Editing Setting:Cloudburst/Rogue Traders (section)

====Rogue Trader House Crusher====
House Crusher is a fixture on Thimble, Cassie’s World, Septiim Secundus, Delving, and all of the other worlds of the Cloudburst Sector that are rapidly expanding their industrial capacity.  The House has made a massive amount of money by selling the archaeotechnological discoveries and trade goods of the Circuit in these industrial dynamos, even to the extent of surprising the Adeptus Mechanicus.  The House Crusher has pumped untold dozens of billions of Thrones into the economies of these worlds, and it is all due to the ambitions of their ruling family.

The House Crusher are wealthy, expansive, and eager to build.  As is often the case, legacy and lineage are important to House Crusher, but they have no restrictions on marriage so long as the wedded-in members of the family swear to place fealty to the House after only the Emperor.  Any other concern is tertiary at best, and the House takes this with proper weight.

However, even good breeding and loyalty are second to ambition.  House Crusher has not risen to power on the basis of its lack of drive.  The money they make, the discoveries they commercialize, and the alliances they forge are all products of a burning will to seize more, more, more.

The House does have a singular Warrant, of course, as every House does, but they do not place any special emphasis on its holder being the sole leader of the House.  Rather than have a single House Warrant holder, the Warrant is left in a stasis field in their orbiting palace above Hapster, and instead, the ‘official’ Warrant holder simply casts the final vote in the periodic ballots for the future of the House.  For the past eighty years, the ballot has been for expansion, into more markets, more fields, more exploration.

This manifests as frequent explorations of the Cloudburst Circuit, and even the more dangerous Exo-zone.  The House has lost ships, and even Crusher family members, in the pursuit of opportunity in the void of space.  The House has had far more successes than failures, however.  It was the House Crusher that discovered the Abhuman world Crispin, and the world of man/machine hybrids called AHG131 (a point of contention, since Thomas Walsh ordered it destroyed before House Crusher was done robbing it).  House Crusher was the force that blazed the trail through the Warp to the Oldlight Exo-zone colony of Misty Step, and funded the arrival of the first six thousand colonists from the Drumnos Hive World of Arquebus.

House Crusher has many small businesses under their thumb, of course, and even a few controlling shares in large corporations on Thimble and Septiim.  By far their most profitable venture in that regard is their thirty percent share in the Flaxweave Foundry, which produces the highest quality clothing and outerwear available in the entire Galactic North, even selling to two Astartes Chapters.  However, the House’s passion for discovery and new places can’t be sated by sitting behind a desk watching a stock ticker.  The House Crusher is always pushing for more, and funds whole convoys of ships and escorts into the deep clouds of the Circuit, seeking glory and treasure.

They occasionally find what they seek.  House Crusher has developed a solid reputation as Hulk-finders.  Their collection of highly skilled Navigators and Astropaths have meticulously scoured the nearby regions of space for any signs of the thinning of the Immaterium veil that presages the violent exit of a Space Hulk.  The House remains one of only three non-transhuman forces in the Sector to have successfully enacted a Hulk capture.  The others are House Marcus and the Imperial Navy’s Hulkbreaker squadrons from Cypra Mundi that sometimes dock at Coriolis.

House Crusher has developed very positive relationships with the Adeptus Mechanicus, thanks to decades of extensive trade with the Techpriesthood.  They have exchanged starmaps, technologies, refugee populations for projects, and the aforementioned Space Hulks.  In return, the Adeptus Mechanicus has rewarded them with mountains of upgrades for their ships, their land-based businesses, and the small space stations the House maintains for their fleet.  Mostly, the House prioritizes sensor and augur upgrades, allowing their assets to peer deeper into the darkness.  The other upgrades go to their business structures on the worlds that house their legitimate trades.  These include cheaper, cleaner energy sources, Forge World-quality fabricators, Techpriests to oversee it all, high-efficiency cogitators, and other things that give an edge of superiority over competing brands.

Perhaps it is because of this positive relationship that the House has been able to make inroads to the Oldlight Exo-zone that the other Rogue Traders of the region rarely do.  The Mechanicus has as much interest in looting the ancient knowledge and wealth of the Exo-zone as any other party in the region, and perhaps more.  The Oldlight Exo-zone, however, has two distinct risks to it that few other regions do.  First, the Exo-zone is almost entirely unmapped.  Although it is well known that the forces of the Imperium waged savage wars against the aliens that lived there during the Great Crusade, its territory now is vacant of much Imperial life, thanks to the difficulty in detecting the Astronomican there.  The fact that Navigators have such difficulty seeing there makes exploration faster than a snail’s pace rare and hazardous, despite actually being closer to Terra than the Eastern Fringe.  The second reason is that of entrenchment by the Imperium’s opponents.  Just because the ships of the Imperium rarely travel there doesn’t mean the inhabitants of the Exo-zone are unaware of it.  The Imperium of Man has been an active force in the universe for over one hundred twelve centuries; few in the galaxy aren’t aware of it.  There are pocket kingdoms of non-Warp capable aliens, human wildcat colonies, Orkholds, and worse that dot the entire Exo-zone, and it would take immense resources to ferret them all out.  These are resources the Imperium presently can’t spare.

House Crusher is one of the few forces of the Galactic North that still makes the effort.  The House Crusher fleets have even traveled to Deathwatch stations in the region to share knowledge collected on indigenous aliens, albeit rarely.  Other Crusher ships scour the few mapped starlanes in the region for any sign of surviving Terran Federation colonies, or their remnants.

However, these expeditions are expensive and take immense time to perform.  House Crusher augments their income with other tasks.  At times, the House has even accepted privateering contracts from the Segmentum Ultima to assist the Battlefleet Drumnos with their occasional wars against pirate gangs or Freebootaz.  These contracts pay well and offer some action, so younger scions of the House are encouraged by their elders to take up the sword for the family’s sake.