Local Peerage

Planetary Governor: No

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

Climate: Rapid variation between hot and cold temperatures everywhere except the frozen poles, frequent lightning storms

Geography: 1.11 times the size of Terra, with thick bands of mountains rising from tectonic junctures and seabed subduction zones

Gravity: 1.06 Terran Gravity

Economy: Gelt Thrones and Silver Thrones

Principle Exports: Lithium, Carbon Chemicals, Soil, Textiles, Fruit, Soldiers
Principle Imports: Luxuries, Refined Metals

Countries and Continents: Twelve continents, eighty-five nations

Military: Oromet Shield Companies (medium quality PDF), Oromet Shock Troopers (medium quality Guard)

Contact with Other Worlds: Common

Tithe Grade: Decuma Particular

Population: 4,134,000,000

Description:
Oromet is a world of regret and peace, a combination that rarely surfaces in the extroverted and violent Imperium of Man.
The Administratum colonized the world long after the Gold Rushes that established the Sector.  In fact, the planet slipped past the Explorators and Rogue Traders that mapped the Oldlight Proximate Circuit.  It was only many centuries later that the world came to the attention of the Imperium.
Originally, the world was an out-of-the-way colony of the old Terran Federation.  The human populace traded extensively with aliens and other human worlds, but did so through orbitals and space stations, not surface visits.  Years of work ground the rough surfaces and non-Diaspora life of the planet down to human standards, and after a time, large mercantile companies managed to gain profits and success from Oromet’s many private manufacturing concerns.
When the lean times came, they came in fire.
Absolutely unheralded and without without pity, an army of the Men of Iron slammed the planet’s infrastructure to scraps.  A war broke out on the surface, one that ended with an eventual human victory that crippled its remaining industries.  Oromet didn’t even make it to the collapse of the Terran Federation before it fell apart.  When the last of its orbitals de-orbited thanks to disuse, the resultant fires and shortages destroyed what little remained of centralized government among the people.

As was the case on hundreds of thousands of worlds across the galaxy, anarchy followed decentralization.  The population felt hope rise and fall as warlord after warlord tried to unite the fractured populace and halt their decline, only for it to inexorably resume after their death or failure.  By the time the Imperium found the world, its climate had broken down completely, its cities were rubble, and its people numbered a pitiful half a million worldwide.

Bringing the world into Imperial compliance was easy, now that the Ministorum had nine thousand years of practice.  Missionaries, Mechanicus surveyors, Ordo Dialogous Sisters, and Administratum bureaucrats descended on the world.  Plague and misfortune struck several Imperial servants low, including the leader of the Missionaries, but eventually the planet fell into line with the Administratum.
Imposing Imperial law was simplicity itself.  The Administratum just picked the most popular warlords from the surviving populace and made them local governors, a system that had worked a million times before at least.
It worked on Oromet.  Within two centuries, the wars had stopped, ecological cleanup had begun, farms and mines popped up across the plains, and the out-of-control climate machines had come under Mechanicus control.  One hundred years after that, the world was paying a tithe, it had its own Planetary Bishop, and psyker harvesting had begun.

By all exterior appearances, the world had become a peaceful success story of the Imperium’s well-oiled Compliance machine.  Small Arbites precincts and a few orbitals followed the departure of the Missionaries, and the system even received a new deep-space augury platform from the Mechanicus to keep a vigil for pirates.

Then, quite without anybody else in the Imperium noticing, all hell broke loose.

One morning, an innocuous radio broadcast from the reigning Archbishop of the planet suggested, ever so innocently, that clergy could interpret the Emperor’s Tarot as clearly as a psyker could.  That raised a few eyebrows among the world’s Astropaths, certainly, since it is patently untrue, but it was so obviously untrue that they took no action.  Any clergyman who attempted to read the Tarot would make a fool of themselves, as surely as the sun rises.
The Astropaths found their unease returning in somewhat greater force when the Archbishop, Haggar, actually carried out a Tarot reading, and apparently did so accurately, foretelling a great storm before it appeared on the planet.  The Astropaths shrugged their shoulders and tried to forget their disquiet, but more and more, it appeared to them that Haggar had actually been blessed by the Emperor in some way.  His Tarot readings were consistently accurate.

It did not take long for Haggar to shift from simply telling people he could read the Tarot to saying that only he could do it properly.  This was a step too far for the planet’s psychic population, which was disproportionately small as it is on most Cloudburst worlds.  One such Astropath challenged him on his assertion.  When he performed a public Tarot reading, however, he realized too late that the psycrystal cards Haggar gave him to read were faked.  When he proclaimed this, an offended crowd tore him apart.

By this time, Haggar had sunk into outright heresy, and turned much of the young colony against the Imperium.  Oromet’s population had swollen large from the influx of new colonists from other worlds in the Imperium, who had moved there to escape overcrowding on their homeworlds.  As such, very few of the people living in the cities and towns of Oromet were native to the planet, and Haggar benefited from such a diverse background in his minions.  The surviving Astropaths took shelter in the Arbites Precinct Fortress in the capital, but now Haggar was whipping the populace into a frenzy with oratory and promises.  His broad range of public support meant that the Administratum was all but helpless, and the Astropaths managed send out one message before the horde besieged their refuge.

With nearly a billion colonists swarming around the Precinct, there was no realistic way to keep them out forever.  Even a pile of bodies would have let the invaders climb up and into the building eventually.  The Arbites mobilized the PDF, but the Judges and Marshals knew very well that that would not buy them much time.  Sure enough, much of the PDF had fallen under the sway of the cunning Archbishop.  The PDF forces assaulted and destroyed each other in hordes outside the capital, while the Arbites used the chaos to quietly slip reinforcements in from other Precincts around the planet, and evacuate the loyal Adepts from the capital.

By the time the Ordo Hereticus had received the message, the Arbites had evacuated approximately five percent of the capital, with Capital Spaceport personnel evacuating several hundred more citizens and some loyal PDF wounded, but the writing was on the wall for all to see.  There was simply no way that the Arbites and Astropaths would be able to evacuate all the people who needed to be evacuated before the fighting between PDF elements ended and the horde assaulted the Precinct Fortress in number.  Covert sharpshooter assistance from Arbites snipers and the occasional loyal Enforcer managed to slow the process, but Oromet’s capital was doomed.

Ordo Hereticus operatives on Maskos and Thimble knew that the window in which they would be able to salvage the planet was closing quickly.  If Haggar had made some pact that let him read the Tarot, and bring a billion people under control that quickly, there was no telling what other forces he had brought to his side.  The Ordo Hereticus needed to solve the problem before it became an Ordo Malleus problem instead.  Moving as quickly as they could, the Ordo pulled together a force of Throne Agents, Arbites, and Scions from Thimble, as well as five regiments of Thimble Argent Swords.  Of course, a force of fifty two thousand could hardly defeat a force of a billion, especially without a local PDF upon which to rely, but it might have provided them enough cover to capture Haggar alive and force him to recant.

