Editing Nobledark Imperium Notes (section)

= Notable Planets =

==Medusa==

To clarify, the giant terraformers aren’t Men of Iron in any way. They’re basically DaoT roombas that someone forgot to hit the off switch on (or the off switch broke, considering the Age of Strife).
Originally just the AdMech and the AdBio were going to be mentioned, until it became apparent that Eldar farseer terraforming counts as “Imperial” as well. The point is more that these terraforming machines are beyond what M41 humanity is capable of, rather than any comparison between humanity and the Eldar. However, the Eldar have lost their best stuff too, so it’s likely that the way farseers terraform worlds is simple compared to what the Old Eldar Empire was capable of. Indeed, these terraformers more brute-force the habitability of a world, rather than develop a healthy ecosystem the way the Eldar do.

==Ganymede==

One of the main figures in charge of Ganymede is Inquisitor Jaq Draco, one of the Imperium's extremely high-end psykers and one of the few humans that can navigate the Webway. Also as nutty as they come. Draco is as much an object to be contained as a staffmember, and the fact that the Imperium would station one of their most powerful psykers here as a safeguard against something going wrong on Ganymede speaks volumes about the danger posed by the stuff on Ganymede.

Ganymede is kind of a sore spot between Eldar and human parts of the Imperium. The Eldar elders think most of the stuff held on Ganymede is fricking dangerous, and it should be destroyed posthaste (preferably by throwing it into the nearest star). They tend to say "I told you so" when something breaks out or goes horribly wrong. The humans tend to reply that we don't even know how to safely destroy most of this stuff (e.g., throwing an artifact into a star could just result in the object eating the star, especially if it's C'tan tech), it's safer where it is (e.g., Apep), and it might prove useful someday. They tend to say "I told you so" when items on Ganymede turn out to be of relevance or provide valuable information to stopping a threat.

==Old Earth and the Sol System in general==

In general, non-humans aren't allowed to set foot on Earth past the Daisy Chain without the proper permits. Old Earth being restricted to humans is more a matter of privacy than anything else. Old Earth is a pretty big deal to humans and holds a lot of spiritual significance, regardless of religion, and they don't want a veritable horde of xeno tourists coming in and messing everything up like drunks spray-painting a holy site. However, the Imperium also tries to afford the same kind of respect to other species. Xenos generally aren't allowed outside the Xenos districts of Craftworlds without prior permission, non-Tau are generally not allowed on T'au, etc. Exceptions are generally made in the case of emergencies like a ship being blown off course because of a warp storm.

That said, Old Earth does have non-humans on it, just not very many. Annual permits are issued for non-humans to visit Earth. As is the case for some places today, foreigners (by which I mean non-humans) can rent places, but they can't buy property (then again, few can buy property on Old Earth). Ambassadors from the Craftworlds and non-human civilizations get a pass, as well as seers and other people who work for the Administratum. You get tourists and students who are able to articulate well enough that they won't go getting drunk and disrupting cultural sites. Merchants and traders who want to sell wares (though it's generally a bad idea trying to sell tech in Mars' backyard). And of course Isha and the Handmaidens get a free pass because it would be stupid for the fricking Empress to not be allowed to set foot on the throne world.

On the other hand, most foreigners and tourists don't even care if they get to set foot on Old Earth specifically. Urban sprawl has reached the point that the entire Sol System is considered the metropolitan heart of the Imperium, to the point that most visitors from out-of-system (human and otherwise) usually end up touring around the outer parts of the Sol System and still feel like they can say they've visited the Imperium's capital.

==the Realm of Ultramar and the Imperium Secundus Plan==

Roboute Guilliman just loved his contingency plans. No matter what happened he had a plan for how to beat it. It was how his forces reacted so quickly and coherently when The Beast smashed into Imperial Space. They just adapted one of his older plans slightly. He was anticipating the discovery of some great and hostile empire, possibly human possibly xeno, out on the Eastern Fringe. Sort of an "Evil Twin. Wat Do?" type deal. The Ultramarine WotB plans were mostly just adapted from that.

Guilliman’s plan for the absolute worst case scenario, one where the “evil empire” made it all the way to Segmentum Solar and Old Earth fell, was to rally all the assets that could be salvaged and rebuild the Imperium somewhere else. Guilliman made no secret about his plan B (as well as the fact that it was supposed to be just that, a plan B), as it was only sensible to prepare for the worst. For this plan, Guilliman chose the Survivor Civilization of Ultramar. Ultramar was about as far away from the Imperium as you could get and still be in what one could call civilization. Ultramar was also very well-organized, so his plan was mostly based around the older empire of Ultramar and using that as a keystone for other systems to rally around. If the hypothetical evil empire arose anywhere else and smashed into Segmentum Solar and Old Earth, Ultramar would be the best place to be clear of the blast radius. In any case the Imperium Secundus groundwork needed someone to oversee it. Lord Guilliman’s grandson, Gaufrid Guilliman, was a very competent and respected member of the Administratum who was tasked with overseeing this great and hopefully never to be used Plan B. 

When Guilliman first came to Ultramar, Ultramar was organized in a manner similar to the Delian League of ancient Earth. On paper, Ultramar was supposed to be an association of equals, but in practice it was a hegemonic empire with Macragge, being the most populous and militarily powerful, calling the shots. Guilliman made numerous reforms to Ultramar’s government and bureaucracy, among other things turning it into a “one planet, one vote” system. Macragge went along with it because at the time Macragge afraid of being upstaged by Calth, who threatened to surpass Macragge in terms of population and therefore threatened Macragge’s power in Ultramar. Ironically, Guilliman preserved Macragge’s voice in the system at the expense of ending Macraggian hegemony. Macragge and Calth still tend to butt heads politically, being the two largest and most prosperous worlds in Ultramar, but the system is far smoother and more efficient than it once was.

Guilliman's plan proved surprisingly prescient. When the War of the Beast broke out, Ultramar's remote location meant it was spared the worst of the fighting. Ultramar saw conflict, as did all regions of the Imperium but it did not see the fierce fighting that wracked Segmenta Solar and Obscurus. Gaufrid Guilliman was the only descendant of Yolande Fouché and Roboute Guilliman to survive the War of the Beast, thanks to Guilliman’s contingency plan. The line of Guilliman and House Guilliman failed on Old Earth. None of his descendants were counted among the living at the end of the war. There are still people in the realm of Ultramar with the name Guilliman. They are almost certainly descendants now very far removed.

==Rynn's World==

The planet of Rynn’s world is rather unusual in that the planet is ruled by the combination of the married union of a (usually matriarchal) ruler and the Chapter Master of the Crimson Fists. It is a ceremonial thing going back to the days of Rynn when the Exiled King married his daughter and heir to the head the military in the convoy, a Space Marine of great wisdom and charisma called Alexis Polux.

It is a tradition known as the everlasting marriage to symbolize the eternal bond between Rynn's World and the Imperium. The marriage is everlasting because when one dies the surviving member has to marry the replacement. Needless to say this has resulted in the royal title being strictly matrilineal despite the rest of the aristocracy being cognatic. Should either party to assume the position be already married then the other half in this arrangement becomes a secondary wife/husband, in such cases the marriage does not need to be consummated as that would/might infringe on per-existing vows.

It also results in stability as there is no question of succession as upon the death of one the other takes their title, lands and possessions until the replacement marriage ceremony which does mean that in the days between partners the title of Chapter Master is held by a woman which is possibly unprecedented.

This breakdown of a clear dividing line between the baseline humans and Space Marines, and indeed between military rank and the aristocratic hierarchy, has in the years since Rynn and Polux permeated totally in society. Although the commoners cannot become nobility save through special and rare appointment by the Queen or by marriage into the nobility the rank of (usually) unlanded-nobility is traditionally handed out with promotion to officer.

