Fra'al

Fra'al Satrapies
Capital	Unknown
Official Languages	Fra'al Lexicon
Power	Minor Power
Size	Unknown
Head of State	Council of Satraps
Head of Government	Council of Satraps
Governmental Structure	Nomadic Decentralized Council
State Religion/Ideology	Mercantilism, Piracy
Demographic	Fra'al
Military Force	Fra'al Forces, Fra'al Fleets

"Of all the vices you Imp’ral possess, I find the one you call ‘greed’ most fascinating. That you would sell your secrets, betray your kin’blood, and even enslave your own race to us, and for what? Mere trinkets and toys — for the least of our crafts. Most amusing..."

– Master Vray, Fra'al Satrap (not realizing he's being cheated by humans, because none of that stuff matters to something as massive as the Imperium.)

The Fra'al are an elusive and mysterious xenos species usually found in Segmentum Obscurus. Very little is known about them, though the Imperium of Man mostly knows them as both raiders and as merchants.

Despite being an enigmatic race of nomadic psykers, they are most definitely not related in any way to that other enigmatic race of nomadic telepaths, and any resemblance is just an inadvertent coincidence.

Contacts with the Imperium

Fanmade image of what the Fra'al Flag/Iconography would look like.

It is widely believed between the Ordo Xenos that Humanity's first contact with the Fra'al goes back to the time of the Dark Age of Technology (about a year before WotC bought TSR, to be precise), though more details on that are beyond scarce. The first recorded contacts with the Imperium were during the Great Crusade. Apparently, the Astartes Legions fought many Fra'al outposts and spaceships. At the very least we know that the Salamanders, White Scars, Word Bearers, Death Guard, Night Lords and Alpha Legion fought them during the Imperium's expansion. We even know that the Fra'al were powerful enough to cause frequent casualties for the Astartes, with many of those wounded being entombed in Dreadnoughts.

Post-Heresy, Mankind has rarely had contact with them, though they can frequently be heard of as piratical raiders, attacking civilian vessels and lightly-protected military vessels for whatever resources they could find. They can also be found as merchants, doing business with Rogue Traders, selling their weird alien tech and whatever valuable resource they managed to steal on a previous raid. This trade is heavily watched over by the Inquisition as it's done inside the borders of the Imperium.

Society

The Fra'al are a nomadic species, though it's believed that they held a small empire within the Gothic Sector. While being both an empire and nomads at the same time might sound counterintuitive at first, and has caused a decent amount of skubbed debate, keep in mind that this has happened in real life. The best example of this is the Mongol Empire.

Other than that, not much is known of the Fra'al's society. We know that they are a psychic species and that their technology is highly advanced and they have a taste for messing with humans every chance they get, but to be fair, that's a hobby shared with every denizen of the galaxy, especially humans themselves. The lack of contact with the Imperium offers little chance of knowing them.

One would think that the Imperium would consider a psychic race like the Fra'al a prime target for extermination. This has not yet come to pass, probably due to the constant stream of even greater threats the Imperium is facing during the Time of Ending and subsequent Age of the Dark Imperium. There is also information suggesting the Fra’al and an ancient human federation along with a few other alien species teamed up against the Men of Iron. If the Imperium or at least its leadership and Inquisitors are aware of this, it could explain why the Fra’al have been spared. Also probably because they are smart enough to not fuck with the premier galactic superpower. The ones fought during the Great Crusade were probably pirates/a rogue splinter faction that was highly militarised.

Technology

The Fra'al Battlecruiser, the only canon image we have of them thanks to GW laziness.

The Fra'al's technology is considerably advanced, and in many aspects it is superior to their Imperial equivalents, with the possible exception of the Adeptus Mechanicus. Their most important discovery is Ether technology, with which they constructed their feared Fra'al Battlecruisers. These monsters are rarely seen, but they are rightly feared by any other space faring species that has found them before. The Ether technology powers their Ether Cannons, weapons that throw beams of pure corrosion that cannot be blocked by neither void nor power shields. This basically means that the target's innards start corroding from the inside out, which can cause such funny things as breaking the Warp Engines and causing a small warp tear inside of the ship, or making the oxygen generators break, suffocating everyone inside. For the most part, though, this serves to burn down the ship's shields so as to attack them with barrages of lance fire afterwards. This technology is so good that Chaos is trying to replicate it, it is that effective. Suffice it to say, the Adeptus Mechanicus desperately want to get their hands on one of these ships, to try and study them, and go to great lengths to find and capture them if possible.

Outside of Ether technology, other pieces of Fra'al technology include Fra'al night shards, shards that are often used as divination foci by some Imperial psykers, and Fra'al glass knives. The knives appear as jagged, dagger-like blades that appear to have been carved from a single piece of smoky crystal. Despite their primitive appearance, they are sharp enough to cut through ceramite, and they keep their sharpness by continually fracturing tiny shards from their cutting edge, with the shards often finding their way into the wounds the knife makes, turning cuts into agonizing injuries.