The force of Loyalists arrived in orbit over Oromet just as the last the of the Loyalist PDF retreated into the city, under constant attack from enraged citizens on rofotops with firebombs and caltrops.  The PDF rallied around the Prectinct Fortress in which the Astropaths had taken residence, prepared to make one last stand.  Arbites from other Prectincts around the planet had partially surrounded the city, but that was a mere cordon.  Hundreds of millions of brainwashed citizens packed every street, every building.  Waste overflowed the sewers and water tyreatment centers as the population exceeded the city’s infrastructural capacity by a factor of ten times what it had been designed for.  The power draw on the city was so great that the local power plants had to institute daytime brownouts, if the Loyalist PDF hadn’t blow them up first.

Quick communications with the Astropaths that remained in the Precinct Fortress established that Haggar was actually still in the city somewhere, but he had been wise enough to relay his radio broadcasts through local telecommunications infrastructure instead of using the antenna in his cathedral.  His intent was obvious enough to the Ordo troopers: force any invader to dislodge a billion people finding him.
However, Haggar’s plan hinged on none of the Astropaths that had witnessed his broken psycrystal card trick surviving long enough to report in.  To his peril, two of the Astropaths that had witnessed their partner being ripped to shreds had survived, by hiding in plainclothes Arbites evacuation vehicles and riding to Precincts in other cities with less distress.  They reported that Haggar had broken the Tarot cards he had given to the departed Astropath, but also their realization after the fact.  Haggar was a psyker himself, a remarkably disciplined one by all indications.  The Astropaths realized that his own Tarot reading had been completely genuine, and derived from a pool of psychic power, not any strange bargains or Emperor-granted blessings.

That made the Ordo’s two tasks quite different.  Finding a preacher of superhuman luck and charisma wasn’t typically difficult, and finding one with psychic power and no Sanction to shield his soul was even easier.  However, a psyker can also assert control over the hearts of the weak and the weary, and there was every chance that the great mob in the city below would be able to fight on long after a rational force had broken and withdrawn, if Haggar was using his own power to compel him.
All this together meant that Haggar would be easier to find and harder to extract alive with conventional forces alone.  The PDF Loyalists on the ground were exhausted, their ammunition all but depleted by killing their traitorous comrades, and morale hung by a thread.  While the Ordo Hereticus task force awaited the arrival of the Thimblan Guard regiments, the presiding Ordo Hereticus Inquisitor sent an instruction to the system’s Lord Marshal to estimate how much time they had before the mass of civilians attacked.
The Lord Marshal estimated two days.  That was how much time the Inquisition had to find the guilty Archbishop and get him out, or kill him if that was not an option.  The Inquisition waited until the last minute, then ordered a white phosphorous dispersal attack on random spots around the capital.
The PDF was understandably reluctant to dump burning phosphorous on a city full of unarmed people, but enough units followed the order that the Inquisition was able to get their Scion force down into the spaceport unopposed in the chaos that followed.  Meanwhile, psychic Inquisitors and Agents in orbit used their power to triangulate on any sites of unexpected psychic activity in the wake of the total panic from the incendiary attack.
They found Haggar at once, in an armored bunker beneath an abandoned PDF base.  The Inquisition struck, sending dozens of Throne Agents and Arbites elites into the bunker to clear it out and capture Haggar.  They found him hunched over his precious radio, still pouring psychic power into his words, commanding his brainwashed followers to kill, kill, kill.

A Tempestor Prime reached him first and beat him into a bloody coma, while the remainder of the Hereticus force attacked outwards from the spaceport.  Without the psychic impulses driving them, most of the civilians ran screaming from the scene of massacres, burning corpses, and ruthless Inquisitorial justice.  The ones who didn’t were either the true believers over whom Haggar had never needed to exert psychic control, the ones who had some other grievance towards the Inquisition, looters who preferred death to capture, or those driven to rage over the use of white phosphorous against civilians.

By the time the Thimblan Argent Swords arrived and joined the fighting, some roads had fifteen-foot walls of bodies.  Thousands more died from being trampled or crushed by cars as the populace abandoned the cty in great walls of unwashed bodies.  Tens of thousands more died or went mad from the Archbishop’s psychic presence suddenly vanishing from their minds, and PDF casualties mounted to ninety eight percent by the end of the whole affair.

In the end, Haggar was taken offworld for interrogation, and some semblance of peace reigned over Oromet, one buried in a mountain of corpses.  Ultimately, however, blame for the entire affair fell on the Adeptus Astra Telepathica.  How had they missed a psyker as powerful as Haggar?  How had a group of local Astropaths been the only ones to realize something was wrong when a clergyman could read the Tarot?  Embarassed but defiant, the Adeptus pointed out that Oromet’s own government and law enforcement had failed too, both to prevent a cleric from gaining such control over the local military and for allowing a psychic to slip through the fingers of their tithe.

As is so often the case when assigning blame takes precedence over preventative maintenance, little was done in the aftermath of the cleanup.  The Munitorum assigned the Argent Sword regiments to the planet as its new PDF, and new Astropaths and Arbites flew in from Terra to replenish the local ranks.  It took fourteen years of nonstop work to bring the city and its infrastructure back online, and the populace never quite recovered from losing several million people to death and millions more to madness and trauma from their psychic assaults.

Perhaps, as some sages assert, history is a cycle, and all the trappings draped over it by one era of mankind’s civilization are just terrain for the next one, but whatever lesson the local Ministorum should have learned from the Haggar incident, they did not.  Not four hundred years later, yet another Oromet clergyman turned his soul’s coat.  Deacon Woldenbar was no psyker, but he wanted to be.  In the hateful night, as he raged and fumed over the inherent unfairness of it all, he reached out to the Emperor and begged for power.  It was, predictably enough, not the Emperor who answered.
Over the next few months, thoroughly enthralled by his new daemon patron, the Deacon began his dark work.  Woldenbar knew he would never be able to capture as many souls publicly as Haggar had, but his master was insatiable, and to save his own soul from the daemon’s hunger, Woldenbar turned to baser methods of control than Haggar’s subtle mind control.  Starting with his parish’s children and slowly expanding his grip outward, the Deacon wended his way through the faith of his neighbors, until his Chaotic power had brought hundreds to heel.  He whispered lies about the Emperor’s power, and when those lies did not take root, he would rip the souls from the truculent and cast them into the Warp to be eaten, in front of others contemplating resistance.

