Death unto Darkness - User contributions [en]

Astronavigational Information

2020-03-26T11:48:26Z

Jc:

Like much of the galactic void, the vast majority of the Prosperitas Sector consists of empty space and dull, lifeless rocks holding little interest to the Imperium. The sheer size of an Imperial Sector, however, means that despite this it is still home to countless billions flung across a myriad of planets, moons, asteroids, ships and space stations. These are spread out over an unimaginably large expanse, with particlar worlds or regions playing host to a dversity of different activities - sanctioned or not.

Traversing Imperial space is not a trivial task, requiring enormous amounts of time in realspace under conventional power, or the assistance of a Navigator to travel through the Warp - with all of the risks that that entails.

=== '''The Subsectors''' ===

The sector is divided into four subsectors: Primus, Secundus, Tertius and Tenebris.

'''Subsector Primus''': home to the sector's capital, Duroverum, which acts as the seat of the Sector Governor, and has born the least of the brunt of Archenemy incursions into Imperial Space. [blah blah more info please]

'''Subsector Secundus''': [blah blah]

'''Subsector Tertius''': [blah blah blah]

'''Subsector Tenebris''': formerly known as Subsector Quartus, the subsector was ravaged by an event known as the Lash of the Eye in 304.M41. [blah blah blah blah]

=== '''Regions of the Sector''' ===

Aside from the subsector divisions, there are specific areas of the sector that are notable for one reason or another.

'''The Rimward Marches''': a vast region of the Prosperitas Sector not yet conquered by Imperial Forces. Beyond it lies the Lightless Gulf, where there are few stars for a considerable stretch of space. The region is a haven of scum and villainy: many remnant forces of the Regency retreated here, and it is the location of many untamed worlds including the suspected homeworld of the parasitic xenos known as the Thri'qun.

'''The Nemean Gulf''': along the spinward edge of the Prosperitas Sector lies a vast region of unexplored space known as the Nemean Gulf. This region stretches for lightyears of uncharted void encompassing an area wide enough to contain several sectors, before eventually at the far side meeting the trailing edge of the Piscina Sector. Encompassing a vast number of worlds, from the Red Worldz of the Orks to the Graveyard at the Rimward edge where the Shavasti nomads are often found, the Gulf remains the most untouched region of the Sector.

'''The Tenebris Arm''': part of a massive Warp rift and permanent Warp Storm nearly twenty thousand light years across known as the Eye of Terror, or Ocularis Terribus, the Prosperitas Sector orbits this storm impaled upon a reaching tendril, known as the Tenebris Arm, that spears into the eponymously named Subsector Tenebris and claims it with madness.

'''The Ættin Heima''': a vast collection of worlds within the edge of the roiling warp-storm known as the Eye of Terror. Once a part of Subsector Tertius, they were conquered by tribes from the Eye. Given their immersion within the edge of the storm, dealing with this threat presents a serious challenge for the Imperium.

'''The Môr Draenog''': [blah blah description here]

'''The Shard Reef''': [blah blah description here]

'''22-32-Azhdahā''': [blah blah description here]

=== '''Trade Routes''' ===

The Trade Routes of the sector present vital lifelines for citizens and resources to track their way through the perils of the sector. Considered of the utmost importance, the Imperial Navy ensures that they remain open at all costs.

'''The Sol-Prosperitas Passage''': the route blazed by Warmaster Durovera I when she first founded the Prosperitas Sector, the Sol-Prosperitas Passage remains vital for the sector's survival. The Warp tides are treacherous, but offer an unrivalled fast passage from the Prosperitas Sector through to the upper reaches of the trade-lanes into the Segmentum Solar and Sol itself.

'''The Cadian Corridor''': forged by House Majid, the Cadian Corridor is a narrow passage of calm space that runs perilously close to the edge of the Eye and is heavily ravaged by pirates and raiders. Vital to the sector's economy, the corridor allows Prosperitas to feed the hungry fortresses of the Cadian Sector.

'''The Iron Stair''': winding upwards from the galactic plane from the Forges of Castellum and Naximus Prime, the Iron Stair was once a rich trade route. With the Ork devastation of Persephon, the death of Caudica Secundus and Rebellion on Mawson's Wake, these have left the Rimward arm of this trade route quite poorly used, and many of the worlds along its path neglected.

'''The Prosperitas Trade Spine''': named the 'Spine' for its vital role in supplying the majority of the major worlds of the Prosperitas Sector not already serviced by the Sol-Prosperitas Passage, the Trade Spine is currently under the control of House Di Firro who use it to support their House expeditions into the Rimward Marches.

=== '''Types of World''' ===

There is a large number of different kinds of world to be found within the sector.

For a detailed description of these, please go the [[Types of World]] page which explains them in more detail. Some of these are not currently found in Prosperitas.

Here is a brief rundown:

'''Agri-World''': dedicated to crop and livestock production, primarily as a food source.

'''Armoury World''': directly controlled by the Departmento Munitorum for the storage of armaments.

'''Cemetary World''': given over to caring for the remains of the Imperial dead.

'''Civilised World''': not dedicated to any specific purpose, though loyal to the Imperium.

'''Dead World''': devoid of an ecosystem, atmosphere or native life.

'''Death World''': inhospitable to human life due to its environment or biosphere.

'''Feral World''': home to hunter gatherer, early agricultural or nomadic societies, under minimal influence from the Imperium.

'''Feudal World''': home to pre-industrial societies, under little influence from the Imperium.

'''Forge World''': directly controlled by the Adeptus Mechanicus for machine manufacture.

'''Fortress World''': a bastion in the defence of the Imperium against outside threats.

'''Frontier World''': at the fringes of the Imperium, and usually lacking an effective planetary government.

'''Garden World''': dedicated to being a cultured retreat for the Imperial nobility (and others who can afford to pay).

'''Hive World''': densely populated with hive cities, and home to the Imperium's workforce.

'''Industrial World''': dedicated to heavy industry or resource extraction.

'''Knight World''': home to Imperial Knights, and in the demesne of either the Imperium or the Adeptus Mechanicus.

'''Non-Compliant World''': not necessarily actively hostile, but independent of the Imperium's influence.

'''Penal World''': a prison planet, with a population primarily consisting of criminals.

'''Quarantined World''': off-limits to contact with Imperial citizens.

'''Shrine World''': dedicated to the Imperial Cult, frequently under the direct control of the Ecclesiarchy.

'''Space Marine Chapter Homeworld''': directly controlled by a chapter of the Adeptus Astartes for use as a base.

'''War World''': currently an active warzone.

There are also a variety of space stations, battlegroups and independent vessels throughout the sector that serve as permanent homes to millions of citizens - of varying levels of loyalty to the Imperium.

=== '''Worlds of the Prosperitas Sector''' ===

==== Subsector Primus ====

'''[[Asteroid 24334-1]]''': '''Satellite Colony'''. A luxurious asteroid colony known to its residents at '''Cyprus Creek''', it is the seat of the Chartist House Globex.

'''[[Carthusia]]''': '''Civilised World'''. A wet, humid planet with a high water table, it is a prosperous Imperial world favoured as a tourist destination by the wealthy of Subsector Primus.

'''[[Castellum]]''': '''Forge World'''. Rival to Ferrareus, it is the youngest of the Forge Worlds, having only been founded in mid-M.41. Although not as industrialised as other Forges, it is better known for the ancient pre-Imperial ruins found in its snow-capped mountain regions.

'''[[Duroverum]]''': '''Hive World'''. Designated as the Capital of the Prosperitas Sector, it is the seat of Imperial Governance. Though rule of the sector is shared with the military leadership of the Office of the Warmaster – it is Duroverum where the Sector Governor reigns.

'''[[Ferraeus]]''': '''Forge World'''. Taken from Hereteks early in the Prosperitas Crusade, it is the victim of millennia of pollution that has made the air toxic and forced its inhabitants to live their lives in environment suits.

'''[[Gaudium]]''': '''Hive World'''. Once a thriving and beautiful Shrine World, it is now an overpopulated and sprawling mass of hive cities spreading across a barren and treacherous coastline.

'''[[Korimesta]]''': '''Hive World'''. One of the oldest planets in the sector, it was once a hub of trade. Now it is an idol of fallen splendour. The world’s atmosphere, polluted by industry, has forced its inhabitants into huge hive cities built around mountains.

'''[[Kydos]]''': '''Agri-World'''. A small, dense world covered in phenomenally deep planetary oceans, which support a vast range of flora and fauna.

'''[[Letifer Secundus]]''': '''Hive World'''. A poisonous wasteland dotted with atmo-sealed hives, it was once a refugee colony. In recent years it has become the home of the heart of the sector’s narcotics industry.

'''[[Mazar-63]]''': '''Satellite Colony'''. A tunnel-honeycombed, hollow moon around a sterile planet, it is the seat of Noble House Roshan-Fikran.

'''[[Merewald]]''': '''Feudal World'''. A world of few natural threats and a generally warm, equable climate suitable for cultivation. Its population is spread widely, with few towns and no cities as such: most of the inhabitants are peasants, ruled from the castles and palaces of the Noble Houses.

'''[[Midsummer]]''': '''Agri-World.''' '''No description yet.'''

'''[[Monacus]]''': '''Hive World'''. A rich and crowded world, serving as a popular tourist destination for the wealthy youth of Subsector Primus due to its uphive clubs catering to pleasures of all kinds.

'''[[Nivalis]]''': '''Non-Compliant Shrine World'''. Previously a pristine world, its mountains carved with the likenesses of Heroes of the Imperium, its uncountable temples and shrines have been wrecked by the bombardment of the Archenemy against the fanatics of the now-excommunicated Cardinal-Emissarius Grulge who shelter there.

'''[[Persephon IV]]''': '''War World'''. Having born the brunt of the savage greenskins of Waagh!! Gazbag since 531.M41, much of its original glory has been ravaged by the Orks. Its people fight an endless war in order to ensure that the greenskin menace is contained there.

'''[[Strayvia]]''': '''Dead World'''. A former agri-world, it was devastated by Exterminatus virus-bombs in 577.M41, leaving the Strayvian Regiments homeless and embittered.

'''[[St Sebastian’s Redoubt]]''': '''Space Station'''. Once home to a heretic order, the station was cleansed by the Ministorum and turned into a holy place of education. The gothic spires of this asteroid fortress house both a Schola Progenium and a Ministorum Seminary, but still hide many secrets.

==== Subsector Secundus ====

'''[[Caracas]]''': '''Feral World'''. A world where the majority of the population are nomadic tribespeople, it is covered mostly in dense forest in the equatorial and tropical regions, with tundra towards the poles. It is valued solely for its hardy human population.

'''[[Caudica Secundus]]''': '''Dead World'''. A former hive world, it originally prospered as a profitable mining world. Its biosphere was eradicated due to Exterminatus in late 582.M41, though some of the population was evacuated as the Caudican Diaspora.

'''[[Everholt]]''': '''Quarantined World'''. A heavily forested former agri-world known for its lumber exports, it rose up against the Imperium in 586.M41. This led to the planet's interdiction and all approaching ships are turned away by the Gothic-class ''Righteous Indignation''.

'''[[Finisterra]]''': '''Non-Compliant World.''' A non-Imperial world beyond the boundaries of Imperial Space, it is the site of a humiliating defeat for the Imperium in 592.M41. The local human population, the 'Esa', successfully drove off an Imperial Expeditionary Force despite being technologically inferior to the Imperium, and has so far resisted conquest. It has been earmarked for future military operations.

'''[[Helaerus III]]''': '''Hive World'''. A hellish, temperate death world forest covers the surface of the planet, though the population live inside several dozen hives.

'''[[Henlock]]''': '''War World'''. Currently held by the forces of the Archenemy, it was formerly an Adeptus Mechanicus world, valued for its Titan training grounds and ancient Heresy-era Titan Graveyard. When Archenemy forces took the world in 538.M41, a desperate counter-attack by the Imperium led to a disaster that cost the life of the Warmaster of the Prosperitas Crusade.

'''[[Kirkcud III]]''': '''Civilised World'''. A wild and newly-developed haven, it is heavily wooded and perfect for settlement, but dogged by rumblings of non-compliance from a stubborn local population.

'''[[Lerwick]]''': '''Civilised World'''. A desolate and arctic oceanic planet, it is heavily defended from orbit. It lies at a strategically vital location on the Rimward edge of the Trade Spine.

'''[[Macharion CDXI]]''': '''Frontier World'''. The sector’s most recent colony, it is a dry and dusty world in the early stages of Imperial colonisation that so far has shown promise.

'''[[Mawson’s Wake]]''': '''Frontier World'''. At the Rimward edge of the sector, and a patchily-inhabited, struggling frontier planet with a history of revolt. Largely desertified and scarred by open-cast mining, the Wake ekes out an existence dependent on an ancient vehicle manufactorum, and pays its tithe with conscripts from among the resentful populace.

'''[[Olethros Secunda]]''': '''Partially Non-Compliant Civilised World'''. A third generation colony world, the planet was settled with the help of a substantial grant of sacred technology from the Adeptus Mechanicus of Naximus Prime. Controversially, it still pays tithes to the Mechanicum of Naximus in recognition of this bond in lieu of Imperial taxation, and considers its duty to the Imperium to be in a distant second place.

'''[[Shadowglow]]''': '''Death World'''. Shrouded in near-permanent darkness by a complex lunar cycle, it is a freezing, inhospitable desert world. The planet is home to a race of abhumans known as 'Raivans', whose fanatical loyalty to the Imperial Cult, combined with superior strength and speed, make the world a fertile recruiting ground for the Crusade.

==== Subsector Tertius ====

'''[[Agrial III]]''': '''Shrine World'''. An ancient world covered in dusty sepulchres and echoing chapels, it is a seldom-mentioned backwater planet that contains what is possibly one of the largest libraries in all of Segmentum Obscurus.

'''[[Amenophis IV]]''': '''Hive World'''. An old, desert planet on the Tenebris border, with a series of industrial hive cities and some impressive ruins.

'''[[Bachian IV]]''': '''Industrial World'''. A mining outpost with a highly toxic atmosphere, controlled by House Vilas-Lobo.

'''[[Burisalis Prime]]''': '''Civilised World'''. At a comfortable distance from a stable star, it is a temperate world of gentle, sweeping plains. It is used primarily by the sector’s Imperial Guard as a training ground for armoured and artillery regiments.

'''[[Butonia]]''': '''Feudal World'''. Conquered for its carbon-3 deposits, the majority of the planet is a feudal, low-advancement society, though it's capital and Noble Houses are reaching Imperial-levels of technology thanks to the world's mining efforts. Serf rebellions in 537.M41, under the guidance of a supposed Living Saint, have disrupted supplies.

'''[[Kuatis]]''': '''Industrial World'''. Focused on shipbuilding, and dominated by guilds and the Imperial Navy, it is controlled as a naval fiefdom. Smog and near-constant sheeting rain obscure starlight, while tunnels run across the surface between settlements to protect those that can afford to pass through them from the miserable environment.

'''[[Lubyanka]]''': '''Penal World'''. The surface is a frozen wasteland, peppered with valuable meteor strikes. Beneath, there is a vast network of tunnels occupied by convicts, their jailers and daredevil Noble scions competing to make their fortunes.

'''[[Morghull]]''': '''Feral World'''. A heavily-forested world at the edge of the subsector. The natives consist of scattered bands of iron-age nomads who roam the endless forests, following herds of local herbivores. Known for their hardy physiques and physical prowess, Morghullites are dour, aggressive and brave, but also highly superstitious and mistrustful of outsiders.

'''[[Vannin]]''': '''Death World'''. Made up of impenetrable jungle, it is part of the holdings of House Vilas-Lobo, albeit only in a technical sense: even to a house accustomed to the exploration of any world, no matter how hostile, there is little here to interest them. It presents no commercial use, nor is it interesting to scholars, and as such it is omitted from many maps of the House's holdings and they are responsible for no tithe from it.

==== Subsector Tenebris ====

'''[[Anaximund Alpha]]''': '''Non-Compliant Knight World'''. The only known Knight World of the sector, its sole duty is to feed the worker population of Naximus Prime. Its rulers, House Qureshi, have ridden their war engines to the defence of the Mechanicus and the Imperium on many occasions, though only ever with the blessings of its Forge World patron.

'''[[Kelper Prime]]''': '''Fortress World'''. A heavily fortified Fortress World on the Tenebris border, Kelper Prime controls one of the main Warp routes into Subsector Tertius.

'''[[Naximus Prime]]''': '''Non-Compliant Forge World'''. Rediscovered in 401.M41, it is not welcoming to the Imperium. Rigidly independent, its Forges accept Imperial work-orders, but do so at their own discretion. The three Temple-Moons of the planet serve as heavily-armed defences to the system.

'''[[Polarnus Station]]''': '''Space Station'''. An orbital habitat-cum-shipyard, it is a giant asteroid hollowed into a multitude of labyrinthine tunnels. Once an ancient trade hub, it now acts as the headquarters for the front-line deployment of Crusade High Command, and is constantly bustling with the business of readying ships and soldiers for war.

'''[[Vallum]]''': '''Fortress World'''. On the far Coreward-Spinward corner of the subsector, the it stands as the lonely guardian of the final approach to the area around Polarnus Station.

Kelper Prime

2020-03-26T11:44:48Z

Jc:

{| class="wikitable" style="float:right; margin-left: 10px;"
|-
! Name !! Kelper Prime
|-
| style="text-align:center" colspan=2 | [[file:Kelper Prime.png|200px|Kelper Prime]]
|-
| '''Sub-Sector''' || Tenebris
|-
| '''Type''' || Fortress World
|-
| '''Population''' || 5 billion
|-
| '''Climate''' || Subarctic
|-
| '''Status''' || Imperial
|}

=== About Kelper Prime ===

Kelper Prime has been a world devoted to the defense of the Sector since [[Warp Storm Tenebris]] devastated [[Subsector Quartus]]. With a habitable though cold climate, plenty of open tundra to build settlements, and a friendly population, Kelper took on the lion’s share of refugees fleeing the devastation of the Subsector in 331.M41. The planet’s population swelled by billions overnight; all that the locals asked, in return for housing, feeding and clothing the shattered remnants of a hundred Imperial worlds now lost to the warp storm, was that their new neighbours devote themselves to the defense of their home. The immigrants integrated quickly and seamlessly, joining the newly founded planetary defence and Imperial Guard regiments which quickly absorbed most of the adult population.

Kelper today is the site of regular incursions by Enemy forces desperate to control the firm base for warp transit into [[Subsector Tertius]]. For a century and a half, the locals and descendants of the original refugees have fought them off, bolstered by Crusade forces on regular rotation, who use the planet for extreme weather training and exercise as well as providing live fire support against Enemy occupation attempts.

As a result of the locals’ particular love for ambush tactics, and the presence of large quantities of volatile mineral compounds in the local soil, the permafrost of Kelper is heavily mined outside the main fortified cities. Local youth training regiments compete with each other in contests of ingenuity and perseverance to prepare new minefields in any areas the Enemy might use as a landing site or defensive position. After decades of enthusiastic preparation, the only safe routes to travel across the surface are the main metalled roads – and even those are frequently underlain with culvert bombs and deactivated pressure plates, requiring only the work of a moment by a knowledgeable local to turn a secure crossing-point into a deathtrap. The frequent storms and flooding accompanying the season the Kelperites generously call “spring” – the brief period in the planet’s thousand-day year cycle when temperatures edge above freezing – often cause these buried landmines to shift and move, meaning that any map of the minefields is hopelessly out of date almost as soon as it is drawn. The Kelper Engineer Regiments are famous across the Sector for their knowledge of improvised explosives, and regularly send bright instructors to teach at the Guard academies for sappers, ammunition technicians and explosive ordnance operatives.

Although most of Kelper’s military might is concentrated in its ground forces, the planet does keep a respectable detachment of Thunderbolt attack craft based on orbital platforms, supported by Avenger pattern ground attack fighters quartered at the planetary capital of Stanportley. The pilots are treated with a mixture of respect and gentle mockery by their “ground-pounding” comrades, who appreciate their skills and laud their willingness to meet Enemy forces head-on in a dogfight, but maintain that a true Kelperite spends their time elbows-deep in permafrost and home-made explosives.

The only signs today of the planet’s hybrid history are in food and naming conventions; Kelper cookery is famous across the Subsector for its delicate fusion of lost Subsector Quartus dishes with the solid, starchy stews traditional on the freezing planet. Children born on Kelper usually take local first names, which mirror the traditional names common before Durovera’s Crusade reclaimed the planet; popular names include Apay, Kallik, Kumaglak, Luava, Muktuk, Nanouk and Osha. Middle names and surnames are often agglutinative references to the off-world blood now present in almost all native families, memorialising cities and planets now fallen to the [[Archenemy]] – Daliasecundus, Koiturnsworld, Maorusprime and Secondspire are all common surnames.

Agriculture on Kelper is minimal, with most of the adult population devoted to the planet’s defense, and it barely produces enough food on an annual basis to sustain itself. The most common food animal is a large, flightless aquatic bird known as the Manchot, which has the distinction of being just light enough not to trigger the standard pressure release plates fitted to Kelperite anti-personnel landmines, and therefore roams freely over the planet’s landmasses. The planet’s grox population, being substantially heavier, did not survive the first decade of defensive emplacements.

Anaximund Alpha

2020-03-26T11:43:10Z

Jc:

{| class="wikitable" style="float:right; margin-left: 10px;"
|-
! Name !! Anaximund Alpha
|-
| style="text-align:center" colspan=2 | [[file:Anaximund Alpha.png|200px|Anaximund Alpha]]
|-
| '''Sub-Sector''' || Tenebris
|-
| '''Type''' || Knight World
|-
| '''Population''' || 3 billion
|-
| '''Climate''' || Temperate
|-
| '''Status''' || Mechanicum (nominal), Non-Compliant
|}

=== About Anaximund Alpha ===

As green and fertile as Naximus is smog bound and arid, it would be easy to think that Anaximund Alpha stood free of Mechanicus presence were it not for the hulking metal clad Knights that patrol its land. A lush agricultural world of various temperate climates, the population of this world have as their sole purpose the feeding of the worker-population of nearby Forge of Naximus Prime. The exact date of founding is unknown but it is clear the symbiotic relationship between the Magos of Naximus and the Knights of this world has existed from the time of the Heresy as it is this dynamic that allowed both to survive their opposition to to the Sector Regency for ten thousand years. Tied together under a formulation of the Sidon protocols the Forge World stands as patron to Anaximund Alpha and its leaders, House Qureshi, whilst the Knight world serves as loyal vassal, valuable resource and military might. It is this co-dependency that has formed such a strong link between the two worlds, the exchange of powerful and arcane machinery of war for trained and experienced warriors to wield it when called upon. As a result the culture of the Knight World stands as a unique hybrid society within the sector, combining the neo-feudal origins with Naximus Prime’s particular form of Orthodox Mechanicus beliefs.

A world of haves and have nots at its core Anaximund Alpha is built on a system of fiefdoms and vassals with the Knight House absolute owner of all land and assets. With no desire to oversee the day to day administration of livestock farming, crop rotation and pest control the Qureshi leaders allow those they see favorably to “hold” pieces of land and work them. In return for this work House Qureshi grants protection and prestige as well as the promise of further tenancies and progression if the vassal proves their worth. This division in status is further enhanced by the fact the ownership of Mechanicus technology is restricted by Naximus’ representative on the world, the Archmagos Prelate. House Qureshi and their closest allies have access to the greatest machinery and augmentation present on the world whilst the presence of it diminishes as the social ladder descends. As a result of this, and in an odd mirroring of culture upon their patron world, social worth is judged according to the augmentations and technology owned by an individual. An outsider might notice that this is an unhelpful model when technology is allocated on planet according to social worth and status but the local populace would receive such news coldly. They see it as a structure that gives directed motion to life thereby becoming a macrocosm of the First Universal Law of the Mechanicus. Religious practices vary wildly from settlement to settlement but the unerring constant across them all is an unshakeable faith and confidence in the Omnissiah as the embodiment of all power and knowledge within the Universe.

The leaders of Anaximund, House Qureshi are a political family that have held a grip on the world since Mechanicus records first began here thanks to the armoured steeds their Knights ride. Concerned less with blood ties, new members of the ‘family’ are chosen and adopted in from the most promising vassals within the planet’s high society, their lives scrutinised according to the Sixteen Universal Laws by the Archmagos and the incumbent Head of House. The current leader of the Qureshi Knights is Laleh Qureshi who has recently gained the title after the far overdue passing of her infamously orthodox predecessor Gul Qureshi. As the only Knight World within the sector the House has often been called upon by other Forge Worlds within the Sector and even by the Imperial High Command when their firepower was desperately needed. No matter the riches promised or consequences threatened, Gul only ever answered the call when their patron allowed it. This has left bad blood within some Imperial Guard and Navy regiments on this frontier who have taken to sarcastically asking under their breath for “The Qureshi Cavalry” when a loss is certain and backup far from sight. In the past half a decade however Laleh has been reported holding meetings with some of the more forward thinking of Naximund’s Magos as well as reportedly sending invites to high profile individuals across the Sector. With a political divide apparently developing within their patrons Forge World some wonder whether Laleh is preparing to dramatically shake up the nature of the Protocols she is bound under and look for greater independence. Others decry this as dangerous sedition and cannot believe she would be so bold when it is as yet uncertain that any other Mechanicus in the Sector know the secrets of the Knight technology Qureshi relies so much upon.

Naximus Prime

2020-03-26T11:41:24Z

Jc:

[[File:Forge World banner.jpg|Naximus Prime]]

{| class="wikitable" style="float:right; margin-left: 10px;"
|-
! Name !! Naximus Prime
|-
| style="text-align:center" colspan=2 | [[file:Naximus Prime.png|200px|Naximus Prime]]
|-
| '''Sub-Sector''' || Tenebris
|-
| '''Type''' || Forge World
|-
| '''Population''' || 9.3 billion
|-
| '''Climate''' || Polluted
|-
| '''Status''' || Mechanicum (nominal), Non-Compliant
|}

=== About Naximus Prime ===

Originally a rather lush and green world, uninhabited when the Naximus system was first charted in M.23, Naximus Prime and its three moons were immediately claimed by the [[Adeptus Mechanicus]]. With a speed that could only be accomplished by the [[Machine Cult]] the entire planet was industrialised, and its moons turned into temples for the machine god. Mined hollow, and filled with ordnance, they stand as both a symbolic and functional warning to any who would approach the planet without permission of its owners. Resolutely independent from the Imperium forces in the sector Naximus Prime was occasionally approached by colonists seeking alternative sources of help and power. Ever eager to spread the word and influence of the Omnissiah these arrangements can be seen lasting to this day on the worlds of Anaximund Alpha and Olethros Secunda.

Naximus Prime was the last of the [[Forge Worlds]] of the [[Prosperitas Sector]] to be united with the Imperium in M.41. It has stood effectively blockaded for ten thousand years, unwilling to bend the knee to the [[Regency]] they viewed as anathema to their [[Machine God]]. Having withstood invasion for such a length of time thanks to a combination of perfect factors Naximus Prime remains actively unwelcome to outsider visitors, allowing entry only by the permission of the Hierophant-Technis of the Forge who governs the world with a tight fist. At the other end of the spectrum from Imperial-welcoming Ferrareus, the Mechanicus of Naximus Prime still act as if they live in the Golden Age of the Imperium, where the Mechanicum was an Empire unto its own. Their ownership of the only Knight World in the sector among the reasons why the Sector government allows such a status.

Details of the forge world’s society are hard to find, however those who have been permitted on Naximus Prime report a planet poisoned by industry and a world where the colour green is limited only to the glowing cybernetics of its population. It is these cybernetics where Naximus Prime gains its greatest renown and proves its indispensable nature to the Imperium. Thanks to the quality of locally mined metals the bionics crafted by the forges here are better made and more reliable than many others. Though the [[Machine Cult]] has always been known for its melding of flesh and machine as a religious principle it has reached a stage the majority of the population have bionic modifications, as a result of the artisan skill possessed by the Cybersmiths of Naximus Prime. It is a sign of wealth and beauty, to the people here to not be melded with the machine is an abnormality – the more subtle and delicate bionics considered ‘pretty’ and the larger, more steel and heavy duty types, considered a sign of strength.

The result of this cybernetic mastery is a [[Taghmata Omnissiah]] filled with high quality cybernetic troops that stand elevated in the hierarchy of Naximus Prime and a common aspiration of all menial workers. The entire culture of this world is alien to the Imperium, every strata of society assimilated into the [[Machine Cult]], to outsiders, it is a strange and unwelcoming place, even towards other members of the [[Adeptus Mechanicus]], independent, and still thinking of itself as existing in a time when the Mechanicum existed as a separate, and powerful, independent empire. The leading Magos of Naximus have made it clear they see [[Ferrareus]] as being overly reliant on the Imperium, a simple vassal world rather than a powerful Mechanicum Forgeworld working hand in hand with an allied power.

Naximus Prime

2020-03-26T11:41:07Z

Jc:

[[File:Forge World banner.jpg|Forge World]]

{| class="wikitable" style="float:right; margin-left: 10px;"
|-
! Name !! Naximus Prime
|-
| style="text-align:center" colspan=2 | [[file:Naximus Prime.png|200px|Naximus Prime]]
|-
| '''Sub-Sector''' || Tenebris
|-
| '''Type''' || Forge World
|-
| '''Population''' || 9.3 billion
|-
| '''Climate''' || Polluted
|-
| '''Status''' || Mechanicum (nominal), Non-Compliant
|}

=== About Naximus Prime ===

Originally a rather lush and green world, uninhabited when the Naximus system was first charted in M.23, Naximus Prime and its three moons were immediately claimed by the [[Adeptus Mechanicus]]. With a speed that could only be accomplished by the [[Machine Cult]] the entire planet was industrialised, and its moons turned into temples for the machine god. Mined hollow, and filled with ordnance, they stand as both a symbolic and functional warning to any who would approach the planet without permission of its owners. Resolutely independent from the Imperium forces in the sector Naximus Prime was occasionally approached by colonists seeking alternative sources of help and power. Ever eager to spread the word and influence of the Omnissiah these arrangements can be seen lasting to this day on the worlds of Anaximund Alpha and Olethros Secunda.

Naximus Prime was the last of the [[Forge Worlds]] of the [[Prosperitas Sector]] to be united with the Imperium in M.41. It has stood effectively blockaded for ten thousand years, unwilling to bend the knee to the [[Regency]] they viewed as anathema to their [[Machine God]]. Having withstood invasion for such a length of time thanks to a combination of perfect factors Naximus Prime remains actively unwelcome to outsider visitors, allowing entry only by the permission of the Hierophant-Technis of the Forge who governs the world with a tight fist. At the other end of the spectrum from Imperial-welcoming Ferrareus, the Mechanicus of Naximus Prime still act as if they live in the Golden Age of the Imperium, where the Mechanicum was an Empire unto its own. Their ownership of the only Knight World in the sector among the reasons why the Sector government allows such a status.

Details of the forge world’s society are hard to find, however those who have been permitted on Naximus Prime report a planet poisoned by industry and a world where the colour green is limited only to the glowing cybernetics of its population. It is these cybernetics where Naximus Prime gains its greatest renown and proves its indispensable nature to the Imperium. Thanks to the quality of locally mined metals the bionics crafted by the forges here are better made and more reliable than many others. Though the [[Machine Cult]] has always been known for its melding of flesh and machine as a religious principle it has reached a stage the majority of the population have bionic modifications, as a result of the artisan skill possessed by the Cybersmiths of Naximus Prime. It is a sign of wealth and beauty, to the people here to not be melded with the machine is an abnormality – the more subtle and delicate bionics considered ‘pretty’ and the larger, more steel and heavy duty types, considered a sign of strength.

The result of this cybernetic mastery is a [[Taghmata Omnissiah]] filled with high quality cybernetic troops that stand elevated in the hierarchy of Naximus Prime and a common aspiration of all menial workers. The entire culture of this world is alien to the Imperium, every strata of society assimilated into the [[Machine Cult]], to outsiders, it is a strange and unwelcoming place, even towards other members of the [[Adeptus Mechanicus]], independent, and still thinking of itself as existing in a time when the Mechanicum existed as a separate, and powerful, independent empire. The leading Magos of Naximus have made it clear they see [[Ferrareus]] as being overly reliant on the Imperium, a simple vassal world rather than a powerful Mechanicum Forgeworld working hand in hand with an allied power.

Morghull

2020-03-26T11:37:06Z

Jc:

[[File:Feral World banner.jpg|Morghull]]

{| class="wikitable" style="float:right; margin-left: 10px;"
|-
! Name !! Morghull
|-
| style="text-align:center" colspan=2 | [[file:Morghull.png|200px|Morghull]]
|-
| '''Sub-Sector''' || Tertius
|-
| '''Type''' || Feral World
|-
| '''Population''' || approx. 500 million
|-
| '''Climate''' || Cold temperate
|-
| '''Status''' || Imperial
|}

=== About Morghull ===

Morghull is a heavily-forested feral world at the edge of the [[Subsector Tertius]]. The natives consist of scattered bands of iron-age nomads who roam the endless forests, following herds of local herbivores. Known for their hardy physiques and physical prowess, Morghullites are dour, aggressive and brave, but also highly superstitious and mistrustful of outsiders. The musket and sabre are the weapons of choice of the nomad tribes, and frequently used against one another in the constant inter-clan skirmishes that occur in the depths of the Morghull forests.