With the marriage of Chapter to the Aristocracy and every Space Marine having been trained to be officers of one sort or another this has resulted in the Chapter becoming a not insubstantial part of the landed gentry. Every marine has an estate, a patch of their homeworld that they call their own. Due to them having no real interest in such things this is typically the less sought after land in inhospitable places. The craggy mountains around their fortress, deserts and the wind swept and salt spray blasted islands in the far north and south. The few hardy inhabitants of these remote lands appreciate that there are masters who will lend a hand if needed but tend to live in those lands because they don't care for authority above them and so value the Space Marines lack of any real interest.

Rynn's World was not the original home of the chapter, at first they were nomadic and had been since they were the 405th Company of Dorn's Legion. It was by attaching their forces to Rynn's colony fleet as it set out to resettle an exterminated world in the time of The Rebuilding that they came to enjoy their more permanent habitation.

Pedro Kantor is the current commander of the remnants of his chapter, king of a world brought to ruin and husband of Queen Maia Cagliestra who actually rules the planet when it's not being raped to death by orks.

The Crimson Fists did boast ~2,100 members all accounted, now down to 128. The Fortress has been relocated to New Rynn City. As the world is rebuilt and the other lesser cities reestablished the intention is to appoint each company to a city and diffuse the chapter. Next time it's going to take more than 1 malfunctioning nuclear missile to devastate them. The Immortal Captain Alessio Cortezwill be put in command of the fortress to be rebuilt Caltara and will have the dubious honour of owning the crater of Arx Tyrranis when the time comes.

In the wake of the devastation caused by Snagrod the province of Dorado in the north of the west continent was completely depopulated as people fled to the safety of Santoris, the only city in that land.

When the walls fell nobody was spared. Those that fled or had previously tried to hide in the wilderness were hunted down in the following months as sport. If there were as many as a hundred survivors left it would be miraculous and what few there were wandered south to warmer climes in the search for other survivors.

It was not until a few years later when expeditionary forces sent before settlement teams sailed north from Port Calina that they found that Dorado had now gained new inhabitants. The royal court of Rynn's World had by satellite imagery been aware of activity in that province and had hoped that it was a previously hidden survivor population coming back out into the open or unofficial land grabbers that could be reasoned with and made into the basis of the recolonization. What they were dreading was a feral ork resurgence.

It was none of these things. With ample fertile land lying unclaimed exodites had moved in rather than let those fields become totally overgrown. They seemed uninterested in leaving as they had just set up their modest houses, sown their seeds and had even planted a new wraith-tree (itself a monumental occasion). Although Chapter Master Kantor was all for forcibly relocating them off the planet, as illegal squatters they had no rights, this was not a military matter unless things went very wrong. After due consideration Queen Cagliestra allowed them to stay on the principle that exodites were typically polite to their hosts and didn't cause trouble. And also the planet was still pretty empty considering that the only real body of survivors had been the Silver Citadel at the heart of the capital city.

In gratitude the exodites promised to hand over any surplus produce from their new homeland as a form of rent. As this was not massively different to the way things were before and the cost of resettlement was being paid by someone else everyone was happy, or only mildly cantankerous.

The chapter itself raised the matter of rebuilding with its neighbouring chapters at the Feast of Blades held in the following year. Due to the increasing strains of an increasingly hostile galaxy none promised and assistance in the rebuilding, preoccupied with their own troubles as they were.

Rynn's World was just one little agri-world after all and not so broken that it couldn't heal on its own.

==Severan Dominate==

The Severan Dominate is a violent oppressive enclave that as of 999.M41 is primarily holding on through grimderp pseudo-pragmatism that is really serving to make things worse for everyone. Their casus belli for secession basically boils down to the fact that the Severan Dominate are basically lucky in that they’ve never really seen a real war. Like the Tau in vanilla, they really don’t understand the scope of the galaxy they live in. So when they hear stories of what is happening elsewhere in the galaxy, they think it’s on the same level of what they have to deal with, exaggerated by shell shock, big fish stories, and an intragalactic game of telephone. They hear stories of endless hordes of insectoid xenos (Tyranids) and go “we have those too, we call them the Q’orl”. They think an invasion by the Blood Pact is on the same level as a Black Crusade. They think a bunch of isolated enclaves are what the Imperium worries about when they hear “Necron Star Empire”. They think Grimtoof Git-Slaver is on the level of Ghazghull. They’re like soldiers fighting in Africa during World War I hearing about what’s going on in No-Man’s Land and finding what there hearing simply too ridiculous to believe. They're the logical extension of someone hearing of how the galaxy really works and finding the truth to be more ridiculous than fiction.

The Imperium has tried explaining what’s really going on to the Severan Dominate, but the Dominate refuses to believe them. They see the Imperium as using the Tyranids, Necrons, Chaos, and Brain Boyz as boogeymen used to justify the increasingly high tithes placed on worlds like the Dominate in order to support their favored worlds like, say, Cadia. They think the Imperium is overexaggerating the threat and that they can survive perfectly well on their own. They have no idea the kind of rapetrain that is out there in the darkness. Additionally, the current heads of the Severus family are kind of self-centered assholes and see setting up their own petty empire as their own personal ego-trip. As a result, it was relatively easy for them to convince the citizenry that the Imperium had been lying to them to justify higher taxes and incite secession.

Of course, this leads to problems. Part of the deal on joining the Imperium is that when you are in, you are in for good. There are no fair-weather friendships or chickening out in the Imperium. The Imperium can’t afford to let the Dominate leave. If the Imperium allows a state to leave then others in a similar position will leave. If they all piss off it's going to be a small number of worlds holding up a large number of fortress worlds that are keeping the monsters out. The walls fall through lack of support and monsters get in and the Imperium gets annihilated and, and here is the real kicker, those worlds that ran away realize their folly only after it's too late to possibly be doing anything about it and everyone is dead and there is no hope for meaningful survival of any member of the Imperium. Hence the current war with the Dominate. The Emperor also doesn’t like the idea of leaving an uncorrupted human civilization out to hang, but the situation is starting to become one in which there is no objectively right decision. Either kill a whole bunch of citizens of the Severan Dominate and the greater Imperium in a bloody war to suppress the rebellion, or leave the Dominate out to hang and watch an entire civilization get killed by Chaos/Dark Eldar/Orks/Slaugth/whatever.

The Severan Dominate see the overwhelming response of the Imperium as the desperate attempts of a failing empire to hold onto power, rather than simply the sheer amount of power the Imperium is able to wield its fuckhuge army in times of relative peace (see: [[Nobledark_Imperium_Drafts#The_Badab_War|Badab]], the last time the Q’orl got uppity). However, the Imperium is still much, much bigger than they are, and the Dominate is starting to get desperate. They’re not stupid enough to try joining Chaos, but they might even be stupid enough to try and get backing from forces that they should know better than to negotiate with to achieve their goals. Specifically, the Severus family is making deals with the Slaugth instead of/in addition to the Dark Eldar, giving the maggot-men a few worlds in exchange for an external foe to keep the Dominate in line ([[Nobledark_Imperium_Drafts#The_Rangdan_Xenocides_and_the_Slaugth|and completely unaware of what happens if you let the Slaugth get a foothold]]), hence why there are so many Slaugth in the Calixis Sector.

As of 999.M41, the suppression of the rebellion of the Severan Dominate is just still going on. No one is aware of the level of shit that is about to go down, so it’s possible the Dominate might just get the lucky break they have been hoping for.

==Olamic Quietude==

Editor's Note: May have to rewrite, threads talked about making Olamics "brain in a jar" remotely piloting robot bodies to avoid the issues with a post-scarcity society curbstomping everyone.

The Olamic Quietude are a bastion of isolation in a sea of mostly Imperial space. A highly-technologically advanced human society, the Olamic Quietude survived the Dark Age of Technology by uploading their minds as A.I. and resleeving them into robot bodies. New citizens of the Quietude are born by growing new brains and uploading them as soon as possible into mechanical bodies. The Adeptus Mechanicus hate the Quietude with a frothing vengeance, making A.I. is bad enough but actually becoming them is tech-heresy of the highest caliber. Others in the Mechanicus don’t just hate the Quietude for tech-heresy but because on some level the Quietude represent the logical extrapolation of Mechanicum ideals, replacing every part of the body with machinery, and it scares them.