Naturally, the planet’s Astropathic and Arbites authorities were on the lookout for any sort of heretical or unauthorized psychic after the dangerous behavior of the Archbishop a few centuries before.  Woldenbar avoided working his toxic magic on the minds of the people nearest these centers of power, staying instead in the slums and the poorhouses, where the Ministorum went and few others bothered.  Over time, his lies and promised swayed more and more loyal citizens to the cause of the Dark Gods.

Beyond a point, however, the increased vigilance of the Arbites, Ministorum, and Inquisition could not be evaded.  By the time the Ordo Hereticus had taken notice of the goings-on, and sent an appropriate reprisal force of Battle Sisters from the convents of Maskos and Septiim, Woldenbar had already corrupted a million souls directly and indirectly.  With his tools of witchery and blackmail, Woldenbar had twisted an entire city to his words.

However, a million bewitched pawns are no match for four thousand Battle Sisters with an Inquisitor at the head and a brigade of elite tanks in the rear.  Woldenbar’s dark patron, having accomplished its insidious goal, made it clear that it would abandon Woldenbar as soon as it looked like he was going to lose.  When the Inquisition showed up and started infiltrating his city, Woldenbar panicked.  Rousing his herd to action, he ordered his thralls to assault the Inquisitorial delegation while he attempted to undertake a ritual to bring his patron to the Materium.
His daemonic master, however, was having none of it.  Having a far better idea about the content of the Inquisitorial delegation than the untrained Woldenbar, it chose instead to cut its losses.  As Woldenbar pled and pled for the being of the Warp to honor its bargains and defend it, the outside of the city caught alight.

The Sisters of Battle are not a subtle force of the Emperor’s divine judgment.  With the rage of four thousand Power Armored killers and eight hundred Arbites Marshals, the Inquisitorial task group assaulted the city in a lighting raid just before sunrise.  Massive flare bombs that released glowing gasses and spikes of light up above the city showed hordes of Power Armored women cutting through vast ranks of Chaos-worshippers.

What the light did not reveal was something odd: a daemon had backed out of a bargain with a mortal, and not claimed their soul.  Woldenbar’s pathetic entreating and meandering ritual disgusted his daemonic patron, who retreated from Woldenbar’s corrupt soul when it sensed the righteous hate of the Sisters approaching.  As soon as over half of the hostile force suddenly broke or threw themselves on the blades of the Sisters, the Inquisition knew what had happened.

Once the slaughter was done, the Inquisitors cut their way to Woldenbar.  Ignoring his panicked pleas and explanations for mercy, the Inquisitor at the head of the task force beat him unconscious and dragged him to a shuttle, and then took him to Celeste for cryo-imprisonment.

Oromet has only barely begun to recover from this pair of crippling heresies.  Although only one city was affected the second time, the fact is that the entire planet is now suspect in the eyes of many Ordo Hereticus Inquisitors.  The name Oromet is coming up quite a lot in recent discussions in the Maskos Palace, and not favorably.  What is it, they wonder, that brings heretics and those vulnerable to the whispers of heresy on Oromet?


Quite aside from its predisposition to errant behavior, the planet has a few other distinct features.  Oromet language, fashion, agriculture, art, and regional history are all similar across population centers.  This is an artifact of its relatively large pilot population of settlers, all of whom came from the same continent on the same planet: Grhalskr, a Hive World in Drumnos Sector.  Much of the Hiver culture is long since gone, of course, but Inquisitors have asked in the past if the planet’s relatively high homogeneity may lend itself to deviant thought.  Or, failing that, it may at least help explain why it spreads so quickly through the populace.

Oromet’s primary interaction with the Imperium at large isn’t heresy, despite its reputation.  Instead, it is a heavy exporter of complex batteries.  Oromet has the best battery manufacturing facilities outside Cognomen, and this is all due to the composition of its crust.  Oromet congealed from the mingling gasses of two local nebulae, seeded by the supernebula of the ancient exploding star that shrouds the whole Cloudburst Sector.  The crust has vast deposits of lithium, manganese, copper, zinc, aluminum, iron, and cobalt, all of which are valuable to the creation of batteries, capacitors, and transistors.  The Mechanicus closely oversees these extraction, refinement, and shipping of these valuable metals.  Its adherents see this duty as a sacred one, as they ensure the safe birth of the carriers of the Motive Force that illuminates all technology.  Oromet batteries and capacitors find a home in electronics across the Circuit, thanks to their common use in tools and equipment among Rogue Traders and Explorators.

The planet also has extensive vine-growth agriculture, thanks to its many mountains and volcanoes.  The soil near these mountains is often rich and thick, thanks to the nutrients dislodged or deposited by these upthrusts and eruptions.
Therefore, once the local plants are cut back, this soil is perfect for growing creeping and climbing vines.  Huge frameworks of hollow transparent plastic dot the sides of the mountains, growing megatons of beans, fruits, and feedstock for animals.  Agri-combine trucks from House Carvan transport the food to shipping and bottling plants in the cities, which then transport the food to markets and spaceports.

Industrially, much of Oglith’s production relates to its enormous battery and capacitor manufacturing, but not all.  Much of Oglith’s processed materials go to Thimble, to feed that recovering world’s insatiable need for goods.  Several dozen freighters can be found on its routes back and forth, flying raw goods and food to Thimble, and bringing back fertilizers and finished products.

Oromet’s orbital infrastructure is underdeveloped, even for a world as relatively new to the Imperium as it is.  Aside from some basic defensive structures and a small anchorage for its SDF gunboats, it lacks any means of repelling serious attempts at landing on the surface.  While it does have a few small surface guns, they are mostly for asteroid diversion, not the destruction of warships.
Asteroid diversion is a serious concern for Oromet, however.  The Mechanicus has seen fit to bless Oromet with eleven Kintetic Repulsives, surface silos that fire rockets containing powdered lead weights, to either fly alongside asteroids and divert them with gravity wells or slam into them and redirect them.  The space around Oromet is aflood with debris, even worse than Thimble and Delving.  The rough concurrence of several Warp routes around the world, including several crossing currents, ensures that any asteroids that get sucked into the Warp for dozens of lightyears around inevitably find themselves flung at Oromet.  Of course, most fly directly into the star, but every once in a while, one passes close enough to the planet to necessitate deflection.  This also means that when a Space Hulk flies through the Cloudburst Sector, Oromet is usually the first planet to see it.