Due to the fractious nature of the tribes, there is no unified planetary government; the nearest Morghull has to a planetary ruler is the chieftain of the largest tribe; Khan Damir Zoric of the Pathka. Khan Zoric, backed by Imperial support, has pacified a large area of the northern continent, and established one of the only permanent settlements on the planet; Pathka-rath.

Missionaries have been preaching the [[Imperial Faith|Cult Imperialis]] on Morghull for centuries but, due to the dense forests and the locals’ natural distrust of outsiders they have often found the work difficult.

Kuatis

2020-03-26T11:36:02Z

Jc:

{| class="wikitable" style="float:right; margin-left: 10px;"
|-
! Name !! Kuatis
|-
| style="text-align:center" colspan=2 | [[file:Kuatis.png|200px|Kuatis]]
|-
| '''Sub-Sector''' || Tertius
|-
| '''Type''' || Industrial World
|-
| '''Population''' || 700 million
|-
| '''Climate''' || Subtropical
|-
| '''Status''' || Imperial
|}

''“We made landfall not far from Ibrill, and spent a diverting few days exploring the planet from the air in an Aquila lander. I recommend seeing it this way; the odd geography is very beautiful from a height, and one can always skim above the cloud-layer if the monotonous weather becomes too tiresome.” Travel Diary of Lucius di Firro, 572.M41''

=== About Kuatis ===

Kuatis is the only non-gas body in the Kuatis system, and its distance from its star would suggest that it would be a comfortable planet. Records indicate that the planet was chosen for its promising, if dry, climate and that it had originally been surveyed as a largely rocky planet, with large permafrost areas and ice caps, with a ring of fertile land close to the equator. For this reason, it is believed that it was originally classified as a relatively low-yield Agri World with a limited amount of mining towards the rocky areas of either hemisphere.

From what records have survived the [[Crusade]], a disastrous gas release during the first century of mining operations altered the climate considerably, resulting in a rapid and substantial temperature rise, a permafrost melt event, and a consequential increase in water suspended in air across the planet. When the forces of [[Warmaster Ulian]] retook the planet in 324.M41, the [[Administratum]] declared an urgent reclassification to an Industrial World (the actual reclassification order being handed down after some 45 years of citizens attempting to farm the land under these conditions).

The modern Kuatis experiences near-constant rain across all of its habitable surface, due to the now-wet planet’s water evaporating in the smog-fuelled heat of the surface, before rapidly condensing in the rapid pressure change above the smog layer. Smog from the industrial operations is generally caught in the middle atmosphere, causing light and visibility to be very low. What light does reach the surface is orange-tinged, a condition which is not helped by the proliferation of smog burners. It is common for settlements to be equipped with smog burners, which use large open flames to clear the air around the populace. The largest settlements, and all the factories, are equipped with dozens of smog burners that tower into the sky, granting additional light to their surroundings but suffusing it with an orange glow.

The peculiar history of Kuatis’s climate has led to the usual geological actions of erosion and ocean formation taking a strange turn. The deep valleys of the pre-disaster planet remain, without banks having hewed themselves in, but are now full of rushing water that would have previously been impossible. Even the seas and oceans are surrounded by large cliffs, without a history of water movement creating banks.

This odd geology has meant that the planet has remained habitable, despite the weather. Settlements are relatively high above sea level and there is little surviving soil on much of the rock, resulting in marsh conditions being avoided. The main danger, in areas where the underlying rock is fine and loose, is a landslide.

Since reclassification, mining operations have been intensified to support Imperial shipyards in orbit and on the surface. As the difference between the equator and the rest of the planet has almost disappeared, settlements now dot both hemispheres, largely composed of ramshackle buildings filled with lowborn, surrounding gargantuan mineral extraction facilities. These settlements are built directly on to the rock below, with limited foundations, and are routinely washed away after particularly heavy days of rainfall.

Closer to the factories, the buildings become more solid and sheltered from the elements by use of vast slabs of plascrete foundation flattening the damp rock underneath, as well as sophisticated drainage systems operated by the Guild of Diversion. While still looming over the shanty towns of the lowborn, the nobility does not live in anything approaching the scale of a Hive World spire. Space on the solid ground between these structures is coveted by lowborn traders, who routinely set up markets there, plying goods to the thronging masses of servants, labourers, minor officials and enforcers who still have to walk in the open air to pass between the edifices of their betters. Tensions between the street traders and those living in relative safety are high, and these spaces often serve as flashpoints for gang violence and cult activity.

But, no settlement can compare to the terrifying height of Kuatis’s factories. Colossal Mechanicus structures strike into the sky, penetrating the smog layer, even reaching high enough to escape the rain. Small rivers form around the factories where industrial effluent and rain is pumped away at all hours, and at the height of each structure, beyond the sight of those below, payloads are fired to the shipyards in orbit above.

Since the reclassification, guilds have controlled every aspect of life on Kuatis. As well as the standard assortment of food, gambling, and pit guilds, there are several that take advantage of Kuatis’s situation. For the traveller that cannot afford a flyer, the Kuatis Traversement Guild operates the tunnels that wind across the surface of the planet. Two thirds of each tunnel’s width is filled with a land-roller, its treads not stopping for anything so small as a pedestrian in its path. These land-rollers are deemed to be essential to the proper economic function of the planet, and the local [[Arbites]] frequently supplement the Guild guards in the tunnels. In the cramped sides of each tunnel, the mass of people who cannot afford to board either flyer or land-roller walk the tunnels, taking their lives into their hands through necessity or foolishness.

In the settlements, the homes of the great and the good are protected from flooding by the Guild of Diversion. This guild operates complex networks of watertight barriers, canals, and storm drains to direct and divert floodwater away from the areas under its protection. However, the Guild’s power has significantly decreased since an incident in 585.M41, which saw a township of ore processing workers drowned, causing significant stoppage to the work of a shipyard which was dependant on the ore. Following an [[Arbites]] investigation, it was found that there had been no risk of flood damage to the factories or noble housing. Those that ordered the diversion were duly sentences, and it was ruled that all water control and diversion systems connected to the production of craft for the [[Imperial Navy]] would be controlled by the Navy or their duly appointed delegates. The Guild of Diversion protested this judgment, but the position of the planet as a naval fiefdom caused the decision to stand.

In recent years, the planet and system have been declared to be a naval fiefdom under the control of a Commodore-Governor. This has been a boon to those citizens who can claim that their work relates to the vast industrial shipyards, which has afforded some degree of protection from the casual cruelty of the guilds. This has also meant that the planet’s mineral wealth is funnelled directly into the planet’s shipbuilding pursuits, rather than directly into the earnings of any of the sector’s great Houses. This has resulted in the power of the guilds lessening somewhat, and many being acquired by the Great Houses, particularly House Majid, which has purchased extensive holdings in the larger settlements outside of the capital.

On the rare days when it does not rain, it has been noted that labourer productivity markedly decreases, and lawlessness increases. This has been repeatedly noted by [[Arbites]] and [[Administratum]] authorities to be less than ideal, and discussions are thought to be underway with the [[Adeptus Mechanicus]] to determine whether it is possible or desirable to cause the rain to be truly constant.

The map of modern Kuatis now resembles a vast web towards Ibrill, which serves as the planetary capital and the major surface-based shipyard. Each settlement sends some of its production directly into orbit, but much is sent to Ibrill. From space, the smog around the capital can be observed as the “Eye of Kuatis” effect – a swirling vortex of pollution, darker than its surroundings, punctuating the sky above the capital as it drains the planet’s wealth away.

Butonia

2020-03-26T11:29:48Z

Jc:

[[File:Butonia banner.jpg|Butonia]]

{| class="wikitable" style="float:right; margin-left: 10px;"
|-
! Name !! Butonia
|-
| style="text-align:center" colspan=2 | [[file:Butonia.png|200px|Butonia]]
|-
| '''Sub-Sector''' || Tertius
|-
| '''Type''' || Feudal World
|-
| '''Population''' || 3 billion
|-
| '''Climate''' || Temperate
|-
| '''Status''' || Imperial (nominal), Unstable
|}

=== About Butonia ===

An old world conquered by the Imperium at the start of the Prosperitas Crusade, Butonia was a quiet backwater planet at the fringes of sector politics but what development has occurred has been largely thanks to its position as a cross roads on a number of trade-routes. For this reason alone the Butonia capital was a vibrant and semi-modern hive with all the benefits of modern Imperial society available to the rich aristocracy. The difference is living standards between rich and poor was as stark here as anywhere in the sector and it was this simple buying power in the hands of the nobles that always meant that they could maintain personal armies and fiefdoms, bribe away any serious threat and generally maintain order through a mixture of oppression and corruption.

The lords themselves had their own rivalries and ambitions but after the calamitous Titian revolt 300 years ago all nobles agreed that should any of them resort to the support of the masses then that family will be purged utterly from the face of the planet. Baron Janus Titian had been outmanoeuvred by one of his closest rivals in his efforts to exploit new carbon-3 deposits found in the northern wastes but when he resorted to a people’s uprising using most of his families vast wealth to arm the people in a peasants revolt he found himself betrayed by one of his own blood. Despite this he was able to drag out the war last for 10 years. In the end the though the noble houses untied against him when the distant dream of emancipation was raised by Titian at an speech he gave in the northern woods. He was hunted down and killed by an assassin and within three months the war was over.

Since that time the people were treated like cattle. Little more than serfs, a nobles wealth was measured by how many people they could drive into the mines to claw out the precious Carbon-3. By 583.M41 the volume of ore that the planet paid to the Administratum was five times what it was in Titian’s time but the desire to keep the people weak meant that technological development and advanced mining techniques were simply outlawed.

Attracted by the prospect of escape many young volunteers joined the PDF but these regiments became little more than armed gangs going by names such as the “Rattlers”, “The Collectors” or “Zombies” and the behaviour of their Commanders was more akin to that of petty warlords than upstanding Imperial officers.

=== The Saint’s Rebellion – 583.M41 ===

The Governor became more anxious to fulfil quotas, turning to the aid of the Adeptus Mechanicus for aid in the rapid extraction of the Carbon-3 the only thing that gave his domain value. That aid came at a price, in the long term it would pollute the atmosphere and poison the soil of Butonia – but the seeds of rebellion where born from the mass land clearances that faced the Serf population, and where Serfs refused to give up their homes, their farms, they were slaughtered by the increasingly out of control PDF.

Open rebellion against the Sector Governor erupted in M41.583 with the defection of several of the infamous PDF regiments to the side of the revolting Serfs – in response those forces loyal to the Governor began to slaughter their way through the under-armed population in order to put down the conflict. The Rebels were rallied, however, by a young woman known as Safina, who proclaimed herself a ‘Living Saint’.

At the height of what could have been a brutal civil war, the Governor was assassinated by agents unknown, without his corrupt leadership the upper classes faltered and the Serfs led by ‘Saint’ Safina have taken control of much of the planets surface. The Mechanicus in turn inflamed the situation further by claiming the papers signed by the deceased Governor give them right to mine the Carbon-3 deposits on Butonia.

=== The Purges – 592.M41 ===

By 592.M41 Butonia had fallen into a state of anarchy, the Living Saint having vanished without a trace, and no true governor put in place Butonia had been forgotten by the powers of the Imperium, the rebellion suppressed, its corrupt governing class toppled, and yet, nothing changed: there was no order, no restored control, the Black Ship tithe forgotten, mutants unattended and allowed to grow in size and population… the planet needed leadership.

In 592.M41, the people, enflamed by a Redemptionist element, rose up to take control themselves, an army of the Faithful overran what few of the corrupt PDF bases remained on the planet, murdering their occupants who had divided the small world up into their own feudal domains. When the last of the petty Warlords of Butonia fell, the Faithful spread out, seized by Redemptionist dialogue they attempted to scour the world clean.

Like many Redemptionist elements, this quickly grew out of control as the Redemptionist factions attacked peasants and Nobles alike in a mad witch-hunt for supposed heresies as their puritanical stranglehold further fragmented the world.

=== Rise of the Popular People’s Militia – 593.M41 ===

The arrival of support for the people of Butonia from the Faith Militant in 592.M41 under the auspice of Lord-Militant Zacharias All-Souls-Cry-Out-For-Salvation Cadence introduced another change to the political landscape – proving capable of directing Redemptionist factions away from the peasants and against the mutant and archenemy cults holding out in the Butonian wilderness the Lord-Militant raised the Popular People’s Militia by arming thousands of Butonian volunteers willing to help restore law and order to their world. This success has not gone unnoticed in the wider Imperium however, and the recent declaration by the Militia of the leadership of Butonia under the Lord-Militant is something of a controversial move, for the appointment of a leader based on popular support is heterodoxy against Imperial doctrine.

The only other candidate is a thin-blooded Noble survivor of the former ruling House of Butonia, Jenita Morrow who began her rise as an Ecclesiarchy priest – but the Nobility do not enjoy much local support, and the current Imperial stance of allowing the situation on Butonia to burn itself out prevents them having the forces to exert their will.

Olethros Secunda

2020-03-26T11:27:08Z

Jc:

{| class="wikitable" style="float:right; margin-left: 10px;"
|-
! Name !! Olethros Secunda
|-
| style="text-align:center" colspan=2 | [[file:Olethros Secunda.png|200px|Olethros Secunda]]
|-
| '''Sub-Sector''' || Secundus
|-
| '''Type''' || Civilised World
|-
| '''Population''' || 2 billion
|-
| '''Climate''' || Temperate
|-
| '''Status''' || Imperial (nominal), Non-Compliant
|}

''“We arrived just in time for the Games, and struggled to find any room at all in Backshore. A and the retinue ended up sleeping in the shuttle – it was that or the floor! The views from orbit are stunning – the islands, still green despite the rise of heavy industry, like emeralds set in a gunmetal sea. The victors’ parade was a sight to behold; they all seemed so young and so proud – I wonder if they have any idea what truly awaits them?” Travel Diary of Lucius di Firro, 578.M41''

=== About Olethros Secunda ===

Olethros Secunda is a balmy, temperate world in a stable orbit around a main sequence G-type yellow dwarf. Violent tectonic activity in its early development led to the formation of no major continents above the sea level; instead, the planet’s habitable southern hemisphere is a vast archipelago of islands, the largest no more than fifty miles in diameter, resting in a shallow, fruitful and mildly alkaline ocean. These islands experience a warm, mild littoral climate, with vegetation rarely growing above large bushes or small trees analogous to cypress, laurel and juniper. The northern hemisphere is almost entirely bereft of land masses, and the oceans are much deeper. Aerial augur surveys report biomass signals consistent with large – very large – organisms in the bathypelagic zones, but no recorded sightings have yet been confirmed. The northern polar cap is host to a small variety of native mammals and birdlife, some of which are hunted for their skins.

The colony of Olethros Secunda was founded in the early 400s.M41. The leader of the original colonisation effort, Brigadier-General (later Governor-General) Akwesi zu Septimian, was granted an Administratum Writ and permission to raise colonist forces from across the local worlds following her loyal service under Warmaster Fassir. However, with no independent wealth and no desire to suborn herself to any of the Sector noble houses, zu Septimian turned to an unusual source for assistance in setting up the equipment and transportation necessary to enable the huge effort of colonising a new world: the newly recontacted [[Adeptus Mechanicus]] of [[Naximus Prime]].

Following zu Septimian’s entreaty, the Mechanicum provided the Olethros colonists with all the shipping and logistical support they needed to commence the long process of civilising their wet and empty world. Thousands of sacred machines and their red-robed keepers accompanied the colonists, shortening the work of subduing the oceans to Humankind’s will from generations to months. The inhabited islands of the Southern archipelago are now linked by a network of delicate sky-spanning plasteel bridges, their pilings and foundations maintained by a horde of amphibious Mechanicus servitors who eternally sing watery praises to the [[Omnissiah]] as they go about their squamous business.

The population of Olethros today is healthy, stable and expanding, with a robust subsistence economy founded on fishing, mineral extraction from the rich oceans, and substantial olive-groves planted on the larger islands. The planet exports dehydrated and processed fish and seafood popular as a compact and nutritious protein source in military rations, and there is a substantial submarine Mechanicus facility on the ocean floor near the equator – though what precisely it mines, processes and ships to [[Naximus]] and the orbital stations nearby is a mystery the red-robed Priests do not share lightly.

The assistance given to Olethros’ founding was not without a cost, though to speak to an Olethran native – all of whom piously regard the Priesthood of [[Naximus Prime]] as their first masters, and the Imperium as a distant second – all service rendered to the followers of the Omnissiah is an honour and its own reward. Every five years since the Founding, the sector-famous Olethran Games are held. These Games gather every able youth between the ages of fifteen and thirty, and pit them against each other in trials of strength, song, speed and logic. The winners of the Trials from each Island are brought together on the planetary capital of Backshore, a vast artificial platform which has far outgrown its original island and extends several miles over the open ocean. From these, the finalists compete against each other under the watchful eyes of Mechanicus priests who travel all the way from [[Naximus]] for the occasion, and observe the Games from the height of their great three-legged silt-walkers, autonomous platforms designed to easily stride across the shallow seas between Olethran islands. The finalists who succeed most convincingly in the eyes of the Priests are given the great honour of being taken up into the Arks and carried in state back to [[Naximus Prime]], where they serve their new masters as vassals into eternity. These youths are known colloquially as the “Glorious Ten Thousand”, though for religious reasons, the actual number is eight thousand, one hundred and ninety-two – a number more pleasing in the eyes of the [[Omnissiah]].

This arrangement is known as the Righteous Tithe, and its enshrinement in planetary law is responsible for the Olethran Governor’s conviction that the planet is not subject to Imperial taxation. The Sector Administratum ferociously disagrees, and the matter is the subject of a savage ongoing jurisdictional argument between the Subsector Praefector and the Governor, currently Kojo zu Septimian, Akwesi’s eldest child. The Mechanicum of [[Naximus]] certainly consider Olethros Secunda part of their domain, and regularly provide Kojo with diplomatic support in their efforts to resist Imperium census-takers and tax-collectors making planetfall. The matter has not yet come to violence, although the Subsector Praefector frequently threatens to call in favours with the Salient commanders if Kojo continues in their steadfast refusal.

Mawson’s Wake

2020-03-26T11:26:29Z

Jc:

{| class="wikitable" style="float:right; margin-left: 10px;"
|-
! Name !! Mawson’s Wake
|-
| style="text-align:center" colspan=2 | [[file:Mawson's Wake.png|200px|Mawson’s Wake]]
|-
| '''Sub-Sector''' || Secundus
|-
| '''Type''' || Frontier World
|-
| '''Population''' || approx. 5 billion
|-
| '''Climate''' || Semi-arid, partial terraforming
|-
| '''Status''' || Imperial (nominal), Unstable
|}

''“A charming little industrial backwater. My father’s advice was quite correct – I found that one truly can source nearly anything made by human hands here, if one has the correct introductions and ready Thrones to burn. Food indifferent, locals discourteous, sunsets beautiful.” – Travel Diary of Lucius di Firro, 578.M41''

=== About Mawson’s Wake ===

Named for a long-forgotten pioneer in the early days of colonisation, Mawson’s Wake is a dry, dusty and tumultuous planet. Its early colonists were intended for another world, but disembarked early after sabotage to their ships’ systems. Distress calls went unanswered as the settlers fought to tame arid wastelands with unsuited equipment; the survivors struggled through generations of thirst and desperation to forge a culture of dedicated, survivalist independence. They uncovered the remains of an ancient manufactorum complex which contained copies of the patterns and equipment necessary to construct, fuel and arm Tauros rapid assault vehicles. Over decades they established sufficient patchy mineworks to begin producing the patterns and spread out into a network of small, poverty-wracked townships which persist to this day.

When the intended settlers arrived with terraforming equipment and the strong arm of government, the established colonists reacted poorly. The Guard were sent in, and new Mechanicus forces seized control of the manufactories to keep their brethren – felt to have ‘gone native’ – in check, with violent purges of tech-heretics from among the populace following. Hives were constructed for the newcomers as the revolt was brought to heel, and terraforming began.

Civil disruption, minor riots, high crime and ongoing low-level hostility dogged the planetary governor’s projects. Eventually the economic situation deteriorated such that he could only fulfil the world’s tithe by providing soldiers, and so a Tauros-mounted guard regiment – Mawson’s First Rapid Reconnaissance – were raised, by ruthless draft; trained, with the brutality necessary to force the deeply anti-authoritarian conscripts into submission; and shipped offworld. Months later, the sector high command sent hostile investigators to discover why this poorly-regarded planet’s promised regiment had not arrived: Mawson’s First had been lost in the warp.

The news provoked an outburst of violent rioting more severe than even the initial revolt against the colonists. The sectoral investigators were slain, and a full-scale rebellion ensued. The planetary governor suppressed it with overwhelming force, but the sector withdraw all support for the planet’s ongoing development in retaliation. Terraforming was halted along with all other major works, leaving only fragmentary areas fully habitable. Within a century the besieged hives were mostly abandoned for the resilient settlements, with only government forces still holding out within.

Mawson’s Wake now scrapes out an existence largely based around its vehicle construction capacity, farmed out to whichever traders – Rogue or scheduled – can arrive with ready Thrones and the raw materials for their order. Between such flurries of production, small-time blast-miners broker their materials to the Mechanicus, enabling the techpriests to produce enough Tauri to mostly offset the tithe; the planetary governor fulfils the rest with conscription at gunpoint, rounding up entire towns for the Guard. Each major recruitment drive or raising of a regiment spikes hostilities and risks revolt; another has recently erupted after the raising of Mawson’s Fourth began two years ago. Fighting has thus far been sporadic as the planetary governor’s forces bunker down. She has repeatedly cried out for support from the Crusade, the sector government or her trading partners. Rumour has it she is becoming desperate.

Nivalis

2020-03-26T11:24:00Z

Jc:

{| class="wikitable" style="float:right; margin-left: 10px;"
|-
! Name !! Nivalis
|-
| style="text-align:center" colspan=2 | [[file:Nivalis.png|200px|Nivalis]]
|-
| '''Sub-Sector''' || Primus
|-
| '''Type''' || Shrine World
|-
| '''Population''' || 3.5 billion
|-
| '''Climate''' || Subarctic
|-
| '''Status''' || Non-Compliant, Conflict
|}

''“We arrived deep in local winter and stayed for nearly a week. C complained, of course – unpredictable ground, foul weather, all the usual Voidborn grumbles. Secretly I think he was as impressed as I was by the capital. The holy statues are too vast to comprehend, even for someone used to Navy ships. More like mountains than artefacts. Went hunting in hill forests – unsuccessful but hugely enjoyable; hired snow gear from native guide, wasted a lot of ammunition. Local wildlife faster than expected!” – Travel Diary of Lucius di Firro, 575.M41''

=== About Nivalis ===

An ancient seat of nobility in the Sector, Nivalis is an inhospitable but beautiful planet just far enough inside its sun’s orbit to avoid the designation of Ice World. The habitable zone on the planet is restricted to a mountainous strip a few hundred kilometres wide at the Equator, with the rest of the planet locked in permanent glacial cold.

The mountains are home to a hardy, hospitable breed of Imperial citizens who greatly prize physical courage and cunning. Their favoured hobby is hunting, and anyone of birth or breeding on the planet is expected to prove their worth by tracking and killing one of the many dangerous mountain beasts. Nivalians view the wearing of furs, or jewellery made from the teeth or claws of one’s kills, as a status symbol, and tend to look down on those who do not wear them.

Nivalis is a [[Shrine World]] first and foremost, with piety driven into the very bones of the land. Travellers and pilgrims say that every valley and secluded peak boasts its own shrine to the [[God-Emperor]] and His [[saints]]. Some of the highest peaks have been carved into massive likenesses of the great Heroes of the Imperium, the greatest of these visible from distant orbit. The constant presence of pilgrims travelling to and from the planet has led to extensive development in the urban centres. The capital and many secondary cities boast all the facilities that the discerning and pious citizen might need, and there is an extensive transport network connecting the most popular pilgrimage sites. In happier times, it was said that one could walk into a cathedral in the capital and find worshippers from every world in the Sector at prayer together.

Nivalis’ peaceful existence came to an abrupt end in 584.M41. According to official records, a group of [[heretics]] disrupted the traditional annual religious festivities, leading to widespread panic and rioting. The riots spread in an uncontrolled wave across the planet, taking the meagre [[Planetary Defence Force]] by surprise and shattering the once-peaceful planet into civil chaos. The Ecclesiarchy called in the [[Adeptus Sororitas]] to suppress and control the unrest, with the [[Order of our Martyred Lady]] supplying a large operational deployment of [[Militant Sororitas]].

While engaged in counterinsurgency and stabilisation, the Sisters reported a miracle whose echoes are still felt in the religious and political hierarchies of the Sector. Every statue of the [[God-Emperor]] on the planet, from tiny household icons to the kilometre-high colossus at the heart of the planetary capital, was witnessed to weep tears of blood. In the wake of this miracle, the Sisters engaged in offensive operations to return Nivalis to order with a bloodthirsty piety unlike anything seen before on the planet.

Nivalis fell under the rule of [[Cardinal-Emissarius Grulge]]. The ongoing civil conflict was suppressed – often brutally – the insurgency kept to a quiet simmer by the security presence of the [[Sisters Militant]].

Despite this Nivalis was no longer the safe haven for pilgrims that it once was, with scattered groups of heretics and planetary nationalists – bitter at the long arm of the Ecclesiarchy “usurping” their government – still holding out in the rural mountain areas despite the Sorors’ best efforts.

=== The Invasion of Nivalis and Subsequent Conflicts – 592.M41 Onwards ===

In 592.M41 the Space Hulk Durovera’s Pain appeared from the warp above Nivalis, bringing multiple renegade vessels in its wake, exiting close to planetary orbit. This foul fleet made short work of the Pilgrim and System Defence vessels, and soon the orbit of Nivalis burned with the hulls of ruined vessels, in a swift four-hour campaign, the Enemy established orbital control of Nivalis.

Recognising the danger, of orbital attack [[the Order of his Sanguine Tears]] evacuated their Fortress-Covent knowing it was vulnerable to orbital attack, letting [[Archenemy]] fire destroy it while the Order made its way to the the Cathedral-City of Nivalis and reinforced there beneath its protective void shields alongside the [[Fidelis Militia]]. Insurgent Nivalian forces, no friend to the [[Archenemy]] or the Cardinal and his Allies, realizing something significant was approaching, retreated from conflict zones.

The [[Archenemy]] hordes rained from the skies sparing no one, hordes of diseased barbaric scum charged against Imperial lines, advancing from their dropsites towards the many shrines and places of worship across the planet's surface. Rapid reaction forces of Sorors and [[Fidelis Militia]] swept into place swiftly, experienced veterans of the counter-insurgency efforts on the planet [[Ecclesiarchy]] forces slowed the [[Archenemy]] advance. The second wave of dropships did not hit Imperial lines however, but rather fell upon insurgent-held territories, rapidly wiping out what little resistance remained, and driving a flood of desperate refugees towards Imperial lines with fantastic tales of engaging heavily armoured barbaric warriors.

[[The Order of His Sanguine Tears]] retreated from Nivalis in 593.M41 after Archenemy Forces broken their defensive lines at the Cathedral City and ransacked it, only for Cardinal-Emissarius Grulge to return to the system at the head of a host of fanatics and [[fidelis militia]] raised from the worlds of the [[Prosperitas Sector]] declaring a holy war to retake the world from the [[heretics]] that had fallen upon it.

Since 593, Nivalis has been devastated by nearly a decade of constant conflict, it’s once-pristine shrines wrecked, it’s forested stripped barren by traitor and faithful bombardments, though there is a stable area around the ruined Cathedral City of Nivalis controlled by the [[Cardinal-Emissarius]] the frontlines of the fight shift back and forth between traitors and the faithful daily, and few pilgrims come here without anything more than the intent to join the fanatical faithful hosts on the planet to retake it from the [[Archenemy]].

Persephon IV

2020-03-26T11:23:40Z

Jc:

[[File:War World banner.jpg|Persephon IV]]

{| class="wikitable" style="float:right; margin-left: 10px;"
|-
! Name !! Persephon IV
|-
| style="text-align:center" colspan=2 | [[file:Persephon IV.png|200px|Persephon IV]]
|-
| '''Sub-Sector''' || Primus
|-
| '''Type''' || War World
|-
| '''Population''' || approx. 1 billion
|-
| '''Climate''' || Temperate
|-
| '''Status''' || Imperial (partial), Conflict
|}

=== About Persephon IV ===

Persephon IV is a habitable planet revolving around a normal yellow star (Persephon) in [[Subsector Primus]]. Long inhabited by Man, it was conquered early in the Prosperitas Crusade and has grown to be a shining beacon of the [[Imperium]] in the Sector, green and verdant continents with scattered rural settlements and farms, and on each of the four major continents there were two or three hive cities, containing much of the populace of about three billion. It stood as a self supporting world without specialising into a specific role: however, it had sufficient industry to tie it into the interplanetary trade networks, and as a stop off point for many space faring vessels passing through the area.

Any major assaults from outside forces on the Persephon system were in distant antiquity, and barely remembered by the local populace. It raised a modest levy of regiments for the [[Imperial Guard]], and maintained a planetary defence force for its own protection.

That was until 534.M41 when, out of the Galactic East, a massive raiding force of the savage [[xenos]] known as [[Orks]] emerged, rampaging through the worlds the [[Prosperitas Crusade]] had previously believed to be safe, having long since been conquered and brought into Imperial compliance. At Persephon IV however, this green tide ‘[[Waagh Gazbag]]’ smashed against the noble men and women of the Persephon [[Imperial Guard]] Regiments and the planet’s Planetary Defence Force. While the progress of the Ork‘s was stalled at Persephon long enough for the threat of the Waagh to be contained, the verdant world was almost entirely overrun with [[xenos]], leaving Persephon IV’s Primaris Hive Persephon Prime besieged.

Although Persephon Prime managed to erect its forcefields to extend some protection to the city itself, the outlying suburbs were razed to the ground, with many of the survivors left as refugees in their own city. Though Persephon has held against these savage [[Xenos]], it has paid dearly for it, in their efforts to develop crude industry to support their fight against the noble men and women of Persephon, the [[Xenos]] have all but destroyed the planet’s ecosystem. And over the last few years since the invasion, the once-verdant world has be reduced to an ash blasted dustbowl of dried earth, across which the invaders have almost total mastery. Only Persephon Prime survived as a bastion against the invasion, with supplies being shipped in from the other less war-torn planets.

The isolation of the city on the [[Xenos]] battlefront, under siege and bombardment for so long, with rationing and overcrowding prevalent, damaged the psyche of the inhabitants, and slowly the despair and destruction became too much. What started off as obscene graffiti took hold and within a short period, the rot had set in, the innocuous ‘old religion’ of the Sector had taken root and blasphemy and rebellion had began to circulate within the populace. Ultimately erupting into a bloody civil war in Hive-structures of Persephon Prime leading to the noble regiments of Persephon IV being forced to take arms against those they had sought to protect.

Though the noble actions of the Persephon Regiments held the line, the underlying threat of rebellion has turned the Hive Primaris into a stronghold under martial law as the conflict grows ever more desperate. The war against the [[Greenskins]] continues, with attempts being mounted to take back the territories lost to the [[xenos]]. However, the [[xenos]] are striking back and spreading again, building great ocean going vessels out of the scrap dragged out of the ruins of the suburbs of Persephon Prime. Chaos is not entirely eradicated from Persephon IV either, survivors from the Xenos-devastated wastes, mutated beyond recognition, joined by those cultists who fled the rebellion at Persephon Prime now join battle with both the [[xenos]] and the [[Imperial Guard]].

Persephon IV is no longer a green and pleasant place. Whilst most of Persephon Prime’s infrastructure survives, most of the production that was once shipped off-world is now channelled into the war effort, in an attempt to prevent the whole world succumbing to conflict.

Butonia

2020-03-26T11:20:07Z

Jc:

[[File:Butonia banner.jpg|Butonia]]

{| class="wikitable" style="float:right; margin-left: 10px;"
|-
! Name !! Butonia
|-
| style="text-align:center" colspan=2 | [[file:Butonia.png|200px|Butonia]]
|-
| '''Sub-Sector''' || Tertius
|-
| '''Type''' || Feudal World
|-
| '''Population''' || 3 billion
|-
| '''Climate''' || Temperate
|-
| '''Status''' || Imperial (nominal), Conflict
|}

=== About Butonia ===

An old world conquered by the Imperium at the start of the Prosperitas Crusade, Butonia was a quiet backwater planet at the fringes of sector politics but what development has occurred has been largely thanks to its position as a cross roads on a number of trade-routes. For this reason alone the Butonia capital was a vibrant and semi-modern hive with all the benefits of modern Imperial society available to the rich aristocracy. The difference is living standards between rich and poor was as stark here as anywhere in the sector and it was this simple buying power in the hands of the nobles that always meant that they could maintain personal armies and fiefdoms, bribe away any serious threat and generally maintain order through a mixture of oppression and corruption.

The lords themselves had their own rivalries and ambitions but after the calamitous Titian revolt 300 years ago all nobles agreed that should any of them resort to the support of the masses then that family will be purged utterly from the face of the planet. Baron Janus Titian had been outmanoeuvred by one of his closest rivals in his efforts to exploit new carbon-3 deposits found in the northern wastes but when he resorted to a people’s uprising using most of his families vast wealth to arm the people in a peasants revolt he found himself betrayed by one of his own blood. Despite this he was able to drag out the war last for 10 years. In the end the though the noble houses untied against him when the distant dream of emancipation was raised by Titian at an speech he gave in the northern woods. He was hunted down and killed by an assassin and within three months the war was over.