The Imperium via the Vlka Fenryka tried to make peaceful contact with the Quietude during the Great Crusade. A society with that much Dark Age-era technology would be a huge boon to the Imperium. The Quietude attacked the contact team without provocation and vivisected the survivors. Seeing the state of the rest of the galaxy, particularly the near-absence of common Dark Age technology like A.I. (which made the Imperium seem downright backwards to the Quietude), the Quietude considered themselves the only true successors to the Great and Bountiful Human Dominion and the rest of humanity as nothing more than devolved savages.

Russ and Bjorn were quite angry. Russ in particular. He wanted to rain nuclear fire on them from orbit, smash their ships and pitch them into the nearest gravity well, topple their orbital dockyard and drop it on the capital city and hunt them down to the last man, take any sufficiently unaugmented women as war-brides and adopting any children and dependents. Yes he promised after the Scouring of Skand Wars that he and his people would never do this shit again and the tradition would be retired but he felt the Old Ways could be brought out again just for this one special occasion. They had insulted the Imperium, they had insulted his Legion and he had friends in the contact team and he knew that they died badly.

In the end the Steward managed to calm him down enough to call him off and the Olamic Quietude dodged a bullet. The Imperium would have won, in time, but the cost would have been astronomical. Despite being restricted to a handful of planets, of which only their frozen homeworld was inhabitable in the strictest sense of the world, the high tech base of the Quietude and their ability to restore from backup would mean it would cost numerous Imperial soldiers to permanently kill one Quietude one. It would have been a bloodbath, and would have been all for a world that had little to no strategic or resource value whatsoever. The Steward told Russ the next time the Quietude attacked the Wolves he would allow them no quarter.

As a result, the Imperium adopted a cold war quarantine policy towards the Olamic Quietude. Quietude ships in Imperial space are shot on sight as well as vice versa. Thankfully, although the Quietude had warp capability they weren't expansionist and didn't seem interested in expanding beyond the dozen or so nearest worlds to their frozen homeworld. The Quietude initially believed that the Imperium would implode. They weren't the first big interstellar empire that had arisen around them. All the others had died, this one would too. By the time it looked like they were here to stay it was far too late for the Quietude to be able to do anything about it and claim what they saw as their birthright. To the Imperium the Quietude were, and would continue to be, a problem for later. The problem is that unlike the Adeptus Mechanicus the Quietude have no prohibitions on inventing so their technology is constantly improving. Sooner or later, the Quietude is going to have to be dealt with, as eventually the force multiplication of Quietude technology is going to outweigh the Imperial advantage of numbers.

That said, the Quietude have their weaknesses, even if they don’t project them to outsiders. First, they get screwed over by catastrophes just as badly as the Imperium does. When the War of the Beast broke out, the Quietude were hit just as hard as the Imperium and as such were in not position to take advantage of the weakened state. The Harrowing screwed them over. The death screams of the possible Man of Gold screwed them over. The Black Crusades screw them over. Every time they get screwed over their technology get knocked back quite a bit and they have to rebuild, not enough that they lose all their gains but enough that they have yet to reach the critical tech-levels they need to go on the offensive. Half the time they engage in brushfire hostilities and posturing with the Imperium it’s to prevent the Imperium from figuring out this little fact and wiping them out while they are weak.

Additionally, because the Quietude are not reproducing like organic humans, their population is gradually getting whittled down by attrition and each citizen of the Quietude controls an increasing proportion of the Quietude’s power base and processing power. So while Quietude tech base is increasing their population drops. This means that while it is difficult to kill a Quietude soldier, as time goes on the permanent death of a soldier represents a bigger loss to the Quietude. The obvious solution to this from the Quietude’s standpoint would be to grow more people, but that would mean the already existing populace would have to give up some of their bandwidth and processing power due to the increased population, which they aren’t interested in.

Ten thousand years later between the 12th Black Crusade, the increase in hostilities with the Necron Star Empire, and the appearance of tyranids on the other end of the galaxy, the Olamic Quietude sees the strains on an overtaxed and attacked on all sides Imperium. Despite being damaged by the 12th Black Crusade themselves, they smell blood in the water and are mobilizing for war. 

They have taken the ancient listening posts on the worlds at the border, killing the crews and exterminating the service towns that grew up around them. They are very much prepared to take as much as they can while the Imperium is distracted elsewhere. Their fleets are assembled, their soldiery constructed and trained and they are going to methodically and meticulously take and settle and turn to war world after world until they take Old Earth. What will life be like under the Olamic Quietude? Nobody will ever find out. They don't leave survivors. At least none that the Imperium can find. Baseline humans and any human not of their realm are seen as some sort of tribal barbarian or primitive lesser animal. They have made so far no distinction beyond civilian or soldier, adult or child.

Ljot's Landing is an inhabited world not very far from the Olamic Quietude exclusion zone. Very similar to the Quietude homeworld in that it's a half frozen semi-wasteland. And it is a Fenrisian Colony, with a chapter of its very own. The call has been put out. The Valkyries are rising, the Wolves are awakening and Bjorn is at long last going to be allowed to settle the long, long held and unfulfilled grudge.

They killed everyone, the men, the women, the children, making no distinction between combatant and non-combatant except for the way they killed them. The soldiers were killed where they stood with their strange weaponry, leaving eerie ashen sillhouetes wherever the Quietude's weapons hit home. What they did to the civilians was worse, taking what they wanted, the brains, the spines, sometimes the internal organs, and leaving the rest. Butchered bodies half-buried under snow littered the fields and streets, at first resembling the bodies of dead animals, except for the fact that their corpses were mostly drained of blood and their wounds were made with the precision of a surgeon instead of the tearing marks of an animal. Even if they did not have enhanced senses the Space Wolves could have smelled them, reeking with that stale, clinical odor from being treated with so much antiseptics and antimicrobials that the bodies would not decompose naturally for months and the carrion birds would not touch them.

No one in the Imperium knows why the Quietude are doing this. The leading suggestion is the Olamics are taking the brains, lobotomizing them, and incorporating them into their neural network as extra processors as a twisted form of mercantilism. Throughout the history of humanity and other species people have often sought to circumvent the overexplotation of local resources by stealing them from someone else. Only in this case the resource in question isn’t gold, or wood, or land, but bandwidth via brains.  Others point out the Quietude could easily vat-grown brains if they wished. It's possible if the Quietude tried to grow more brains those brains would be by Quietude law considered citizens, and therefore must be treated as people and not resources. But by Quietude standards outsiders aren't people and thus there are no such restrictions. On the other hand, maybe there is something specific they want from these brains, perhaps using the memories to gather information on what the Imperium has been up to. Or, perhaps, the Quietude are having fun. They butchered the people of Ljot’s Landing because it upsets the Fenrisians and the Think Tank remembers how enjoyable it was to vivisect the members of Russ’ diplomatic team thousands of years prior.

The Emperor isn’t happy about the situation, but he realizes just as the Quietude do that the galaxy is due to erupt into all-out-war any day now. The Quietude have to be taken out of the way now rather than later when they could potentially cost the Imperium the war by taking advantage of their weakened state or divert resources better used elsewhere. So the Vlka Fenryka are given the go ahead to wipe them out. Bjorn’s response? “By Hal, it’s about time”.

== The Arkhan Confederacy ==

Arkhan is a planet whose greatest crime is being on the wrong side of history. A land of mini-mecha and aristocratic landowners, the Arkhan Confederacy declared their support for Vandire during the Imperial Civil War, in a sector that was deeply divided between Throne and Rebellion supporters. The inhabitants of Arkhan are known for their bitterness over the results of the Imperial Civil War, mostly because the surrounding planets never let them live it down. Even though in hindsight the more recent citizens of Arkhan agree with the general consensus that Vandire was a nut with good charisma, they still have grievances with what the pro-Thor planets did to them during the war, as well as the fact that the pro-Thor planets treated them like garbage afterwards. The area around Arkhan was home to some brutal fighting between Thor and Vandire loyalists, with both sides bombarding the others’ population centers from orbit. Sebastian Thor is not a popular figure on Arkhan.