This necessitates a considerable groundside defense, as an Ork-infested Space Hulk – or worse, a Genestealer-infested Space Hulk – could easily arrive in orbit over a world with as few orbital guns as Oromet.  Oromet prefers quantity over quality for its armed forces, and its Shield Companies are a middling PDF at best.  Training usually lasts six months, after which members of the service rotate to their hometowns, to be called up in an emergency.  By contrast, the Oromet Shock Troopers are a full-time, professional force, usually recruited from volunteers of the Shield Companies.  Although the Oromet Shock Troopers model their appearance and tactics after Cadian templates, actual Cadians would find a direct comparison rather offensive.  Oromet troops lack most varieties of Leman Russ tank and have far lower standards of discipline, by virtue of not having an eleven thousand year tradition of martial excellence.  Of course, to dismiss the Oromet Shock Troopers would be a mistake, since their extensive field deployments on other planets has lent them the ability to adapt to most terrain types, and they work well with psykers, unlike many Cloudburst regiments.

Oromet does have another distinguishing feature in its military.  The planet plays host to a massive prison, the size of a city.  Inside, over eighty million prisoners from across the Thimble Subsector, mostly Thimble itself, reside and labor for the Imperium.  The prison sits on an island far from the mainland, within eyeshot of a large volcano on the planet’s north polar circle.  Inside the prison, the prisoners are given three choices: sit out their sentences in ordinary confinement, trade time for labor and work it off quicker, or join a Penal Legion and redeem themselves through fighting for their lives.
The planet fields over a million Penal Legionnaires annually, with the vast majority going to fight on behalf of the Imperium in the nearby Naxos Sector.  Naxos suffers intense raider and Chaos invader problems, and the inflow of Penal Legionnaires blunts the damage on the sector’s own precarious population.


System: Liprel Shoal

Galactic Position: Cloudburst Sector, Oglith Subsector

System Overlord: None

Planets: Seven, one inhabitable, one moon terraformable

Frontier World: Hangonne

Satellites: None

Tropospheric Composition: Nitrogen 78%, Oxygen 20%, Argon 1%, Water .95%, Carbon Dioxide 0.05%.

Religion: Imperial Cult

Government Type: Local Republics

Planetary Governor: Yes, position presently vacant

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

Climate: Largely temperate, with arid grasslands at the equator and frigid glaciers at the poles

Geography: Flat plains with occasional sharp, dirt-less mountains, tidal basins, broad rivers with slow water, deep oceans with fast currents, .97 times the size of Terra

Gravity: Hangonne has .91 Terran gravity

Economy: Gelt Thrones and Silver Thrones

Principle Exports: Textiles, Magnesium, Coal, Nitrogen, Leather, Silver
Principle Imports: Complex Alloys, Military Equipment, All-Terrain Vehicles, Satellites, Teachers

Countries and Continents: Hangonne has eighty local governments over four continents

Military: Hangonne Rangers (high quality PDF), Hangonne Light Rifles (medium quality Guard)

Contact with Other Worlds: Uncommon

Tithe Grade: Solutio Prima

Population: 69,820,000

Description:
Hangonne is a place of peace and plenty, and is so thankful for it that it colors every aspect of its citizens’ lives.  If there were a world that could be said to carry the Emperor’s personal blessing, Hangonne would be it.  Of all the worlds in Cloudburst, none can be called luckier than Hangonne.  Its people look at the stars every night and thank Him On Terra for their survival, and their underlying unease grows every time.  Soon, change will come to Hangonne, and every occupant knows and dreads it.

Founded long before the establishment of the Sector, the Frontier World of Hangonne sits quietly in the edges of Imperial territory, minding its own business.  Like Oglith itself, it is a Frontier World and pleased by that.  Realistically, there are few ways the Imperium can physically expand past Hangonne, unless humanity tries once more to colonize the Oldlight Exo-zone.  As such, it is a Frontier in the physical sense as well as in its logistical and infrastructural nature.  While the world does have a few large cities, they are not the towering spires of Celeste or the sprawl of Maskos.  Most Hangonne cities are neat, compact affairs with walls and sturdy architecture, more akin to Clegran than Septiim.  The scouring wind whips past the cities on its way from the sea to the mountains, sometimes carrying rain or snow to water the hardy plants that emerge from the scratch and hardpack.

The majority of the population lives in the thousands of small towns and villages that settlers built all across the globe.  These towns fish, hunt, farm, ranch, and dig for their food, and usually produce just enough for their own needs, a bit of storage, and leftovers to export.
Politically, the planet’s settlers split into a patchwork of roughly eighty republics, each of which convenes every ten years to select a President who represents the world to the Imperium.  That President serves as the de facto Plantary Governor.  The system does not yet qualify for a System Overlord by necessity, although the Sector Administratum is free to select one for convenience any time they wish.  Hangonne’s economic prospects for the future are limited by its anomalously low content of the elements needed to make steel and low-quality soil, but its population has ample room to grow, and may someday need a true System Overlord.

However, Hangonne’s own populace does not wish for that responsibility.  Hangonne enjoys its isolation, for the most part, and its people have decided, collectively, that greater participation in the Imperium is not for them.  Election after election has shown that the Hangonne populace prefers to remain disconnected from larger affairs of clergy and state.
Until, of course, the Glasians arrived.

When the aliens assaulted Hangonne in the Third Migration, the planet was barely prepared.  The destruction of Chlorit in the previous Migration weighed heavy on the minds of the planet’s defenders, which consisted of eight regiments of the Imperial Guard and the world’s own PDF.  The possibility that the planet could fall to the Glasians informed every decision the planetary government made.  Every chapel, every church, every shrine on the planet crammed with Hangonnians desperate to avert their fate.
Fate listened, or perhaps the Emperor, or just simple luck.  Regardless of the source of their fortune, the Glasians never even arrived on the planet.  As their ship, a lesser Cylinder, emerged from FTL, its presence lit up every single sensor in the outer system.  This was the first sign that something was different; usually their vessels arrived in strealth.  Hours later, the report filtered in from Mechanicus fueling platform minders at the termination shock of the system: the Glasian ship had collided with an asteroid as it emerged from its mysterious Faster Than Light mode, and had triggered a catastrophic overload of its reactor.
Seven hours later, the glare from the blast reached orbital telescopes.  Riotous cheers erupted across the planet, as Cloudburst celebrated the first casualty-free (and to date only casualty-free) defeat of the Glasians.

Understandably, piety and thanks were the order of the day, month, and decade after that.  The Ministorum had no need to parlay this unexpected deliverance into a message from the Emperor, as the relieved people did that by themselves.  Of course, the fact that the Emperor had not seen fit to deliver every other system the Glasians had ever targeted went neatly overlooked.
Still, regardless of the source of their rescue, the planet survived, and the Glasians have not targeted it since.  The regmiments on planet quickly shipped off to other worlds to help alleviate the strain of their own invasions, while the preparations Hangonne had undertaken to survive the Migration sat fallow and unused.