Since that time the people were treated like cattle. Little more than serfs, a nobles wealth was measured by how many people they could drive into the mines to claw out the precious Carbon-3. By 583.M41 the volume of ore that the planet paid to the Administratum was five times what it was in Titian’s time but the desire to keep the people weak meant that technological development and advanced mining techniques were simply outlawed.

Attracted by the prospect of escape many young volunteers joined the PDF but these regiments became little more than armed gangs going by names such as the “Rattlers”, “The Collectors” or “Zombies” and the behaviour of their Commanders was more akin to that of petty warlords than upstanding Imperial officers.

=== The Saint’s Rebellion – 583.M41 ===

The Governor became more anxious to fulfil quotas, turning to the aid of the Adeptus Mechanicus for aid in the rapid extraction of the Carbon-3 the only thing that gave his domain value. That aid came at a price, in the long term it would pollute the atmosphere and poison the soil of Butonia – but the seeds of rebellion where born from the mass land clearances that faced the Serf population, and where Serfs refused to give up their homes, their farms, they were slaughtered by the increasingly out of control PDF.

Open rebellion against the Sector Governor erupted in M41.583 with the defection of several of the infamous PDF regiments to the side of the revolting Serfs – in response those forces loyal to the Governor began to slaughter their way through the under-armed population in order to put down the conflict. The Rebels were rallied, however, by a young woman known as Safina, who proclaimed herself a ‘Living Saint’.

At the height of what could have been a brutal civil war, the Governor was assassinated by agents unknown, without his corrupt leadership the upper classes faltered and the Serfs led by ‘Saint’ Safina have taken control of much of the planets surface. The Mechanicus in turn inflamed the situation further by claiming the papers signed by the deceased Governor give them right to mine the Carbon-3 deposits on Butonia.

=== The Purges – 592.M41 ===

By 592.M41 Butonia had fallen into a state of anarchy, the Living Saint having vanished without a trace, and no true governor put in place Butonia had been forgotten by the powers of the Imperium, the rebellion suppressed, its corrupt governing class toppled, and yet, nothing changed: there was no order, no restored control, the Black Ship tithe forgotten, mutants unattended and allowed to grow in size and population… the planet needed leadership.

In 592.M41, the people, enflamed by a Redemptionist element, rose up to take control themselves, an army of the Faithful overran what few of the corrupt PDF bases remained on the planet, murdering their occupants who had divided the small world up into their own feudal domains. When the last of the petty Warlords of Butonia fell, the Faithful spread out, seized by Redemptionist dialogue they attempted to scour the world clean.

Like many Redemptionist elements, this quickly grew out of control as the Redemptionist factions attacked peasants and Nobles alike in a mad witch-hunt for supposed heresies as their puritanical stranglehold further fragmented the world.

=== Rise of the Popular People’s Militia – 593.M41 ===

The arrival of support for the people of Butonia from the Faith Militant in 592.M41 under the auspice of Lord-Militant Zacharias All-Souls-Cry-Out-For-Salvation Cadence introduced another change to the political landscape – proving capable of directing Redemptionist factions away from the peasants and against the mutant and archenemy cults holding out in the Butonian wilderness the Lord-Militant raised the Popular People’s Militia by arming thousands of Butonian volunteers willing to help restore law and order to their world. This success has not gone unnoticed in the wider Imperium however, and the recent declaration by the Militia of the leadership of Butonia under the Lord-Militant is something of a controversial move, for the appointment of a leader based on popular support is heterodoxy against Imperial doctrine.

The only other candidate is a thin-blooded Noble survivor of the former ruling House of Butonia, Jenita Morrow who began her rise as an Ecclesiarchy priest – but the Nobility do not enjoy much local support, and the current Imperial stance of allowing the situation on Butonia to burn itself out prevents them having the forces to exert their will.

Burisalis Prime

2020-03-26T11:19:19Z

Jc:

{| class="wikitable" style="float:right; margin-left: 10px;"
|-
! Name !! Burisalis Prime
|-
| style="text-align:center" colspan=2 | [[file:Burisalis Prime.png|200px|Burisalis Prime]]
|-
| '''Sub-Sector''' || Tertius
|-
| '''Type''' || Civilised World
|-
| '''Population''' || 1.5 million
|-
| '''Climate''' || Tundra
|-
| '''Status''' || Imperial
|}

With no substantial mineral deposits and shallow, infertile soil, Burisalis Prime is a flat and almost featureless world of sweeping plains and scrub tundra. Hardly any vegetation on the planet grows to more than three feet in height; the rare stands of trees are limited to the broken hill-country of the southern polar islands.

Never heavily populated, Burisalis has seen heavy use for the last three hundred years as the training ground for the Prosperitas Sector [[Imperial_Guard|Imperial Guard]] regiments and formations. Units on rotation away from the front are often sent here to hone their skills and drill together before being sent back into the maelstrom of the [[Crusade|Crusade]]. With its simple terrain, and almost no chance of collateral damage, the planet makes an ideal location for live firing training and testing. Day and night, the plains of the desolate planet echo to the sound of artillery and armour-firing main armaments.

The Burisalis population is tiny, and almost all the permanent inhabitants are employed in the maintenance and upkeep of the training area and firing ranges. At any given time, however, the population can be doubled or tripled by the number of soldiers busy training on the planet’s surface. Most of the natives live in or around the settlement simply known as Temple, named for its dominant feature – a huge [[Ecclesiarchy|Ecclesiarchy]] cathedral so vast it is visible from near orbit. The cathedral can comfortably fit an entire [[Imperial_Guard|Guard]] Regiment within its pews, and frequently does so when pious Colonels parade their troops for a religious service seeking the blessings of the [[God-Emperor|God-Emperor]] before they return to the war.

As with any training ground, accidents do happen. The brutal demands of the Sector’s [[Crusade|Crusade]] mean that casualties for pre-deployment training exercises usually run somewhere between 1% for artillery and support units, up to 5% for light role and reconnaissance infantry. Those [[Imperial_Guard|Guard]] soldiers who die without ever seeing the face of the enemy are buried on Burisalis, in graveyards that occupy several square miles north of Temple. This vast cemetery also includes a number of monuments to the unburied fallen and the unidentified and unknown dead, which are an occasional site of pilgrimage for [[Imperial_Guard|Guard]] veterans; these are arranged in the form of circles of massive standing stones.

There is a persistent rumour that a particularly brutal [[Imperial_Guard|Guard]] Colonel training on Burisalis about a decade ago worked her regiment so hard that half were killed or seriously wounded and the other half deserted. If the rumours are true, the remnants of the deserters might still be living wild in the planet’s forgotten corners – but surely no one could still be alive after ten years in such an inhospitable place.

Agrial III

2020-03-26T11:08:31Z

Jc:

[[File:Shrine World banner.jpg|Agrial III]]

{| class="wikitable" style="float:right; margin-left: 10px;"
|-
! Name !! Agrial III
|-
| style="text-align:center" colspan=2 | [[file:Agrial III.png|200px|Agrial III]]
|-
| '''Sub-Sector''' || Tertius
|-
| '''Type''' || Shrine World
|-
| '''Population''' || 1.1 million
|-
| '''Climate''' || Subtropical
|-
| '''Status''' || Imperial
|}

''“Dull. Dull, dull, dull. I can’t imagine spending your whole miserable life here; frankly I’d rather do something appalling like join the Guard.” – Travel Diary of Lucius di Firro, 579.M41''

=== About Agrial III ===

An ancient shrine world covered in dusty sepulchres and echoing chapels, Agrial III is a seldom-mentioned backwater planet that contains possibly one of the largest libraries in the entire Segmentum. Centuries ago Agrial was a powerful and populous shrine world with significant influence in the politics of the Prosperitas Sector. Located on a primary trade route through the subsector, countless traders and pilgrims stopped off at Agrial every year, either to refuel and resupply before moving on or to worship at the numerous temples.

It was not just its holy shrines which drew pilgrims, however. Agrial was well known for the vast libraries that each temple-city maintained, together forming one of the largest and most comprehensive collections of knowledge in the Sector.

Collecting information on countless subjects and in endless formats, the libraries of Agrial attracted countless scholars and sages, and even members of the holy Inquisition, all of whom came to study the vast catalogue of information. All were welcome to read freely of the books, tomes, scrolls and hololiths, and to spend as much time doing so as they desired; all that the Scribe-Priests asked was a small donation to the upkeep of the libraries and also a donation of knowledge to the library itself. Each visitor was asked to write down something –whether a short titbit of information or an entire treatise was up to the visitor- and add it to the archives of Agrial.

Trade routes are known to change however, and when they did, they brought about the end of the importance of Agrial. Without the income brought by the traders the shrine world faded into obscurity; the once-thronging streets are now quiet and the holy sepulchres and reliquaries dusty and often neglected. A few pilgrims and knowledge-seekers still visit Agrial, but now the libraries are echoing, cobweb-choked and dark, home to a few ancient custodians and ageing Scribe-priests.

Macharion CDXI

2020-03-26T11:03:01Z

Jc:

{| class="wikitable" style="float:right; margin-left: 10px;"
|-
! Name !! Macharion CDXI
|-
| style="text-align:center" colspan=2 | [[file:Macharion CDXI.png|200px|Macharion CDXI]]
|-
| '''Sub-Sector''' || Secundus
|-
| '''Type''' || Frontier World
|-
| '''Population''' || 3 million
|-
| '''Climate''' || Warm temperate
|-
| '''Status''' || Imperial
|}

=== About Macharion CDXI ===

Orbiting a small brown dwarf in the Rimward Marches, Macharion is the youngest Imperial colony in the Prosperitas Sector. The earliest records of Durovera‘s Crusade mark the planet as uninhabited but viable, with a climate on the warmer side of temperate. The first application for colonisation was submitted to the Administratum in 205.M41, duly interrogated and processed, returned with minor corrections in 321.M41, resubmitted immediately with minor amendments to subclauses, punctuation and righteous capitalisation reviewed, and finally returned with approval in 550.M41. Preparations for colonisation began immediately. A call for volunteers went out across the loyal planets of Subsector Secundus, and millions of pious citizens answered the cry.

The Ecclesiarchy bolstered their recruiting efforts with tales of the victories of the Lord Solar Macharius, whose Crusade and heroic death in 400.M41 were received as fresh news within living memory in the Prosperitas Sector. Inspired by his stirring tale, the colonists voted unanimously to name their new home after the Saint. Unusually, its designation CDXI refers to its place in the list of hundreds of similarly-named worlds across the Segmentum Pacificus, rather than its position in solar orbit – it is in fact the fifth planet from its star, and Administratum clerks are in a constant vicious and bitter stalemate over astrogation charts they maintain should read Macharion V.

Nearly six million Imperial citizens survived the Warp transit, and first footfall was made in 581.M41. Half of this number are already on the planet, living in a mixture of prefabricated and scratch-build accommodation on the temperate and verdant northern polar cap. The remaining half remain in cryosleep in orbiting ark shell pods, until their hardier comrades complete first stage terraforming. At current schedules, the next ten shifts of relief colonists should be woken at six-year intervals, with full population resident on the surface and a stable third generation of Macharian natives reaching working age by 641.M41. The Macharian 1st Light Infantry Regiment is scheduled for First Founding in 593.M41, and should send its first detachment to join the Crusade in the mid-590s.

The capital, named Sejanus after Macharius‘ chief general and lifelong companion, is a thriving and vibrant frontier town in a constant fever of expansion. The sounds of hammering and drilling, and unceasing hymns to the Machine-Spirits of the fabricator engines building new roads and pipelines, fill the air day and night. The rough and dusty city changes so often it is widely considered unmappable; the unquestioned centre, however, is certainly Founders’ Square, supposed (apocryphally) to be centred on the exact spot on the planet where the first colonist’s boot hit Macharian dirt. The place is marked with a great statue of the planet’s patron saints, standing together and smiling towards the distant horizon. The image depicts both in full armour blazoned with the Solar sunburst and Aquila, Saint Sejanus holding Saint Macharius‘ helmet in one hand, his other hand tangled affectionately in his General’s hair.

The central continental belt is currently highly inhospitable, and too hot and dry to sustain permanent settlements. However, adventurous young colonists regularly mount expeditions in sealed rover vessels into the interior deserts to conduct reconnaissance, take scientific readings to confirm the progress of terraforming, or simply flee their elders and betters for a week or two. The southern polar cap is almost completely unexplored; auspex surveys from void orbit suggest a permissible climate similar to that of the northern cap, but vast fog banks and electromagnetic interference from an unknown source (some speculate rare mineral deposits in the nearby oceans) have prevented any more in-depth surveys.

Smaller settlements some fifty miles south and east of Sejanus, with the current proposed names of Lysander and Peritas, are mapped and the land cleared; construction work is scheduled to begin in late 591.M41. Peritas is a coastal city with a good command of a fertile river delta and will eventually act as the planet’s primary shuttle port, while Lysander is high up on a rocky plateau among the mountains. The terrain is too steep for farming, but the tech-augurs’ haruspex readings suggest that the nearby cliffs are highly likely to contain substantial iron and cobalt deposits.

The planet’s newly-minted Governor is Halina Chenau, an elderly but plasteel-tough woman originally from Helaerus. After a distinguished career in the Helaerus Reconnaissance Regiment, Chenau was awarded retirement with full honours and the Governorship in lieu of higher command – some mutter that this was a ploy to get her out of Crusade High Command and far away from her political rivals, and point to her habit of speaking uncomfortable truths loudly and repeatedly where higher authority can hear them. She rules Macharion with an approach to justice that her adoring colonists characterise as tough, just and fair in the finest traditions of the Imperium. She has no genetic heirs and has not yet seen fit to adopt any colonist as her successor. When questioned on the matter by Subsector news reporters, she fondly referred to her colonist charges as “a bunch of wastrels”, “lizards” and “get out of my office, I have an autocannon”.

The first planet-born Macharians are still children, but there are many youths born during the colonists’ long warp transit who proudly consider themselves Macharian. There is a fashion among Macharian parents to name their children after figures from the legends of the Lord Solar and in the fashion of the homeworlds of his bosom companions. Names such as Philip, Olympias, Aegis, Anaxamander, Ariadne, Nike and Hippolyta are common among the younger generation of colonists, and some families have even rejected their former surnames in lieu of variants on their patron saints’ names to show their loyalty to their new homeworld.

Lerwick

2020-03-26T11:01:56Z

Jc:

[[File:Lerwick banner.jpg|Lerwick]]

{| class="wikitable" style="float:right; margin-left: 10px;"
|-
! Name !! Lerwick
|-
| style="text-align:center" colspan=2 | [[file:Lerwick.png|200px|Lerwick]]
|-
| '''Sub-Sector''' || Secundus
|-
| '''Type''' || Civilised World
|-
| '''Population''' || 1.5 billion
|-
| '''Climate''' || Subarctic
|-
| '''Status''' || Imperial
|}

''“A rugged and vast beauty from orbit. C. wanted to go iceberg-diving – a popular local pastime, supposedly – with young N. and some of his more excitable colleagues. I left them to their adventures and sampled the dubious delights of the capital; a built-from-template city indistinguishable from a thousand others in the Sector. I wish I could have seen the ruins of Summerhome, but they are sadly off-limits by Ecclesiarchy decree…” – Travel diary of Lucius di Firro, 581.M41''

=== About Lerwick ===

An icy and storm-tossed world, with a pockmarking of habitable islands set in an arctic sea, Lerwick is home to a hardy population who took to Imperial occupation with much the same stoic, stubborn approach they have always faced icebergs, hurricanes and other natural disasters. Pacified and brought under Imperial control during the last days of [[Warmaster Ulian|Warmaster Ulian’s]] sweep across the Rimwards reaches of [[Subsector Secundus]], the planet is hostile to the unprepared and unable to support a much larger population without substantial climate-defended structures. Its strategic location at the heart of Warp routes from the Rimwards marches back into the well-defended heartland of [[Subsector Primus]], however, has made it a critical node in the [[Crusade]] fleet’s lines of communication, and it is fiercely defended by an interlocking fortress of orbital stations and void patrols.

The planetary capital, Farile, is a new city, prefabricated in orbit and constructed almost overnight by teams of Mechanicus-sponsored servitor and local serf workers to create an administrative and legal hub. It replaces the old heartland city of Summerhome, which was razed to the waterline in 321.M41 by orbital bombardment after the local population met a demand for their surrender and capitulation with insolent silence. The local narrative – that the Queen of Summerhome attempted again and again to open communications with the invaders, but possessed no communications technology capable of breaking through the notoriously difficult atmospheric storms – is denounced as heresy by the planetary government.

When Imperial forces began their ground campaign on Lerwick, they discovered an amphibious, approximately humanoid native species superficially resembling a bipedal seal present in large numbers on the coastlines of the habitable islands. Initial reports stated that they talked in human voices, and sang strange songs at night, luring unwary Guard to their doom on the treacherous rocks. Controversy erupted over the creatures, called “selkies” by the native population and the subject of innumerable myths and superstitions; the [[Ecclesiarchy]] swiftly denounced them as [[mutant|abhumans]] and [[mutant|mutants]], with enthusiastic support from the Monodominant faction of the subsector’s Inquisition, and set about a holy purge supported by the [[Frateris Militia]]. The Magos Biologos of the [[Adeptus Mechanicus]] who accompanied the initial expedition, however, was unconvinced, and after conducting extensive tests declared that the “selkies” – classified Phoca Loquens – were no more than superficially intelligent but non-sentient animals, with an imitative capacity similar to the parrot or void-monkey. The purge was halted, though colonial families still view Phoca Loquens with superstitious dread, and their meat and skins fetch a high price across the subsector.

Nivalis

2020-03-26T11:01:40Z

Jc:

{| class="wikitable" style="float:right; margin-left: 10px;"
|-
! Name !! Nivalis
|-
| style="text-align:center" colspan=2 | [[file:Nivalis.png|200px|Nivalis]]
|-
| '''Sub-Sector''' || Primus
|-
| '''Type''' || Shrine World
|-
| '''Population''' || 3.5 billion
|-
| '''Climate''' || Subarctic
|-
| '''Status''' || Non-Compliant
|}

''“We arrived deep in local winter and stayed for nearly a week. C complained, of course – unpredictable ground, foul weather, all the usual Voidborn grumbles. Secretly I think he was as impressed as I was by the capital. The holy statues are too vast to comprehend, even for someone used to Navy ships. More like mountains than artefacts. Went hunting in hill forests – unsuccessful but hugely enjoyable; hired snow gear from native guide, wasted a lot of ammunition. Local wildlife faster than expected!” – Travel Diary of Lucius di Firro, 575.M41''

=== About Nivalis ===

An ancient seat of nobility in the Sector, Nivalis is an inhospitable but beautiful planet just far enough inside its sun’s orbit to avoid the designation of Ice World. The habitable zone on the planet is restricted to a mountainous strip a few hundred kilometres wide at the Equator, with the rest of the planet locked in permanent glacial cold.

The mountains are home to a hardy, hospitable breed of Imperial citizens who greatly prize physical courage and cunning. Their favoured hobby is hunting, and anyone of birth or breeding on the planet is expected to prove their worth by tracking and killing one of the many dangerous mountain beasts. Nivalians view the wearing of furs, or jewellery made from the teeth or claws of one’s kills, as a status symbol, and tend to look down on those who do not wear them.

Nivalis is a [[Shrine World]] first and foremost, with piety driven into the very bones of the land. Travellers and pilgrims say that every valley and secluded peak boasts its own shrine to the [[God-Emperor]] and His [[saints]]. Some of the highest peaks have been carved into massive likenesses of the great Heroes of the Imperium, the greatest of these visible from distant orbit. The constant presence of pilgrims travelling to and from the planet has led to extensive development in the urban centres. The capital and many secondary cities boast all the facilities that the discerning and pious citizen might need, and there is an extensive transport network connecting the most popular pilgrimage sites. In happier times, it was said that one could walk into a cathedral in the capital and find worshippers from every world in the Sector at prayer together.

Nivalis’ peaceful existence came to an abrupt end in 584.M41. According to official records, a group of [[heretics]] disrupted the traditional annual religious festivities, leading to widespread panic and rioting. The riots spread in an uncontrolled wave across the planet, taking the meagre [[Planetary Defence Force]] by surprise and shattering the once-peaceful planet into civil chaos. The Ecclesiarchy called in the [[Adeptus Sororitas]] to suppress and control the unrest, with the [[Order of our Martyred Lady]] supplying a large operational deployment of [[Militant Sororitas]].

While engaged in counterinsurgency and stabilisation, the Sisters reported a miracle whose echoes are still felt in the religious and political hierarchies of the Sector. Every statue of the [[God-Emperor]] on the planet, from tiny household icons to the kilometre-high colossus at the heart of the planetary capital, was witnessed to weep tears of blood. In the wake of this miracle, the Sisters engaged in offensive operations to return Nivalis to order with a bloodthirsty piety unlike anything seen before on the planet.

Nivalis fell under the rule of [[Cardinal-Emissarius Grulge]]. The ongoing civil conflict was suppressed – often brutally – the insurgency kept to a quiet simmer by the security presence of the [[Sisters Militant]].

Despite this Nivalis was no longer the safe haven for pilgrims that it once was, with scattered groups of heretics and planetary nationalists – bitter at the long arm of the Ecclesiarchy “usurping” their government – still holding out in the rural mountain areas despite the Sorors’ best efforts.

=== The Invasion of Nivalis and Subsequent Conflicts – 592.M41 Onwards ===

In 592.M41 the Space Hulk Durovera’s Pain appeared from the warp above Nivalis, bringing multiple renegade vessels in its wake, exiting close to planetary orbit. This foul fleet made short work of the Pilgrim and System Defence vessels, and soon the orbit of Nivalis burned with the hulls of ruined vessels, in a swift four-hour campaign, the Enemy established orbital control of Nivalis.

Recognising the danger, of orbital attack [[the Order of his Sanguine Tears]] evacuated their Fortress-Covent knowing it was vulnerable to orbital attack, letting [[Archenemy]] fire destroy it while the Order made its way to the the Cathedral-City of Nivalis and reinforced there beneath its protective void shields alongside the [[Fidelis Militia]]. Insurgent Nivalian forces, no friend to the [[Archenemy]] or the Cardinal and his Allies, realizing something significant was approaching, retreated from conflict zones.

The [[Archenemy]] hordes rained from the skies sparing no one, hordes of diseased barbaric scum charged against Imperial lines, advancing from their dropsites towards the many shrines and places of worship across the planet's surface. Rapid reaction forces of Sorors and [[Fidelis Militia]] swept into place swiftly, experienced veterans of the counter-insurgency efforts on the planet [[Ecclesiarchy]] forces slowed the [[Archenemy]] advance. The second wave of dropships did not hit Imperial lines however, but rather fell upon insurgent-held territories, rapidly wiping out what little resistance remained, and driving a flood of desperate refugees towards Imperial lines with fantastic tales of engaging heavily armoured barbaric warriors.

[[The Order of His Sanguine Tears]] retreated from Nivalis in 593.M41 after Archenemy Forces broken their defensive lines at the Cathedral City and ransacked it, only for Cardinal-Emissarius Grulge to return to the system at the head of a host of fanatics and [[fidelis militia]] raised from the worlds of the [[Prosperitas Sector]] declaring a holy war to retake the world from the [[heretics]] that had fallen upon it.

Since 593, Nivalis has been devastated by nearly a decade of constant conflict, it’s once-pristine shrines wrecked, it’s forested stripped barren by traitor and faithful bombardments, though there is a stable area around the ruined Cathedral City of Nivalis controlled by the [[Cardinal-Emissarius]] the frontlines of the fight shift back and forth between traitors and the faithful daily, and few pilgrims come here without anything more than the intent to join the fanatical faithful hosts on the planet to retake it from the [[Archenemy]].

Everholt

2020-03-26T10:55:04Z

Jc:

[[file:Everholt banner.jpg|Everholt]]

{| class="wikitable" style="float:right; margin-left: 10px;"
|-
! Name !! Everholt
|-
| style="text-align:center" colspan=2 | [[file:Everholt.png|200px|Everholt]]
|-
| '''Sub-Sector''' || Secundus
|-
| '''Type''' || Agri-World (former)
|-
| '''Population''' || prev. 3 billion (unknown)
|-
| '''Climate''' || prev. Temperate (unknown)
|-
| '''Status''' || Quarantined World
|}

=== About Everholt ===

Everholt was a Agri-World Covered in Forests, conquered in 506.M41. A young addition to the Imperium it was considered to be locally turbulent, but not valuable enough to warrant mass deployment of [[Guard]] or [[Arbites]], instead it was stripped of its forests for their wood and access to mining resources. Those forests that survived were reduced to the private hunting grounds of the [[Factions_of_the_Prosperitas_Sector#Noble_Houses_in_the_Prosperitas_Sector|Noble Houses]] of the Prosperitas Sector.

The majority of locals were employed in the logging industry slowly stripping the planet’s once-lush forest bare. Because of the uncaring quotas set by the [[Administratum]] this threatened both the hunting industry (which, as a luxury, is not protected by Imperial law), as well as the local’s pre-Imperial traditions to which the trees and hunting were important. The latter already being an issue of contention given laws imposed by the Imperium granting the Nobility exclusive hunting rights and redefining local hunters as ‘poachers’ unless employed by the Hunting Lodges as Gillies.

The majority of the older generation who capitulated to the Imperium were dying off and many young locals had not experienced the wrath of the Imperium – a complacent Imperium led to a whole generation have growing up on a diet of quiet anger at the Imperium’s ‘defilement’ of their world, and this led to open rebellion in 586.M41

Before and after the Imperium’s arrival, the people of Everholt lived the life of a frontier colony, the only thing of note was the game offered by local xenofauna. Before the Imperium they say they lived in sustainable symbiosis with the flora and fauna of Everholt’s forest – since the Imperium conquered Everholt, that relationship had been utterly destroyed.

A big cause of this were the local ‘Gillies’ who descend from the ‘Hunting Lodges’ that used to be a part of the planetary culture before the Imperium arrived. The [[House Durovera]] that holds right of conquest over Everholt claimed exclusive hunting rights to its fauna, once a right shared by ALL the people of the world. Rather than join any resistance against this, most of the hunting lodges complied and became gamekeepers for the Imperials to forge an arrangement where they could preserve the traditions of their lodges.

Due to their close relationship with the Imperial Nobility, Gillies made up a majority of the Imperial-appointed local leaders, and the majority of the populace were forced to labour at the logging camps and saw-mills of the Imperium.

Most importantly, the Imperium turned a blind eye when local fauna ends up on a Gillie’s plate, whereas the Gillies came down harshly should meat find it’s way to the plate of a local who lacks membership of one of their hunting lodges. This is only made worse by the Gillies breeding of ‘new’ game for their Lords that have, when released, been known to prey on humans, and disturb local ecosystems.

=== Uprising and Censure – 586.M41 ===

In [[Sector_Report_I|586.M41]] Everholt openly rebelled against the Imperium during a visit by Sector-Governor [[Armelius Durovera]] (who would later state the events of the rebellion inspired his transformation into a strong leader). Years of Imperial misrule and abuse of local customs and the planetary environment led to open uprisings when a series of executions of the local population, including members of the [[Ecclesiarchy]], sparked open revolt. Assassination attempts were made upon the Sector-Governor's life, by rebel elements believed to be linked to the [[Archenemy]], and the entire planet erupted into anarchy and chaos.

In the aftermath of the uprising, the Gothic-class Cruiser ''Righteous Indignation'' was deployed to Everholt, nobly rescuing Sector-Governor Durovera, and destroying a number of craft in orbit of the world under the control of rebel elements. Governor Durovera, by now holding the position of Warmaster, placed the planet under Imperial Censure, effectively blockading all supplies from reaching the surface. Under the terms of Censure, the ''Righteous Indignation'' has enforced a brutal quarantine, refusing to allow vessels within reach of the world. Despite objections from various factions the Warmaster held stern on the issue, insisting that the world must suffer for its disobedience, and assuring others that once the world is determined to have paid its penance the interdiction will be lifted.

There has been no announcement of any lifting of the planet's censure since the Governor's replacemet by his sister Hermione.

It is unknown what life is like on the surface of the world now. Many rumours suggest that the planet has been subject to exterminatus bombardment, however this would not explain the reason for its continued interdiction.

Caudica Secundus

2020-03-26T10:49:05Z

Jc:

{| class="wikitable" style="float:right; margin-left: 10px;"
|-
! Name !! Caudica Secundus
|-
| style="text-align:center" colspan=2 | [[file:Caudica Secundus.png|200px|Caudica Secundus]]
|-
| '''Sub-Sector''' || Secundus
|-
| '''Type''' || Hive World (former)
|-
| '''Population''' || Depopulated
|-
| '''Climate''' || Atmosphereless
|-
| '''Status''' || Dead World
|}

''“There is nowhere in the Sector more pleasurable and diverting for a lover of music and fine art than the upper Spires of Caudica’s northern continent. Every truly brilliant composer since the Crusade began has studied here in their time. I have an enduring fondness for the planet and the great beauty it inspires in those of finer sensibilities.” Travel Diary of Lucius di Firro, 570.M41''

=== About Caudica Secundus ===

Caudica Secundus was a thriving Hive-World in Subsector Secundus, first settled prior to the rise of the Imperium. It was initially settled by colonists eager to take advantage of the bountiful agricultural wealth found in its archipelagos.

What started as fishing communities grew to cities and then supercities. The booming economy was supported by the discovery of extensive mineral deposits on the southern desert continent. By mid-M41 the planet was an economic powerhouse in the subsector. The planetary governor – a semi-hereditary position, with new incumbents determined by ritual duels held between four ruling families – was widely considered one of the most respected positions in the Prosperitas Sector.

The great Hive Arcologies, forming a ring around the northern hemisphere, were inhabited by nearly six billion citizens; another four billion toiled in the desert mining hives in the south. Kept in order by a brutally efficient planetary defence force, the Hives produced all the tithes expected of a well-ordered Imperial world, including three [[Imperial Guard]] armoured cavalry regiments. The planet had a number of thriving academies of the arts, and Caudican opera of the mid-M41 is regarded throughout the Sector as the finest example of the art.

All this ended in the M41.580s. A blind Ministorum preacher appeared in the primary mining Hive. He claimed to have come from the deep desert; to have seen visions of the Emperor in the trails of the great sand-worms. His popularity spread, igniting the Lower Hives in a fervour unlike any seen on Caudica before. Reports of his disciples performing miracles, seeing the future and hearing the memories of their ancestors, caused even Upperhive dwellers to take a fashionably salacious interest in this underclass cult.

The local [[Ecclesiarchy]], blindsided by the apparent renewal of faith among the Underhive dwellers, were slow to spot the heterodoxies and deviances spread by the preacher’s followers. By the time the alarm was raised, it was too late; the cult of the “Great Worm” had infiltrated every level of the southern continent’s mining industry, brutally murdering all who remained loyal to the God-Emperor. The planet’s industry was turned over to the treacherous cult. Panic engulfed the northern continent, leading to brutal purges as the planetary governor fought to retain control.

After a snap investigation by the [[Inquisition]], the planet was declared irredeemable. The order to carry out an evacuation of the northern Spires, followed by Exterminatus, was relayed to the nearest vessels of [[Battlefleet Prosperitas]].

The planet’s biosphere was eradicated by cyclonic torpedo in late M41.582. Several million refugees were first evacuated to neighbouring worlds and orbital stations, many with the assistance of the same Navy vessels which delivered the bombardment. Displaced Caudicans can be found all over Subsector Secundus. While some have adapted poorly to life off-planet, the majority of them have found ready employment in the mining industries of nearby systems.

The Caudican Guard regiments still exist, but are awaiting permission from the Departmento Munitorum to recruit from other worlds. With no source of casualty replacements, they face disbandment or amalgamation before the decade is out if permission is not forthcoming soon.

Caudica today is an airless ruin. There is some hope that the surface may become stable enough to allow servitor-led mining operations within the century.

=== Survivors in the Caudican Diaspora ===

The majority of the surviving Clans of Caudica have settled on [[Polarnus Station]] where, until its invasion, they were working in the deep warren-tunnels of the station's sublevels, aiding in operations to mine out and expand the great asteroid-facility. This exile community swelled and grew, thanks to the aid of well-placed Caudicans including an Archdeacon who did their best to help it survive, founding several social programs to better aid them. Unfortunately the arrival of Cardinal-Emissarius [[Grulge]] in 584.M41 caused a huge amount of Ecclesiastical upheaval; the funding for these schemes dried up as a result, and the Caudican population suffered.

The Caudican population has become more and more disillusioned over the course of losing their world with a marked rise in violent crime amongst the population, due to the rise of members of the diaspora community who do not support the Imperium like many of their elders, with many young Caudicans turning towards these agitators for leadership. The formation of of ‘Protection Squads’ to protect the Caudican community on Polarnus Station has further polarised community opinions and militarised the anti-Imperial elements.

The Caudicans are a multi-ethnic group comprising the three main ethnic groups within the Prosperitas Sector, but in possession of their own distinct cultural quirks as a planet. The majority of Caudicans belong to a Mining Clan, although the name is a misnomer - for the Mining Clans controlled the arable archipelagoes and their agriculture as well as the desert mining hives. The Clans bridged upperhive/underhive social divides often with underhive gangs serving as muscle for when Clan disagreements turned violent, but the world was mostly civilised and minimal in its violence. To be without a Clan was to be a social pariah. Indeed one of the groups the Cult of the Great Worm converted en-masse were the dispossessed of clan: despite the cultural taboo, they brought many clans together under their banner.