Eventually this resentment reached a tipping point and in 861.M41 the planet rebelled. When the Imperium’s military response arrived four years later, they found the Arkhan Confederacy had been defeated by a counter-resistance of Imperium loyalists, who had overthrown the Arkhan Confederacy and established the more centralized Arkhan Dominion. The leader of the Dominion is a taskmaster, but he is also a devious, deeply unpleasant man. There are even whispers that he stoked the flames of resentment in order to seize power in the first place. He maintains order and keeps the planet politically stable, but many are worried his heavy-handed tactics are building more resentment and are likely to cause another rebellion. Unfortunately, Arkhan is a nowhere world out in the boondocks, and as long as people aren’t actively shooting at each other the Imperium is willing to begrudgingly look the other way.

From a meta perspective, the politics of the Arkhan system and the potential of stopping (or starting) another civil war are meant to be a plot hook for street level games (e.g., Dark Heresy).

== Monarchia and the Word Bearers ==

Because the Word Bearers don’t have any special connections to Colchis in this timeline, the primary base of operations for the modern chapter is actually Monarchia of all places. Monarchia was constructed by the primarch Lorgar as a planned settlement, a Katholian “city on a hill”. It was intended to be a peaceful place demonstrating the ideals of Katholianism and a place where people of all faiths could meet and discuss their beliefs, because Lorgar loved debate and syncreticism and interfaith dialogue, believing all reasonable religions to ultimately stem from a universal truth (even if he did keep trying to reinterpret and cram everything through his Katholian worldview, for example reconciling the existence of the eldar pantheon by claiming they were archangels sent by God to watch over the eldar in the same way that biblical angels were sent to Earth and that all reasonable non-idolatrous faiths had their ultimate origins in Quolious). When the Word Bearers split into chapters the eponymous chapter got Lorgar’s planned city as their base. Because the Steward wasn’t as offended by the idea of religious institutions in this timeline (as long as they weren’t worshipping Chaos or him), Roboute Guilliman was never ordered to burn Monarchia.

Unfortunately, the existence of Monarchia did offend the Taskmaster of Shaa-Dome, who considered the Katholians’ “city on a hill” to be blasphemy and the Katholians themselves to be idolaters raising temples to venerate “false gods” (i.e., any god that wasn’t his beloved waifu Slaanesh). This was some time after the Great Hunt or early Black Crusades, Lorgar may have still alive and the Imperium was somewhat reconquered after the Beast. The Taskmaster would have taken the system and desecrated it during some gathering of the Conclave or something similar, making a point to enjoy the ravaging of the beautiful central hive himself. The Taskmaster's restraint, vanishingly rare in all other Slaaneshi, ensured there was a small population of Monarchians that survived relatively unmolested as it was his intention that they carry forth word of the deeds they witnessed. Some effort might have been made to permanently taint the world and system, but when the Word Bearer descendants were ready to respond in force the Taskmaster promptly returned to the palace in the Eye, and let the stragglers leaving the afterparty face the vengeful Imperial guns.

Yeah, I can imagine the first sacking was some time after the Great Hunt or early black crusades, Lorgar may have still been alive (he lived to 1100) and the Imperium was somewhat reconquered after the Beast. The Taskmaster would have taken the system and desecrated it during some gathering of the Conclave or something similar, making a point to enjoy the ravaging of the beautiful central hive himself. The Taskmaster had every reason to make Slaanesh a hated foe of Imperial religion, their candlelight gods are useless but it lends towards the Prince of Pleasure's intention to become the subconscious archenemy of the Imperial couple. Provoking (raping and razing) the church(es) is an excellent way to be denounced extra hard as a god of sin. The Taskmaster's restraint, vanishingly rare in all other Slaaneshies, ensured there was a small population of Monarchians that survived relatively unmolested as it was his intention that they carry forth word of the deeds they witnessed. Some effort might have been made to permanently taint the world and system, but when the Word Bearer descendants were ready to respond in force the Taskmaster promptly returned to the palace in the Eye, and let the stragglers leaving the afterparty face the vengeful Imperial guns. The Taskmaster’s desecration of Monarchia was so thorough that the Word Bearers became a fleet-based chapter in the aftermath, as Monarchia could no longer support a fully-staffed Space Marine chapter.

For nearly fifty years the Word Bearers existed as a fleet based chapter, bringing the good news of civilization across the Imperium (as in, secular proselytizers in space). That stopped after the Battle of Neo-Babylon (or Bablyon II if a more sci-fi name is required). Neo-Babylon sent out a general call for aid against an invasion and the Word Bearers were one of the Astartes chapters that responded. [[Minotaurs|All 2,500 of them at once.]] The Word Bearers were commended for their aid but the Imperium was confused why the Word Bearers would drop everything and come to Bablyon II, not even leaving a token guard present at their homeworld. When the Imperium learned the truth they were floored. The destruction of Monarchia had slipped through the cracks of the Administratum and the Word Bearers had been too stoic and humble to make enough of a fuss. The news filtered its way up to the Master of the Administratum and the Steward, who order them to go back and rebuild Monarchia (providing funding to rebuild ostensibly as a reward for saving Neo-Babylon). Having a first founding chapter be effectively homeless is an embarrassment and unacceptable to the Imperium.

[[Rape|They finished rebuilding just in time for Arrotyr and the Scions of the Old Helm to show up.]] Arrotyr heard that the Taskmaster had sacked Monarchia in the name of Slaanesh and didn’t want anyone to get the idea that there's a Chaos God more important than THE BLOOD KING OF THE GALAXY. Though attacks on various other emblems of Imperial religions would be locally devastating at worst and hard fought defenses at very best, he eventually broke off, maybe having hounded the Word Bearers, maybe having mockingly avoided them in their exile from Monarchia. Then after its rebuilt and restored, bam, Arrotyr shows up to argue the merits of worshiping King Khorne with the rite of system wide bloodshed, fire, and war, because he's a colossal dick.

The Taskmaster would have actually moved on to other things. Always more ships to order built in Shaa-Dome, entreaties for the favor of princedom to screen, soulstones to grind up for master to snort, etc. so the Taskmaster had nearly forgotten about Monarchia in the first place but nobody, except possibly Be'lakor, holds on to a grudge or a perceived slight like Arrotyr.

Monarchia was rebuilt. Again. As of M41 Monarchia is a hive city now. A very large hive city. The first Monarchia was designed with all effort put into making it a nice place to live and defense as an afterthought. It was in its way an architectural marvel and in some distant possible future when war is just a memory it design choices would have been copied across the galaxy. But it was easily defeated.

New Monarchia was far more formidable and had elements taken from Perty's designs and innovations discovered since. Arrotyr had to work for it. New Monarchia was not as devastated as the first city was and there were enough survivors left to rebuild and legitimately claim continuity. 3rd Monarchia was rebuilt stronger again.

Only a fool would go to Monarchia now with hope of an easy victory. Lorgar was pleased with the results even if reaching them was a price he believed nobody should have to pay.

The surface of Monarchia outside of the primary hive is not as messed up as Armageddon or Cadia, not actually a deathworld, but scarred. It was visited millennia ago by the prime agents of two hostile gods, Slaanesh's majordomo and Khorne's foremost commander. Even without the massive occult power that implies either one could arguably be the most heavily armed (former) mortal in the galaxy, boasting personal command of forces only rivaled by the fleets and armies united in singular purpose under Oscar in acts as Warmaster. Both are known for massive gestures in their gods' names and the physical signs of these acts would be hard to cover, even long after any curses or horrible blessings are dispelled, the only thing being to let erosion and reforestation, flooding and tremors, slowly make it fade away.