In the aftermath of the abortive invasion, the Mechanicus undertook its various data-takings, visiting the site of the wreck and attempting to learn more, which ultimately failed.  The Glasian technology that had surived the impact and explosion was still too heavily tainted to attempt to reverse-engineer, and had to be disposed of by flinging it into the sun.

Still, while the relief on the planet was evident in its inhabitants’ every action for years after, the question lingered in the hearts of the local government.  How had their level of readiness been so low that they had needed eight Imperial Guard regiments at least, just to have a hope of drawing even?

Hangonne is a world of cultural stasis, even stagnation, by its own choice.  While that suits the tastes of its people well, it does not lend itself to defense from hostile aliens.  The world was born from the desire of many of the Naxos economic elite to escape the combination of hostility and pollution that hangs over that sector’s few remaining worlds that have not yet been the site of Nurglite cult uprisings.  Hangonne colonists were early all travelers and settlers from rich worlds in Naxos, and they came to Hangonne to escape the lives they lived.  On Hangonne, the people don’t live in harmony with nature so much as cloister themselves from the rest of the Imperium’s assault on it.  Cities on Hangonne never take up more land than needed, food never goes uneaten because people never grow more than they need to eat or export, and most of all, the people do not force technological niches into their lives that they need mechanisms to fill.

The people of Hangonne don’t identify as holistic in their lifestyle, but the world could certainly export more than it does and import orders of magnitude more than it does.  This does not go over well with the Administratum, of course, but the planet’s unshakable piety and loyalty do allay concerns in Cloudburst’s subterranean halls that the world’s leaders are simply being greedy, and denying Terra her Due.

The world’s government is an inefficient one from the perspective of the three Adepta that require resources from the Imperium’s worlds, however, even accounting for its deliberately primitive technology levels.  The Ecclesiarchy is generally happy with its collections and level of thankful piety, though the small, humble religious institutions the world builds are a bit too small for its liking.  The choice of ejecting all unneeded technology from daily life is a hostile one in the eyes of the Mechanicus, but they tolerate it thanks to the world’s exports of high quality metals (except steel) and food to Cognomen.  The Administratum dislikes any world that doesn’t have a single, centralized government with which to negotiate and from which to collect taxes, but generally puts up with it to avoid unnecessary jurisdictional battles.
All of that may change.  Although the Glasians show no sign of returning, it would be naïve in the extreme to assume they will never do so in the future.  Despite the comfort and peace it usually brings, the Hangonne lifestyle leaves the world terribly vulnerable to attack by enemies.  What if, the Officio Munitorum has asked, the Glasians had sent multiple ships?  What if instead of a single Cylinder with its escorts riding on the hull, it had instead been a convoy of Orks, like the one attacking Oglith?  Or, perhaps, a Chaos warfleet, which always arrive in a new system in a dispersed formation to prevent just such a disaster?  Isolationism and primitivism served Hangonne well when its biggest concern was privacy and overreliance on the Mechanicus, but against the foes of man, it will just make their tasks harder.

As such, there is a gradual, somewhat resentful shift in the world’s politics, toward centralization of some governmental bodies and infrastructure.  The planet has opened a Scholam Progenium, for instance, as well as a few larger Mechanicus-owned factories to produce local weapons.  Like many Frontier Worlds, Hangonne depends as little as possible on commerce with other worlds, but what it can export to Cognomen, it does, mostly silver.  It also exports some textiles to Thimble, which it grows on its wide, windy plains where no vegetables can take root.

Each of the planet’s dozens of republics controls one or two large cities, a few towns and manufacturing centers, and hundreds of villages and small ranch holdings, with none having a population larger than a million.  Most have far fewer, and the exceptions are all larger as a result of having built up around rivers and seas, where more opportunities for farming and trade exist.  Most of the world’s power comes from geothermal and wind turbines, with the Mechanicus only bothering to install other sources in places that need round-the-clock power in great volumes, like the world’s few vehicle factories.  Economically, the Imperial Administratum does not believe Hangonne will need such a low tithe grade for much longer, as long as its population continues to expand at its current rate.

The Hangonne military uses the opposite approach to warfare as Oromet or Lorelei.  Those worlds depend on masses of lightly trained militia and the largest number of professional soldiers it can afford, trained to reasonable levels, while Hangonne deploys small teams of professional PDF and Guard as different branches of the same service.  The Rangers serve as the PDF, and select small numbers of each republic’s own forces as the pool for their own numbers.  Rangers train under a cadre of full-time instructors, learning things like balance, pain tolerance, how to identify edible plants, and riding.  Officers train further in various morale and leadership roles, while enlisted men train on heavy weapons and vehicle operation, sharpshooting, and field encamping.  The Hangonne preference for not using unneeded technology extends to Rangers, who only employ electronic devices when the mission profile calls for it.  Despite this, the Rangers do use whatever weaponry they have on hand when fighting, usually various slug rifles and lasweapons, with the usual assortment of vehicles for a PDF, albeit a slightly low-tech one.

The Hangonne Light Rifles, however, are a more generalized force, and use a mixture of Ranger tactics and more general Guard tactics for their task of augmenting whatever force they’re attached to.  As a Light Rifle unit, they prefer the use of man-portable weapons and fast vehicles, usually Chimaeras or Tauroses, and only field tanks when the need is dire.  Being from a world without much wealth or high technology, the Hangonne Light Rifles prefer subtlety when the option exists.  There is no denying that they are not a particularly capable force outside their mission profile, but this is often the case for Frontier World Guard units.  The discrepancy in their noted quality profile stems from the fact that Guard are often called upon to participate in a wider variety of missions than a PDF, and although they are even better at serving as a stealth recon force or light small-unit tactics asset than the Rangers, they are simply not good at garrison or boarding actions.
This does limit their deployability.  On a world with more wealth or love of high technology, or a world with a larger population, the recruitment pool may be large enough to allow for multiple specializations in their Guard forces.  Instead, Hangonne military forces choose to do one thing very well.

Hangonne’s barrenness and open plains make for great practice space for its armed services.  Recently, the Hangonne PDF has begun importing hundreds of all-terrain vehicles for its units to practice on, to augment horse cavalry in its Rough Riders.  It has also continued the program of satellite launches that the Navy employed to harden up its orbital defenses in advance of the arrival of the Glasians, which sat unused for centuries after the aliens failed to reach them.


The outer reaches of the Liprel Shoal include a handful of uninhabitable planets, including 6-19, a moon of a gas giant.  The moon is large enough for gravity and atmosphere, and the Administratum has plans to make it into a terraformed breadbasket world, to feed extra food and textiles into Thimble and Cognomen’s never-full warehouses.