There were just under a hundred clans at the time of Caudica’s destruction but with many corrupted by the cult, or lost in the death of the world, along with subsequent marrying and intermingling to survive as a people after the loss of their homeworld there are only a handful left. Clan is more important now after the death of Caudica then it ever was on the world. It is the general opinion of the Caudicans that all the Clans need to worth together for the collective survival of their people. The clan-marks that many Caudicans wear on their face are believed to have begun as ‘barcoding’ for scanners to identify slaves, but that origin has long-since been forgotten and the technological patterns of straight lines and angular shapes that make up Caudican markings has evolved as another artform of their people. Every Caudican has a tale to tell about their Clan marks, and the only way to really learn another’s clan is by talking to them about it, especially now with so many clans mingled together.

Some of the Surviving Clans are;

* '''Clan Rojav (Horizontal Vertical Markings in Black)''': This clan, originally nomadic, had a reputation for deep desert navigation before the Exterminatus. They specialised in reconnaissance and survival in hostile terrain, and often scouted new mineral deposits for Imperial trade houses. They have struggled to adapt to life in the close confines of Polarnus, with many of the elders suffering from intense and crippling claustrophobia.
* '''Clan Dreis (Diagonal Markings in Green)''': Largely lost in the exterminatus, Clan Dreis was re-founded on Polarnus Station by Sannah Dreis, one of the pre-eminent Caudican community leaders and the only surviving scion of the original Clan. Clan Dreis is one of the most hostile of the surviving Clans towards the Imperium and their number are often targeted by Imperial Enforcers.
* '''Clan Wren (Horizontal Markings in Blue)''': This clan was largely offworld during the exterminatus, with the bulk of their number serving as the Caudican 2nd Armoured Regiment. They are a clan most notable for their conservatism and their strict codes of honor that made them the prime target for the planetary tithe of Guard recruits. Perhaps the most martial of the survivors though split by its loyalty to the Imperial Guard and their anger and feelings of betrayal of the death of Caudica, and the struggle of the Caudican regiments to retain their name.
* '''Clan Hashd (Crosshatched Markings in Purple)''': The Hashd clan had a long history as caretakers, guides and protectors of the sacred shrines found across Caudica. Pious but also pragmatic, many of their number found work with the security forces of Polarnus, protecting the mining warrens and keeping order among their fellow clans.
* '''Clan Huld (Zig-Zag Markings in Red)''': Although there are many higher ranked survivors of Clan Huld left in the sector, they mostly show allegiance to Archdeacon Anactos Huld, a community leader of the Caudican diaspora on Polarnus Station, and a devoted believer in the God-Emperor. The Clan is highly opposed to Clan Dreis, but has been known to work with them for the greater good.

While Clan is less of a divide between the surviving Caudicans, their opinions on the Imperium are widely split. While a greater majority remain largely loyal citizens, a growing angry, mostly young, minority are increasingly hostile to the Imperium, and are often prey for seditionists like the [[Rising Flame]], or even [[Cults]] – this is something that the more rational Caudican people have done everything to prevent, acutely aware of the ability of the Imperium to sanction their entire surviving population to death should they perceive the Caudican people to be irrevocably tainted.

The Caudicans tend to mingle artistic expression with their work ethic. The arts are a precious thing to them so many Caudicans will possess an art alongside their other more practical talents. Although the Imperium may see this as worthless, the Caudicans have survived financially as much by working hard for the Imperium as selling their artistic talents to visitors to their settlements; as a result they are still greatly in demand by the Imperial Nobility when they require artistic talents.

Overall, the Caudicans are a broken people, but they have a fiery will to survive and maintain their culture that is unlike many Imperial populations. The leaders of the surviving clans know that the day may come that there are no Caudicans left to carry on their traditions and bonds of Clan and that the memory of the Caudican people will fade into the long history of extinct cultures within the Imperium.

Caracas

2020-03-26T10:34:24Z

Jc:

[[file:Feral World banner.jpg|Caracas]]

{| class="wikitable" style="float:right; margin-left: 10px;"
|-
! Name !! Caracas
|-
| style="text-align:center" colspan=2 | [[file:Caracas.png|200px|Caracas]]
|-
| '''Sub-Sector''' || Secundus
|-
| '''Type''' || Feral World
|-
| '''Population''' || approx. 500,000
|-
| '''Climate''' || Temperate
|-
| '''Status''' || Imperial
|}

''Strikingly beautiful from orbit. Strikingly untidy on the surface. No vestiges of civilisation whatsoever. A. wanted to stay, chasing rumours of buried treasure, but I was nearly savaged by something horrible with wings and teeth at the landing site. We did not tarry.” – Travel Diary of Lucius di Firro, 580.M41''

=== About Caracas ===

Caracas is covered mostly in thick marshland in the equatorial and tropical regions, and tundra towards the poles. A lonely planet towards the rimwards boundary of [[Subsector Secundus|Subsector Secundus]], Caracas has remained largely uncontacted by Imperial forces throughout its long and quiet history. The presence of humans – albeit in a primitive and degenerate state – implies colonisation in the distant past, but the occasional [[Explorator|explorator]] team has so far totally failed to uncover any trace of landing craft or any structure more complex than a mud hut.

While fertile, the planet would require substantial terraforming and a heavy injection of colonists before it could make a good [[Agri World|Agri World]]. No valuable mineral deposits or other natural resources of note have yet been discovered. The planetary fauna is diverse, with several species of large, aggressive saurians roaming the tundra zones freely. There are also several varieties of simian creature, between three and seven feet in height, who hunt in packs and aggressively defend their territory from all comers. The human population, estimated to number in the low hundreds of thousands, are primarily nomadic and tribal in nature, referring to themselves collectively as the Taurekareka. Most of their society comprises of pre-literate hunter-gatherers who follow the migrations of local wildlife in bands of tens or hundreds, though some tribes have built the early stages of settlements. The population is notable for being both hardy and dangerous, and are valued by the Imperium as primitive assault troops.

In addition to the human population on Caracas, the planet’s high mountain ranges and high plateaus possess a number of avian [[beastmen|beastmen]] known locally as the ‘Ēkara’, who live in a tribal state mirroring that of the lowlander human tribes of the Taurekareka. Swift and nimble, with particularly keen vision, these beastmen are occasionally rounded up by [[Crusade|Crusade]] expeditions and exported offworld to serve as helot scouts ahead of the bulk of [[Crusade|Crusade]] forces. They are prized as helots by those Nobles who take great pleasure in the sport offered by the fauna of the planet, for which the Ēkara are invaluable as spotters and guides.

Both the Taurekareka and Ēkara possess what appears to be a rudimentary and primitive approach to the [[Imperial_Faith|Imperial faith]], though it is not known exactly how it was introduced as Missionarius Galactica expeditions did not reach the planet until the late 300s of M41. They give worship to crude renditions of the Imperial Aquila and worship the God-Emperor in the form of ‘Rangu’, ‘Void Father’ in Low Gothic. Certain tribes possess the belief that if they are pious and strong, pale choosers of the slain will descend from the heavens to choose the greatest of their number to join them in the stars.

The planet’s central continental band is bordered by a sharp mountain range, young in geological terms, which is home to a number of isolated valleys so deep that most orbital augurs are unable to penetrate into them. Alongside the fruitful and extreme biodiversity this causes, there are persistent rumours that there is something hidden on Caracas – remnants of a lost colony, hidden [[Xenos|Xenos]] tribes guarding powerful artefacts, a deceased [[Rogue_Trader|Rogue Trader]]’s hidden smuggling cache, or something stranger still. So far, no expedition has uncovered anything to prove which of these rumours - if any - is the truth.

Strayvia

2020-03-26T10:05:54Z

Jc:

[[File:Strayvia banner.jpg|Strayvia]]

{| class="wikitable" style="float:right; margin-left: 10px;"
|-
! Name !! Strayvia
|-
| style="text-align:center" colspan=2 | [[file:Strayvia.png|200px|Strayvia]]
|-
| '''Sub-Sector''' || Primus
|-
| '''Type''' || Agri-World (former)
|-
| '''Population''' || Depopulated
|-
| '''Climate''' || Biohazardous
|-
| '''Status''' || Dead World
|}

''“A tragedy, and not only for the subsector economy; I pity the Generals who have to keep the Strayvian Regiments in line after this. The northern plateaus were very beautiful, once.” – Travel Diaries of Lucius di Firro, 578.M41''

=== About Strayvia ===

Strayvia was once a small backwater agricultural planet in a little-visited corner of [[Subsector Primus]]. Its reconquest by the [[Prosperitas Crusade]] in the early 100s.M41 passed without incident; the planetary government capitulated wholesale to Durovera’s forces, and for most on the pleasant, temperate world, life changed very little from one day to the next. A productive agri-world with a comfortable level of technological advancement supporting vast continent-spanning fields of bio-engineered wheat variants, it played host to a modest population in the low billions. Most civilians were employed in the arable zones, with a few million migratory workers following the annual harvest cycles to labour in shipping and packing factories in the urban spaceports at the poles. The planet was quiet and largely peaceful, with a small local Planetary Defence Force recruited mostly for show and to keep the youth out of trouble.

Everything changed in the late 560s. During Arch-Militant Voss’ highly successful Persephonian Gambit, a number of elite regiments from the Primus-Tenebris border area around the Strayvian Gateway had been retasked to combat the Waaagh! threatening the Sector’s exposed Spinwards flank. The new Warmaster, Ilyenós, determined to plug the holes in the subsector’s defensive line against the ever-present threat from the [[Tenebris subsector]], implemented a programme of aggressive recruitment from border worlds. Thus were born the Strayvian Skirmishers, a new founding of [[Imperial_Guard|Guard regiments]] conscripted from across the planet and sent to fight the Enemy far from home.

Initial recruitment was highly successful, with huge numbers of enthusiastic young men and women, enchanted by propaganda holo-vids of heroic Guard slaughtering the Enemies of Humankind, volunteering for service. Patriotic fervour swept the planet, and every village and farmstead was soon adorned with banners and prayer-screeds extolling the heroic names of their boys and girls at the front.

The quality of the Regiments’ commanders, however, was as haphazard as that of their troops; with most of the top-quality officers fighting the Waaagh! in the Galactic East, the border defence command was left to younger [[Scions]] looking for glory, washed-out and jaded armchair generals and bean-counting staff officers promoted far beyond their competence. Under their arrogant and panicky leadership the character of the Strayvian forces was soon to change. They threw their troops at the contested border planets in human-wave attacks and hopeless charges, resulting in huge casualties and very little strategic effect. Most of the experienced officers transferred into the Regiments’ unit and sub-unit commands from elsewhere in the Guard were killed in the first six months, resulting in a surfeit of field promotions from among the native Strayvians; soon, any young man or woman who showed the faintest hint of leadership or charisma could be found wearing an officer’s pips.

A [[Commissariat]] investigation and the execution of a great part of the senior staff for flagrant misuse of resources followed, but the damage was already done. Hardened and bitter, what remained of the Strayvian Regiments were resentful and distrustful of outsiders, low on morale, and borderline-mutinous. After a decade of fighting and horrific losses, their patriotic frenzy had dissipated, and the now experienced and battle-hardened soldiers were greatly in need of rotation home on leave.

At home, however, all was not well. With the flower of Strayvian youth taken away to fight, the remaining population struggled to fill [[Administratum]] harvest quotas – once reasonable, but now punishing. The Censors and tithe authorities paid no heed to the increasingly desperate pleas of the planetary government to lower production quotas. Failure was met with increasingly harsh retribution upon the lowest-producing farmsteads, prompting a cycle of despair and privation; in the midst of thousands of acres of edible crops, families starved, or “stole” food from their own farmland and were mercilessly hunted as outlaws.

A series of increasingly violent protests followed, as angry youths too young for the Guard quota and ageing farmsteaders expressed their anger by smashing [[Administratum]] tithe-houses and attacking government institutions armed with little more than billhooks and stones. Each protest was met with violent suppression from the Defence Force and the [[Arbites]]; the survivors returned to their homes, defeated and furious.

The reports on what happened next are classified CONSIGNATUS OBSCURUS and inaccessible to most casual historians, but it seems apparent that the population turned to dark and terrible means to help them in their hour of need. A series of Administratum teams sent to the surface to investigate the sudden halt in food shipments disappeared without trace. As the Strayvian regiments were finally rotated off the front line and preparing to return home for training and recuperation, the [[Inquisition]] were already taking notice of the planet. Terrible rumours of wheat-fields glowing with a foul luminescence, nameless pustulent tentacular masses bursting forth from the ocean to drown low-flying shuttle transports, and isolated farmsteads simply vanishing from the map to be replaced by… something else… began to filter back to the Sector hierarchy.

By the time intervention came, the planet had gone too far to be saved. The same Navy transports designated to collect the Strayvian regiments from the front and bring them home were retasked to conduct Exterminatus Extremis upon Strayvia. The planet’s surface was virus-bombed in 577.M41, with no recorded survivors.

Strayvia today is a ruined planet. It has huge strategic significance at the heart of the Strayvian Gateway, the first line of defence against the denizens of the [[Tenebris Subsector]] warp-storm for the vulnerable core worlds of [[Subsector Primus]]. Under [[Warmaster Ilyenós’]] vision, [[Battlegroup Hesperidus]] under Admiral Ridea Holz has its centre of gravity in the area around the planet, though the lingering effects of the virus-bombs and the planet’s interdiction means that no surface landings are permitted by Inquisitorial decree.

The Strayvian regiments remain committed to [[Battlegroup Hesperidus]], and are a notoriously difficult to command; bitter, angry and frequently insubordinate after the loss of their homeworld, they are nevertheless battle-hardened and highly competent soldiers who are often selected for the most demanding missions requiring strike forces of fast-moving and self-sufficient light role infantry.

Persephon IV

2020-03-26T10:05:11Z

Jc:

[[File:War World banner.jpg|Persephon IV]]

{| class="wikitable" style="float:right; margin-left: 10px;"
|-
! Name !! Persephon IV
|-
| style="text-align:center" colspan=2 | [[file:Persephon IV.png|200px|Persephon IV]]
|-
| '''Sub-Sector''' || Primus
|-
| '''Type''' || War World
|-
| '''Population''' || approx. 1 billion
|-
| '''Climate''' || Temperate
|-
| '''Status''' || Conflict
|}

=== About Persephon IV ===

Persephon IV is a habitable planet revolving around a normal yellow star (Persephon) in [[Subsector Primus]]. Long inhabited by Man, it was conquered early in the Prosperitas Crusade and has grown to be a shining beacon of the [[Imperium]] in the Sector, green and verdant continents with scattered rural settlements and farms, and on each of the four major continents there were two or three hive cities, containing much of the populace of about three billion. It stood as a self supporting world without specialising into a specific role: however, it had sufficient industry to tie it into the interplanetary trade networks, and as a stop off point for many space faring vessels passing through the area.

Any major assaults from outside forces on the Persephon system were in distant antiquity, and barely remembered by the local populace. It raised a modest levy of regiments for the [[Imperial Guard]], and maintained a planetary defence force for its own protection.

That was until 534.M41 when, out of the Galactic East, a massive raiding force of the savage [[xenos]] known as [[Orks]] emerged, rampaging through the worlds the [[Prosperitas Crusade]] had previously believed to be safe, having long since been conquered and brought into Imperial compliance. At Persephon IV however, this green tide ‘[[Waagh Gazbag]]’ smashed against the noble men and women of the Persephon [[Imperial Guard]] Regiments and the planet’s Planetary Defence Force. While the progress of the Ork‘s was stalled at Persephon long enough for the threat of the Waagh to be contained, the verdant world was almost entirely overrun with [[xenos]], leaving Persephon IV’s Primaris Hive Persephon Prime besieged.

Although Persephon Prime managed to erect its forcefields to extend some protection to the city itself, the outlying suburbs were razed to the ground, with many of the survivors left as refugees in their own city. Though Persephon has held against these savage [[Xenos]], it has paid dearly for it, in their efforts to develop crude industry to support their fight against the noble men and women of Persephon, the [[Xenos]] have all but destroyed the planet’s ecosystem. And over the last few years since the invasion, the once-verdant world has be reduced to an ash blasted dustbowl of dried earth, across which the invaders have almost total mastery. Only Persephon Prime survived as a bastion against the invasion, with supplies being shipped in from the other less war-torn planets.

The isolation of the city on the [[Xenos]] battlefront, under siege and bombardment for so long, with rationing and overcrowding prevalent, damaged the psyche of the inhabitants, and slowly the despair and destruction became too much. What started off as obscene graffiti took hold and within a short period, the rot had set in, the innocuous ‘old religion’ of the Sector had taken root and blasphemy and rebellion had began to circulate within the populace. Ultimately erupting into a bloody civil war in Hive-structures of Persephon Prime leading to the noble regiments of Persephon IV being forced to take arms against those they had sought to protect.

Though the noble actions of the Persephon Regiments held the line, the underlying threat of rebellion has turned the Hive Primaris into a stronghold under martial law as the conflict grows ever more desperate. The war against the [[Greenskins]] continues, with attempts being mounted to take back the territories lost to the [[xenos]]. However, the [[xenos]] are striking back and spreading again, building great ocean going vessels out of the scrap dragged out of the ruins of the suburbs of Persephon Prime. Chaos is not entirely eradicated from Persephon IV either, survivors from the Xenos-devastated wastes, mutated beyond recognition, joined by those cultists who fled the rebellion at Persephon Prime now join battle with both the [[xenos]] and the [[Imperial Guard]].

Persephon IV is no longer a green and pleasant place. Whilst most of Persephon Prime’s infrastructure survives, most of the production that was once shipped off-world is now channelled into the war effort, in an attempt to prevent the whole world succumbing to conflict.

Monacus

2020-03-26T10:02:54Z

Jc:

[[File:Monacus banner.jpg|Monacus]]

{| class="wikitable" style="float:right; margin-left: 10px;"
|-
! Name !! Monacus
|-
| style="text-align:center" colspan=2 | [[file:Monacus.png|200px|Monacus]]
|-
| '''Sub-Sector''' || Primus
|-
| '''Type''' || Hive World
|-
| '''Population''' || 20 billion
|-
| '''Climate''' || Artificial (hives), otherwise Toxic
|-
| '''Status''' || Imperial
|}

''“For any young noble of means and taste, there is simply nothing to compare to the delights of the Hyacinth Club. Of course, a true connoisseur will put themself in the ring once or twice, and not be limited to merely frittering thousands of Thrones in idle bets on the luck and skill of a favourite champion….” Travel Diary of Lucius di Firro, 549.M41''

=== About Monacus ===

Monacus is a crowded, dirty and bustling planet at the crossroads of several Subsector shipping lanes. Originally a manufactorum world, with a proportion of its income still reliant on heavy industry from the midhive Factorum complexes, Monacus has grown in popularity as a weekend getaway for the idle youth of a hundred minor Houses based in and around the Sector capital Duroverum – a short and convenient hop away by warp-cutter.

The grand gilt spires – once visible from low orbit, but now hidden by the ash-storms which plague the lower atmosphere – mark the upper hives of Monacus as a place of wealth and pleasure. The crowded and squalid underhives are hidden beneath a veneer of luxury and indulgence, with every civilised pleasure and taste – and some substantially less civilised – catered for on the upper levels. The popular saying is that “only a corpse is bored on Monacus” – and for those with the Thrones to sustain the heady lifestyle, that holds true.

While the drinking-houses, pleasure-dens, menageries and artistic entertainments of Monacus are rightly famous across the sub-sector, it is the planet’s casinos and private gambling houses which draw the noble youth in their droves. Every young socialite of any standing boasts membership of one of the exclusive uphive “clubs” at the peaks of Monacus’ glittering spires; these elaborate complexes are cities in miniature, with the finest boasting gymnasia, dining-houses, state-of-the-art medical facilities and armies of servants attending to the every whim of the pampered guests. Famous examples include the Adelphi Club, whose dice and card tables impose elaborate paired forfeits for the partners of unlucky gamblers; the Hyacinth Club, where feats of athletic and duelling prowess attract astronomical wagers from baying participants, and where the occasional foolhardy noble can be coaxed into the gladiatorial ring in person; and the Luxovius Club, a rarefied and exclusive venue rumoured to be sponsored by House Roshan-Fikran, where the cool trickle of water-gardens and scent of rare blooms accompany savage and punishingly intellectual challenges of probability and philosophy.

The planetary government is under the control of the Maldigri-Duroveras, a cadet branch of House Durovera. The current governor, Scion-Governor Amari Maldigri-Durovera, is rumoured to have ambitions towards an Imperial Charter and full Noble status for their House. Governor Amari is viewed with a mixture of resentment and intense pride by their subjects; ever since they gained the planetary throne in a freak baccarat accident which killed both their mother and all eligible sibling rivals, they have relentlessly pursued an agenda which puts Monacus first, even at the cost of endangering centuries-old treaties.

The most recent and visible manifestation of Amari’s agenda is in the arming of the Spire Guard. The Guard, an ancient and proud institution marked by their distinctive red military coats and jodhpurs, have been seen as a ceremonial institution for centuries, more suitable for parading outside palaces and providing honour guards than in keeping order. Recently, however, the Governor’s decree has seen them armed with discreet and ornamental but powerful stub pistols – there are rumours that the weapons were a gift from House Sarandeen. Most young noble tourists, accustomed to seeing the Spire Guard as no more than glorified servants who can occasionally be called upon to beat an uppity Midhiver out of one’s way in the street, laugh off the change as irrelevant. Others – particularly the locals – are not so sure.

Outside the claustrophobic luxury and cramped lower levels, the surface of Monacus is deeply inhospitable, though not universally lethal. Poisoned by years of industrial waste from factorum outlets, the atmosphere is technically breathable, but the density of ash so high and the violent dust-storms so frequent that survival without a respirator and protective clothing is usually measured in minutes or hours. There are persistent rumours of an atmospheric anomaly on the planet’s temperate northern polar cap which has generated a “bubble valley”, still fertile and free from the cloying ash; locals claim that great secrets from long before Durovera’s Crusade are hidden here. Anyone who has conducted even a basic atmospheric survey, however, will laugh at the suggestion that the surface of Monacus is anything but barren and lifeless, and dismiss the local superstition as ridiculous.

Mazar-63

2020-03-26T10:00:10Z

Jc:

[[File:Mazar-63 banner.jpg|Mazar-63]]

{| class="wikitable" style="float:right; margin-left: 10px;"
|-
! Name !! Mazar-63
|-
| style="text-align:center" colspan=2 | [[file:Mazar-63.png|200px|Mazar-63]]
|-
| '''Sub-Sector''' || Primus
|-
| '''Type''' || Satellite Colony
|-
| '''Population''' || 500 million
|-
| '''Climate''' || Artificial
|-
| '''Status''' || Imperial
|}

''“Good. Very impressive. Now play it again, but blindfolded.” – Chancellor-Artisan Ringbolt Fischer, Professor of Music''

=== About Mazar-63 ===

Mazar-63 is a hollow moon in orbit around a sterile world in Subsector Primus. It is most famous as the seat of the Primus Noble House Roshan-Fikran. A network of ancient tunnels honeycomb the interior of the moon, for the most part arranged into grand avenues and pleasant squares to rival the most luxurious hive-spires. Any civilised world has its dark underbelly, however, and Mazar-63 is no exception; in the cold outer reaches near the moon’s frozen surface, close to the ancient void-seals which keep the rich artificial atmosphere within, there are dark unexplored networks of shanty-town caves and disused factorium complexes where the poor and unfortunate of Mazar’s population lurk in resentful and criminal squalour.

The aged and academic splendour of the central tunnels is maintained and ordered by the House’s Chancellor-Artisans, who describe their life’s work and duty as the crafting of young nobles into finely tuned instruments of the Emperor’s Will. The reputation of the House is built on academic and intellectual excellence of all varieties; and Mazar-63 is an engine for inculcating, refining and testing that excellence among the young nobles and their support staff. Every conceivable expression of human mental brilliance, from rote memorisation to musical genius to rhetoric, Ecclesiastical philosophy to applied astronavigation, is taught somewhere inside the vast schola-halls. The moon’s reputation is such that on many worlds in the Sector, a psycho-conditioning record showing even brief academic experience on Mazar is enough to immediately qualify one for a senior role at a Scholam or military training academy.

This excellence attracts reputation; other Noble Houses, interested in rounding off their progeny’s education, will sometimes send them to be fostered at Mazar-63 for a few years, often in early childhood. These young Scions are treated with fastidious care while within the hollow palaces, and in many regards their experience barely differs from the Roshan-Fikran children – but ever conscious of the value of information, the Chancellor-Artisans ensure that there are some places the cuckoo youth cannot go, and some texts they will never be permitted to read.

Although purity and excellence of mind is the highest value within Mazar, the Chancellor-Artisans hold that a mens sana grows from a corpore sano; so among both the noble and common residents of the moon, many physical pursuits are a well-regarded way to spend leisure cycles, including some peculiar to the moon’s internal architecture. Deep-tunnel spelunking, vent-ghast hunting with rifle and lamp-pack and dropshaft-tennis are all popular with the locals. For those offworlders missing a more typical planetary environment, and the young who wish to train themselves for a future in the Imperial Guard, a village-sized section of the central-east tunnel axis has been painstakingly bio-engineered with imported soil and plantlife, with the house’s allied Adeptus Mechanicus providing artificial weather and a holoprojected simulated “sky” widely regarded as somewhat unconvincing. Access to this area is tightly controlled based on the academic term rota and the demands of the various competing faculties, and it is not uncommon to find a savage – if very eloquent – row between the Artisan-Professor of Applied Pharmacy and the Chancellor-Ascendant of Practical Anatomy, each with a comet-tail of obedient young students, at the environment-gates.

Most of the interior of Mazar-63 is mapped, though some areas – particularly those near the surface – remain impenetrable to servo-skull cartographical drones. There are two major docking-ports for voidships, and innumerable smaller archaic void-locks which permit passage onto the low-gravity surface. The head of House Roshan-Fikran is the de facto Governor of the planet, though cedes most prosaic matters of day-to-day planetary administration to the Chancellor-Artisan Majoris, currently an elderly and mostly deaf professor of Ecclesiastical Archaeology named Balustrade Hacknesse.

House Roshan-Fikran and the millions of vassals who make up the population of the Moon nurse a two-century-old rivalry – usually friendly – with the Seminary of St Sebastian’s Redoubt, a major Ecclesiastical institution in another part of the Subsector. At its harmless end, the grudge extends to elaborate student pranks and well-attended sporting competitions; its darkest manifestations occasionally include sabotaged data-cortices, stolen texts, rumours of academic espionage, and even plagiarism.

Kydos

2020-03-26T09:59:18Z

Jc:

{| class="wikitable" style="float:right; margin-left: 10px;"
|-
! Name !! Kydos
|-
| style="text-align:center" colspan=2 | [[file:Kydos.png|200px|Kydos]]
|-
| '''Sub-Sector''' || Primus
|-
| '''Type''' || Agri-World
|-
| '''Population''' || 6.8 billion
|-
| '''Climate''' || Oceanic temperate
|-
| '''Status''' || Imperial
|}

=== About Kydos ===

Kydos is a small world first settled by mankind in the late 31st millennium. Though smaller than the other two planets in the system, Kydos’s super dense core means it has a gravity with 0.1 variance to terran standard and can thus maintain an atmosphere suitable for human life. Initially it was this super dense core, and the mineral wealth it promised, that due the attention of the Imperium but the geography of Kydos presented too many problems and costs, making mining vastly uneconomical. 80% of Kydos’s surface is covered by kilometre-deep oceans which prohibited mining operations without a vast outlay of resources rarely lavished on such a small planet.

The oceans that make mining operations on Kydos impossible are in truth the source of its wealth and indeed the very reason that the planet is inhabitable at all. A constant process of seeding and harvesting gathers in the endless wealth of plankton which is then processed into a variety of foodstuffs; the bulk of which is shipped off world to feed other planets in the sub-sector. Marine life is also harvested to provide delicacies; the rarest of items even making their way all the way to the tables of the palaces on the Sector Capital.

Land on Kydos is in short supply and, given the large space required for the landing fields to accommodate the bulk transporters, the vast seeding plants and the harvesting and processing factories, the population of the planet is crowded into densely packed cities clustered atop the islands jutting from the oceans. The abundance of food means that Kydos supports a relatively large population and the cities are somewhat smaller versions of the great urban constructs on the hive worlds of the sector. Densely packed, socially segregated and teeming with humanity from it’s best to it’s basest. Some of the cities rest not on dry land but are built up on mountains that rise up kilometres from the ocean-bed though do not breach the surface of the water. Individual cities reach as much as two kilometres below the waves before reaching the solid ground of the planet. Standing upon a vast metal base, inhabited at every level, these cities spread out above the surface of the ocean like gigantic metal fungus. The constant rain of oils, waste and corroded metals from the underside of the cities into the water makes travel beneath the cities as unpleasant as it is dangerous. Even the cities built on dry land spread out over the surface of the ocean such is pressure of the population and the need for space. Only the most select and elite of settlements fail to follow this pattern and the only hive that soars ever upwards, as opposed to sluggishly climbing up whilst sprawling outwards, is the planetary capital Tegea.

Seat of the Governor of Kydos, the prime spire of the Tegea hive reaches a full ten kilometres over the surface of the ocean. For the last thirteen centuries the family of Hyrakles Diodus have ruled over the planet, passing the governorship from father to son and each taking the same name upon ascension to the command of the planet. The depth and nature of this command has varied depending upon the strengths and intellect of the incumbent Governor. Even at best though, this will only extends to an ability to exert varying levels of control over near-independent city states each maintaining a separate standing army and each engaging in bilateral agreements with other cities based upon the requirements of the seeding and harvesting of the oceans.

=== Stirrings of Rebellion ===

Just before 200.M41 the incompetence and laxity of the incumbent Governor Diodus, a particularly weak and enfeebled example of the family, had allowed the planet to slip dangerously towards civil war and conflict the likes of which had not before been seen upon Kydos. An alliance of cities, led by the second largest city Taras, a vast hive plunging a kilometre under the surface of the ocean to rest upon the tip of an under-sea mountain, claimed that the Governor and his family were leading the planet adrift from the Imperial way and sought only personal wealth and aggrandizement. The loyalist hives meanwhile accused the Taras alliance of secessionist ambitions and various other heresies. Neither side wished to start a war and impact the off-world trade, and the wealth it bought, so the situation remained one of rhetoric and occasional skirmishes between naval patrols from the two sides. Other hives remained aloof of the conflict neither supporting the rebels accusation nor, damningly, affirming their support for the Governor who, despite his many shortcomings, was the rightful commander of the planet and representative on Kydos of his Imperial majesty [[the Emperor]] of Mankind.

Seeing a chance to resolve the situation before it got out of hand, and rid themselves of an incompetent planetary Governor into the bargain, sub-sector command dispatched a new governor, former [[Imperial Guard]] General Sebius Van Heth to replace Diodus and bring Kydos back firmly into the Imperial fold. Citing Diodus’s great age and many years of service, the old governor was retired to much public ceremony and celebration. Later, to little private ceremony but still some celebration, the old man was stood up against a wall and shot.

Van Heth’s placement bought the planet three years of peace before conflict finally broke out. Cities with genuine concerns about Diodus’s competence were quickly mollified by the new Governor’s forthright approach. Some key individuals in these cities, those who had been slightly too quick and keen to call for revolution and revolt, were rounded up and removed. This of course merely cemented Van Heth’s reputation as a harsh but unquestionably loyal man; truly the epitome of an Imperial Guard General.

During those three years Van Heth made some changes that were later to be instrumental to the Imperium’s victory over the rebels. Firstly he placed all air craft of any designation bar personal transports, though even these were restricted to a quite low tonnage, under central authority. Coupled with this move all surface to orbit and orbit to surface traffic was controlled and vetted by a central command in Tegea. Six weeks after this order was imposed the rogue trader vessel Void Shark attempted to bypass this new authority and land at the minor city of Salapa to carry out some smuggling of contraband goods. A combination of orbiting defence satellites and ground based laser batteries crippled the ship before she was boarded and seized by Naval Armsmen from the frigate Purity of Wrath in orbit over Kydos at the time. The very public execution of the Void Shark’s crew laid to rest any doubts over the Governor’s tolerance to infringements of his new laws.

Van Heth’s most insightful change however was to the structure of the armies on Kydos. Until his changes were implemented each city raised and equipped their own army and these forces were more likely to turn on each other than integrate should they ever be required to defend Kydos from an external threat. Tithing for the [[Imperial Guard]] had always been a process of taking squads, platoons or companies from these armies and attempting to forge them into a working Guard regiment. The general assessment from Department Munitorum was that the Kydos regiments needed at least one engagement to whittle them down to 75% strength before the survivors would begin to mesh into an effective fighting force. Even then the regiment was likely to be very factional and best used for forlorn hope assaults on enemy strongholds. The Governor judged this distribution of armed force to be intolerable and set about consolidating the use of effective armed power under his own command. To this end, all “private” or city-based armies were declared disbanded and Van Heth set about founding new regiments based much more closely on the [[Imperial Guard]] model he knew so well. With characteristic foresight many of the Van Heth’s entourage, who he had brought with him upon appointment to Kydos, were ex-Guard with a large number of senior NCO experienced in training up Guard forces elsewhere in the sector. Many cities got around this prohibition by renaming their forces as militias but the loyal cities followed the Governor’s commands and the new Kydosian regiments were founded. It would not be long after the first founding before they were sent in to fight their own people and put down the revolt brewing before Van Heth’s arrival.