== Terranis ==

In the original story Terranis survived, barely. I suggest we keep it like that. The 'Nids couldn't eat the planet because every time they got a digestion pool and giant drinking straw arrangement set up something unfortunate kept happening to it and the only way to stop that from happening was to exterminate the last of the Terranites, which was proving difficult in the extreme.

The rest of the Imperium just assumed that Terranis was dead. They lost contact with it 20 years ago and their only curiosity about the place was why the Shadow in the Warp was still there 20 years later, but unless they were prepared to travel to the edge of the Shadow and spend decades to centuries at sub-light trying to reach the planet they couldn't know. And they always had better stuff to divert those sorts of resources to. Sadly resource diversion and interstellar level triage was why Terranis was left for the 'Nids in the first place, Terranis was deemed an acceptable loss in the grand strategy. The Kriegers sticking around was them either not getting the orders, being used as a diversion or just being characteristically stubborn/uncooperative.

'Nids remain on Terranis and in Terranis orbit for the better part of 40 years before the Terranites and Krieger forces bleed them dry beyond the point where they can maintain the Shadow. Then the one remaining astropath on the planet sends out a brief report on the situation and the Imperial brass is absolutely fucking dumbfounded. That planet was written off as "unsalvageable" even with off-world help. It should not be alive. It shouldn't have been capable of resisting. They really shouldn't be getting any sort of report from the place. It sure as shit should not have been winning a game of attrition against the Dreaded Star Locust. But it is. A 'nid siege was a race against time based on how much materiel they had left versus how much biomass the 'nids had. You can only have so much explosives to blow up the drinking straws and you are essentially playing chicken as imagined by Dorn and Perturabo where either the hive ships starve to death or you run out of bombs. The Derivatives said 'fuck that' and improvised fresh explosives from tyranid bodily fluids. Some of those are pretty volatile, use the homebrew for the artillery and mines, use the vintage stock for the big shit like the capillary towers and dread the day when you have to try and make a 'nid snot bob big enough take one of those fucking things out. It won't let shit last indefinitely unless you can also make the artillery shell of out actual shells (maybe they can) but it could help you last a lot longer.

Which is not to say that the Terranians would have it their own way. The 'nids are nothing if not adaptive and although they can't stop making volatile mucus and still have useful weapons they wouldn't be limited to ripper variants. After the first few failed attempts to eat the bastion cities and the thining of the ground forces the Hive mind will either send down one or more Norn Queens to spawn an army locally to cut down on travel time and expending resources on space-to-ground pods or they are going to start spawning legitimate creatures rather than weapons. Shit with digestive systems and reproductive organs and the ability to survive for extended periods of time. This is also assuming that the Terranians absolutely salted all the earth everywhere when the planet became irretrievably tyrannoformed. Which they probably did quite effectively because when it comes to fucking up a planet down all the way back to pre-terraformed state whilst still living on it the Kriegers have prior experience. 'Nid fleet can't go because it'll starve to death in transit if it can't recover the expended bio-matter and it can't do that until the bio-matter stops planting IEDs on it's drinking straws and gets digested properly. Maybe if it hadn't been so effort/resource conservative when it first arrived shit would have gone down different but it had no way of knowing the tried and tested maximum efficiency method would be insufficient this time. It does highlight a rather funny weakness in the tyranids though. When the tyranids begin to digest the planet most of their biomass, including the warrior forms, is tied up in the digesting pools. The Hive Mind can't give commands to the pools like it can to the hive ships and bioforms so the ground is being held by a skeleton crew. In theory by this point all non-tyranid life on the planet is dead anyway so it doesn't matter. But if not...well you get Terranis, and all the Hive Mind can do to compensate is pupate new bioforms out of the rippers lying around. If it were a larger Hive Fleet that could spare more resources Terranis would have been in big trouble.

Imperium send in an Ordo Xenos team with Deathwatch accompanying them to confirm that this isn't a clever ruse. They find a planet knee deep in 'Nid chitin and the ground stained in xeno blood. It looks a bit like Cadia, a bit like Krieg and a lot like Hell on the day they couldn't get the fires to light. And amidst the carnage and corpse fields continents wide they find the bastion cities, Krieg away from Krieg. But also not Krieg. It's like Krieg but Krieg made human, humanity restored to the Kriegers. Everybody is masked and uniformed, and then you see this mini-kriegers giggling. All is dusty and gloomy but you hear music in the distance. And old and crippled Krieger that somehow has survived is telling tales about the wider Imperium. They are survivors that don´t lose the hope in the face of an unbeatable enemy. If people send to Krieg end depressed, in Terranis find what really means being an imperial citizen. They will never surrender, not even faced with the Armageddon, because they are the last light in the galaxy.
 It's real fucking difficult to tell Kriegers from Terranites and among the mixed children, referred to by the old Kriegers as the Derivatives, the distinction is meaningless.

Most people will be a more than a little perplexed with the Derivations. Even kriegs will not understand what the fuck has happened. They have survived an impossible situation. Yeah, they seem like the standard Kriegers, but they are not. Remember that they don´t have vitae-wombs. They have families and a home that they love. Where the kriegers are a bunch of nihilistic fellows, these guys just plain and simple have adapted to a death world. They probably fight with tactical acumen as an attrition war against nids is a fucking nightmare. They hold the line an then return with their families. True, like the kriegers there aren´t civilians in their culture... but they have a culture, is only that theirs is extremely militarized, and that is not that rare in the ND galaxy. They have a lot in common with other deathworlders troops like the Catachans, that just plain simple have adapted. Esencially, a less sugary version of the guys from Love and Krieg.

For the old Inquisitor Kryptmann, on one hand he would really, really love them. Terranis derivations are absolutely fantastic: The devotion of the Kriegers. Tactical acumen. Better liked by the Ad-mech for not having to use Vitae-wombs. Probably partial immunity to nids toxins. Smell genestealers cults and probably know like a million recipes to eat them and cook them and turn them into weapons. They are the children that he never fathered. Probably Terranis is the only place in that he can feel like home. On the other hand, the idea of basically becoming the tyranids to defeat the tyranids would be disgusting and he would have a first hand look at the kind of arguments people are making in the Imperial Army that soldiers need to be more like Krieg. As proud as he is of his unfathered children he doesn't want to force others to become as shit as him.

For the first time since the Civil War there is internal dispute on Krieg. Are these Terranite people Kriegers now? Are their half-breed children? Are the old veterans who were born on Krieg still Kriegers? Are the old veterans renegades or are they some glimpse that salvation is possible? Is this the rain washing their sins away?

Kriegers don't have violent disputes among their own kind any more outside of practice wars. But they have also had no real differences of opinion since the end of the nuclear war either. The rest of the galaxy is in constant uncertainty but they have always prided themselves on being the immovable center of certainty. They have always been 100% sure on what they are, what everyone else is and on what to do about it. But now the generals can't agree on a subject despite all having all of the same available facts. It's hard to tell because the regiments continue to operate as freakishly well as always but the upper layers of the Stratocracy get really fucking nervous when you mention Terranis.
Of the planet Terranis itself in 999M41, the Imperial Army has arrived in force. They can spare the numbers now. The orbiting bioships were malnourished and weak and were cut down by the navy assets with little trouble and the ground forces are landing in the cleared areas and killing fields around the bastion cities. The standstill has tipped, the siege is lifted and across the planet the Tyrannids are being hunted down and hounded to their stinking holes and nests. Terranis is being cleansed and already the Administratum is drafting plans for it's rebuilding.

Terranis held.

Now that the 'nids danger has passed, The only true resource is a lot of experienced badass soldiers. So they, like Catachans fight because his people back home need the resources. It's only been 30 years so most of the more durable and non-organic shit from their old civilization will be left behind. They can salvage to get a boost with the whole rebuilding society thing for short term gains but the planet is going to need the attention of the AdBio for terraforming work. Thankfully it still has a breathable atmosphere so there must be enough normal biological action in the sea and soil at the microscopic level to sustain it. Maybe it won't take that long. Give it 30 years and the toxins will have broken down and planting of plants to see what will grow and what won't can start. 30 years after that and the background radiation will be getting low enough across the least nuked areas to be considered "almost safe". 30 years after that and it will only be the worst salted areas that are no-go.