System: Limmerdine

Galactic Position: Cloudburst Sector, Hapster Subsector

System Overlord: Lord Connor Rodiel

Planets: Eight, one habitable

Death World: Limmerdine 3

Satelites: none

Tropospheric Composition: Nitrogen 79%, Oxygen 19.7%, Argon .2%, Water .6%, Unknown 0.1%, Carbon Dioxide .4%

Religion: Imperial Cult

Government Type: Extended Emergency Coalition (Mechanicus/Administratum/Ecclesiarchy)

Planetary Governor: No

Adept Presence: Adeptus Administratum, Adeptus Ministorum, Adeptus Arbites, Adeptus Mechanicus, Adeptus Astra Telepathica (system’s edge)

Climate: Mixtures of natural weather and rot

Geography: 87 million mi² of surface, alternating between strips of clean land and rotting waste

Gravity: 1.04 Terran Gravity

Economy: Gelt Thrones and Silver Thrones

Principle Exports: N/A
Principle Imports: Ecobalance Equipment, Hazard Suits, Food, Ammunition

Countries and Continents: Nine continents

Military: Celestial Guard and Thimblan Argent Swords

Contact with Other Worlds: Rare

Tithe Grade: Aptus Non

Population: 82,342

Description:
Once, Limmerdine was a verdant world of pine forest analogues, with extensive agriculture and a healthy population.  Now, it is a toxic wasteland, only halfway through an arduous and expensive reconstruction process that experts think will take another twenty five centuries at minimum.

The planet’s history in the Imperium is one of false starts, beginning days after the Administratum first formed the colony.  When the Imperial settlers arrived from Hapster in M37, before the Cloudburst Sector existed, the Mechanicus had surveyed the planet and found nothing that could cause a failure of its colony plans.  However, within a few weeks of settling on the planet, just as pre-fab structures were going up to provide more power and clean water, the Mechanicus withdrew the entire population into space.  To their own embarrassment, they had missed something.
As they dug the main colony site’s first thermoplasmic generator, the Mechanicus located enormous metal structures mere feet below the surface.  When they learned of this, the Administratum leaders of the colony expedition raged at the Mechanicus for missing something in their surveys that a shovel or a magnet could have located.

Embarassed and racing the clock, the Mechanicus began large-scale excavations posthaste, and found that the metal structures at the colony site were mostly empty, and appeared to be storage.  Further investigation, conducted by Tech-adepts rushing to overcome the stranded colonists’ dwindling food supply, showed the buildings to be over eleven thousand years old, predating even the Rise of the Iron Men.  The buildings had their own power supplies, a collection of broken solar panels and batteries.  Beneath them, the Tech-adepts found caverns filled with junk and garbage.

Inside the structures, though, there seemed to be nothing to find.  The walls of the buildings were intact, thanks to the metallurgical wunderkraft of the ancient Terrans, but their actual function and intended contents remained mysterious.
Eventually, faced with the imminent loss of the world’s food supply, the Mechanicus allowed the colonists to return and resume their plans.  Although several colonists nearly died of starvation before emergency relief supplies arrived from other worlds, the disruption caused no more than a year’s delay once the colonists were back from space.  The structures remained inscrutable, and were reburied, albeit with access doors dug from the surface down to allow further examination.

The colony persisted for a few more years, until M37.789.051.  One dreary morning, with no warning of trouble at all, the Tech-adepts boiled out of their tunnels like ants defending a nest.  They set on the other human colonists and began ripping them to pieces, shooting and cutting, and using welding torches to burn them up.

The six Arbites assigned to the pilot colony responded quickly and blasted the Tech-adepts into oblivion.  Once order was restored, the Arbites braved the depths of the tunnels, but returned at once.  The walls had begun vibrating at resonant frequencies, they reported, and only when they engaged the audio muffling of their helmets did going anywhere near the walls become possible.  Later, each would admit to being nearly overwhelmed by the urge to kill, which faded only when they turned on their muffles.

Clearly, there was far more going on than the Mechanicus had realized, now twice in two years.  The Administratum ordered the archaeotech destroyed, over the Mechanicus’ objections, and relocated the colony to elsewhere on the planet.


Thousands of years of hard work later, the planet had become a productive Agri-world of the Imperium.  Its primary export was softwoods, grown in carefully tended arboreal ranches by professional farmers.  Huge timber and pulping mills processed the softwoods and turned them to paper and wood products, then magnetic trains lifted them into cargo containers for its spaceports.
The world had a variety of local industries that allowed it a measure of independence from the infrastructural dependencies of other Agri-worlds.  The planet’s power grids had a series of local geothermal power plants and solar farms that provided abundant electricity for the cities, and the Mechanicus mined large polar deposits of manganese and nickel to produce steel for off-world foundries.

However, Limmerdine was not beyond the sight of the Emperor’s enemies.  As Limmerdine sat on a Warp Route, the planet often served as a source of food and supplies for Imperial Guard infantry, which would sometimes fly by on troopships for dispatch to wars.  One such convoy of troopships arrived in orbit of Limmerdine in M38.799.  After sending the appropriate codes and pleasantries, the lead vessel in the small convoy asked for permission to send down some troops to enjoy a few days’ leave and buy some supplies.  Limmerdine’s traffic control agreed, and the convoy sent some shuttles down.  Then, this time unannounced, they sent several hundred more.  Limmerdine traffic control demanded an explanation, but all channels were dead.  The shuttles landed to a hasty reception from local military, but nothing could have prepared the people of Limmerdine for what happened next.  Tens of thousands of Nurglite cultists and warriors poured out of the shuttles and attacked the spaceports of the planet, overrunning them in minutes.  Local PDF and Arbites forces responded in kind, and the cities dissolved into fractious warzones in hours.
As any sensible planetary administrator would do, the Governor gave the call to evacuate the cities into other locales with no invaded spaceports.  Meanwhile loyal SDF vessels assaulted the troopships in orbit.  Two of the troopships exploded as soon as the SDF closed to firing range, revealing themselves as Q Ships, and crippled three SDF gunboats.  The others attacked the SDF despite being slightly outgunned, buying time for their bretheren on the surface to carry out their dark work.

As refugees poured into the outlying cities, though, the Nurglites revealed the depth of their true, depraved plan.  The illnesses they carried had taken root in the water supply of several cities, and several refugee convoys fell sick over the next week with a variety of horrid Warp-spawned poxes.  Millions fell sick and died, and the PDF and Arbites were not spared.  Despite their numeric advantage over the invaders, they lost their grip on the initially-targetted cities.  The surviving Nurglites consolidated their numbers in the capital to begin the process of summoning a monstrous daemon to reality and consume the world.