=== War on Kydos ===

Almost three years to the day since Van Heth’s arrival the real shooting war started following years of political bickering and intrigue. The city of Eryx, an ally of Taras, was gutted by a huge explosion carried into the very heart of the hive by a ship from the loyal city of Himera. Later investigation shows that the explosion was in fact caused by agents from Taras to provide a casus belli. Eryx was always a minor city and could thus be sacrificed by Taras to justify a larger conflict. Acting in “retribution” for this attack, Taras naval forces shelled Himera into rubble before landing troops to destroy what was left. An estimated 6 million Imperial citizens lost their lives and the Kydosian VII regiment, based at Himera and likely the real target of the offensive, was destroyed. Lacking the ordinance to effectively counter the naval bombardment, the troops had weathered the storm and then, through significantly depleted by the attack, had risen up to battle the invading forces. Ultimately they were overwhelmed and killed to a man. The VII was never re-founded and their recovered battle banner and colours hang in the Hall of Remembrance in the Cathedral of the Emperor’s Light in Tegea Hive.

Simultaneous to the Himera assault, rebel forces staged attacks upon key cities, facilities and staging posts across the planet. The effectiveness of these attacks was blunted by the presence of the new Kydosian Regiments who all fought with the same tenacity and bravery as their doomed comrades in the VII regiment. Their bravery was costly however and the need to replace their losses meant the loyal forces would have to wait before going on the offensive and gave the rebels time to dig in and fortify their territories. The Governor’s decision to centralise control of all air and orbital assets meant that the loyal forces had a distinct advantage over the rebel forces at sea and quickly drove the enemy ships back to their homes crippled or sent them down to the crushing depths. Their bold opening strike defeated and control of the air and sea in Van Heth’s hands, the rebels hunkered down in their cities and waited for the onslaught. So vital were the seeding and harvesting factories in these cities that orbital retribution was not an option and the cities and hives would have to be cleared by the new Kydosian Regiments. It would take ten years to finally break the rebels and the Imperial forces involved in this brutal, bloody would come to refer to this period as the Long Grind.

The siege of Taras would be the ultimate act in this grim play however there were several key engagements along the way that defined the nature of the war on Kydos. Individual cities had to be subdued and brought back under Imperial control and generally this required such a commitment of time and resources that only one hive could be assaulted at any one time whilst other Imperial forces kept the rebels pinned down. The assaults would start with Imperial airpower attacking the defenders' defence batteries in order to allow the infantry waves to reach the enemy. These infantry waves, usually attacking with no armour support as the nature of the battlefield made such forces virtually useless, would be ferried to the fight in landing craft that would either deposit them on the rocky beaches or onto the walls of the hives direct. There they would cut a way in using melta-torches and demolition charges. Once inside they would fight their way along the roads, balconies and tunnels of the hives clearing out buildings as they went.

These battles were a nightmare to try and control as enemy assaults and avenues of attack for the Imperial troops could be in any direction including from above or below. Tactical command was very much devolved to platoon and squad level with only the most general of instructions coming from regimental command. Needless to say, casualties were very high and assaulting regiments were usually rendered, in the dry language of the Department Munitoum, “combat ineffective”. In practical terms, this meant the first regiment in had to be withdrawn and rebuilt before it could fight again having suffered greater than 50% casualties.

Though no stranger to the staggering costs that were sometimes required in order to attain victory, Van Heth was not content to merely throw endless waves on troops at the rebels and accept that many would not return. If armoured support was not an option then the troops themselves would be armoured instead. Using his reputation and considerable influence within the Department Munitorum and the Imperial Guard, Van Heth arranged for the supply of heavy carapace armour to the Kydosian regiments and ultimately arranged for the founding of manufactories to produce the armour on Kydos itself.

Regiments that managed to go in first and come out fighting would quickly gain a reputation they would fight all the harder to keep. The XIII regiment, recruited mainly from the city of Locri, gained a fearsome reputation when they were sent to capture Locri itself which had declared for the rebel forces. The regiment suffered slightly less than 20% casualties for just over 90% rebel and nearly 80% civilian losses due to their judicious use of flamer and melta weaponry.

The III regiment made a reputation in the assault on Galatia when, arriving by high tide onto the sloping walls of the hive, the troops landed right into the teeth of the enemy defensive positions. By this stage of the war the rebel forces in some cities were running low on ammunition and preferred to close with Imperial forces and engage in close combat as soon as troops had landed. Anticipating this, the men of the III regiment had all been equipped with close quarters weaponry for the assault and made short but bloody work of the rebel forces. Flushed by success they continued their assault and took the hive in a fine display of martial savagery for little loss. They would manage to repeat their performance at the minor cities of Naxos and Entella, where they were dropped in by air, before the regiment was ripped to shreds at the siege of Taras.

Following the eventual victory over the rebel forces and the dispatch of Kydosian regiments to the battlefields on numerous other planets, the Kydosian’s have been classed as heavy or assault infantry in the roster of [[Imperial Guard]] forces in the sector due to each infantryman’s personal armour and their experience of assaulting hives and other settlements on Kydos.

=== The Beginning of the End ===

Finally, after 10 years of assaults, city fighting and endless patrolling and raids, only Taras itself remained in rebel hands. Standing proud but isolated in the midst of the vast southern ocean, Taras braced itself for the Imperial assault whilst the loyalist forces prepared for the final push. Kydos by this stage was a ravaged ruin. The rebel strongholds had been pounded to rubble and the loyal cities and hives had suffered at the hands of the initial rebel assault a decade past and numerous rebel raids since then, as well as a fair share of explosions and attacks from rebel sympathisers in the population. In some locations only the seeding and harvesting factories remained with just enough population, usually shipped in from loyal hives, to maintain operations. In other places even these key facilities had been destroyed; either by tactical necessity or by rebel spite. The seas around the hive of Thurii and the cities of Dascon, Caulonia and Gela were completely dead, poisoned by leaked chemicals and oil from the battles to capture them.

The seas around the city of Tyndarus were also similarly dead however the cause was of more concern. In the ninth year of the war, during the assault by the Kydosian XXXIV regiment, newly founded that year and having suffered 40% casualties before fighting their way into the city, the rebel forces released a bio-toxin weapon against their attackers. Needless to say, released in a crowded city the weapon failed to distinguish between friend and foe and rampaged indiscriminately through the city. The remainder of the XXXIV, the rebel forces and the entire population of the city were killed with a matter of hours. The virus then spread into the oceans surrounding Tyndarus before thankfully breeding itself out before the infection spread through-out the seas. Of particular concern to the inquisitorial forces who had been dispatched to review the situation on Kydos, the bio-toxin displayed distinct similarities to several variants of the [[Nurgle]] plague weapons utilised by adherents to that foul god throughout the galaxy. Investigation following the burn-out of the toxin revealed the presence of cult activity in Tyndarus.

This was the first indication of the presence of the ruinous powers on Kydos and the investigation deemed it likely to have been an effect of the rebels’ divergence from the Imperial path rather than a cause of the rebellion itself. Observers at the siege of Taras also noted un-human shapes amongst the defenders’ ranks. These sharp eyed officers were later executed to stop the information spreading and maintain morale amongst Imperial forces. Apart from these incidents the [[Inquisition]] ruled the conflict “clean” and blamed the war upon the all-too-human greed of the rebel leaders rather than the more deadly machinations of Chaos.

=== The Battle For Taras ===

The siege of Taras itself was a disaster. Given time to prepare themselves, the rebels had turned the hive into a vast fortress bristling with defence cannons, emplacements and armoured bulwarks jutting from the surface of the hive. Every square metre of the hive skin had been reinforced with sheet after sheet of steel and armour, much of it scavenged from the other rebel cities and the dismantled Taras fleet. The underside of the massive hive was a clear 100 metres over the surface of the seas and thus the Imperial forces were forced to assault the trunk of the city, itself more than two kilometres in diameter. Due to the nature of the rebels’ work on Taras the Imperial air power was never able to completely subdue the defensive batteries and the assaulting regiments went in under heavy fire.

Leading the assault was the Kydosian VIII regiment, supported by the III and XXV regiments and spearheaded by a detachment of engineers who would rip open the truck of the hive to allow the infantry in. The commander of the VIII Regiment and over-all commander of the assault, Colonel Pancrates Tellias, was killed a mere two minutes after his landing vessel left the protection of its mother ship within the Imperial fleet. The rest of Regiment continued with their assault though had suffered as much as 35% losses by the time they reached the edge of the hive and passed into its shadow. There, if anything, things got worse. The engineers found that the trunk of the hive had been reinforced with a full ten meters of armour plate and they did not have the explosives necessary to drive a hole through it. Their efforts, futile as they were, were short lived in any event as the weight of fire coming from the underside of the hive cut the engineers down to a mere handful. These survivors were all seriously injured and stuck in slowly sinking landing boats. Efforts to enter the hive had effectively ended however the vessels carrying the infantry continued to pass under the edge of the hive and stack behind other boats full of troops waiting to assault a breach that would never come.

All across the underside of the hive small shutters opened in the armour plates and a constant rain of weapons fire and bombs fell upon the immobilised Imperial troops. Unquestionably the assault had failed but communicating this to the commanders in the [[Imperial fleet]], and any efforts by them to recall the troops, was impossible. The loss of senior officers and the disruption to communications from being over five kilometres past the edge of the hive meant that the troops followed the Imperial Guard doctrines drilled into them by their instructors and continued their hopeless assault.

With no communications from the attacking forces to warn them of the next wave of troops was sent in at the appointed time and a further six regiments ran the gauntlet of defensive fire to pass under the hive and be massacred by the murderous rain from above. The press of burning boats by this time meant that some of the assault craft did not pass beneath the hive before they could see what awaited them. The situation was hastily passed back and the order to retreat was given. For the vast majority of troops this was too late to matter and handfuls of troops eventually made their way back in battered boats or clinging to wreckage and swimming away. Many of them fell to the continued fire from the hive and others never received the message to fall back at all, communication by then reduced to shouted orders trying to be heard above the roar of gunfire and flames. All of the initial attack regiments suffered greater than 90% casualties and were effectively destroyed. The second wave regiments suffered between 60 and 80% casualties depending upon their “success” in closing to the trunk of the hive. Taras hive would not be broken by infantry assault.

A second option was now utilised and in the evening of the same day as the doomed attack, the Imperial fleet withdrew beyond the horizon and turned their bows towards the hive before dropping sea anchors. Meanwhile, the submersible assault vessel Glory of Himera made a stealthy approach towards the city. At 02:23 local time a nuclear tipped torpedo launched from the submersible detonated a kilometre beneath the surface of the sea where the great trunk of the Taras hive stood upon an undersea mountain. The resulting pressure wave destroyed the Glory of Himera instantly and would sink a further four dozen Imperial vessels in the fleet through their careful orientation towards the wave meant that the majority of the vessels rode out the tidal wave with little loss of life. The cities of Medma, Solus and Acragas were completely destroyed by the wave when it reached them though up to a two days after the event itself.

For Taras however, the end came much sooner. Felled like a great and vastly top-heavy tree, the city plunged into the waves and sank at a terrible rate. The Imperial fleet moved towards the site and no doubt took some revenge in the necessary killing of all those of Taras who made it to the surface from their lost home. Sonar aboard the Imperial submersibles could detect the sound of the stronger compartments in the city finally being crushed by the terrible pressures of the deep oceans up to a week after the city sank. The last rebels had no chance to fight for whatever misguided ideals they held but were simply crushed with no chance of resistance by Kydos itself. The use of a nuclear warhead meant the seas and foodstuffs harvested from that area of Kydos are heavily radiated however the produce has been rated as Grade D (suitable for consumption by general population in non-critical functions) and thus can still be harvested and shipped off world.

=== After the Rebellion ===

For the Kydosian regiments, a similar fate awaited. Due to their excellent training, comprehensive assault and urban combat experience and their adherence to the Imperial Guard standard model, as soon as they are no longer needed on Kydos, the regiments were shipped off world as newly founded Imperial Guard units to support the Emperor’s fighting forces elsewhere in the sector. The majority remain on Kydos however overseeing the return to normality and ensuring Imperial rule in the name of Governor-General Sebius Van Heth.

Those regiments that had been torn to shreds at Taras, and those that had suffered a similar fate at other cities and had yet to be brought back to strength, were dispatched in handfuls to warzones wherever ships could take them. Their Imperial Guard standard training means they can be dropped into any warzone and should give a good account of themselves in the name of the Emperor.

Korimesta

2020-03-26T09:58:33Z

Jc:

[[File:Hive World banner.jpg|Korimesta]]

{| class="wikitable" style="float:right; margin-left: 10px;"
|-
! Name !! Korimesta
|-
| style="text-align:center" colspan=2 | [[file:Korimesta.png|200px|Korimesta]]
|-
| '''Sub-Sector''' || Primus
|-
| '''Type''' || Hive World
|-
| '''Population''' || 22.2 billion
|-
| '''Climate''' || Polluted
|-
| '''Status''' || Imperial
|}

''“Frankly I have never thought much of the so-called planetary ‘nobility’ of the Spires; I find them small-minded and parochial next to the true Void Aristocracy. The entertainments here, however, can be thoroughly diverting for a young traveller with time and money to spare…” – Travel Diary of Lucius di Firro, 580.M41''

=== About Korimesta ===

Early records indicate some [[Human]] inhabitation prior to M25, however as with all proto-civilisations prior to the [[Age of Strife]], little knowledge has been retained from this time and any ruins that once existed have been built over and subsumed by the all-encompassing Hives which are now present on Korimesta.

Korimesta shows signs of Crusade era unification including typical fading icons of the era presumably after the existing civilisation was brought to bloody compliance.

At some stage the planet was turned over to manufacturing weapons of war. Many of these manufactora still stand in M.41 after the planet's liberation.

By planetary lore at some point during the reign of the [[Regency]], the planet was invaded by long-forgotten [[Xenos]].

The planet was a [[war world]] for several centuries, it is possible that there were several invasions and independent wars, but all differentiation of those records have been lost.

Eventually, the planet was liberated and all traces of the [[xenos]] were purged from the planet, and it continued as an Industrial planet. Local lore refers to this as the Xenopurge, but no clear records of the event exist.

As time went on, its importance dwindled, as other planets nearby (in galactic terms at least) became colonized. However, by this point, the planet was heavily industrialized, the atmosphere already becoming toxic, trapped within their Hive Cities the planet was a faded shadow of a once-proud world when the [[Prosperitas Crusade]] reached it.

Korimesta did not put up much of a fight against the invading Imperium. Many of its leaders were all too quick to bow to their new Masters. Those who resisted were not killed by Imperial guns, but Korimestan knives, in one bloody night the Korimestan political order shed itself of any Regency-loyal or Anti-Imperial Families that stood against surrender and capitulated to the Crusade.

Korimesta sacrificed much to comply with the Imperium, breaking the Labour Guilds and accepting [[Adeptus Mechanicus]] overseers to improve the output of their aging Manufactora in the vain hope of regaining a position of glory.

Despite everything, however, the Planet is still a faded reflection of the stories of its golden age that its natives cling to.

The culture inside the great spires of the Hive Cities clings to the remnants of its old glory – the time of the Xenos occupation is romanticized, and strength of arms is seen as a sign of blessing. Blood sports are common, and not just among the lower hive – the [[nobility]] of the upper hives have regular ‘hunting trips’ into the lower, hunting [[Mutant|mutants]], [[The_Lowborn|scum]] and escaped slaves. Pit slave fights are the favorite entertainment of all, and [[Mutant|mutated]] creatures bred from native stock are trained to fight and kill.

Hives on Korimesta are generally built around the remains of mountainous regions, little is left of the rocky outcrops that originally supported these huge structures. Instead glistening spires of crenellated Iron and glass poke out above the pollution layer, where the rich and wealth can enjoy all the fine things of Imperial life, safe from the noxious atmosphere behind their reinforced gas, with their scrubbed and cooled air to breathe. Life is less so pleasant as one drops down the hive, at ground level slums cascade outwards from the metal spire bases. Air filtration is rough and ready at best, with most lower hivers having some form of respiratory disease and chronically shortened life spans. Here lie the grand manufactora which keep the planet, from economic ruin, many of the lower hive population live as little more than slaves under the harsh eye of the [[Adeptus Mechanicus]] overseers brought in by the Ruling Families to overhaul them.

This has created considerable conflict with the remnants of the former Labour Guilds many of whom now form insurgent terrorist groups within the Industrial sectors, ostensibly arguing they are trying to assert the rights and free Korimestan labour from the oppression of the [[Adeptus Mechanicus]] and the Ruling Families who have sold the planet to the cruel and corrupt Imperium and turn the common people into slaves.

=== The Devastation of Hive Secundus ===

In 582.M41, Hive Secundus, the largest hive on the Southern Continent and the second largest Hive on the entire planet, suffered a major attack by unknown forces. It is not entirely known what happened, and although many terrorist groups have laid claim to the attack no evidence to support any claims has ever been substantiated. What is known, is that during the Hive’s night-cycle, a high-yield nuclear weapon was detonated in the underhive.

The initial explosion killed millions, and disrupted the foundations of the Hive causing sections to begin to collapse – as a direct consequence of the explosion and as sections of city collapsed into the underhive, the Hive’s aging generators ignited in a massive chain reaction that killed the entire Hive population in one explosion so bright it could be viewed clearly from space.

Immediately after the devastation, the shockwave flattened several minor arcologies in the surrounding wasteland and irradiated the lesser sibling-hives of Hive Secundus – since 582.M41 the Southern Continent has remained an irradiated Nuclear wasteland, the resultant loss of production has been devastating for the planet, with entire Families ruined or destroyed overnight.

=== Hive Primus ===

The Planetary Captial, Hive Primus, occupies much of the planet's northernmost mountain range. It is a vast sprawl with a long and storied history, it claims to be the rallying point around which the people of Korimesta rallied against the [[Xenos invaders]] – it is an ancient structure and the source of much of the architectural evidence of the planet's occupation by [[Imperial forces]] during the [[Great Crusade]]. It has many spires labeled alphabetically, as ‘Spars’ with Spar A being traditionally the seat of power of the ruling powers of the Hive.

Like most of Korimesta, however, it is a rotting ruin of what it once was when Imperial forces invaded and one of the first projects undertaken by the Administratum was the grand construction of a brand-new spire structure, reaching higher than any of those that came before it – known as the Spar A Urban Construction Project. It took close to four hundred years for the project to be completed before in 587.M41 the new Spar A was completed.

The Newspire, as it is locally called, supplanted the ancestral homes of the Hive’s Families in the newly reclassified Spar B referred to colloquially as Oldspire. This resulted in a mass exodus of all the families wealthy enough to buy estates in the Newspire, leaving Oldspire to Houses too poor to afford estates, many of which had been devastated by the loss of the Southern Continent.

Many locals have a vastly more disparaging name for the Oldspire, the Pauperspire, as many families there truly represent once-proud Families clinging to the pretense of nobility in a rotting tower.

Duroverum

2020-03-26T09:56:56Z

Jc:

[[File:Hive World banner.jpg|Duroverum]]

{| class="wikitable" style="float:right; margin-left: 10px;"
|-
! Name !! Duroverum
|-
| style="text-align:center" colspan=2 | [[file:Duroverum.png|200px|Duroverum]]
|-
| '''Sub-Sector''' || Primus
|-
| '''Type''' || Hive World
|-
| '''Population''' || 24.2 billion
|-
| '''Climate''' || Polluted
|-
| '''Status''' || Imperial, Sector Capital
|}

=== About Duroverum ===

Designated as the Capitol of the Prosperitas Sector, Duroverum is the seat of Imperial Governance. Though rule of the sector is split between the military leadership of the Office of the Warmaster – it is Duroverum where the Sector Governor reigns. The planet is named for [[Timeline_of_Historical_Events#09.M41_-_The_arrival_of_the_Durovera_Expedition_-|Warmaster Durovera]], who launched the Prosperitas Crusade.

Prior to the arrival of the Prosperitas Crusade, the planet was called Legio Venia, and was the seat of the pre-Crusade ‘[[The_Archenemy#The_Old_Religion|Regency]]’ that ruled the sector in the years of long silence between the arrival of Durovera and the end of the Horus Heresy. Duroverum was the initial target of the Prosperitas Crusade, and felt the full brunt of Durovera‘s forces in a planetary invasion that lasted nearly five years of constant fighting to secure the world. Much of the ancient planetary city, believed to date back into the Dark Age of Technology, was reduced to ruins by the invasion, and it is believed many old shrines to the Regencies’ religion are buried down amongst the twisted metal and rubble.

In the years since, the planet has grown, building upon the ancient planetary city, expanding to meet the needs of the of subsector administration, miles upon miles of [[The_Imperial_Government|Administratum]] buildings, space ports and distribution plants stretch across the planets surface – millennia of urbanization has developed what began as hives into a planet-spanning city, straddling polluted seas that are buried under layer upon layer of city developments and with civilization even pushing into the planetary poles it seems unlikely that the spread of urbanization will halt until all of the planets surface is claimed by the planetary city.

Only in recent years has much of note occurred on Duroverum, in 566.M41, after years of PDF and [[Arbites]] forces neglecting the necessary duties of culling the [[mutant]] population in the Duroverian Underhive a rogue [[Psyker]] escaping from [[Inquisition]] custody engineered a mutant uprising. Though local forces believed the mutants to be quickly suppressed the situation escalated to the point that the forces of the Inquisition intervened, ordering orbital bombardment of nearly five hundred square kilometers of the planetary city, the scar of which is still visible today.

=== The Planetary City ===

The Planetary City is Duroverum, and Duroverum is the planetary city: so little of the planet remains un-urbanised that the distinction between the two isn’t needed in this modern age of the Imperium.

Rising up from the planet spanning maze of streets, sub-streets and underhive, are the spires of the Duroverian Aristocracy. Ancient gilded structures set in perfect geographic positions across the planetary city, the Spires divide the planet into the ancestral dominions of Duroverum‘s Aristocracy, and act as high-orbital space elevators and docking platforms for visiting ships. Miniature cities in their own right, the Spires may contain upwards of several million people, the majority of which will be servants of the various noble houses that call them home. Most spires are ruled by a single Noble House with various vassal Houses sharing the spire of their Lords – for the most part the ruling houses have been the same for centuries, and it would take a considerable amount of effort to put one entirely out of power.

Asides from the Spires, the most important structure on the planet is the Imperial Capitol Palace, and impressive obsidian structure that, while squatter than the Spires, covers a vastly wider amount of land. Guarded by several legions of Arbites, this blank dark building covers a whole block of city and disappears for many miles beneath it. Serving as the headquarters for the Arbites on Duroverum alongside its duties housing the Subsector Administration and Governor, it is probably the most heavily defended location on the planet, only rivalled perhaps by the Spires of some of the more militant Noble Houses.

Beneath the Spires and the Capitol Palace lies the City proper, often divided between the upper city, and the under city. By and large these areas are dominated by the common classes of the Imperium, from the Administratum Overseers and Merchants of the upper city to the [[The_Lowborn|workers and scribes]] who make their homes in the low-rent under city. The city is a maze, layers upon layers of overpasses and bridges, hab blocks, bars and offices going right down to the massive durasteel barriers that marks the border of the underhive.

At the depths of Duroverum lies the Underhive, sprawling over the ruins of the ancient city that the Planetary City was built upon, and the radioactive seas – it is a desperate place, unregulated by the Imperial rulers of the world, subject to pogroms by Arbites and PDF forces who have been increasingly stringent in their duties after the Mutant uprising in 566.m41 – still this strange and alien world beneath is home to more than a few strange faces.

Anaximund Alpha

2020-03-26T09:52:14Z

Jc: Created page with "{| class="wikitable" style="float:right; margin-left: 10px;" |- ! Name !! Anaximund Alpha |- | style="text-align:center" colspan=2 | file:Anaximund Alpha.png|200px|Anaximund..."

{| class="wikitable" style="float:right; margin-left: 10px;"
|-
! Name !! Anaximund Alpha
|-
| style="text-align:center" colspan=2 | [[file:Anaximund Alpha.png|200px|Anaximund Alpha]]
|-
| '''Sub-Sector''' || Tenebris
|-
| '''Type''' || Knight World
|-
| '''Population''' || 3 billion
|-
| '''Climate''' || Temperate
|-
| '''Status''' || Non-Compliant
|}

=== About Anaximund Alpha ===

As green and fertile as Naximus is smog bound and arid, it would be easy to think that Anaximund Alpha stood free of Mechanicus presence were it not for the hulking metal clad Knights that patrol its land. A lush agricultural world of various temperate climates, the population of this world have as their sole purpose the feeding of the worker-population of nearby Forge of Naximus Prime. The exact date of founding is unknown but it is clear the symbiotic relationship between the Magos of Naximus and the Knights of this world has existed from the time of the Heresy as it is this dynamic that allowed both to survive their opposition to to the Sector Regency for ten thousand years. Tied together under a formulation of the Sidon protocols the Forge World stands as patron to Anaximund Alpha and its leaders, House Qureshi, whilst the Knight world serves as loyal vassal, valuable resource and military might. It is this co-dependency that has formed such a strong link between the two worlds, the exchange of powerful and arcane machinery of war for trained and experienced warriors to wield it when called upon. As a result the culture of the Knight World stands as a unique hybrid society within the sector, combining the neo-feudal origins with Naximus Prime’s particular form of Orthodox Mechanicus beliefs.

A world of haves and have nots at its core Anaximund Alpha is built on a system of fiefdoms and vassals with the Knight House absolute owner of all land and assets. With no desire to oversee the day to day administration of livestock farming, crop rotation and pest control the Qureshi leaders allow those they see favorably to “hold” pieces of land and work them. In return for this work House Qureshi grants protection and prestige as well as the promise of further tenancies and progression if the vassal proves their worth. This division in status is further enhanced by the fact the ownership of Mechanicus technology is restricted by Naximus’ representative on the world, the Archmagos Prelate. House Qureshi and their closest allies have access to the greatest machinery and augmentation present on the world whilst the presence of it diminishes as the social ladder descends. As a result of this, and in an odd mirroring of culture upon their patron world, social worth is judged according to the augmentations and technology owned by an individual. An outsider might notice that this is an unhelpful model when technology is allocated on planet according to social worth and status but the local populace would receive such news coldly. They see it as a structure that gives directed motion to life thereby becoming a macrocosm of the First Universal Law of the Mechanicus. Religious practices vary wildly from settlement to settlement but the unerring constant across them all is an unshakeable faith and confidence in the Omnissiah as the embodiment of all power and knowledge within the Universe.

The leaders of Anaximund, House Qureshi are a political family that have held a grip on the world since Mechanicus records first began here thanks to the armoured steeds their Knights ride. Concerned less with blood ties, new members of the ‘family’ are chosen and adopted in from the most promising vassals within the planet’s high society, their lives scrutinised according to the Sixteen Universal Laws by the Archmagos and the incumbent Head of House. The current leader of the Qureshi Knights is Laleh Qureshi who has recently gained the title after the far overdue passing of her infamously orthodox predecessor Gul Qureshi. As the only Knight World within the sector the House has often been called upon by other Forge Worlds within the Sector and even by the Imperial High Command when their firepower was desperately needed. No matter the riches promised or consequences threatened, Gul only ever answered the call when their patron allowed it. This has left bad blood within some Imperial Guard and Navy regiments on this frontier who have taken to sarcastically asking under their breath for “The Qureshi Cavalry” when a loss is certain and backup far from sight. In the past half a decade however Laleh has been reported holding meetings with some of the more forward thinking of Naximund’s Magos as well as reportedly sending invites to high profile individuals across the Sector. With a political divide apparently developing within their patrons Forge World some wonder whether Laleh is preparing to dramatically shake up the nature of the Protocols she is bound under and look for greater independence. Others decry this as dangerous sedition and cannot believe she would be so bold when it is as yet uncertain that any other Mechanicus in the Sector know the secrets of the Knight technology Qureshi relies so much upon.

Butonia

2020-03-26T09:49:03Z

Jc: Created page with "Butonia {| class="wikitable" style="float:right; margin-left: 10px;" |- ! Name !! Butonia |- | style="text-align:center" colspan=2 | file:Butoni..."

[[File:Butonia banner.jpg|Butonia]]

{| class="wikitable" style="float:right; margin-left: 10px;"
|-
! Name !! Butonia
|-
| style="text-align:center" colspan=2 | [[file:Butonia.png|200px|Butonia]]
|-
| '''Sub-Sector''' || Tertius
|-
| '''Type''' || Feudal World
|-
| '''Population''' || 3 billion
|-
| '''Climate''' || Temperate
|-
| '''Status''' || Imperial (nominal)
|}

=== About Butonia ===

An old world conquered by the Imperium at the start of the Prosperitas Crusade, Butonia was a quiet backwater planet at the fringes of sector politics but what development has occurred has been largely thanks to its position as a cross roads on a number of trade-routes. For this reason alone the Butonia capital was a vibrant and semi-modern hive with all the benefits of modern Imperial society available to the rich aristocracy. The difference is living standards between rich and poor was as stark here as anywhere in the sector and it was this simple buying power in the hands of the nobles that always meant that they could maintain personal armies and fiefdoms, bribe away any serious threat and generally maintain order through a mixture of oppression and corruption.

The lords themselves had their own rivalries and ambitions but after the calamitous Titian revolt 300 years ago all nobles agreed that should any of them resort to the support of the masses then that family will be purged utterly from the face of the planet. Baron Janus Titian had been outmanoeuvred by one of his closest rivals in his efforts to exploit new carbon-3 deposits found in the northern wastes but when he resorted to a people’s uprising using most of his families vast wealth to arm the people in a peasants revolt he found himself betrayed by one of his own blood. Despite this he was able to drag out the war last for 10 years. In the end the though the noble houses untied against him when the distant dream of emancipation was raised by Titian at an speech he gave in the northern woods. He was hunted down and killed by an assassin and within three months the war was over.

Since that time the people were treated like cattle. Little more than serfs, a nobles wealth was measured by how many people they could drive into the mines to claw out the precious Carbon-3. By 583.M41 the volume of ore that the planet paid to the Administratum was five times what it was in Titian’s time but the desire to keep the people weak meant that technological development and advanced mining techniques were simply outlawed.

Attracted by the prospect of escape many young volunteers joined the PDF but these regiments became little more than armed gangs going by names such as the “Rattlers”, “The Collectors” or “Zombies” and the behaviour of their Commanders was more akin to that of petty warlords than upstanding Imperial officers.

=== The Saint’s Rebellion – 583.M41 ===

The Governor became more anxious to fulfil quotas, turning to the aid of the Adeptus Mechanicus for aid in the rapid extraction of the Carbon-3 the only thing that gave his domain value. That aid came at a price, in the long term it would pollute the atmosphere and poison the soil of Butonia – but the seeds of rebellion where born from the mass land clearances that faced the Serf population, and where Serfs refused to give up their homes, their farms, they were slaughtered by the increasingly out of control PDF.

Open rebellion against the Sector Governor erupted in M41.583 with the defection of several of the infamous PDF regiments to the side of the revolting Serfs – in response those forces loyal to the Governor began to slaughter their way through the under-armed population in order to put down the conflict. The Rebels were rallied, however, by a young woman known as Safina, who proclaimed herself a ‘Living Saint’.

At the height of what could have been a brutal civil war, the Governor was assassinated by agents unknown, without his corrupt leadership the upper classes faltered and the Serfs led by ‘Saint’ Safina have taken control of much of the planets surface. The Mechanicus in turn inflamed the situation further by claiming the papers signed by the deceased Governor give them right to mine the Carbon-3 deposits on Butonia.

=== The Purges – 592.M41 ===

By 592.M41 Butonia had fallen into a state of anarchy, the Living Saint having vanished without a trace, and no true governor put in place Butonia had been forgotten by the powers of the Imperium, the rebellion suppressed, its corrupt governing class toppled, and yet, nothing changed: there was no order, no restored control, the Black Ship tithe forgotten, mutants unattended and allowed to grow in size and population… the planet needed leadership.

In 592.M41, the people, enflamed by a Redemptionist element, rose up to take control themselves, an army of the Faithful overran what few of the corrupt PDF bases remained on the planet, murdering their occupants who had divided the small world up into their own feudal domains. When the last of the petty Warlords of Butonia fell, the Faithful spread out, seized by Redemptionist dialogue they attempted to scour the world clean.

Like many Redemptionist elements, this quickly grew out of control as the Redemptionist factions attacked peasants and Nobles alike in a mad witch-hunt for supposed heresies as their puritanical stranglehold further fragmented the world.

=== Rise of the Popular People’s Militia – 593.M41 ===

The arrival of support for the people of Butonia from the Faith Militant in 592.M41 under the auspice of Lord-Militant Zacharias All-Souls-Cry-Out-For-Salvation Cadence introduced another change to the political landscape – proving capable of directing Redemptionist factions away from the peasants and against the mutant and archenemy cults holding out in the Butonian wilderness the Lord-Militant raised the Popular People’s Militia by arming thousands of Butonian volunteers willing to help restore law and order to their world. This success has not gone unnoticed in the wider Imperium however, and the recent declaration by the Militia of the leadership of Butonia under the Lord-Militant is something of a controversial move, for the appointment of a leader based on popular support is heterodoxy against Imperial doctrine.