In 200 years Terranius could be a Civilized/Agri-world with good martial traditions. Not long after that and they can be paying full tithe rates.

=== Terranis and the Hrud ===
The inhabitants of Terranis are less xenophobic than the Kriegers, largely due to the actions of the Hrud.

The Hrud were a godsend on Terranis once the siege begins, because they essentially granted the human populations immunity to Tyranid infiltration. Hrud are quite defensive of their homes, and even if they are able to slip around any tyranid organism through their spacial folding the Hive Fleet takes the air and water and everything else living when they leave a planet and Hrud need to breathe same as everyone else. Hrud are also very good at sniffing out Genestealer cults, with many of their seemingly random killing sprees being revealed to be eradication of a genestealer presence, which on a world where the Hive is getting desperate because the usual maximum-efficiency tactics aren't working would start seeking alternate means of disrupting the local defenses. 

Once, at the beginning, the defenders were angry and on edge whenever the Hrud would suddenly and violently pulp a seemingly random person on the spot. Then they started getting the reports of outposts devastated by someone seemingly going rogue, of genestealers passing as human long enough to weaken defensive lines right before a Tyranid attack, and of parasite forms that would latch on to a host without them ever knowing, showing no signs before they spontaneously erupted with dozens of tiny chittering lifeforms eating their way out from inside the unsuspecting host.

The Hrud have learned since then too. Rather than the immediate violence towards the affected, they just glide into the mess hall or the barracks and gently tap the unfortunate soul on the shoulder, and the message is clear. They whisper quiet goodbyes and distribute their gear, then stand up and leave with the Hrud, the rest of their gear being returned for sanitation later.

Their bodies cannot be recycled into food for their remaining fellows- Untainted organic matter is at a premium, but they are no longer untainted. Instead, their biomass is used to make Saltpeter and bait for traps against the roaming hunters, a primitive system that nevertheless allows them to aid their comrades one last time, screaming defiance against the tide of flesh from beyond the grave in one last brilliant flash of fire and force and spite, a gout of light against the darkness before fading to ash and smoke that are useless to the all-consuming foe.

As a rule, the Hrud aren't reliable. However, Terranis is possibly the only instance in which they make an exception to that rule. They're not workers, of course, they're not helping maintain the equipment and by and large they're still oily and evasive as all hell to the point where even vague estimates of the local numbers are impossible to form. The caveat is that any Hrud's number-one priority is the survival of the Hrud, and when faced with tyranid Armageddon, the survival of the Hrud is directly linked to the survival of the human populace.

It's not that the Hrud aren't useful, it's that they aren't reliable workers. They don't keep timetables, they kind of follow orders but their attention span is not brilliant and the only ones who they make any effort to cooperate are the tribal elders of their kind. The elders can ensure that there is one obedient hrud at the checkpoints and gatehouses at all times but they can't guarantee that it's the same one so you're constantly having to train new staff. Also the space folding thing they do is unnerving as balls to watch and they are secretive little bastards by nature. People also used to complain that they never took the hoods off to be identified but then one day after much asking one did and it was a fucking horrifying cross between a xenomorph and a cockroach. After that people stopped asking them for facial identification. Not that identifying them is needed to ensure that they aren't tainted, the hrud are if anything more thorough about purging hrud genestealers than human ones.


They can't get ordered out on scouting missions, but they still show up and warn about incoming Tyranid waves. They can't be ordered to man the checkpoints, but they tend to hang out by them anyways, sometimes only revealing their presence when they detect an infiltrator. They are not organized beyond the loosest interpretations of the word, but they are creatures inclined to flight before fight who have nowhere to run, and that desperation if nothing else leads them to be more helpful than their kind usually are.

Also the fact that everybody is wearing gasmasks all the time helps mitigate the ssaak; doesn't stop it completely, since it's not entirely physical, but does enough to slow it down that the normal rotations of the garrison keep most of the troops from suffering more than minor side-effects.

Also they steal unattended things. Not anything of real value but they are a nuisance.

The Terranites still have no idea exactly how many Hrud are on Terranis beyond "more than we thought". Before the war they thought there weren't any so that's not very helpful.

In a way, the fact that the Hrud are so repulsive and reviled makes the fact that the Terranites are practically cordial with them an even greater source of discord for the pure Kriegers. It's not just any filthy xenos that they're accepting of, but the one considered more pest than people by the majority of people in the Imperium.

As for the Terranites, anyone who survived the Hive Fleet by their side is all right by them, and the fact that the Hrud would bring them information that normally would have cost them precious lives and kept their strongholds secure goes a long ways towards fostering good sentiments. They're all brothers and sisters of the muck and filth, after all, and the tunnels that became many of their bases of operations were once the Hrud's homes.

More interesting is how the Hrud of Terranis were affected, and how the rest of the Hrud would see them. The hrud see themselves as a collective, with no social divisions between them, but the Hrud from Terranis are putting this ideas to the test as much as the Derivatives are for Krieger philosophy. The rest of the galaxy might not notice the difference, but to the rest of the Hrud the Terranis stock probably seem reckless and borderline suicidal.

==Aloh'Eur'ii==

A.k.a., the Tau colony world in Nemesor Zahndrekh's Gidrim Dynasty.

The Tau Empire and Aloh'Eur'ii have been intentionally kept unaware of each other by the Imperial Ambassador and her team for the simple reason that nobody would be happy if they found out. The Tau Empire would not gain anything from laying claim to them beyond mild expense re-uplifiting them. The Yokel-Tau would not survive as a culture and would not be happy under The Empire having grown in a completely different direction and the Nemensor wouldn't be happy if someone tried to take his least shit planet from him because of he offered a safe haven to a bunch of primitives and the primitives won't leave a planet they have invested so much time and effort into working.
What we do know:
* That they are the descendants of early colonists in one of the lost colony ships and as they have been separated from the Tau Empire since then they have not benefited from any new technological developments and are still using tech not too far advanced from 20th century Earth, bar recently imported toys.
*Their world was described as the more habitable of the two inhabitable worlds in the Nemesor's Estate but that's not a great achievement as the other one is very borderline.
* They have abandoned the caste system due to the limited gene-pool and have interbred to the point were they wouldn't easily fit into the modern caste system.
* The Nemensor occasionally visits them in an official capacity to remind them that he still exists and this is still actually his planet. They pay some minimal and mostly symbolic tribute as they don't have anything particularly valuable.
*They aren't aware of anything in the Tau Empire since the date they lost contact with it and the Tau Empire is totally unaware of their existence and considers the lost colony ship ancient history long since dead and buried.

Aloh'Eur'ii (which means "cold wind, bitter tears" in Tau) is an ancient Necrontyr world, and given how close it is to Zahndrekh's home it must have been at least sparsely populated as it does have an atmosphere, then it would have been a potential target for Old One and their servants to attack. Also Zahndrekh never set up his home there so that would imply that it was never a particularly nice place even before the Old Ones wrecked it and as the Necrontyr had a high discomfort threshold then it must have been really shit. Gidrim by contrast might have been pretty verdant before the War in Heaven broke it and the subsequent ~65,000,000 years of neglect.

And it is barely inhabitable for Tau who are native to a slightly arid but warm planet. To this end I'm going to suggest that the planet is shit because it looks like the arse end of Antarctica. It's cold and wet and for an added bonus the ozone layer is a bad joke. There is life on the surface, the flora caps out at a bit of hardy moss and the most exciting fauna is a beetle looking thing the size of a human thumbnail that moves very slowly and eats moss. There is also a bit of pink algae in the ice and a type of worm that very slowly corkscrews through the ice.