Ultimately, however, consolidating their numbers was their biggest mistake.  The surviving Ecclesiarchial and military authorities of the world recognized that their objective was to create a Daemon World.  If that happened, it did not matter how many people survived the plagues, for an eternity of things far worse would follow, and the living would see the dead jealously.
Whipping the surviving Limmerdines into a frenzy, the preachers and officers of the Adepta charged the civilian populace of the world into the capital in a force of over seventeen million, most unarmed.  The Nurglites had not expected this display of backbone and foresight from the Imperium, and they only held back the horde of roaring faithful for minutes.  A solid wall of running people slammed into the ritual site, overrunning it and interrupting the conjuration.  The ships in orbit, seeing that all was lost, took off for the safety of the Naxos Sector’s Nurglite worlds, and the day was technically won.

The world that the Nurglites left behind, though, was no world the Imperium wanted.  Of the two hundred million residents of the planet, there were thirty left uninfected by something.  An entire continent would require sterilization, with careful bacteria and plant reintroduction over thousands of years being the only way to restore it to inhabitability.  Even after the death of all of the Nurglites and the Imperials they infected with their diseases, the planet would need millennia to recover.  The exact amount needed ranged in estimation, from roughly five thousand to a more realistic seven thousand, with dour predictions landing at eight thousand six hundred.  The surviving population had to be checked for diseases and shipped to other worlds, lest they grow ill as well.

Now, on the eve of M42, the planet has recovered approximately forty five percent of its damaged surface area.  The rivers of pus and blood that poured into the local water table and ocean were easier to clean up, but the land area has required extensive prayer from both the Mechanicus and Ministorum, as well as untold millions of Thrones to salvage.  In some areas, the Mechanicus has sinmply given up on the challenge, and resorted to using brute force terraforming techniques to restore the land.

With so many worlds having swelled the numbers of the region since the incident that led to the destruction of so much of Limmerdine, some in the Administratum have begun to question whether the process to restore Limmerdine is really worth the effort.  There are several primitive worlds in the Cloudburst Sector and Circuit that could easily replace Limmerdine’s industrial and agricultural output.  The fact that the planet was the site of a near-victory by Nurgle over the Imperium is just another reason to abandon it, as far as the Astra Militarum is concerned.

The loudest voice for the planet’s restoration, however, is not the Mechanicus or Ministorum, but the Inquisition.  Inquisitors of the Ordos Hereticus and Malleus are convinced by the behaviors of Nurglite groups in the past that the cult that attacked Limmerdine did so for a reason, and they may well return to the site to attempt their ritual again.  Lady Inquisitrix Mizuki Kimihira of the Ordo Malleus has been studying the ways of Nurglite cults for over two hundred years.  She thinks that the physical location of the planet, relative to the Pox Ring of Nurgle worlds in the Naxos Sector, is of great significance to the efforts of Chaos in some way.  She desires the world’s restoration, and for its defenses and population to be ready for the return of the Nurglites.
Whether there is truth to her suspicion, only time can tell, but certainly the Nurglites have affected attempts to retake the world for themselves.  As recently as one hundred ten years before the First Glasian Migration, Nurgle-aligned pirates and raiders assaulted the small Imperial restoration task force on the planet, carrying out harrying strikes and distraction runs as if keeping the Imperials from noticing something.  Whatever their goal, they retreated after losing a ship, and did not return.


Today, Limmerdine has only a few tens of thousands of people on it, all of them members of either the restoration task force or the military barracks protecting them.  The tiny contingent of Arbites and Ecclesiarchial personnel attached to this task force spend their time obsessively patrolling and praying over the workers, ensuring that their souls remain properly aligned to their task, and do not stray from the light of the Emperor.

Their task is worsened by battle.  Periodically, the shambling remains of the dead from past populations of the world rise from the dirt and attack the camps.  Most of the remains are human, and most of those are from the Imperial colony, but sometimes large animals from the deep woods or humans from the original human colony the world hosted thousands of years before the Imperium rise also.  The camps of the restoration task force started as flakboard and slat, but have since upgraded to reinforced plasteel and ferrocrete bunkers, with entirely air-sealed interiors and extensive auto-turrets.  Unfortunately, the planet’s scars will not heal faster if more money or people are thrown at them.  The Mechanicus can’t accelerate all natural processes, and so some of the restoration of the planet must come from effort and not resources.

When the reanimated skeletons rise, however, they do so in groups, and they attack regardless of the hour.  The reanimated beings have caused more than two hundred interruptions in work protocols serious enough to merit delay while the field teams recall to their bunkers for safety.  Arbites and Guards in their Thimble-built aircars swoop and soar above the hordes of teeming undead, using incendiaries and concussion bombs to crack their bones.  Once the hordes have abated, the work can resume.  To the Inquisition’s cautious hope, areas that have had Mechanicus and Ministorum abatement work done and prayers recited rarely have problems with the animated dead, which means the restoration work may be having the intended effect.  The skeletal beings are less durable while walking over ground that is so hallowed, too, so the perimeter becomes easier to secure with each passing year.


System: Avius

Galactic Position: Cloudburst Sector, Maskos Subsector

System Overlord: None

Planets: Seventeen, one inhabitable

Frontier World: Lorelei

Satellites: None

Tropospheric Composition: Nitrogen 77%, Oxygen 21%, Argon 1%, Water .99%, Carbon Dioxide 0.01%.

Religion: Imperial Cult

Government Type: Local Hegemony, Elected President-By-Consent

Planetary Governor: Yes,

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

Climate: Thick, broad ice caps and seasonal glaciers above polar circles, vast jungle and arctic rain forests, some isolated plateau have year-round dryness

Geography: Wide plains between tropics and polar circles, some with heavy foresting; extensive river networks with abundant natural water springs; long chains of volcanic islands, light crustal materials means little volcanism and upthrust, .96 times the size of Terra

Gravity: Hangonne has 1.01 Terran gravity

Economy: Gelt Thrones and Silver Thrones

Principle Exports: Metal Ores, Unrefined Plant Matter, Talc, Ice
Principle Imports: Aircars, Crafting Materials, Teachers

Countries and Continents: Lorelei has no nations on seven continents

Military: Lorelei Militia (low quality PDF), No Guard yet, Deathwatch (fluctuating)

Contact with Other Worlds: Uncommon

Tithe Grade: Solutio Extremis

Population: 19,744,000

Description:
Lorelei is a profound pain in the fundament.  There is no world in the entire Cloudburst Sector that is quite like Lorelei.  Not restive Hapster, not frequently assaulted Oglith, not bipolar Nauphry IV.  No world in the Cloudburst Sector, the Cloudburst Circuit, or the pitiful collection of colonies in the Exo-zone routinely comes so close to outright defiance of Imperial rule than Lorelei, and its inhabitants are innocently unaware of just how close they are to a reprisal that will give their grandchildren the night terrors.