The only other candidate is a thin-blooded Noble survivor of the former ruling House of Butonia, Jenita Morrow who began her rise as an Ecclesiarchy priest – but the Nobility do not enjoy much local support, and the current Imperial stance of allowing the situation on Butonia to burn itself out prevents them having the forces to exert their will.

Bachian IV

2020-03-26T09:44:41Z

Jc: Created page with "Bachian IV {| class="wikitable" style="float:right; margin-left: 10px;" |- ! Name !! Bachian IV |- | style="text-align:center" colspan=2 | fi..."

[[File:Bachian IV banner.jpg|Bachian IV]]

{| class="wikitable" style="float:right; margin-left: 10px;"
|-
! Name !! Bachian IV
|-
| style="text-align:center" colspan=2 | [[file:Bachian IV.png|200px|Bachian IV]]
|-
| '''Sub-Sector''' || Tertius
|-
| '''Type''' || Industrial World
|-
| '''Population''' || 50 million
|-
| '''Climate''' || Toxic
|-
| '''Status''' || Imperial
|}

''“The poison clouds are very beautiful from orbit, and I had the pleasure of meeting one of the clanmothers at a Vilas-Lobo party on the third moon; once you get past the shocking appearance, she was surprisingly courteous for an abhuman – I was quite charmed.” – Travel diary of Lucius di Firro, 562.M41''

=== About Bachian IV ===

A savage, toxic world in the corewards reaches of Subsector Tertius, Bachian IV and its attendant moons are a vassal holding of House Vilas-Lobo and a source of substantial mineral wealth for the House. The world itself is uninhabitable by unmodified humans, with a poisonous atmosphere and corrosive precipitation that defeats even the most ingenious atmospheric processors after a few months of exposure. As a result, the Vilas-Lobo scions and overseers reside on artificial habitats on the world’s three small moons, and the surface is the preserve of heavily genehanced and modified abhumans, created under license by the House’s allied Mechanicus Genetors. Organised into mine-clans, these abhumans live primarily in a generously-appointed network of cave systems under the surface, creating comparative luxury out of conditions that would kill any unprotected human in minutes.

Since its discovery and colonisation in the early 300s, the history of Bachian has mostly been a quiet one, with the abhuman population kept largely quiescent and profitable through a combination of rough Imperial discipline and promises of generous retirement packages on the moons for workers from particularly productive mine-clans. However, in the mid 500s, a series of initially cordial industrial disputes spiralled out of control when a subversive organisation known as the Black Gauntlet began to agitate amongst the clans. Wildcat strikes and property destruction followed, resulting in increasingly brutal reprisals from Vilas-Lobo overseers but complicated by the difficulty of deploying any significant force onto the planet without expensive protective equipment.

Separating the Black Gauntlet agitators from mine-clans with genuine grievances has proved a nearly impossible task for Vilas-Lobo negotiators. The competing concerns of keeping the mining exports flowing – which include rare elements vital in the manufacture of Adeptus Mechanicus neural interfaces and Gellar field maintenance tools – and keeping control over the planet has proved a nearly impossible task for a series of governors. Governor Mindinha Vilas-Lobo, the sixth governor in a decade, is eager to resolve the crisis before it attracts Crusade or – worse – Inquisitorial attention, and rumoured to be willing to negotiate with the clan-bosses on much more open terms than her replaced and assassinated predecessors.

Amenophis IV

2020-03-26T09:40:35Z

Jc: Created page with "Amenophis IV {| class="wikitable" style="float:right; margin-left: 10px;" |- ! Name !! Amenophis IV |- | style="text-align:center" colspan=2..."

[[File:Amenophis IV banner.jpg|Amenophis IV]]

{| class="wikitable" style="float:right; margin-left: 10px;"
|-
! Name !! Amenophis IV
|-
| style="text-align:center" colspan=2 | [[file:Amenophis IV.png|200px|Amenophis IV]]
|-
| '''Sub-Sector''' || Tertius
|-
| '''Type''' || Hive World
|-
| '''Population''' || 8 billion
|-
| '''Climate''' || Arid
|-
| '''Status''' || Imperial
|}

''“…desires that there be made for him […] as a monument with an eternal and everlasting name…. My father, who advised me concerning it…. To suggest making [illegible] in this distant place. …Behold, it is I who has discovered it: not being the property of a god, not being the property of a goddess, not being the property of any people to lay claim to it….” – Translation of stelae fragments found in the ruins of Hive Primus, Amenophis IV''

=== About Amenophis IV ===

In the depths of Subsector Tertius, on Tenebris border territory, just inside the warp corridors from Kelper Prime – its nearest neighbour – Amenophis IV is a populous Hive-World in stable orbit around a white dwarf. The planetary structures are ancient, extending across the surface of a dry and largely barren planet, with Hive-Cities springing up like reed plantations along the banks of a mighty river which bisects the single habitable continent. The river, locally called the Aur, is thick with millennia of pollution and effluvia from the arcologies which crowd its banks, and plays host to a number of notoriously venomous local life-forms adapted to swim and crawl in the toxic sludge.

The planet’s major industry is in the production of binding agents for rockcrete and plascrete, taking advantage of the substantial gypsum and bismuth deposits in the local soil. The ancient Hives are factorums on a grand scale, with agglutinations of hab-blocks and Administratum buildings soaring above hundreds of square miles of drying and processing yards. Despite the desert terrain and high population, through careful reprocessing and vast subterranean mycoprotein vats, the planet is nearly self-sufficient, only needing to import food in particularly difficult years.

By ancient tradition, the settlements upstream in the rocky southern highlands are known as “Upper Amenophis”, and the Hive-Cities clustering around the once-fertile northern Aur delta where it flows out to the ocean as “Lower Amenophis”. Local tradition and legend – heavily suppressed by the Ecclesiarchy in the years since Durovera’s Crusade – holds that none can truly rule the planet until they are annointed as ruler of both Upper and Lower Kingdoms. By strange coincidence, the current planetary government system splits executive power between an Administratum-appointed Governor-Castellan in the south who oversees the planet’s industry and production, and a hereditary Governor-General in the north, responsible for security, shipping and legal oversight. Both positions are currently held by members of the powerful Setep family, and there is little friction between the two; but the perennial minor planetary insurgencies frequently use the administrative split as justification to raise rebellion among outlying Hives and the nomadic desert communities, claiming that the Imperial rulers will never be legitimate until the two kingdoms are united.

Outside the fertile strip of the Aur valley, the terrain is inhospitable desert. There are a number of impressive ruins scattered through the southern highlands, including the abandoned skeleton of Hive Primus, destroyed by an unnamed disaster some time in M36 and never repopulated. Local superstition speaks of ghosts and demons, which does nothing to deter an annual parade of thrill-seekers, tomb-robbers and Sisters of the Order of the Eternal Gate, eager to recover artefacts or forbidden knowledge from the ruins.

The only human presence outside the hive-cities are a few tribes of Amenophian nomads, who spend the blistering summer trading in the climate-controlled outskirts of the Upper Amenophis hives, but take advantage of the mild winters – when temperatures can drop to nearly-bearable, in the 40-50 degrees C range – to range out into the desert in long caravans of hypercamels, modified grox and sand-speeders. These, by ancient arrangement with the Imperial mining cartels, search for new mineral deposits among the rocky wastelands, and trade their newfound knowledge when they return in the spring.

The planetary PDF are well-armed and generally respected, with experience at putting down the occasional flash-flood rebellion in the outer Hives. Amenophis also raises a number of Imperial Guard regiments, including the feared 18th Amenophis Light Infantry, who use light boarding shields and short khopesh swords to devastating effect in close-quarters combat in the claustrophobic confines of urban hives and enemy Voidships.

Agrial III

2020-03-26T09:38:35Z

Jc:

[[File:Shrine World banner.jpg|Agrial III]]

{| class="wikitable" style="float:right; margin-left: 10px;"
|-
! Name !! Agrial III
|-
| style="text-align:center" colspan=2 | [[file:Agrial III.png|200px|Agrial III]]
|-
| '''Sub-Sector''' || Tertius
|-
| '''Type''' || Shrine World
|-
| '''Population''' || 1.1 million
|-
| '''Climate''' || Sub-tropical
|-
| '''Status''' || Imperial
|}

''“Dull. Dull, dull, dull. I can’t imagine spending your whole miserable life here; frankly I’d rather do something appalling like join the Guard.” – Travel Diary of Lucius di Firro, 579.M41''

=== About Agrial III ===

An ancient shrine world covered in dusty sepulchres and echoing chapels, Agrial III is a seldom-mentioned backwater planet that contains possibly one of the largest libraries in the entire Segmentum. Centuries ago Agrial was a powerful and populous shrine world with significant influence in the politics of the Prosperitas Sector. Located on a primary trade route through the subsector, countless traders and pilgrims stopped off at Agrial every year, either to refuel and resupply before moving on or to worship at the numerous temples.

It was not just its holy shrines which drew pilgrims, however. Agrial was well known for the vast libraries that each temple-city maintained, together forming one of the largest and most comprehensive collections of knowledge in the Sector.

Collecting information on countless subjects and in endless formats, the libraries of Agrial attracted countless scholars and sages, and even members of the holy Inquisition, all of whom came to study the vast catalogue of information. All were welcome to read freely of the books, tomes, scrolls and hololiths, and to spend as much time doing so as they desired; all that the Scribe-Priests asked was a small donation to the upkeep of the libraries and also a donation of knowledge to the library itself. Each visitor was asked to write down something –whether a short titbit of information or an entire treatise was up to the visitor- and add it to the archives of Agrial.

Trade routes are known to change however, and when they did, they brought about the end of the importance of Agrial. Without the income brought by the traders the shrine world faded into obscurity; the once-thronging streets are now quiet and the holy sepulchres and reliquaries dusty and often neglected. A few pilgrims and knowledge-seekers still visit Agrial, but now the libraries are echoing, cobweb-choked and dark, home to a few ancient custodians and ageing Scribe-priests.

Agrial III

2020-03-26T09:38:16Z

Jc:

[[File:Shrine World banner.jpg|Imperial World]]

{| class="wikitable" style="float:right; margin-left: 10px;"
|-
! Name !! Agrial III
|-
| style="text-align:center" colspan=2 | [[file:Agrial III.png|200px|Agrial III]]
|-
| '''Sub-Sector''' || Tertius
|-
| '''Type''' || Shrine World
|-
| '''Population''' || 1.1 million
|-
| '''Climate''' || Sub-tropical
|-
| '''Status''' || Imperial
|}

''“Dull. Dull, dull, dull. I can’t imagine spending your whole miserable life here; frankly I’d rather do something appalling like join the Guard.” – Travel Diary of Lucius di Firro, 579.M41''

=== About Agrial III ===

An ancient shrine world covered in dusty sepulchres and echoing chapels, Agrial III is a seldom-mentioned backwater planet that contains possibly one of the largest libraries in the entire Segmentum. Centuries ago Agrial was a powerful and populous shrine world with significant influence in the politics of the Prosperitas Sector. Located on a primary trade route through the subsector, countless traders and pilgrims stopped off at Agrial every year, either to refuel and resupply before moving on or to worship at the numerous temples.

It was not just its holy shrines which drew pilgrims, however. Agrial was well known for the vast libraries that each temple-city maintained, together forming one of the largest and most comprehensive collections of knowledge in the Sector.

Collecting information on countless subjects and in endless formats, the libraries of Agrial attracted countless scholars and sages, and even members of the holy Inquisition, all of whom came to study the vast catalogue of information. All were welcome to read freely of the books, tomes, scrolls and hololiths, and to spend as much time doing so as they desired; all that the Scribe-Priests asked was a small donation to the upkeep of the libraries and also a donation of knowledge to the library itself. Each visitor was asked to write down something –whether a short titbit of information or an entire treatise was up to the visitor- and add it to the archives of Agrial.

Trade routes are known to change however, and when they did, they brought about the end of the importance of Agrial. Without the income brought by the traders the shrine world faded into obscurity; the once-thronging streets are now quiet and the holy sepulchres and reliquaries dusty and often neglected. A few pilgrims and knowledge-seekers still visit Agrial, but now the libraries are echoing, cobweb-choked and dark, home to a few ancient custodians and ageing Scribe-priests.

Lerwick

2020-03-26T09:36:53Z

Jc:

[[File:Lerwick banner.jpg|Lerwick]]

{| class="wikitable" style="float:right; margin-left: 10px;"
|-
! Name !! Lerwick
|-
| style="text-align:center" colspan=2 | [[file:Lerwick.png|200px|Lerwick]]
|-
| '''Sub-Sector''' || Secundus
|-
| '''Type''' || Civilised World
|-
| '''Population''' || 1.5 billion
|-
| '''Climate''' || Sub-arctic
|-
| '''Status''' || Imperial
|}

''“A rugged and vast beauty from orbit. C. wanted to go iceberg-diving – a popular local pastime, supposedly – with young N. and some of his more excitable colleagues. I left them to their adventures and sampled the dubious delights of the capital; a built-from-template city indistinguishable from a thousand others in the Sector. I wish I could have seen the ruins of Summerhome, but they are sadly off-limits by Ecclesiarchy decree…” – Travel diary of Lucius di Firro, 581.M41''

=== About Lerwick ===

An icy and storm-tossed world, with a pockmarking of habitable islands set in an arctic sea, Lerwick is home to a hardy population who took to Imperial occupation with much the same stoic, stubborn approach they have always faced icebergs, hurricanes and other natural disasters. Pacified and brought under Imperial control during the last days of [[Warmaster Ulian|Warmaster Ulian’s]] sweep across the Rimwards reaches of [[Subsector Secundus]], the planet is hostile to the unprepared and unable to support a much larger population without substantial climate-defended structures. Its strategic location at the heart of Warp routes from the Rimwards marches back into the well-defended heartland of [[Subsector Primus]], however, has made it a critical node in the [[Crusade]] fleet’s lines of communication, and it is fiercely defended by an interlocking fortress of orbital stations and void patrols.

The planetary capital, Farile, is a new city, prefabricated in orbit and constructed almost overnight by teams of Mechanicus-sponsored servitor and local serf workers to create an administrative and legal hub. It replaces the old heartland city of Summerhome, which was razed to the waterline in 321.M41 by orbital bombardment after the local population met a demand for their surrender and capitulation with insolent silence. The local narrative – that the Queen of Summerhome attempted again and again to open communications with the invaders, but possessed no communications technology capable of breaking through the notoriously difficult atmospheric storms – is denounced as heresy by the planetary government.

When Imperial forces began their ground campaign on Lerwick, they discovered an amphibious, approximately humanoid native species superficially resembling a bipedal seal present in large numbers on the coastlines of the habitable islands. Initial reports stated that they talked in human voices, and sang strange songs at night, luring unwary Guard to their doom on the treacherous rocks. Controversy erupted over the creatures, called “selkies” by the native population and the subject of innumerable myths and superstitions; the [[Ecclesiarchy]] swiftly denounced them as [[mutant|abhumans]] and [[mutant|mutants]], with enthusiastic support from the Monodominant faction of the subsector’s Inquisition, and set about a holy purge supported by the [[Frateris Militia]]. The Magos Biologos of the [[Adeptus Mechanicus]] who accompanied the initial expedition, however, was unconvinced, and after conducting extensive tests declared that the “selkies” – classified Phoca Loquens – were no more than superficially intelligent but non-sentient animals, with an imitative capacity similar to the parrot or void-monkey. The purge was halted, though colonial families still view Phoca Loquens with superstitious dread, and their meat and skins fetch a high price across the subsector.

Agrial III

2020-03-26T09:35:23Z

Jc: Created page with "Imperial World {| class="wikitable" style="float:right; margin-left: 10px;" |- ! Name !! Agrial III |- | style="text-align:center" colspan=2..."

[[File:Shrine World banner.jpg|Imperial World]]

{| class="wikitable" style="float:right; margin-left: 10px;"
|-
! Name !! Agrial III
|-
| style="text-align:center" colspan=2 | [[file:Agrial III.png|200px|Agrial III]]
|-
| '''Sub-Sector''' || Secundus
|-
| '''Type''' || Shrine World
|-
| '''Population''' || 1.1 million
|-
| '''Climate''' || Sub-tropical
|-
| '''Status''' || Imperial
|}

''“Dull. Dull, dull, dull. I can’t imagine spending your whole miserable life here; frankly I’d rather do something appalling like join the Guard.” – Travel Diary of Lucius di Firro, 579.M41''

=== About Agrial III ===

An ancient shrine world covered in dusty sepulchres and echoing chapels, Agrial III is a seldom-mentioned backwater planet that contains possibly one of the largest libraries in the entire Segmentum. Centuries ago Agrial was a powerful and populous shrine world with significant influence in the politics of the Prosperitas Sector. Located on a primary trade route through the subsector, countless traders and pilgrims stopped off at Agrial every year, either to refuel and resupply before moving on or to worship at the numerous temples.

It was not just its holy shrines which drew pilgrims, however. Agrial was well known for the vast libraries that each temple-city maintained, together forming one of the largest and most comprehensive collections of knowledge in the Sector.

Collecting information on countless subjects and in endless formats, the libraries of Agrial attracted countless scholars and sages, and even members of the holy Inquisition, all of whom came to study the vast catalogue of information. All were welcome to read freely of the books, tomes, scrolls and hololiths, and to spend as much time doing so as they desired; all that the Scribe-Priests asked was a small donation to the upkeep of the libraries and also a donation of knowledge to the library itself. Each visitor was asked to write down something –whether a short titbit of information or an entire treatise was up to the visitor- and add it to the archives of Agrial.

Trade routes are known to change however, and when they did, they brought about the end of the importance of Agrial. Without the income brought by the traders the shrine world faded into obscurity; the once-thronging streets are now quiet and the holy sepulchres and reliquaries dusty and often neglected. A few pilgrims and knowledge-seekers still visit Agrial, but now the libraries are echoing, cobweb-choked and dark, home to a few ancient custodians and ageing Scribe-priests.

Mawson’s Wake

2020-03-26T09:29:37Z

Jc: Created page with "{| class="wikitable" style="float:right; margin-left: 10px;" |- ! Name !! Mawson’s Wake |- | style="text-align:center" colspan=2 | file:Mawson's Wake.png|200px|Mawson’s..."

{| class="wikitable" style="float:right; margin-left: 10px;"
|-
! Name !! Mawson’s Wake
|-
| style="text-align:center" colspan=2 | [[file:Mawson's Wake.png|200px|Mawson’s Wake]]
|-
| '''Sub-Sector''' || Secundus
|-
| '''Type''' || Frontier World
|-
| '''Population''' || approx. 5 billion
|-
| '''Climate''' || Semi-arid, partial terraforming
|-
| '''Status''' || Imperial (nominal)
|}

''“A charming little industrial backwater. My father’s advice was quite correct – I found that one truly can source nearly anything made by human hands here, if one has the correct introductions and ready Thrones to burn. Food indifferent, locals discourteous, sunsets beautiful.” – Travel Diary of Lucius di Firro, 578.M41''

=== About Mawson’s Wake ===

Named for a long-forgotten pioneer in the early days of colonisation, Mawson’s Wake is a dry, dusty and tumultuous planet. Its early colonists were intended for another world, but disembarked early after sabotage to their ships’ systems. Distress calls went unanswered as the settlers fought to tame arid wastelands with unsuited equipment; the survivors struggled through generations of thirst and desperation to forge a culture of dedicated, survivalist independence. They uncovered the remains of an ancient manufactorum complex which contained copies of the patterns and equipment necessary to construct, fuel and arm Tauros rapid assault vehicles. Over decades they established sufficient patchy mineworks to begin producing the patterns and spread out into a network of small, poverty-wracked townships which persist to this day.

When the intended settlers arrived with terraforming equipment and the strong arm of government, the established colonists reacted poorly. The Guard were sent in, and new Mechanicus forces seized control of the manufactories to keep their brethren – felt to have ‘gone native’ – in check, with violent purges of tech-heretics from among the populace following. Hives were constructed for the newcomers as the revolt was brought to heel, and terraforming began.

Civil disruption, minor riots, high crime and ongoing low-level hostility dogged the planetary governor’s projects. Eventually the economic situation deteriorated such that he could only fulfil the world’s tithe by providing soldiers, and so a Tauros-mounted guard regiment – Mawson’s First Rapid Reconnaissance – were raised, by ruthless draft; trained, with the brutality necessary to force the deeply anti-authoritarian conscripts into submission; and shipped offworld. Months later, the sector high command sent hostile investigators to discover why this poorly-regarded planet’s promised regiment had not arrived: Mawson’s First had been lost in the warp.

The news provoked an outburst of violent rioting more severe than even the initial revolt against the colonists. The sectoral investigators were slain, and a full-scale rebellion ensued. The planetary governor suppressed it with overwhelming force, but the sector withdraw all support for the planet’s ongoing development in retaliation. Terraforming was halted along with all other major works, leaving only fragmentary areas fully habitable. Within a century the besieged hives were mostly abandoned for the resilient settlements, with only government forces still holding out within.

Mawson’s Wake now scrapes out an existence largely based around its vehicle construction capacity, farmed out to whichever traders – Rogue or scheduled – can arrive with ready Thrones and the raw materials for their order. Between such flurries of production, small-time blast-miners broker their materials to the Mechanicus, enabling the techpriests to produce enough Tauri to mostly offset the tithe; the planetary governor fulfils the rest with conscription at gunpoint, rounding up entire towns for the Guard. Each major recruitment drive or raising of a regiment spikes hostilities and risks revolt; another has recently erupted after the raising of Mawson’s Fourth began two years ago. Fighting has thus far been sporadic as the planetary governor’s forces bunker down. She has repeatedly cried out for support from the Crusade, the sector government or her trading partners. Rumour has it she is becoming desperate.

Astronavigational Information

2020-03-26T09:27:19Z

Jc:

Like much of the galactic void, the vast majority of the Prosperitas Sector consists of empty space and dull, lifeless rocks holding little interest to the Imperium. The sheer size of an Imperial Sector, however, means that despite this it is still home to countless billions flung across a myriad of planets, moons, asteroids, ships and space stations. These are spread out over an unimaginably large expanse, with particlar worlds or regions playing host to a dversity of different activities - sanctioned or not.

Traversing Imperial space is not a trivial task, requiring enormous amounts of time in realspace under conventional power, or the assistance of a Navigator to travel through the Warp - with all of the risks that that entails.

=== '''The Subsectors''' ===

The sector is divided into four subsectors: Primus, Secundus, Tertius and Tenebris.

'''Subsector Primus''': home to the sector's capital, Duroverum, which acts as the seat of the Sector Governor, and has born the least of the brunt of Archenemy incursions into Imperial Space. [blah blah more info please]

'''Subsector Secundus''': [blah blah]

'''Subsector Tertius''': [blah blah blah]

'''Subsector Tenebris''': formerly known as Subsector Quartus, the subsector was ravaged by an event known as the Lash of the Eye in 304.M41. [blah blah blah blah]

=== '''Regions of the Sector''' ===

Aside from the subsector divisions, there are specific areas of the sector that are notable for one reason or another.

'''The Rimward Marches''': a vast region of the Prosperitas Sector not yet conquered by Imperial Forces. Beyond it lies the Lightless Gulf, where there are few stars for a considerable stretch of space. The region is a haven of scum and villainy: many remnant forces of the Regency retreated here, and it is the location of many untamed worlds including the suspected homeworld of the parasitic xenos known as the Thri'qun.

'''The Nemean Gulf''': along the spinward edge of the Prosperitas Sector lies a vast region of unexplored space known as the Nemean Gulf. This region stretches for lightyears of uncharted void encompassing an area wide enough to contain several sectors, before eventually at the far side meeting the trailing edge of the Piscina Sector. Encompassing a vast number of worlds, from the Red Worldz of the Orks to the Graveyard at the Rimward edge where the Shavasti nomads are often found, the Gulf remains the most untouched region of the Sector.

'''The Tenebris Arm''': part of a massive Warp rift and permanent Warp Storm nearly twenty thousand light years across known as the Eye of Terror, or Ocularis Terribus, the Prosperitas Sector orbits this storm impaled upon a reaching tendril, known as the Tenebris Arm, that spears into the eponymously named Subsector Tenebris and claims it with madness.

'''The Ættin Heima''': a vast collection of worlds within the edge of the roiling warp-storm known as the Eye of Terror. Once a part of Subsector Tertius, they were conquered by tribes from the Eye. Given their immersion within the edge of the storm, dealing with this threat presents a serious challenge for the Imperium.

'''The Môr Draenog''': [blah blah description here]

'''The Shard Reef''': [blah blah description here]

'''22-32-Azhdahā''': [blah blah description here]

=== '''Trade Routes''' ===

The Trade Routes of the sector present vital lifelines for citizens and resources to track their way through the perils of the sector. Considered of the utmost importance, the Imperial Navy ensures that they remain open at all costs.

'''The Sol-Prosperitas Passage''': the route blazed by Warmaster Durovera I when she first founded the Prosperitas Sector, the Sol-Prosperitas Passage remains vital for the sector's survival. The Warp tides are treacherous, but offer an unrivalled fast passage from the Prosperitas Sector through to the upper reaches of the trade-lanes into the Segmentum Solar and Sol itself.

'''The Cadian Corridor''': forged by House Majid, the Cadian Corridor is a narrow passage of calm space that runs perilously close to the edge of the Eye and is heavily ravaged by pirates and raiders. Vital to the sector's economy, the corridor allows Prosperitas to feed the hungry fortresses of the Cadian Sector.

'''The Iron Stair''': winding upwards from the galactic plane from the Forges of Castellum and Naximus Prime, the Iron Stair was once a rich trade route. With the Ork devastation of Persephon, the death of Caudica Secundus and Rebellion on Mawson's Wake, these have left the Rimward arm of this trade route quite poorly used, and many of the worlds along its path neglected.

'''The Prosperitas Trade Spine''': named the 'Spine' for its vital role in supplying the majority of the major worlds of the Prosperitas Sector not already serviced by the Sol-Prosperitas Passage, the Trade Spine is currently under the control of House Di Firro who use it to support their House expeditions into the Rimward Marches.

=== '''Types of World''' ===

There is a large number of different kinds of world to be found within the sector.

For a detailed description of these, please go the [[Types of World]] page which explains them in more detail. Some of these are not currently found in Prosperitas.

Here is a brief rundown:

'''Agri-World''': dedicated to crop and livestock production, primarily as a food source.

'''Armoury World''': directly controlled by the Departmento Munitorum for the storage of armaments.

'''Cemetary World''': given over to caring for the remains of the Imperial dead.

'''Civilised World''': not dedicated to any specific purpose, though loyal to the Imperium.

'''Dead World''': devoid of an ecosystem, atmosphere or native life.

'''Death World''': inhospitable to human life due to its environment or biosphere.

'''Feral World''': home to hunter gatherer, early agricultural or nomadic societies, under minimal influence from the Imperium.

'''Feudal World''': home to pre-industrial societies, under little influence from the Imperium.

'''Forge World''': directly controlled by the Adeptus Mechanicus for machine manufacture.

'''Fortress World''': a bastion in the defence of the Imperium against outside threats.

'''Frontier World''': at the fringes of the Imperium, and usually lacking an effective planetary government.

'''Garden World''': dedicated to being a cultured retreat for the Imperial nobility (and others who can afford to pay).

'''Hive World''': densely populated with hive cities, and home to the Imperium's workforce.

'''Industrial World''': dedicated to heavy industry or resource extraction.

'''Knight World''': home to Imperial Knights, and in the demesne of either the Imperium or the Adeptus Mechanicus.

'''Non-Compliant World''': not necessarily actively hostile, but independent of the Imperium's influence.

'''Penal World''': a prison planet, with a population primarily consisting of criminals.

'''Quarantined World''': off-limits to contact with Imperial citizens.

'''Shrine World''': dedicated to the Imperial Cult, frequently under the direct control of the Ecclesiarchy.

'''Space Marine Chapter Homeworld''': directly controlled by a chapter of the Adeptus Astartes for use as a base.

'''War World''': currently an active warzone.

There are also a variety of space stations, battlegroups and independent vessels throughout the sector that serve as permanent homes to millions of citizens - of varying levels of loyalty to the Imperium.

=== '''Worlds of the Prosperitas Sector''' ===

==== Subsector Primus ====

'''[[Asteroid 24334-1]]''': '''Satellite Colony'''. A luxurious asteroid colony known to its residents at '''Cyprus Creek''', it is the seat of the Chartist House Globex.

'''[[Carthusia]]''': '''Civilised World'''. A wet, humid planet with a high water table, it is a prosperous Imperial world favoured as a tourist destination by the wealthy of Subsector Primus.

'''[[Castellum]]''': '''Forge World'''. Rival to Ferrareus, it is the youngest of the Forge Worlds, having only been founded in mid-M.41. Although not as industrialised as other Forges, it is better known for the ancient pre-Imperial ruins found in its snow-capped mountain regions.

'''[[Duroverum]]''': '''Hive World'''. Designated as the Capital of the Prosperitas Sector, it is the seat of Imperial Governance. Though rule of the sector is shared with the military leadership of the Office of the Warmaster – it is Duroverum where the Sector Governor reigns.

'''[[Ferraeus]]''': '''Forge World'''. Taken from Hereteks early in the Prosperitas Crusade, it is the victim of millennia of pollution that has made the air toxic and forced its inhabitants to live their lives in environment suits.

'''[[Gaudium]]''': '''Hive World'''. Once a thriving and beautiful Shrine World, it is now an overpopulated and sprawling mass of hive cities spreading across a barren and treacherous coastline.

'''[[Korimesta]]''': '''Hive World'''. One of the oldest planets in the sector, it was once a hub of trade. Now it is an idol of fallen splendour. The world’s atmosphere, polluted by industry, has forced its inhabitants into huge hive cities built around mountains.

'''[[Kydos]]''': '''Agri-World'''. A small, dense world covered in phenomenally deep planetary oceans, which support a vast range of flora and fauna.

'''[[Letifer Secundus]]''': '''Hive World'''. A poisonous wasteland dotted with atmo-sealed hives, it was once a refugee colony. In recent years it has become the home of the heart of the sector’s narcotics industry.

'''[[Mazar-63]]''': '''Satellite Colony'''. A tunnel-honeycombed, hollow moon around a sterile planet, it is the seat of Noble House Roshan-Fikran.

'''[[Merewald]]''': '''Feudal World'''. A world of few natural threats and a generally warm, equable climate suitable for cultivation. Its population is spread widely, with few towns and no cities as such: most of the inhabitants are peasants, ruled from the castles and palaces of the Noble Houses.

'''[[Midsummer]]''': '''Agri-World.''' '''No description yet.'''

'''[[Monacus]]''': '''Hive World'''. A rich and crowded world, serving as a popular tourist destination for the wealthy youth of Subsector Primus due to its uphive clubs catering to pleasures of all kinds.

'''[[Nivalis]]''': '''Non-Compliant Shrine World'''. Previously a pristine world, its mountains carved with the likenesses of Heroes of the Imperium, its uncountable temples and shrines have been wrecked by the bombardment of the Archenemy against the fanatics of the now-excommunicated Cardinal-Emissarius Grulge who shelter there.

'''[[Persephon IV]]''': '''War World'''. Having born the brunt of the savage greenskins of Waagh!! Gazbag since 531.M41, much of its original glory has been ravaged by the Orks. Its people fight an endless war in order to ensure that the greenskin menace is contained there.

'''[[Strayvia]]''': '''Dead World'''. A former agri-world, it was devastated by Exterminatus virus-bombs in 577.M41, leaving the Strayvian Regiments homeless and embittered.

'''[[St Sebastian’s Redoubt]]''': '''Space Station'''. Once home to a heretic order, the station was cleansed by the Ministorum and turned into a holy place of education. The gothic spires of this asteroid fortress house both a Schola Progenium and a Ministorum Seminary, but still hide many secrets.

==== Subsector Secundus ====

'''[[Caracas]]''': '''Feral World'''. A world where the majority of the population are nomadic tribespeople, it is covered mostly in dense forest in the equatorial and tropical regions, with tundra towards the poles. It is valued solely for its hardy human population.

'''[[Caudica Secundus]]''': '''Dead World'''. A former hive world, it originally prospered as a profitable mining world. Its biosphere was eradicated due to Exterminatus in late 582.M41, though some of the population was evacuated as the Caudican Diaspora.

'''[[Everholt]]''': '''Quarantined World'''. A heavily forested former agri-world known for its lumber exports, it rose up against the Imperium in 586.M41. This led to the planet's interdiction and all approaching ships are turned away by the Gothic-class ''Righteous Indignation''.

'''[[Finisterra]]''': '''Non-Compliant World.''' A non-Imperial world beyond the boundaries of Imperial Space, it is the site of a humiliating defeat for the Imperium in 592.M41. The local human population, the 'Esa', successfully drove off an Imperial Expeditionary Force despite being technologically inferior to the Imperium, and has so far resisted conquest. It has been earmarked for future military operations.

'''[[Helaerus III]]''': '''Hive World'''. A hellish, temperate death world forest covers the surface of the planet, though the population live inside several dozen hives.

'''[[Henlock]]''': '''War World'''. Currently held by the forces of the Archenemy, it was formerly an Adeptus Mechanicus world, valued for its Titan training grounds and ancient Heresy-era Titan Graveyard. When Archenemy forces took the world in 538.M41, a desperate counter-attack by the Imperium led to a disaster that cost the life of the Warmaster of the Prosperitas Crusade.