The sea is a little more interesting. There are crabs and snails and other invertebrate life but nothing as complex as a real fish. The local Tau eat mostly the kelp and seaweed and reserve snail and crab for special occasions. Thankfully the snail-like creatures grow big enough and have enough fiber material in them that their skin can be used for making clothing out of and they typically have enough fat and oil content that they can make fire from them with a bit of effort. One of the things Nemensor Zahndrekh donated to them out of charity was fresh, warm insulation cloth thus instantly gaining their trust.

The planet has no axial tilt or moon so there is no tide or seasons. One day is much like another; shit. The hydro system is minimal and most of the fresh water is holed up in ice caps at the unnecessarily large poles
The life forms on Aloh'Eur'ii seem to be derived from two prior existing ecosystems that have either evolved in total isolation from each other or many species have been imported from elsewhere after the initial terraforming work was done. Many of the lifeforms have genetic markers consistent with life found on other old Necrontyr worlds but the others show resemblance to Tarellians. It can be assumed that either the Necrontyr took and inhabited a former Old One colony or simple cross contamination occurred accidentally. After so many eons without record it's now impossible to know.

The Tau are better off now than they were. When Nemensor Zahndrekh found them they were still living in the disassembled remains of their original colony ship with a few outbuildings and extensions made of local stone, using technology they couldn't reproduce or replace, gradually dwindling away. Nemensor Zahndrekh did offer them far more than they would take, they had their pride and didn't know him yet. Indeed their ancestors set out from the homeworld before the Tau had made first contact so the notion of alien intelligence was still pretty world shaking.

As it stands now the Tau have the ability to replace most of the tech that they are using, very slowly and carefully. They have mines and a few workshops and processors. Their population is on the increase and they have several satellite settlements, each as bleak seeming as the original landing site. Sometimes they will wonder about the old homeworld their ancestors set out from but it is a distant event, many generations removed from living memory or relevance.

Of the Tau themselves they are physically distinct from the main branch Tau lines. They hail from a time when the differences between the castes was not yet as physically noticeable due to centuries of gentle eugenics. The original colony expedition contained mostly Earth Caste as the colony was supposed to be set up, become self sufficient quickly and wait several years at least for the next wave of settlers to arrive as this was in the early days of Tau interstellar travel. Nevertheless, there was a triumvirate of Ethereals, their Water Caste scribes and administrators, a few Air Caste messengers and pilots as well as a detachment of Fire Caste enforcers. The presence of the Fire Caste being in the event of social breakdown caused by extreme conditions on the intended target planet rather than as a deterrent to pirates or raiders, sapient aliens still being a theoretical possibility rather than an accepted part of life at this stage of Tau history.

In appearance the Tau of Aloh'Eur'ii mostly resemble Earth Caste with broader feet, more prominent cheekbones, a generally broader build and slightly stubbier fingers. It is unknown if this is a direct multi-generations long adaptation to the constant cold or if it is just a fortuitous result of the various breeds of that species mingling into a new form.

Society is built around resource conservation, thrift and sustainable long term planning using principles set out by the original triumvirate for the simple and inescapable reason that anything else would have gotten them all killed centuries ago. Life is short and hard which is a good way of describing the people that have had to adopt it. Although in some ways the comparison is not apt, life is also harsh and unforgiving which is an unfair comparison with the Tau of Aloh'Eur'ii as since the arrival of the Nemensor they have been very welcoming of outsiders, if nothing else it broke the sense of utter isolation they were feeling.

The capital "city" of Aloh'Eur'ii now that it is not alone as a settlement has been named Sho'aun'or'es as it can either mean the heat of a reactor or can be used to mean general sources of power. Either direct translation works as it is both the source of planetary authority and the city and especially the dwelling places are all huddled around the ancient colony ship's reactor for warmth.

==Cherys==

After the Dark Wedding the Dark Eldar were not the only ones who made an exodus from Commorragh. Before the Dark Wedding Commorragh, specifically Null City, was a mecca for all sorts of ne’er-do-wells unwelcome in the Imperium for their criminal behavior yet with enough common sense to avoid buying into the brain-rotting madness of Chaos, ranging from enterprising Slaugth to human pirates to rogue non-Dark Eldar corsairs to Sslyth mercenaries. Those who were satisfied with “mundane” crimes like piracy, slavery, and trading in illicit goods and doing whatever they wanted rather than the insane fanaticism and cultish behavior of Chaos, much like the Dark Eldar (who do commit depravities for depravity’s sake, but because they want to rather than to impress some gods). Null City is still home to significant populations of xenos pirates and mercenaries, but quite a few of those that could leave jumped ship or tried to find a new place to ply their wares having seen Vect’s marriage to Malys as a portent of things to come. In the immediate aftermath of the Dark Wedding in addition to the Dark Eldar refugees who thought it better to throw themselves on the mercy of the Craftworlders than let Malys drag them into hell the Imperium also had to deal with a sudden influx of pirates and vagabonds trying to carve out their own little hideaways in the galaxy now that their old port of call was no longer “safe”. 

One such case was the world of Cherys. Cherys was a world that was cut off from the rest of the galaxy for nearly 500 years by bad warp storms. Only the really old humans and some of the eldar even remember when they were actually part of the Imperium. System is not that bad, plenty of mineral wealth on the moons and asteroids. By some quirk there are no solid planets as such, just 8 gas giants ranging in size from one of them being a brown dwarf and the smallest about the size of Neptune. Imperium was going to colonize the shit out of the place because there are a dozen moons about the size of Earth with lots of water ice. Therefore great for colonizing. Set the place up as an industrial and bread basket hub and use it to send out hundreds of on-site built colony ships into the rest of the unclaimed sector, in the following 1,000 years they were hoping to set up hundreds of colonies and eventually have it become an entirely new sector (uplifting and/or offering the hand of friendship to any civilized being that the encounter in the process).

They got as far as building a Ramilies-class Starfort with the great distinction of it actually having been designed by Architect-Supreme Ramilies of the Ad-Mech. Then the warp went funny. Not funny enough to actually break through into real space but it was close and it kept ships away for 500 years.

A few years ago the weather improved and people started to say things like "remember that starfort we built? I wonder if it's still intact?"

Starfort is intact, it's also still inhabited. If it had been managed properly the whole system would be a small legitimate civilization all abustle with activity, industry and getting shit done. As it is it's a starfort that's kind of only half inhabitable and a few outposts on the moons an asteroids that support it, barely.
Law and order broke down more or less immediately once it was isolated because the commander was stricken with a terminal case of what the medicae would call “idiocy” and nobody since has been able to get the gangs to work together or even just stop shooting at each other for more than a few hours at a time.


Then a band of Sslyth arrive from Commorragh pretty much as soon as the warp was safe to travel, they didn't risk taking the webway as they didn't leave the City of Sins on good terms. The original plan of just enslaving them all and forcing their way to power go out the window when it turns out the station has been horribly mismanaged and the residents are desperate for somebody with an actual brain take charge. The Sslyth manage to take over the last pockets of resistance about three months before an Imperial expeditionary fleet slid up along side it with proper military escort. They are going to salvage the original plan of pushing back the border and for that they need the station up and running. The scribes are all over the place talking to the locals about the last half a millennium and the Sslyth are freaking the fuck out because they are pretty sure that they saw a Battle Barge with the heraldry of the War Hounds on it and they are pretty sure they are on the "shoot on sight" category.

The Administratum adepts do eventually find them. They congratulate them on getting the place into some semblance of order, tell them that they will push the paperwork through to have them be the official civilian governing body for the system and ask them to give their regards to the rest of the Diasporex next time they come round this way. Sslyth end up slightly more confused than ever but nobody is shooting them and this is a deal they can live with.