Lorelei is a young colony of the Imperium.  Among its many, many worlds, there are natural categories into which they all fall, usually defined by climate or population level.  Like some other worlds in peripheral and sparse Cloudburst, Lorelei is a Frontier World, meaning that it is, or used to be, a world with little central Imperial infrastructure, and used to be near the edge of Imperial space.  It also has a low population, and largely undeveloped resources.  Beyond that, Lorelei has developed a trait that some other Imperial Fronteir Worlds have acquired in their past, to their detriment.
Lorelei, unlike Hangonne and Oglith, has a rebellious streak that local law enforcement and military can’t seem to stamp out.  The world’s location near the edge of all formal Imperial territory has drawn in hundreds of thousands of outlaws and isolationists from the greater Imperial heartland, some from as far away as the Scarus Sector.  The world has never officially turned on the Imperium, but some Arbites assigned to the world’s sole Precinct Fortress think that to be only a matter of time.

The planet’s populace lives in scattered towns, each more or less identical in its content.  Most have a small mine and a few ranches, a few large farms, and a chapel, plus residences, a few markets and shops, and a variety of local businesses.  These are no low-tech idyllics, however, but instead employ the same levels of technoarcana and business savvy of wealthier worlds, except for a few specific cases.

The prevailing view of the Imperium among the populace is that it is, at best, a distraction, and at worse an active impediment in the ability of the people of Lorelei to live their lives as they wish.  This is, in the eyes of the Adepta, obviously the case.  The Adeptus Terra would not exist if the people of the galaxy were capable of making the right decisions about government, religion, and defense without it.  Lorelei is not special, they scoff, it just wants to be, and so pretends that the thing keeping it from that specialness is what every other world takes for granted.
This is an understandably unpopular opinion on Lorelei, but there will always be nonconformists in any large enough group of people.  Actual crime is no higher on Lorelei than on Oglith or Hangonne.  The Adeptus Ministorum has a tenuous grip on some of the towns, but there are enough clergy on the world to prevent the trend of anti-Imperial sentiment from translating into an overwhelming force of lawlessness.

However, the trend of opposition to the Imperium tends to peter out among the ruling classes.  Like most Imperial worlds, some of the families of Lorelei have naturally drawn towards leadership, and although the President-by-Consent of the planet is elected by locals and Adepts do not get to vote, the last eight Presidents have all been in favor of greater integration with the Imperium.  The benefits are obvious to any official who pays attention, and as the Planetary Governor, the President-by-Consent naturally gravitates towards that integration.  The problem for them is that the populace strongly opposes it, and so each President publicly decries it even while pursuing it out of sight of the people, to varying degrees.

At the moment, this is proving to be a huge liability.  Many of the populations that contribute to the election of planetary and regional governments presently oppose higher integration into the Imperium.  However, the planet is also suffering under the effects of a plague.  So far, over ten percent of the planetary population has come down with this viral illness.  Discreet Ordo Malleus investigation has revealed that the illness is not Nurglite in origin, but its effects are still crippling.
The plague begins by causing costant coughing, followed by severe and uncontrollable excretion and dehydration.  This is followed by high fever, dizziness, sore throat, and lymphatic swelling.  Death follows in ten percent of cases.
Naturally, the people of Lorelei would very much like aid from their government in solving this problem.  However, no cure or vaccine exists, and the Inquisition has placed the entire planet under quarantine until a solution presents itself.  The people are outraged and demanding the quarantine lift, and some towns are even discussing open rejection of the quarantine in favor of seeking off-world help, perhaps from the Mechanicus’ biological sciences offices.

If the people of Lorelei pursue this to its natural conclusion, the retaliatory action by the Inquision would cause a death toll higher than the disease.  The Inquisition has been highly specific on this point, which has driven the stubborn streak of the people even higher into prominence.  So far, the official actions the planetary government has taken to contain the illness have seen some success, but if the people of Lorelei continue to resist common sense, there is no telling what might happen.  What the Inquision has not seen fit to tell the people is that they are entirely convinced that the pathogen responsible for this trouble is alien in origin, and probably artificial.  At the moment, Ordo Xenos Inquisitor deWalt Prang believes that the same force of mysterious aliens responsible for driving the Ork fleets of the Oldlight Exo-zone back from the borders of the Cloudburst Circuit in M41.839 is responsible for this disease.  This is based on some few genetic samples recovered from a crippled savior pod from an alien ship found adrift after the three-way brawl for the edge of the Circuit ended.  If the people of Lorelei were to learn this, the Emperor alone knows how they would react.


There is another point of contention between the Imperium as a whole and Lorelei.  The Deathwatch has constructed a Watch Station on the planet, and they did so with the permission of the Planetary Governor.  Nearly any other world in the Imperium would consider this a positive development, but the Loreleian stubborn side has produced considerable opposition to this effort.

The Watch Station, ironically codenamed Peacekeeper, is the Deathwatch’s intended defense-in-depth of the Subsector against alien incursion.  The possibility that the plague that bedevils the planet is alien in nature has added a sense of urgency to the Deathwatch’s construction of the facility.  Peacekeeper sports several fixed guns for its defense, and the locals are quite put out over it.  The problem the locals have with the Deathwatch isn’t the defenses per se, since they are clearly static and useless for impressing Deathwatch edicts on the populace.  The problem in the minds of the Loreleians is that the mere presence of these defenses may serve as provocation to the Glasians.  The stubborn mindset of the local colonists does not allow for the idea that the Glasians might just attack them anyway, which the Deathwatch has patiently explained again and again.
The Planetary Governor has made similar declarations of the blindingly obvious, to no avail.  The possibility that he may be voted out of office by the Loreleians for daring to side with the Deathwatch over the will of the people hangs heavy over the Governor’s head.  He has pleaded with the people to see reason, and his pleas have gone unheard.
Loreleian Military
The various city-states of Lorelei do practice self-defense, although none are presently at war with each other.  As the world is Imperial despite its best wishes, it does muster a PDF, although the world has managed to weasel its way out of raising Guard regiments so far.  It pays its tithe instead wth metal ores, raw textiles for Thimble, and blocks of ice, as well as the world’s abundant talc.

However, its PDF is undistinguished.  Lorelei has never faced external attack.  Its troops specialize in the use of snipers, minefields, and Rough Riders, and in fact has some of the best Rough Rider PDF in Cloudburst, at least in terms of their marksmanship.  Loreleian lack of discipline affects the PDF, and its troops are notoriously unreliable even under their own officers.