'''[[Kirkcud III]]''': '''Civilised World'''. A wild and newly-developed haven, it is heavily wooded and perfect for settlement, but dogged by rumblings of non-compliance from a stubborn local population.

'''[[Lerwick]]''': '''Civilised World'''. A desolate and arctic oceanic planet, it is heavily defended from orbit. It lies at a strategically vital location on the Rimward edge of the Trade Spine.

'''[[Macharion CDXI]]''': '''Frontier World'''. The sector’s most recent colony, it is a dry and dusty world in the early stages of Imperial colonisation that so far has shown promise.

'''[[Mawson’s Wake]]''': '''Partially Non-Compliant Frontier World'''. At the Rimward edge of the sector, and a patchily-inhabited, struggling frontier planet with a history of revolt. Largely desertified and scarred by open-cast mining, the Wake ekes out an existence dependent on an ancient vehicle manufactorum, and pays its tithe with conscripts from among the resentful populace.

'''[[Olethros Secunda]]''': '''Partially Non-Compliant Civilised World'''. A third generation colony world, the planet was settled with the help of a substantial grant of sacred technology from the Adeptus Mechanicus of Naximus Prime. Controversially, it still pays tithes to the Mechanicum of Naximus in recognition of this bond in lieu of Imperial taxation, and considers its duty to the Imperium to be in a distant second place.

'''[[Shadowglow]]''': '''Death World'''. Shrouded in near-permanent darkness by a complex lunar cycle, it is a freezing, inhospitable desert world. The planet is home to a race of abhumans known as 'Raivans', whose fanatical loyalty to the Imperial Cult, combined with superior strength and speed, make the world a fertile recruiting ground for the Crusade.

==== Subsector Tertius ====

'''[[Agrial III]]''': '''Shrine World'''. An ancient world covered in dusty sepulchres and echoing chapels, it is a seldom-mentioned backwater planet that contains what is possibly one of the largest libraries in all of Segmentum Obscurus.

'''[[Amenophis IV]]''': '''Hive World'''. An old, desert planet on the Tenebris border, with a series of industrial hive cities and some impressive ruins.

'''[[Bachian IV]]''': '''Industrial World'''. A mining outpost with a highly toxic atmosphere, controlled by House Vilas-Lobo.

'''[[Burisalis Prime]]''': '''Civilised World'''. At a comfortable distance from a stable star, it is a temperate world of gentle, sweeping plains. It is used primarily by the sector’s Imperial Guard as a training ground for armoured and artillery regiments.

'''[[Butonia]]''': '''Feudal World'''. Conquered for its carbon-3 deposits, the majority of the planet is a feudal, low-advancement society, though it's capital and Noble Houses are reaching Imperial-levels of technology thanks to the world's mining efforts. Serf rebellions in 537.M41, under the guidance of a supposed Living Saint, have disrupted supplies.

'''[[Kuatis]]''': '''Industrial World'''. Focused on shipbuilding, and dominated by guilds and the Imperial Navy, it is controlled as a naval fiefdom. Smog and near-constant sheeting rain obscure starlight, while tunnels run across the surface between settlements to protect those that can afford to pass through them from the miserable environment.

'''[[Lubyanka]]''': '''Penal World'''. The surface is a frozen wasteland, peppered with valuable meteor strikes. Beneath, there is a vast network of tunnels occupied by convicts, their jailers and daredevil Noble scions competing to make their fortunes.

'''[[Morghull]]''': '''Feral World'''. A heavily-forested world at the edge of the subsector. The natives consist of scattered bands of iron-age nomads who roam the endless forests, following herds of local herbivores. Known for their hardy physiques and physical prowess, Morghullites are dour, aggressive and brave, but also highly superstitious and mistrustful of outsiders.

'''[[Vannin]]''': '''Death World'''. Made up of impenetrable jungle, it is part of the holdings of House Vilas-Lobo, albeit only in a technical sense: even to a house accustomed to the exploration of any world, no matter how hostile, there is little here to interest them. It presents no commercial use, nor is it interesting to scholars, and as such it is omitted from many maps of the House's holdings and they are responsible for no tithe from it.

==== Subsector Tenebris ====

'''[[Anaximund Alpha]]''': '''Non-Compliant Knight World'''. The only known Knight World of the sector, its sole duty is to feed the worker population of Naximus Prime. Its rulers, House Qureshi, have ridden their war engines to the defence of the Mechanicus and the Imperium on many occasions, though only ever with the blessings of its Forge World patron.

'''[[Kelper Prime]]''': '''Fortress World'''. A heavily fortified Fortress World on the Tenebris border, Kelper Prime controls one of the main Warp routes into Subsector Tertius.

'''[[Naximus Prime]]''': '''Non-Compliant Forge World'''. Rediscovered in 401.M41, it is not welcoming to the Imperium. Rigidly independent, its Forges accept Imperial work-orders, but do so at their own discretion. The three Temple-Moons of the planet serve as heavily-armed defences to the system.

'''[[Polarnus Station]]''': '''Space Station'''. An orbital habitat-cum-shipyard, it is a giant asteroid hollowed into a multitude of labyrinthine tunnels. Once an ancient trade hub, it now acts as the headquarters for the front-line deployment of Crusade High Command, and is constantly bustling with the business of readying ships and soldiers for war.

'''[[Vallum]]''': '''Fortress World'''. On the far Coreward-Spinward corner of the subsector, the it stands as the lonely guardian of the final approach to the area around Polarnus Station.

Macharion CDXI

2020-03-26T09:22:33Z

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{| class="wikitable" style="float:right; margin-left: 10px;"
|-
! Name !! Macharion CDXI
|-
| style="text-align:center" colspan=2 | [[file:Macharion CDXI.png|200px|Macharion CDXI]]
|-
| '''Sub-Sector''' || Secundus
|-
| '''Type''' || Frontier World
|-
| '''Population''' || 3 million
|-
| '''Climate''' || Warm Temperate
|-
| '''Status''' || Imperial
|}

=== About Macharion CDXI ===

Orbiting a small brown dwarf in the Rimward Marches, Macharion is the youngest Imperial colony in the Prosperitas Sector. The earliest records of Durovera‘s Crusade mark the planet as uninhabited but viable, with a climate on the warmer side of temperate. The first application for colonisation was submitted to the Administratum in 205.M41, duly interrogated and processed, returned with minor corrections in 321.M41, resubmitted immediately with minor amendments to subclauses, punctuation and righteous capitalisation reviewed, and finally returned with approval in 550.M41. Preparations for colonisation began immediately. A call for volunteers went out across the loyal planets of Subsector Secundus, and millions of pious citizens answered the cry.

The Ecclesiarchy bolstered their recruiting efforts with tales of the victories of the Lord Solar Macharius, whose Crusade and heroic death in 400.M41 were received as fresh news within living memory in the Prosperitas Sector. Inspired by his stirring tale, the colonists voted unanimously to name their new home after the Saint. Unusually, its designation CDXI refers to its place in the list of hundreds of similarly-named worlds across the Segmentum Pacificus, rather than its position in solar orbit – it is in fact the fifth planet from its star, and Administratum clerks are in a constant vicious and bitter stalemate over astrogation charts they maintain should read Macharion V.

Nearly six million Imperial citizens survived the Warp transit, and first footfall was made in 581.M41. Half of this number are already on the planet, living in a mixture of prefabricated and scratch-build accommodation on the temperate and verdant northern polar cap. The remaining half remain in cryosleep in orbiting ark shell pods, until their hardier comrades complete first stage terraforming. At current schedules, the next ten shifts of relief colonists should be woken at six-year intervals, with full population resident on the surface and a stable third generation of Macharian natives reaching working age by 641.M41. The Macharian 1st Light Infantry Regiment is scheduled for First Founding in 593.M41, and should send its first detachment to join the Crusade in the mid-590s.

The capital, named Sejanus after Macharius‘ chief general and lifelong companion, is a thriving and vibrant frontier town in a constant fever of expansion. The sounds of hammering and drilling, and unceasing hymns to the Machine-Spirits of the fabricator engines building new roads and pipelines, fill the air day and night. The rough and dusty city changes so often it is widely considered unmappable; the unquestioned centre, however, is certainly Founders’ Square, supposed (apocryphally) to be centred on the exact spot on the planet where the first colonist’s boot hit Macharian dirt. The place is marked with a great statue of the planet’s patron saints, standing together and smiling towards the distant horizon. The image depicts both in full armour blazoned with the Solar sunburst and Aquila, Saint Sejanus holding Saint Macharius‘ helmet in one hand, his other hand tangled affectionately in his General’s hair.

The central continental belt is currently highly inhospitable, and too hot and dry to sustain permanent settlements. However, adventurous young colonists regularly mount expeditions in sealed rover vessels into the interior deserts to conduct reconnaissance, take scientific readings to confirm the progress of terraforming, or simply flee their elders and betters for a week or two. The southern polar cap is almost completely unexplored; auspex surveys from void orbit suggest a permissible climate similar to that of the northern cap, but vast fog banks and electromagnetic interference from an unknown source (some speculate rare mineral deposits in the nearby oceans) have prevented any more in-depth surveys.

Smaller settlements some fifty miles south and east of Sejanus, with the current proposed names of Lysander and Peritas, are mapped and the land cleared; construction work is scheduled to begin in late 591.M41. Peritas is a coastal city with a good command of a fertile river delta and will eventually act as the planet’s primary shuttle port, while Lysander is high up on a rocky plateau among the mountains. The terrain is too steep for farming, but the tech-augurs’ haruspex readings suggest that the nearby cliffs are highly likely to contain substantial iron and cobalt deposits.

The planet’s newly-minted Governor is Halina Chenau, an elderly but plasteel-tough woman originally from Helaerus. After a distinguished career in the Helaerus Reconnaissance Regiment, Chenau was awarded retirement with full honours and the Governorship in lieu of higher command – some mutter that this was a ploy to get her out of Crusade High Command and far away from her political rivals, and point to her habit of speaking uncomfortable truths loudly and repeatedly where higher authority can hear them. She rules Macharion with an approach to justice that her adoring colonists characterise as tough, just and fair in the finest traditions of the Imperium. She has no genetic heirs and has not yet seen fit to adopt any colonist as her successor. When questioned on the matter by Subsector news reporters, she fondly referred to her colonist charges as “a bunch of wastrels”, “lizards” and “get out of my office, I have an autocannon”.

The first planet-born Macharians are still children, but there are many youths born during the colonists’ long warp transit who proudly consider themselves Macharian. There is a fashion among Macharian parents to name their children after figures from the legends of the Lord Solar and in the fashion of the homeworlds of his bosom companions. Names such as Philip, Olympias, Aegis, Anaxamander, Ariadne, Nike and Hippolyta are common among the younger generation of colonists, and some families have even rejected their former surnames in lieu of variants on their patron saints’ names to show their loyalty to their new homeworld.

Monacus

2020-03-25T23:09:25Z

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[[File:Monacus banner.jpg|Monacus]]

{| class="wikitable" style="float:right; margin-left: 10px;"
|-
! Name !! Monacus
|-
| style="text-align:center" colspan=2 | [[file:Monacus.png|200px|Monacus]]
|-
| '''Sub-Sector''' || Primus
|-
| '''Type''' || Hive World
|-
| '''Population''' || 20 billion
|-
| '''Climate''' || Artificial (Hives), otherwise Toxic
|-
| '''Status''' || Imperial
|}

''“For any young noble of means and taste, there is simply nothing to compare to the delights of the Hyacinth Club. Of course, a true connoisseur will put themself in the ring once or twice, and not be limited to merely frittering thousands of Thrones in idle bets on the luck and skill of a favourite champion….” Travel Diary of Lucius di Firro, 549.M41''

=== About Monacus ===

Monacus is a crowded, dirty and bustling planet at the crossroads of several Subsector shipping lanes. Originally a manufactorum world, with a proportion of its income still reliant on heavy industry from the midhive Factorum complexes, Monacus has grown in popularity as a weekend getaway for the idle youth of a hundred minor Houses based in and around the Sector capital Duroverum – a short and convenient hop away by warp-cutter.

The grand gilt spires – once visible from low orbit, but now hidden by the ash-storms which plague the lower atmosphere – mark the upper hives of Monacus as a place of wealth and pleasure. The crowded and squalid underhives are hidden beneath a veneer of luxury and indulgence, with every civilised pleasure and taste – and some substantially less civilised – catered for on the upper levels. The popular saying is that “only a corpse is bored on Monacus” – and for those with the Thrones to sustain the heady lifestyle, that holds true.

While the drinking-houses, pleasure-dens, menageries and artistic entertainments of Monacus are rightly famous across the sub-sector, it is the planet’s casinos and private gambling houses which draw the noble youth in their droves. Every young socialite of any standing boasts membership of one of the exclusive uphive “clubs” at the peaks of Monacus’ glittering spires; these elaborate complexes are cities in miniature, with the finest boasting gymnasia, dining-houses, state-of-the-art medical facilities and armies of servants attending to the every whim of the pampered guests. Famous examples include the Adelphi Club, whose dice and card tables impose elaborate paired forfeits for the partners of unlucky gamblers; the Hyacinth Club, where feats of athletic and duelling prowess attract astronomical wagers from baying participants, and where the occasional foolhardy noble can be coaxed into the gladiatorial ring in person; and the Luxovius Club, a rarefied and exclusive venue rumoured to be sponsored by House Roshan-Fikran, where the cool trickle of water-gardens and scent of rare blooms accompany savage and punishingly intellectual challenges of probability and philosophy.

The planetary government is under the control of the Maldigri-Duroveras, a cadet branch of House Durovera. The current governor, Scion-Governor Amari Maldigri-Durovera, is rumoured to have ambitions towards an Imperial Charter and full Noble status for their House. Governor Amari is viewed with a mixture of resentment and intense pride by their subjects; ever since they gained the planetary throne in a freak baccarat accident which killed both their mother and all eligible sibling rivals, they have relentlessly pursued an agenda which puts Monacus first, even at the cost of endangering centuries-old treaties.

The most recent and visible manifestation of Amari’s agenda is in the arming of the Spire Guard. The Guard, an ancient and proud institution marked by their distinctive red military coats and jodhpurs, have been seen as a ceremonial institution for centuries, more suitable for parading outside palaces and providing honour guards than in keeping order. Recently, however, the Governor’s decree has seen them armed with discreet and ornamental but powerful stub pistols – there are rumours that the weapons were a gift from House Sarandeen. Most young noble tourists, accustomed to seeing the Spire Guard as no more than glorified servants who can occasionally be called upon to beat an uppity Midhiver out of one’s way in the street, laugh off the change as irrelevant. Others – particularly the locals – are not so sure.

Outside the claustrophobic luxury and cramped lower levels, the surface of Monacus is deeply inhospitable, though not universally lethal. Poisoned by years of industrial waste from factorum outlets, the atmosphere is technically breathable, but the density of ash so high and the violent dust-storms so frequent that survival without a respirator and protective clothing is usually measured in minutes or hours. There are persistent rumours of an atmospheric anomaly on the planet’s temperate northern polar cap which has generated a “bubble valley”, still fertile and free from the cloying ash; locals claim that great secrets from long before Durovera’s Crusade are hidden here. Anyone who has conducted even a basic atmospheric survey, however, will laugh at the suggestion that the surface of Monacus is anything but barren and lifeless, and dismiss the local superstition as ridiculous.

Merewald

2020-03-25T23:05:17Z

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[[File:Feudal World banner.jpg|Merewald]]

{| class="wikitable" style="float:right; margin-left: 10px;"
|-
! Name !! Merewald
|-
| style="text-align:center" colspan=2 | [[file:Merewald.png|200px|Merewald]]
|-
| '''Sub-Sector''' || Primus
|-
| '''Type''' || Feudal World
|-
| '''Population''' || 800 million
|-
| '''Climate''' || Temperate
|-
| '''Status''' || Imperial
|}

''“Took the new aide for a brief jolly. The local aristocracy have a truly charming set of quaint and archaic customs; we were treated to the sight of an honour duel fought with solid-slug flintlocks over a matter of dinner etiquette. Delightful view from the scarp above the western Visick estates.” – Travel Diary of Lucius di Firro, 576.M41''

=== About Merewald ===

Merewald is a world of few natural threats and a generally warm, equable climate suitable for cultivation. Its population of eight hundred million are spread widely across its continents; there are few towns and no cities as such, and most of the inhabitants are peasants ruled from the castles and palaces of the noble Houses.

The planet was cut off from much of the Prosperitas Sector, apparently by warp storms, and gradually regressed. Its technology was slowly lost to time and ignorance, and swathes of the southern hemisphere fell into outright barbarism. The office of the Planetary Governor devolved into a system of Great Houses, all competing for prestige and land through skirmishes of musketeers and lancers, ritualised diplomatic missions, and the exchange of luxuries and marriage contracts. Independent of the formation of the Imperial Cult, the Emperor was still worshipped, but only as a distant – some even dared to say “symbolic” – figure. Nobody imagined that the emissaries of Him on Terra would ever actually set foot on Merewald.

=== The Rediscovery of Merewald ===

All of this changed abruptly in the early years of the Prosperitas Crusade, when the private flotilla of Rogue Trader Seraiah Visick discovered a safe Warp route to this previously isolated world. He found a world ready for exploitation. But he was also a canny man, and realised that even with an Imperial cruiser at his command, open war would deny him the wealth he so dearly craved. His solution was one of shock and awe: he landed one of his escorts, the Chalice, on the planet’s surface and made an offer of fealty and Imperial service to any of the Houses that were wise enough not to attack him.

It worked. Within a decade he had established himself as the head of a new Ruling House, and his entourage married, bribed, or extorted their way into positions in every other House of note – and for the rest of his life, Seraiah ruled the world as his private fief, making no mention of it to the Imperial authorities.

His heirs and successors were, however, more aware of their obligations. They submitted their claim to the Administratum, were congratulated by the adepts of the Prosperitas Sector, and found themselves immediately faced with the problem of how to pay their tithes. Merewald had no industry to speak of, few mineral reserves, and a meagre food surplus. The answer lay in one of the planet’s few luxury goods: tea.

Over the course of M41, increasing swathes of the planet were turned over to the production of this otherwise rare delicacy. The fortunes of Houses have waxed and waned along with the booms and busts of the plantations; for instance, House Honeysett gained immense prestige by leading a campaign to conquer the southern barbarians and clear their territory for cultivation, while House Ab Rosveare and House Teague were reduced to penury when a hurricane devastated their estates.

=== Merewald as it Stands ===

The fundamental ethos of “knowing your place” has kept the highly stratified society of Merewald peaceful (at least for now) while allowing the Great Houses to retreat into a world of wealth, leisure, and ever more elaborate formality. Nonetheless, the system is far from static. The Administratum continue to pressure the ruling House Ab Visick to increase its tithe – there is talk of uprating Merewald to Decuma Extremis, and perhaps even reassessing it as an Agri World – and some offworld traders have found a market in supplying technology such as mechanical harvesters and gene-engineered seeds to desperate overseers.

Unfortunately, there remains a strong resistance to modernisation. The nobility are hostile to anything that allows their subjects to gain any tangible sort of power. Even amongst the peasantry, the Adeptus Mechanicus are viewed with extreme suspicion, and some believe (not without reason) that they are a threat to the orthodox faith that has served the planet so well for the last nine thousand years. Some progress has occurred – the PDF and local Guard regiment are now equipped with autoguns and steam-powered Chimeras, and Merewald even has a System Defence Force – but these developments are still largely ignored or considered irrelevant by the Houses.

Despite the backwards local attitude to technology, the local Imperial Guard unit, the 18th Merewaldian Fusiliers, have a strong reputation across the Subsector. Their excellent foot drill, line discipline and courage under fire have been remarked upon by Crusade High Command as the pinnacle of everything a light infantry regiment should hope to achieve. Their distinctive bright red uniform tunics and tan topi helmets are a sight to stir Imperial pride and piety among civilians from the Rimward Marches to the Tertius border.

Mazar-63

2020-03-25T23:02:05Z

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[[File:Mazar-63 banner.jpg|Mazar-63]]

{| class="wikitable" style="float:right; margin-left: 10px;"
|-
! Name !! Mazar-63
|-
| style="text-align:center" colspan=2 | [[file:Mazar-63.png|200px|Mazar-63]]
|-
| '''Sub-Sector''' || Primus
|-
| '''Type''' || Satellite Colony
|-
| '''Population''' || 500 million
|-
| '''Climate''' || Artificial
|-
| '''Status''' || Imperial
|}

=== About Mazar-63 ===

''“Good. Very impressive. Now play it again, but blindfolded.” – Chancellor-Artisan Ringbolt Fischer, Professor of Music''

Mazar-63 is a hollow moon in orbit around a sterile world in Subsector Primus. It is most famous as the seat of the Primus Noble House Roshan-Fikran. A network of ancient tunnels honeycomb the interior of the moon, for the most part arranged into grand avenues and pleasant squares to rival the most luxurious hive-spires. Any civilised world has its dark underbelly, however, and Mazar-63 is no exception; in the cold outer reaches near the moon’s frozen surface, close to the ancient void-seals which keep the rich artificial atmosphere within, there are dark unexplored networks of shanty-town caves and disused factorium complexes where the poor and unfortunate of Mazar’s population lurk in resentful and criminal squalour.

The aged and academic splendour of the central tunnels is maintained and ordered by the House’s Chancellor-Artisans, who describe their life’s work and duty as the crafting of young nobles into finely tuned instruments of the Emperor’s Will. The reputation of the House is built on academic and intellectual excellence of all varieties; and Mazar-63 is an engine for inculcating, refining and testing that excellence among the young nobles and their support staff. Every conceivable expression of human mental brilliance, from rote memorisation to musical genius to rhetoric, Ecclesiastical philosophy to applied astronavigation, is taught somewhere inside the vast schola-halls. The moon’s reputation is such that on many worlds in the Sector, a psycho-conditioning record showing even brief academic experience on Mazar is enough to immediately qualify one for a senior role at a Scholam or military training academy.

This excellence attracts reputation; other Noble Houses, interested in rounding off their progeny’s education, will sometimes send them to be fostered at Mazar-63 for a few years, often in early childhood. These young Scions are treated with fastidious care while within the hollow palaces, and in many regards their experience barely differs from the Roshan-Fikran children – but ever conscious of the value of information, the Chancellor-Artisans ensure that there are some places the cuckoo youth cannot go, and some texts they will never be permitted to read.

Although purity and excellence of mind is the highest value within Mazar, the Chancellor-Artisans hold that a mens sana grows from a corpore sano; so among both the noble and common residents of the moon, many physical pursuits are a well-regarded way to spend leisure cycles, including some peculiar to the moon’s internal architecture. Deep-tunnel spelunking, vent-ghast hunting with rifle and lamp-pack and dropshaft-tennis are all popular with the locals. For those offworlders missing a more typical planetary environment, and the young who wish to train themselves for a future in the Imperial Guard, a village-sized section of the central-east tunnel axis has been painstakingly bio-engineered with imported soil and plantlife, with the house’s allied Adeptus Mechanicus providing artificial weather and a holoprojected simulated “sky” widely regarded as somewhat unconvincing. Access to this area is tightly controlled based on the academic term rota and the demands of the various competing faculties, and it is not uncommon to find a savage – if very eloquent – row between the Artisan-Professor of Applied Pharmacy and the Chancellor-Ascendant of Practical Anatomy, each with a comet-tail of obedient young students, at the environment-gates.

Most of the interior of Mazar-63 is mapped, though some areas – particularly those near the surface – remain impenetrable to servo-skull cartographical drones. There are two major docking-ports for voidships, and innumerable smaller archaic void-locks which permit passage onto the low-gravity surface. The head of House Roshan-Fikran is the de facto Governor of the planet, though cedes most prosaic matters of day-to-day planetary administration to the Chancellor-Artisan Majoris, currently an elderly and mostly deaf professor of Ecclesiastical Archaeology named Balustrade Hacknesse.

House Roshan-Fikran and the millions of vassals who make up the population of the Moon nurse a two-century-old rivalry – usually friendly – with the Seminary of St Sebastian’s Redoubt, a major Ecclesiastical institution in another part of the Subsector. At its harmless end, the grudge extends to elaborate student pranks and well-attended sporting competitions; its darkest manifestations occasionally include sabotaged data-cortices, stolen texts, rumours of academic espionage, and even plagiarism.

Naximus Prime

2020-03-25T22:53:35Z

Jc:

[[File:Forge World banner.jpg|Forge World]]

{| class="wikitable" style="float:right; margin-left: 10px;"
|-
! Name !! Naximus Prime
|-
| style="text-align:center" colspan=2 | [[file:Naximus Prime.png|200px|Naximus Prime]]
|-
| '''Sub-Sector''' || Tenebris
|-
| '''Type''' || Forge World
|-
| '''Population''' || 9.3 billion
|-
| '''Climate''' || Polluted
|-
| '''Status''' || Non-Compliant
|}

=== About Naximus Prime ===

Originally a rather lush and green world, uninhabited when the Naximus system was first charted in M.23, Naximus Prime and its three moons were immediately claimed by the [[Adeptus Mechanicus]]. With a speed that could only be accomplished by the [[Machine Cult]] the entire planet was industrialised, and its moons turned into temples for the machine god. Mined hollow, and filled with ordnance, they stand as both a symbolic and functional warning to any who would approach the planet without permission of its owners. Resolutely independent from the Imperium forces in the sector Naximus Prime was occasionally approached by colonists seeking alternative sources of help and power. Ever eager to spread the word and influence of the Omnissiah these arrangements can be seen lasting to this day on the worlds of Anaximund Alpha and Olethros Secunda.

Naximus Prime was the last of the [[Forge Worlds]] of the [[Prosperitas Sector]] to be united with the Imperium in M.41. It has stood effectively blockaded for ten thousand years, unwilling to bend the knee to the [[Regency]] they viewed as anathema to their [[Machine God]]. Having withstood invasion for such a length of time thanks to a combination of perfect factors Naximus Prime remains actively unwelcome to outsider visitors, allowing entry only by the permission of the Hierophant-Technis of the Forge who governs the world with a tight fist. At the other end of the spectrum from Imperial-welcoming Ferrareus, the Mechanicus of Naximus Prime still act as if they live in the Golden Age of the Imperium, where the Mechanicum was an Empire unto its own. Their ownership of the only Knight World in the sector among the reasons why the Sector government allows such a status.

Details of the forge world’s society are hard to find, however those who have been permitted on Naximus Prime report a planet poisoned by industry and a world where the colour green is limited only to the glowing cybernetics of its population. It is these cybernetics where Naximus Prime gains its greatest renown and proves its indispensable nature to the Imperium. Thanks to the quality of locally mined metals the bionics crafted by the forges here are better made and more reliable than many others. Though the [[Machine Cult]] has always been known for its melding of flesh and machine as a religious principle it has reached a stage the majority of the population have bionic modifications, as a result of the artisan skill possessed by the Cybersmiths of Naximus Prime. It is a sign of wealth and beauty, to the people here to not be melded with the machine is an abnormality – the more subtle and delicate bionics considered ‘pretty’ and the larger, more steel and heavy duty types, considered a sign of strength.

The result of this cybernetic mastery is a [[Taghmata Omnissiah]] filled with high quality cybernetic troops that stand elevated in the hierarchy of Naximus Prime and a common aspiration of all menial workers. The entire culture of this world is alien to the Imperium, every strata of society assimilated into the [[Machine Cult]], to outsiders, it is a strange and unwelcoming place, even towards other members of the [[Adeptus Mechanicus]], independent, and still thinking of itself as existing in a time when the Mechanicum existed as a separate, and powerful, independent empire. The leading Magos of Naximus have made it clear they see [[Ferrareus]] as being overly reliant on the Imperium, a simple vassal world rather than a powerful Mechanicum Forgeworld working hand in hand with an allied power.

Kydos

2020-03-25T22:52:31Z

Jc:

{| class="wikitable" style="float:right; margin-left: 10px;"
|-
! Name !! Kydos
|-
| style="text-align:center" colspan=2 | [[file:Kydos.png|200px|Kydos]]
|-
| '''Sub-Sector''' || Primus
|-
| '''Type''' || Agri-World
|-
| '''Population''' || 6.8 billion
|-
| '''Climate''' || Oceanic Temperate
|-
| '''Status''' || Imperial
|}

=== About Kydos ===

Kydos is a small world first settled by mankind in the late 31st millennium. Though smaller than the other two planets in the system, Kydos’s super dense core means it has a gravity with 0.1 variance to terran standard and can thus maintain an atmosphere suitable for human life. Initially it was this super dense core, and the mineral wealth it promised, that due the attention of the Imperium but the geography of Kydos presented too many problems and costs, making mining vastly uneconomical. 80% of Kydos’s surface is covered by kilometre-deep oceans which prohibited mining operations without a vast outlay of resources rarely lavished on such a small planet.

The oceans that make mining operations on Kydos impossible are in truth the source of its wealth and indeed the very reason that the planet is inhabitable at all. A constant process of seeding and harvesting gathers in the endless wealth of plankton which is then processed into a variety of foodstuffs; the bulk of which is shipped off world to feed other planets in the sub-sector. Marine life is also harvested to provide delicacies; the rarest of items even making their way all the way to the tables of the palaces on the Sector Capital.

Land on Kydos is in short supply and, given the large space required for the landing fields to accommodate the bulk transporters, the vast seeding plants and the harvesting and processing factories, the population of the planet is crowded into densely packed cities clustered atop the islands jutting from the oceans. The abundance of food means that Kydos supports a relatively large population and the cities are somewhat smaller versions of the great urban constructs on the hive worlds of the sector. Densely packed, socially segregated and teeming with humanity from it’s best to it’s basest. Some of the cities rest not on dry land but are built up on mountains that rise up kilometres from the ocean-bed though do not breach the surface of the water. Individual cities reach as much as two kilometres below the waves before reaching the solid ground of the planet. Standing upon a vast metal base, inhabited at every level, these cities spread out above the surface of the ocean like gigantic metal fungus. The constant rain of oils, waste and corroded metals from the underside of the cities into the water makes travel beneath the cities as unpleasant as it is dangerous. Even the cities built on dry land spread out over the surface of the ocean such is pressure of the population and the need for space. Only the most select and elite of settlements fail to follow this pattern and the only hive that soars ever upwards, as opposed to sluggishly climbing up whilst sprawling outwards, is the planetary capital Tegea.

Seat of the Governor of Kydos, the prime spire of the Tegea hive reaches a full ten kilometres over the surface of the ocean. For the last thirteen centuries the family of Hyrakles Diodus have ruled over the planet, passing the governorship from father to son and each taking the same name upon ascension to the command of the planet. The depth and nature of this command has varied depending upon the strengths and intellect of the incumbent Governor. Even at best though, this will only extends to an ability to exert varying levels of control over near-independent city states each maintaining a separate standing army and each engaging in bilateral agreements with other cities based upon the requirements of the seeding and harvesting of the oceans.

=== Stirrings of Rebellion ===

Just before 200.M41 the incompetence and laxity of the incumbent Governor Diodus, a particularly weak and enfeebled example of the family, had allowed the planet to slip dangerously towards civil war and conflict the likes of which had not before been seen upon Kydos. An alliance of cities, led by the second largest city Taras, a vast hive plunging a kilometre under the surface of the ocean to rest upon the tip of an under-sea mountain, claimed that the Governor and his family were leading the planet adrift from the Imperial way and sought only personal wealth and aggrandizement. The loyalist hives meanwhile accused the Taras alliance of secessionist ambitions and various other heresies. Neither side wished to start a war and impact the off-world trade, and the wealth it bought, so the situation remained one of rhetoric and occasional skirmishes between naval patrols from the two sides. Other hives remained aloof of the conflict neither supporting the rebels accusation nor, damningly, affirming their support for the Governor who, despite his many shortcomings, was the rightful commander of the planet and representative on Kydos of his Imperial majesty [[the Emperor]] of Mankind.

Seeing a chance to resolve the situation before it got out of hand, and rid themselves of an incompetent planetary Governor into the bargain, sub-sector command dispatched a new governor, former [[Imperial Guard]] General Sebius Van Heth to replace Diodus and bring Kydos back firmly into the Imperial fold. Citing Diodus’s great age and many years of service, the old governor was retired to much public ceremony and celebration. Later, to little private ceremony but still some celebration, the old man was stood up against a wall and shot.

Van Heth’s placement bought the planet three years of peace before conflict finally broke out. Cities with genuine concerns about Diodus’s competence were quickly mollified by the new Governor’s forthright approach. Some key individuals in these cities, those who had been slightly too quick and keen to call for revolution and revolt, were rounded up and removed. This of course merely cemented Van Heth’s reputation as a harsh but unquestionably loyal man; truly the epitome of an Imperial Guard General.

During those three years Van Heth made some changes that were later to be instrumental to the Imperium’s victory over the rebels. Firstly he placed all air craft of any designation bar personal transports, though even these were restricted to a quite low tonnage, under central authority. Coupled with this move all surface to orbit and orbit to surface traffic was controlled and vetted by a central command in Tegea. Six weeks after this order was imposed the rogue trader vessel Void Shark attempted to bypass this new authority and land at the minor city of Salapa to carry out some smuggling of contraband goods. A combination of orbiting defence satellites and ground based laser batteries crippled the ship before she was boarded and seized by Naval Armsmen from the frigate Purity of Wrath in orbit over Kydos at the time. The very public execution of the Void Shark’s crew laid to rest any doubts over the Governor’s tolerance to infringements of his new laws.

