Editing Setting:Cloudburst/Rogue Traders (section)

====Rogue Trader House Brasmel====
Most Rogue Traders specialize in some way, and this is a good way to carve out a market niche.  However, the most successful Rogue Traders at least try to break into multiple markets concurrently, to make a name for themselves and ensure that no one catastrophe can wipe out their holdings.  House Brasmel, based on Nauphry IV and ranging forth from its huge orbitals, is one of the rare exceptions.  When one says ‘House Brasmel,’ there is only one word that comes to mind: warfare.

The House Brasmel concerns itself nigh-exclusively with prosecuting wars against other human enemies of the Imperium.  Heretics, witch cabals, Traitors and Renegades, pirate fleets, Secessionists, other Imperial nobles that have gone rogue, and even occasionally retributive wars by Sector governments against rebel planets; the House Brasmel has fought them all.  More than a few members of the Imperial Guard have stated off the record that they think the Warrant of Trade the House holds should be revoked and given to another family, since the House itself barely does any trading.

Indeed, the House Brasmel has committed itself to no more financial transactions and commerce than it needs to support its war goals.  This is horribly stunting to its development as a monetary concern, obviously, but it has some benefits.  Other Traders with far more money may look down on Brasmel House, but they do so with concern and a kind of awed respect.  Brasmel can free itself completely from the desire for money, and its pursuit of the human foes of the Imperium is a grinding nightmare for its targets.

Lord Ayiid Brasmel, the current Warrant holder, is a brutal tyrant of a man, who lurks in the social gatherings he deigns to grace like a combination of vampire and grox, glowering at anybody who approaches and never laughing.  He and his father and brothers are all men of killing and triumph, who have stood high atop mountains of corpses and planted the Imperial flag.  Notably, most of his family’s actions are against human forces in other Sectors, but he has deployed men in his own home Sector, including on Hapster.

Periodically, the vast body of the Imperium rocks from the spasmodic violence of insurrection from Heretics, Liberals, rebels, or just cultural dissidents.  Naturally, police and Arbites presence is enough to quell this most of the time, but when they and even the PDF fail, the Imperium must mobilize proper military assets to constrain the violent.  Most of the time, this consists of mobilizing any available Imperial Guard and Scions in the system itself, or calling for some more from offworld if there aren’t enough available on-planet.  On some occasions, whole regiments may be raised on more stable worlds to put down the violence.  On the rarest of events, even the Adeptus Sororitas or dreaded Adeptus Astartes may get involved.

However, on some occasions, a Planetary Governor or System Overlord doesn’t need much more firepower than they presently have to win a civil war.  Sometimes, the world just needs a few hundred thousand more men, or a few thousand tanks, or a few bombers, and that will be the straw that breaks the camel’s back.  Enter House Brasmel, which functions as much as a consultancy firm as it does a band of warriors.  Although lacking the immediate military heritage of House Marcus, the House Brasmel has far more collective experience in ground battle, and eschews void war.  The House Brasmel offers itself to any System Overlord or Planetary Governor, as a counselor or advisor, or perhaps as a mercenary force.  They charge little and offer much, especially for a Rogue Trader organization.  The group is more than capable of handling flash mobs, or even small insurrections, without any assistance.  In cases of global conflict, the House Brasmel forces can act as a force multiplier for a native militia or Guard force.  They can also serve as an elite corps of troops that can be relied on not to break when confronted with long odds, although even Brasmel units don’t fight to the death unless it is absolutely called for.

Precisely why House Brasmel is so thirsty for blood, and why their hate and focus on other humans is so direct, is not clear to many outside the House.  Even the Brasmel troops themselves, a group of hundreds of thousands of soldiers tasked to the Brasmel name and recruited from across the Galactic North, are not greatly forthcoming on the issue.  They may not know, themselves.

However, the Inquisition’s Ordo Hereticus suspects that the entire issue may well stem from several events in the House’s history.  The first few Warrant holders, the records show, were not as destructive, and in fact focused themselves entirely on the recovery of lost ships from Warp anomalies and Space Hulks around the Sector.  They did well for themselves and made decent money, and the clearing up of navigational hazards endeared them well to the Chartist Captains’ collective, which is normally ambivalent at best to Rogue Traders.  Over time, however, the Family gradually stopped these activities entirely, in favor of their later martial activities.  The Inquisitors who have inspected the House’s activity suspect that the House uncovered some terrible secret of ancient Mankind in their collection of derelict ships.  Some covert probing by the Inquisition has led the concerned Inquisitors to suspect that the secret concerns the nearby Storm of the Emperor’s Wrath, the massive Warp Storm that ripped the Ecclesiarchal fleet apart during the savage rule of Goge Vandire.  While the Inquisitors are yet unable to learn exactly what it is that troubled the old House so, it has clearly been passed along to each new generation of Brasmels, who now rarely do anything but collect the profits from their remaining businesses and spend it on warships and tanks.  They do not fight void wars for pay, but use their ships to protect their ground assets.

Their fleet may not be large, but it is obsessively well-maintained, to the extent that they have actually hired Cognomen and Fabique shipyard bosses and Techpriests for the purpose of keeping their ships in perfect fighting trim.  Their troopships are also of high quality, and are as fast as they can be made to be.  Their dedicated ground forces are more a motley collection of soldiers, however, mostly Officio Munitorum dischargees.  The loyalty and reckless devotion of their leaders bleeds into the conduct of the troops, making them fanatically faithful, though not suicidal.  The House Brasmel headquarters from the sprawling military fortress Ironpoint on Celeste, which a home for the Warrant holder in the same way that a silo is home for a missile.