Van Heth’s most insightful change however was to the structure of the armies on Kydos. Until his changes were implemented each city raised and equipped their own army and these forces were more likely to turn on each other than integrate should they ever be required to defend Kydos from an external threat. Tithing for the [[Imperial Guard]] had always been a process of taking squads, platoons or companies from these armies and attempting to forge them into a working Guard regiment. The general assessment from Department Munitorum was that the Kydos regiments needed at least one engagement to whittle them down to 75% strength before the survivors would begin to mesh into an effective fighting force. Even then the regiment was likely to be very factional and best used for forlorn hope assaults on enemy strongholds. The Governor judged this distribution of armed force to be intolerable and set about consolidating the use of effective armed power under his own command. To this end, all “private” or city-based armies were declared disbanded and Van Heth set about founding new regiments based much more closely on the [[Imperial Guard]] model he knew so well. With characteristic foresight many of the Van Heth’s entourage, who he had brought with him upon appointment to Kydos, were ex-Guard with a large number of senior NCO experienced in training up Guard forces elsewhere in the sector. Many cities got around this prohibition by renaming their forces as militias but the loyal cities followed the Governor’s commands and the new Kydosian regiments were founded. It would not be long after the first founding before they were sent in to fight their own people and put down the revolt brewing before Van Heth’s arrival.

=== War on Kydos ===

Almost three years to the day since Van Heth’s arrival the real shooting war started following years of political bickering and intrigue. The city of Eryx, an ally of Taras, was gutted by a huge explosion carried into the very heart of the hive by a ship from the loyal city of Himera. Later investigation shows that the explosion was in fact caused by agents from Taras to provide a casus belli. Eryx was always a minor city and could thus be sacrificed by Taras to justify a larger conflict. Acting in “retribution” for this attack, Taras naval forces shelled Himera into rubble before landing troops to destroy what was left. An estimated 6 million Imperial citizens lost their lives and the Kydosian VII regiment, based at Himera and likely the real target of the offensive, was destroyed. Lacking the ordinance to effectively counter the naval bombardment, the troops had weathered the storm and then, through significantly depleted by the attack, had risen up to battle the invading forces. Ultimately they were overwhelmed and killed to a man. The VII was never re-founded and their recovered battle banner and colours hang in the Hall of Remembrance in the Cathedral of the Emperor’s Light in Tegea Hive.

Simultaneous to the Himera assault, rebel forces staged attacks upon key cities, facilities and staging posts across the planet. The effectiveness of these attacks was blunted by the presence of the new Kydosian Regiments who all fought with the same tenacity and bravery as their doomed comrades in the VII regiment. Their bravery was costly however and the need to replace their losses meant the loyal forces would have to wait before going on the offensive and gave the rebels time to dig in and fortify their territories. The Governor’s decision to centralise control of all air and orbital assets meant that the loyal forces had a distinct advantage over the rebel forces at sea and quickly drove the enemy ships back to their homes crippled or sent them down to the crushing depths. Their bold opening strike defeated and control of the air and sea in Van Heth’s hands, the rebels hunkered down in their cities and waited for the onslaught. So vital were the seeding and harvesting factories in these cities that orbital retribution was not an option and the cities and hives would have to be cleared by the new Kydosian Regiments. It would take ten years to finally break the rebels and the Imperial forces involved in this brutal, bloody would come to refer to this period as the Long Grind.

The siege of Taras would be the ultimate act in this grim play however there were several key engagements along the way that defined the nature of the war on Kydos. Individual cities had to be subdued and brought back under Imperial control and generally this required such a commitment of time and resources that only one hive could be assaulted at any one time whilst other Imperial forces kept the rebels pinned down. The assaults would start with Imperial airpower attacking the defenders' defence batteries in order to allow the infantry waves to reach the enemy. These infantry waves, usually attacking with no armour support as the nature of the battlefield made such forces virtually useless, would be ferried to the fight in landing craft that would either deposit them on the rocky beaches or onto the walls of the hives direct. There they would cut a way in using melta-torches and demolition charges. Once inside they would fight their way along the roads, balconies and tunnels of the hives clearing out buildings as they went.

These battles were a nightmare to try and control as enemy assaults and avenues of attack for the Imperial troops could be in any direction including from above or below. Tactical command was very much devolved to platoon and squad level with only the most general of instructions coming from regimental command. Needless to say, casualties were very high and assaulting regiments were usually rendered, in the dry language of the Department Munitoum, “combat ineffective”. In practical terms, this meant the first regiment in had to be withdrawn and rebuilt before it could fight again having suffered greater than 50% casualties.

Though no stranger to the staggering costs that were sometimes required in order to attain victory, Van Heth was not content to merely throw endless waves on troops at the rebels and accept that many would not return. If armoured support was not an option then the troops themselves would be armoured instead. Using his reputation and considerable influence within the Department Munitorum and the Imperial Guard, Van Heth arranged for the supply of heavy carapace armour to the Kydosian regiments and ultimately arranged for the founding of manufactories to produce the armour on Kydos itself.

Regiments that managed to go in first and come out fighting would quickly gain a reputation they would fight all the harder to keep. The XIII regiment, recruited mainly from the city of Locri, gained a fearsome reputation when they were sent to capture Locri itself which had declared for the rebel forces. The regiment suffered slightly less than 20% casualties for just over 90% rebel and nearly 80% civilian losses due to their judicious use of flamer and melta weaponry.

The III regiment made a reputation in the assault on Galatia when, arriving by high tide onto the sloping walls of the hive, the troops landed right into the teeth of the enemy defensive positions. By this stage of the war the rebel forces in some cities were running low on ammunition and preferred to close with Imperial forces and engage in close combat as soon as troops had landed. Anticipating this, the men of the III regiment had all been equipped with close quarters weaponry for the assault and made short but bloody work of the rebel forces. Flushed by success they continued their assault and took the hive in a fine display of martial savagery for little loss. They would manage to repeat their performance at the minor cities of Naxos and Entella, where they were dropped in by air, before the regiment was ripped to shreds at the siege of Taras.

Following the eventual victory over the rebel forces and the dispatch of Kydosian regiments to the battlefields on numerous other planets, the Kydosian’s have been classed as heavy or assault infantry in the roster of [[Imperial Guard]] forces in the sector due to each infantryman’s personal armour and their experience of assaulting hives and other settlements on Kydos.

=== The Beginning of the End ===

Finally, after 10 years of assaults, city fighting and endless patrolling and raids, only Taras itself remained in rebel hands. Standing proud but isolated in the midst of the vast southern ocean, Taras braced itself for the Imperial assault whilst the loyalist forces prepared for the final push. Kydos by this stage was a ravaged ruin. The rebel strongholds had been pounded to rubble and the loyal cities and hives had suffered at the hands of the initial rebel assault a decade past and numerous rebel raids since then, as well as a fair share of explosions and attacks from rebel sympathisers in the population. In some locations only the seeding and harvesting factories remained with just enough population, usually shipped in from loyal hives, to maintain operations. In other places even these key facilities had been destroyed; either by tactical necessity or by rebel spite. The seas around the hive of Thurii and the cities of Dascon, Caulonia and Gela were completely dead, poisoned by leaked chemicals and oil from the battles to capture them.

The seas around the city of Tyndarus were also similarly dead however the cause was of more concern. In the ninth year of the war, during the assault by the Kydosian XXXIV regiment, newly founded that year and having suffered 40% casualties before fighting their way into the city, the rebel forces released a bio-toxin weapon against their attackers. Needless to say, released in a crowded city the weapon failed to distinguish between friend and foe and rampaged indiscriminately through the city. The remainder of the XXXIV, the rebel forces and the entire population of the city were killed with a matter of hours. The virus then spread into the oceans surrounding Tyndarus before thankfully breeding itself out before the infection spread through-out the seas. Of particular concern to the inquisitorial forces who had been dispatched to review the situation on Kydos, the bio-toxin displayed distinct similarities to several variants of the [[Nurgle]] plague weapons utilised by adherents to that foul god throughout the galaxy. Investigation following the burn-out of the toxin revealed the presence of cult activity in Tyndarus.

This was the first indication of the presence of the ruinous powers on Kydos and the investigation deemed it likely to have been an effect of the rebels’ divergence from the Imperial path rather than a cause of the rebellion itself. Observers at the siege of Taras also noted un-human shapes amongst the defenders’ ranks. These sharp eyed officers were later executed to stop the information spreading and maintain morale amongst Imperial forces. Apart from these incidents the [[Inquisition]] ruled the conflict “clean” and blamed the war upon the all-too-human greed of the rebel leaders rather than the more deadly machinations of Chaos.

=== The Battle For Taras ===

The siege of Taras itself was a disaster. Given time to prepare themselves, the rebels had turned the hive into a vast fortress bristling with defence cannons, emplacements and armoured bulwarks jutting from the surface of the hive. Every square metre of the hive skin had been reinforced with sheet after sheet of steel and armour, much of it scavenged from the other rebel cities and the dismantled Taras fleet. The underside of the massive hive was a clear 100 metres over the surface of the seas and thus the Imperial forces were forced to assault the trunk of the city, itself more than two kilometres in diameter. Due to the nature of the rebels’ work on Taras the Imperial air power was never able to completely subdue the defensive batteries and the assaulting regiments went in under heavy fire.

Leading the assault was the Kydosian VIII regiment, supported by the III and XXV regiments and spearheaded by a detachment of engineers who would rip open the truck of the hive to allow the infantry in. The commander of the VIII Regiment and over-all commander of the assault, Colonel Pancrates Tellias, was killed a mere two minutes after his landing vessel left the protection of its mother ship within the Imperial fleet. The rest of Regiment continued with their assault though had suffered as much as 35% losses by the time they reached the edge of the hive and passed into its shadow. There, if anything, things got worse. The engineers found that the trunk of the hive had been reinforced with a full ten meters of armour plate and they did not have the explosives necessary to drive a hole through it. Their efforts, futile as they were, were short lived in any event as the weight of fire coming from the underside of the hive cut the engineers down to a mere handful. These survivors were all seriously injured and stuck in slowly sinking landing boats. Efforts to enter the hive had effectively ended however the vessels carrying the infantry continued to pass under the edge of the hive and stack behind other boats full of troops waiting to assault a breach that would never come.

All across the underside of the hive small shutters opened in the armour plates and a constant rain of weapons fire and bombs fell upon the immobilised Imperial troops. Unquestionably the assault had failed but communicating this to the commanders in the [[Imperial fleet]], and any efforts by them to recall the troops, was impossible. The loss of senior officers and the disruption to communications from being over five kilometres past the edge of the hive meant that the troops followed the Imperial Guard doctrines drilled into them by their instructors and continued their hopeless assault.

With no communications from the attacking forces to warn them of the next wave of troops was sent in at the appointed time and a further six regiments ran the gauntlet of defensive fire to pass under the hive and be massacred by the murderous rain from above. The press of burning boats by this time meant that some of the assault craft did not pass beneath the hive before they could see what awaited them. The situation was hastily passed back and the order to retreat was given. For the vast majority of troops this was too late to matter and handfuls of troops eventually made their way back in battered boats or clinging to wreckage and swimming away. Many of them fell to the continued fire from the hive and others never received the message to fall back at all, communication by then reduced to shouted orders trying to be heard above the roar of gunfire and flames. All of the initial attack regiments suffered greater than 90% casualties and were effectively destroyed. The second wave regiments suffered between 60 and 80% casualties depending upon their “success” in closing to the trunk of the hive. Taras hive would not be broken by infantry assault.

A second option was now utilised and in the evening of the same day as the doomed attack, the Imperial fleet withdrew beyond the horizon and turned their bows towards the hive before dropping sea anchors. Meanwhile, the submersible assault vessel Glory of Himera made a stealthy approach towards the city. At 02:23 local time a nuclear tipped torpedo launched from the submersible detonated a kilometre beneath the surface of the sea where the great trunk of the Taras hive stood upon an undersea mountain. The resulting pressure wave destroyed the Glory of Himera instantly and would sink a further four dozen Imperial vessels in the fleet through their careful orientation towards the wave meant that the majority of the vessels rode out the tidal wave with little loss of life. The cities of Medma, Solus and Acragas were completely destroyed by the wave when it reached them though up to a two days after the event itself.

For Taras however, the end came much sooner. Felled like a great and vastly top-heavy tree, the city plunged into the waves and sank at a terrible rate. The Imperial fleet moved towards the site and no doubt took some revenge in the necessary killing of all those of Taras who made it to the surface from their lost home. Sonar aboard the Imperial submersibles could detect the sound of the stronger compartments in the city finally being crushed by the terrible pressures of the deep oceans up to a week after the city sank. The last rebels had no chance to fight for whatever misguided ideals they held but were simply crushed with no chance of resistance by Kydos itself. The use of a nuclear warhead meant the seas and foodstuffs harvested from that area of Kydos are heavily radiated however the produce has been rated as Grade D (suitable for consumption by general population in non-critical functions) and thus can still be harvested and shipped off world.

=== After the Rebellion ===

For the Kydosian regiments, a similar fate awaited. Due to their excellent training, comprehensive assault and urban combat experience and their adherence to the Imperial Guard standard model, as soon as they are no longer needed on Kydos, the regiments were shipped off world as newly founded Imperial Guard units to support the Emperor’s fighting forces elsewhere in the sector. The majority remain on Kydos however overseeing the return to normality and ensuring Imperial rule in the name of Governor-General Sebius Van Heth.

Those regiments that had been torn to shreds at Taras, and those that had suffered a similar fate at other cities and had yet to be brought back to strength, were dispatched in handfuls to warzones wherever ships could take them. Their Imperial Guard standard training means they can be dropped into any warzone and should give a good account of themselves in the name of the Emperor.

Morghull

2020-03-25T22:52:08Z

Jc:

[[File:Feral World banner.jpg|World Type]]

{| class="wikitable" style="float:right; margin-left: 10px;"
|-
! Name !! Morghull
|-
| style="text-align:center" colspan=2 | [[file:Morghull.png|200px|Morghull]]
|-
| '''Sub-Sector''' || Tertius
|-
| '''Type''' || Feral World
|-
| '''Population''' || approx. 500 million
|-
| '''Climate''' || Cold Temperate
|-
| '''Status''' || Imperial
|}

=== About Morghull ===

Morghull is a heavily-forested feral world at the edge of the [[Subsector Tertius]]. The natives consist of scattered bands of iron-age nomads who roam the endless forests, following herds of local herbivores. Known for their hardy physiques and physical prowess, Morghullites are dour, aggressive and brave, but also highly superstitious and mistrustful of outsiders. The musket and sabre are the weapons of choice of the nomad tribes, and frequently used against one another in the constant inter-clan skirmishes that occur in the depths of the Morghull forests.

Due to the fractious nature of the tribes, there is no unified planetary government; the nearest Morghull has to a planetary ruler is the chieftain of the largest tribe; Khan Damir Zoric of the Pathka. Khan Zoric, backed by Imperial support, has pacified a large area of the northern continent, and established one of the only permanent settlements on the planet; Pathka-rath.

Missionaries have been preaching the [[Imperial Faith|Cult Imperialis]] on Morghull for centuries but, due to the dense forests and the locals’ natural distrust of outsiders they have often found the work difficult.

Morghull

2020-03-25T22:50:50Z

Jc:

[[File:Feral World banner.jpg|World Type]]

{| class="wikitable" style="float:right; margin-left: 10px;"
|-
! Name !! Morghull
|-
| style="text-align:center" colspan=2 | [[file:Morghull.png|200px|Morghull]]
|-
| '''Sub-Sector''' || Tertius
|-
| '''Type''' || Feral World
|-
| '''Population''' || approx. 500 million
|-
| '''Climate''' || Temperate
|-
| '''Status''' || Imperial
|}

=== About Morghull ===

Morghull is a heavily-forested feral world at the edge of the [[Subsector Tertius]]. The natives consist of scattered bands of iron-age nomads who roam the endless forests, following herds of local herbivores. Known for their hardy physiques and physical prowess, Morghullites are dour, aggressive and brave, but also highly superstitious and mistrustful of outsiders. The musket and sabre are the weapons of choice of the nomad tribes, and frequently used against one another in the constant inter-clan skirmishes that occur in the depths of the Morghull forests.

Due to the fractious nature of the tribes, there is no unified planetary government; the nearest Morghull has to a planetary ruler is the chieftain of the largest tribe; Khan Damir Zoric of the Pathka. Khan Zoric, backed by Imperial support, has pacified a large area of the northern continent, and established one of the only permanent settlements on the planet; Pathka-rath.

Missionaries have been preaching the [[Imperial Faith|Cult Imperialis]] on Morghull for centuries but, due to the dense forests and the locals’ natural distrust of outsiders they have often found the work difficult.

Morghull

2020-03-25T22:50:26Z

Jc:

[[File:Feral World banner.jpg|World Type]]

{| class="wikitable" style="float:right; margin-left: 10px;"
|-
! Name !! Morghull
|-
| style="text-align:center" colspan=2 | [[file:Morghull.png|200px|Morghull]]
|-
| '''Sub-Sector''' || Tertius
|-
| '''Type''' || Feral World
|-
| '''Population''' || approx. 500 million
|-
| '''Climate''' || Boreal
|-
| '''Status''' || Imperial
|}

=== About Morghull ===

Morghull is a heavily-forested feral world at the edge of the [[Subsector Tertius]]. The natives consist of scattered bands of iron-age nomads who roam the endless forests, following herds of local herbivores. Known for their hardy physiques and physical prowess, Morghullites are dour, aggressive and brave, but also highly superstitious and mistrustful of outsiders. The musket and sabre are the weapons of choice of the nomad tribes, and frequently used against one another in the constant inter-clan skirmishes that occur in the depths of the Morghull forests.

Due to the fractious nature of the tribes, there is no unified planetary government; the nearest Morghull has to a planetary ruler is the chieftain of the largest tribe; Khan Damir Zoric of the Pathka. Khan Zoric, backed by Imperial support, has pacified a large area of the northern continent, and established one of the only permanent settlements on the planet; Pathka-rath.

Missionaries have been preaching the [[Imperial Faith|Cult Imperialis]] on Morghull for centuries but, due to the dense forests and the locals’ natural distrust of outsiders they have often found the work difficult.

Olethros Secunda

2020-03-25T22:48:50Z

Jc:

{| class="wikitable" style="float:right; margin-left: 10px;"
|-
! Name !! Olethros Secunda
|-
| style="text-align:center" colspan=2 | [[file:Olethros Secunda.png|200px|Olethros Secunda]]
|-
| '''Sub-Sector''' || Secundus
|-
| '''Type''' || Civilised World
|-
| '''Population''' || 2 billion
|-
| '''Climate''' || Temperate
|-
| '''Status''' || Imperial (nominal)
|}

''“We arrived just in time for the Games, and struggled to find any room at all in Backshore. A and the retinue ended up sleeping in the shuttle – it was that or the floor! The views from orbit are stunning – the islands, still green despite the rise of heavy industry, like emeralds set in a gunmetal sea. The victors’ parade was a sight to behold; they all seemed so young and so proud – I wonder if they have any idea what truly awaits them?” Travel Diary of Lucius di Firro, 578.M41''

=== About Olethros Secunda ===

Olethros Secunda is a balmy, temperate world in a stable orbit around a main sequence G-type yellow dwarf. Violent tectonic activity in its early development led to the formation of no major continents above the sea level; instead, the planet’s habitable southern hemisphere is a vast archipelago of islands, the largest no more than fifty miles in diameter, resting in a shallow, fruitful and mildly alkaline ocean. These islands experience a warm, mild littoral climate, with vegetation rarely growing above large bushes or small trees analogous to cypress, laurel and juniper. The northern hemisphere is almost entirely bereft of land masses, and the oceans are much deeper. Aerial augur surveys report biomass signals consistent with large – very large – organisms in the bathypelagic zones, but no recorded sightings have yet been confirmed. The northern polar cap is host to a small variety of native mammals and birdlife, some of which are hunted for their skins.

The colony of Olethros Secunda was founded in the early 400s.M41. The leader of the original colonisation effort, Brigadier-General (later Governor-General) Akwesi zu Septimian, was granted an Administratum Writ and permission to raise colonist forces from across the local worlds following her loyal service under Warmaster Fassir. However, with no independent wealth and no desire to suborn herself to any of the Sector noble houses, zu Septimian turned to an unusual source for assistance in setting up the equipment and transportation necessary to enable the huge effort of colonising a new world: the newly recontacted [[Adeptus Mechanicus]] of [[Naximus Prime]].

Following zu Septimian’s entreaty, the Mechanicum provided the Olethros colonists with all the shipping and logistical support they needed to commence the long process of civilising their wet and empty world. Thousands of sacred machines and their red-robed keepers accompanied the colonists, shortening the work of subduing the oceans to Humankind’s will from generations to months. The inhabited islands of the Southern archipelago are now linked by a network of delicate sky-spanning plasteel bridges, their pilings and foundations maintained by a horde of amphibious Mechanicus servitors who eternally sing watery praises to the [[Omnissiah]] as they go about their squamous business.

The population of Olethros today is healthy, stable and expanding, with a robust subsistence economy founded on fishing, mineral extraction from the rich oceans, and substantial olive-groves planted on the larger islands. The planet exports dehydrated and processed fish and seafood popular as a compact and nutritious protein source in military rations, and there is a substantial submarine Mechanicus facility on the ocean floor near the equator – though what precisely it mines, processes and ships to [[Naximus]] and the orbital stations nearby is a mystery the red-robed Priests do not share lightly.

The assistance given to Olethros’ founding was not without a cost, though to speak to an Olethran native – all of whom piously regard the Priesthood of [[Naximus Prime]] as their first masters, and the Imperium as a distant second – all service rendered to the followers of the Omnissiah is an honour and its own reward. Every five years since the Founding, the sector-famous Olethran Games are held. These Games gather every able youth between the ages of fifteen and thirty, and pit them against each other in trials of strength, song, speed and logic. The winners of the Trials from each Island are brought together on the planetary capital of Backshore, a vast artificial platform which has far outgrown its original island and extends several miles over the open ocean. From these, the finalists compete against each other under the watchful eyes of Mechanicus priests who travel all the way from [[Naximus]] for the occasion, and observe the Games from the height of their great three-legged silt-walkers, autonomous platforms designed to easily stride across the shallow seas between Olethran islands. The finalists who succeed most convincingly in the eyes of the Priests are given the great honour of being taken up into the Arks and carried in state back to [[Naximus Prime]], where they serve their new masters as vassals into eternity. These youths are known colloquially as the “Glorious Ten Thousand”, though for religious reasons, the actual number is eight thousand, one hundred and ninety-two – a number more pleasing in the eyes of the [[Omnissiah]].

This arrangement is known as the Righteous Tithe, and its enshrinement in planetary law is responsible for the Olethran Governor’s conviction that the planet is not subject to Imperial taxation. The Sector Administratum ferociously disagrees, and the matter is the subject of a savage ongoing jurisdictional argument between the Subsector Praefector and the Governor, currently Kojo zu Septimian, Akwesi’s eldest child. The Mechanicum of [[Naximus]] certainly consider Olethros Secunda part of their domain, and regularly provide Kojo with diplomatic support in their efforts to resist Imperium census-takers and tax-collectors making planetfall. The matter has not yet come to violence, although the Subsector Praefector frequently threatens to call in favours with the Salient commanders if Kojo continues in their steadfast refusal.

Persephon IV

2020-03-25T22:35:32Z

Jc:

[[File:War World banner.jpg|War World]]

{| class="wikitable" style="float:right; margin-left: 10px;"
|-
! Name !! Persephon IV
|-
| style="text-align:center" colspan=2 | [[file:Persephon IV.png|200px|Persephon IV]]
|-
| '''Sub-Sector''' || Primus
|-
| '''Type''' || War World
|-
| '''Population''' || approx. 1 billion
|-
| '''Climate''' || Temperate
|-
| '''Status''' || Conflict
|}

=== About Persephon IV ===

Persephon IV is a habitable planet revolving around a normal yellow star (Persephon) in [[Subsector Primus]]. Long inhabited by Man, it was conquered early in the Prosperitas Crusade and has grown to be a shining beacon of the [[Imperium]] in the Sector, green and verdant continents with scattered rural settlements and farms, and on each of the four major continents there were two or three hive cities, containing much of the populace of about three billion. It stood as a self supporting world without specialising into a specific role: however, it had sufficient industry to tie it into the interplanetary trade networks, and as a stop off point for many space faring vessels passing through the area.

Any major assaults from outside forces on the Persephon system were in distant antiquity, and barely remembered by the local populace. It raised a modest levy of regiments for the [[Imperial Guard]], and maintained a planetary defence force for its own protection.

That was until 534.M41 when, out of the Galactic East, a massive raiding force of the savage [[xenos]] known as [[Orks]] emerged, rampaging through the worlds the [[Prosperitas Crusade]] had previously believed to be safe, having long since been conquered and brought into Imperial compliance. At Persephon IV however, this green tide ‘[[Waagh Gazbag]]’ smashed against the noble men and women of the Persephon [[Imperial Guard]] Regiments and the planet’s Planetary Defence Force. While the progress of the Ork‘s was stalled at Persephon long enough for the threat of the Waagh to be contained, the verdant world was almost entirely overrun with [[xenos]], leaving Persephon IV’s Primaris Hive Persephon Prime besieged.

Although Persephon Prime managed to erect its forcefields to extend some protection to the city itself, the outlying suburbs were razed to the ground, with many of the survivors left as refugees in their own city. Though Persephon has held against these savage [[Xenos]], it has paid dearly for it, in their efforts to develop crude industry to support their fight against the noble men and women of Persephon, the [[Xenos]] have all but destroyed the planet’s ecosystem. And over the last few years since the invasion, the once-verdant world has be reduced to an ash blasted dustbowl of dried earth, across which the invaders have almost total mastery. Only Persephon Prime survived as a bastion against the invasion, with supplies being shipped in from the other less war-torn planets.

The isolation of the city on the [[Xenos]] battlefront, under siege and bombardment for so long, with rationing and overcrowding prevalent, damaged the psyche of the inhabitants, and slowly the despair and destruction became too much. What started off as obscene graffiti took hold and within a short period, the rot had set in, the innocuous ‘old religion’ of the Sector had taken root and blasphemy and rebellion had began to circulate within the populace. Ultimately erupting into a bloody civil war in Hive-structures of Persephon Prime leading to the noble regiments of Persephon IV being forced to take arms against those they had sought to protect.

Though the noble actions of the Persephon Regiments held the line, the underlying threat of rebellion has turned the Hive Primaris into a stronghold under martial law as the conflict grows ever more desperate. The war against the [[Greenskins]] continues, with attempts being mounted to take back the territories lost to the [[xenos]]. However, the [[xenos]] are striking back and spreading again, building great ocean going vessels out of the scrap dragged out of the ruins of the suburbs of Persephon Prime. Chaos is not entirely eradicated from Persephon IV either, survivors from the Xenos-devastated wastes, mutated beyond recognition, joined by those cultists who fled the rebellion at Persephon Prime now join battle with both the [[xenos]] and the [[Imperial Guard]].

Persephon IV is no longer a green and pleasant place. Whilst most of Persephon Prime’s infrastructure survives, most of the production that was once shipped off-world is now channelled into the war effort, in an attempt to prevent the whole world succumbing to conflict.

Nivalis

2020-03-25T22:30:54Z

Jc:

{| class="wikitable" style="float:right; margin-left: 10px;"
|-
! Name !! Nivalis
|-
| style="text-align:center" colspan=2 | [[file:Nivalis.png|200px|Nivalis]]
|-
| '''Sub-Sector''' || Primus
|-
| '''Type''' || Shrine World
|-
| '''Population''' || 3.5 billion
|-
| '''Climate''' || Sub-arctic
|-
| '''Status''' || Non-Compliant
|}

''“We arrived deep in local winter and stayed for nearly a week. C complained, of course – unpredictable ground, foul weather, all the usual Voidborn grumbles. Secretly I think he was as impressed as I was by the capital. The holy statues are too vast to comprehend, even for someone used to Navy ships. More like mountains than artefacts. Went hunting in hill forests – unsuccessful but hugely enjoyable; hired snow gear from native guide, wasted a lot of ammunition. Local wildlife faster than expected!” – Travel Diary of Lucius di Firro, 575.M41''

=== About Nivalis ===

An ancient seat of nobility in the Sector, Nivalis is an inhospitable but beautiful planet just far enough inside its sun’s orbit to avoid the designation of Ice World. The habitable zone on the planet is restricted to a mountainous strip a few hundred kilometres wide at the Equator, with the rest of the planet locked in permanent glacial cold.

The mountains are home to a hardy, hospitable breed of Imperial citizens who greatly prize physical courage and cunning. Their favoured hobby is hunting, and anyone of birth or breeding on the planet is expected to prove their worth by tracking and killing one of the many dangerous mountain beasts. Nivalians view the wearing of furs, or jewellery made from the teeth or claws of one’s kills, as a status symbol, and tend to look down on those who do not wear them.

Nivalis is a [[Shrine World]] first and foremost, with piety driven into the very bones of the land. Travellers and pilgrims say that every valley and secluded peak boasts its own shrine to the [[God-Emperor]] and His [[saints]]. Some of the highest peaks have been carved into massive likenesses of the great Heroes of the Imperium, the greatest of these visible from distant orbit. The constant presence of pilgrims travelling to and from the planet has led to extensive development in the urban centres. The capital and many secondary cities boast all the facilities that the discerning and pious citizen might need, and there is an extensive transport network connecting the most popular pilgrimage sites. In happier times, it was said that one could walk into a cathedral in the capital and find worshippers from every world in the Sector at prayer together.

Nivalis’ peaceful existence came to an abrupt end in 584.M41. According to official records, a group of [[heretics]] disrupted the traditional annual religious festivities, leading to widespread panic and rioting. The riots spread in an uncontrolled wave across the planet, taking the meagre [[Planetary Defence Force]] by surprise and shattering the once-peaceful planet into civil chaos. The Ecclesiarchy called in the [[Adeptus Sororitas]] to suppress and control the unrest, with the [[Order of our Martyred Lady]] supplying a large operational deployment of [[Militant Sororitas]].

While engaged in counterinsurgency and stabilisation, the Sisters reported a miracle whose echoes are still felt in the religious and political hierarchies of the Sector. Every statue of the [[God-Emperor]] on the planet, from tiny household icons to the kilometre-high colossus at the heart of the planetary capital, was witnessed to weep tears of blood. In the wake of this miracle, the Sisters engaged in offensive operations to return Nivalis to order with a bloodthirsty piety unlike anything seen before on the planet.

Nivalis fell under the rule of [[Cardinal-Emissarius Grulge]]. The ongoing civil conflict was suppressed – often brutally – the insurgency kept to a quiet simmer by the security presence of the [[Sisters Militant]].

Despite this Nivalis was no longer the safe haven for pilgrims that it once was, with scattered groups of heretics and planetary nationalists – bitter at the long arm of the Ecclesiarchy “usurping” their government – still holding out in the rural mountain areas despite the Sorors’ best efforts.

=== The Invasion of Nivalis and Subsequent Conflicts – 592.M41 Onwards ===

In 592.M41 the Space Hulk Durovera’s Pain appeared from the warp above Nivalis, bringing multiple renegade vessels in its wake, exiting close to planetary orbit. This foul fleet made short work of the Pilgrim and System Defence vessels, and soon the orbit of Nivalis burned with the hulls of ruined vessels, in a swift four-hour campaign, the Enemy established orbital control of Nivalis.

Recognising the danger, of orbital attack [[the Order of his Sanguine Tears]] evacuated their Fortress-Covent knowing it was vulnerable to orbital attack, letting [[Archenemy]] fire destroy it while the Order made its way to the the Cathedral-City of Nivalis and reinforced there beneath its protective void shields alongside the [[Fidelis Militia]]. Insurgent Nivalian forces, no friend to the [[Archenemy]] or the Cardinal and his Allies, realizing something significant was approaching, retreated from conflict zones.

The [[Archenemy]] hordes rained from the skies sparing no one, hordes of diseased barbaric scum charged against Imperial lines, advancing from their dropsites towards the many shrines and places of worship across the planet's surface. Rapid reaction forces of Sorors and [[Fidelis Militia]] swept into place swiftly, experienced veterans of the counter-insurgency efforts on the planet [[Ecclesiarchy]] forces slowed the [[Archenemy]] advance. The second wave of dropships did not hit Imperial lines however, but rather fell upon insurgent-held territories, rapidly wiping out what little resistance remained, and driving a flood of desperate refugees towards Imperial lines with fantastic tales of engaging heavily armoured barbaric warriors.

[[The Order of His Sanguine Tears]] retreated from Nivalis in 593.M41 after Archenemy Forces broken their defensive lines at the Cathedral City and ransacked it, only for Cardinal-Emissarius Grulge to return to the system at the head of a host of fanatics and [[fidelis militia]] raised from the worlds of the [[Prosperitas Sector]] declaring a holy war to retake the world from the [[heretics]] that had fallen upon it.

Since 593, Nivalis has been devastated by nearly a decade of constant conflict, it’s once-pristine shrines wrecked, it’s forested stripped barren by traitor and faithful bombardments, though there is a stable area around the ruined Cathedral City of Nivalis controlled by the [[Cardinal-Emissarius]] the frontlines of the fight shift back and forth between traitors and the faithful daily, and few pilgrims come here without anything more than the intent to join the fanatical faithful hosts on the planet to retake it from the [[Archenemy]].