The Sslyth are better rulers than you'd expect from Commorrites, but "better behaviour than the Dark City" is a pretty low bar to set, and this is on the fringes of the Imperium in the first place, so it's not exactly in the spotlight. Even official Imperial posts can be shady as fuck sometimes, just as long as it's within the Imperium's tolerance levels (no Chaos, no blood-sacrifices, keep your criminality deniable, ect.) and this would be on the lower end of that- on the surface. The Ssylth are still absolutely reprehensible by modern moral standards, but to the Imperium they're practically upstanding citizens, especially considering their past and current circumstances. There's still gang wars over territory, gun-trafficking, and all sorts of bad stuff going on in the station, it's just that it's basically "normal" crimes for the Imperium, rather than the balls-to-the-wall edgy shit of Commorragh.

To put it another way- the port is (unofficially) open to pirate vessels, but it is also open to Imperial vessels. Including Imperial warships that may happen to be in the area on anti-piracy patrols. In which case they're not going to leave their buddies out in the cold, they might not be able to save their ship and the poor sods still on it, but they'll cover for the crew who were still on station and put them up until the next ship comes along. Just need to get you putting on a show for the inspectors doing this little job over here, we'll even set you up for pay to make it convincing... and then two months later that crew has fallen into the exact same trap of getting comfortable with having regular meals, cleaning facilities, and an actual bed and the ones who haven't fallen for it and would cause trouble for the rest have wound up in one of the back-corridors of the station where the power isn't consistent with several stab-wounds in the back. And of course, if the Imperial officials happen to ask where any pirate vessels may have been headed when they stopped in...

Basically, they're in what feels like a mini-Commorragh, only with Inquisition and Imperial Navy instead of Vect and pirates instead of the various Dark-Eldar factions. The biggest difference is now they've actually got money in their pockets and reliable resources to use and sometimes the residents thank them and smile in ways that give them funny feelings in their chests that they don't understand.


It should be noted, this is not some grand master-plan of theirs. They've always been regarded as a bit of a doofus-crew by their compatriots, and have spent this entire time feeling like they're in way over their heads and just reacting to the latest "OH SHIT FUCK AHHH" thing that's landed on their doorstep. They're not stupid by any means, and they wouldn't have made it this long or been this successful if they were- if nothing else, they're excellent at problem-solving on the fly. It's just that they've got almost Ciaphas Cain-tier luck and a bad habit of being unwilling to give up whatever they've managed to get. 

Case in point, their stance on slaving. These Ssylth don't engage in the slave trade and tend to crack down on it harshly and bloodily. It's not a matter of approval, they started out in the Dark City after all, it's their possessiveness kicking in. Any slave-trade on the station is dealing with Station-dwellers, and the station-dwellers belong to THEM, so taking them as slaves is basically stealing the Ssylth's shit. And no self-respecting Commorrite is going to tolerate anybody stealing their shit. Of course, this gets misinterpreted as them having a moralistic line they won't cross, so once again the whole situation is screwing them over.

When it comes down to it, they always side with the Imperium over their fellow pirates, but that's less loyalty and more a combination of "the Imperium's the one making this so profitable" and "[[Dakka|Oh fuck they have so many guns we are not picking that fight]]." They are still pirates at heart at least that's what they keep telling themselves.


For that matter, the starport itself isn't the luckiest of places; aside from the whole "getting lost due to warp shenanigans," there's how everything collapsed because somehow an idiot was running the show when things went to hell, plus how things kept going wrong during construction with corridors not lining up correctly and prefabbed pieces somehow completely failing to fit together right. Nothing Warp-tainted, thankfully (the Imperium checked- thoroughly- when these issues kept popping up) but the end result of basically kitbashing stuff together and twisting corridor connections to get stuff to fit together meant that the general construction of the place, while static and thus given clearly-marked maps, is still an absolute nightmare to try and navigate through, especially for people who are used to the more organized overflow of most human constructions, where they started out orderly and then became a mess because of the bloat of too much stuff. This station was built messy from the start due to stuff just going wrong in the most annoying way possible.

There's rumors of a shrine to Murphy on the station. Nobody knows where or if it was there from the start, or got erected by somebody asking for mercy during construction or the period when the station was lost. They just know that attempting to get rid of it ends badly, and praying/making offerings is just asking for trouble.

Whether the shrine actually exists or not is ambiguous, but ultimately it does not matter whether it is real. It is equally as plausible that the shrine doesn't exist, but that people on the station are willing to believe it does because it would give an explanation for why things keep going sideways at Cherys. Then there's the possibility of it being a chicken-and-egg scenario; is the prevalence of things going wrong a result of the shrine, or is the shrine a result of all the bad luck that manifests on the station? Ultimately it's all academic, because the takeaway is always that the station seems to be a magnet for mishaps. 

The more interesting case for the existence of the shrine is that, while the station is a magnet for mishaps, it's not necessarily a magnet for misfortune. Your plan is going to crumble to pieces, but there always seems to be opportunity mixed in. The Ssylth's plight is the perfect example of this; from their viewpoint, things have been going wrong and stayed going wrong ever since they arrived- or before, since they only found the station in the first place because their navigation got shot to hell while fleeing the Dark City and forced them to make a blind jump into the void. Despite that, they're better off than when they arrived, with steady income, positions of power, followers who would die for them, and even friends and allies. And all of this was not because they sought it out, but because every time things went FUBAR the solution to the problems would end up giving them good things on top of the even bigger problems it came with.

There's at least a couple of the Ssylth who are so adamant about still being mercenaries and bad people because they're terrified that if they admit what they've become and try to actually pursue their new purpose, the effect will reverse and they'll end up actually having to go back to being pirates.


Life on the port is... interesting. The Murphy-effect doesn't just affect the sneks, though they certainly seem to have gotten hit by it harder than most.
At this point, it's somewhat normal for the residents, who don't really see anything too weird about it, and an outsider looking in wouldn't notice anything too glaring at first. Then they get to one of the station's worksites and find people with five different wrong types of connector that the workers go through until one of them inexplicably fits, backup tools are stashed in every crevice, and a normally-minor discrepancy with the power intake leading to everybody leaving the floor, seconds before the power-surge the discrepancy heralded wreaks havoc on the floor.

In other words, they've grown very good at anticipating unexpected dangers and working with the wrong materials. When they're off the station and out in the rest of the Imperium, this can come off as paranoia and obsessive-compulsive behavior, but on-station it's all completely justified.

As for Rogue Traders, of course they stop by, and several of them leave with hulls full of riches or powerful new crew-members or the like. This is because to them, the station is basically like a casino; Try your luck and see if you make it big! There's potential for profit here, a land of opportunity, but only if you're lucky enough!
Some of them find that fortune in ways that basically screw them out of being Rogue Traders, others just get screwed, but they keep coming because they hear about the ones who came out better for it, and ignore the bit about how customer satisfaction is universally shit.


The station is a lot cleaner than you'd expect something getting run by the Ssylth to be. There's a number of reasons for this: First and foremost, the Imperium is not stupid and has ambitions for the area, so if the Ssylth had acted like typical Ssylth, they'd have gotten Blammed and replaced by either a Space Marine chapter or somebody more official. This band of Ssylth are well aware of this, and considering they're a bunch of dregs from barely-relevant houses, they'd be mincemeat against a Space Marine squad. Thus, they are very eager to not give the big bad Imperium a reason to come after them. This doesn't mean they avoid their standard shady shit, but they let it come to them rather than seeking it out, and keep it as quiet as they possibly can.

To give perspective, the main source of income, and the only thing they really had in place when the Imperium showed up, was the legitimate resource-harvesting the station was built for. True, they'd originally been intending the resources for building ships for themselves, but they've given up on that thanks to the dollar-signs the Imperium pays for it.

This pretty much characterizes the struggle these Ssylth have been going through; they set out to do something properly Ssylth-y, and then something screws it up so hard they end up looking like the good guys. Big pirate captain stops in to sell his booty? An argument springs up that ends with your blade in his neck right as an Imperial warfleet shows up, and you end up getting praised and collecting the bounty on his head. Slavers show up with fresh labor? Somehow you getting lost in the corridors with them gets interpreted as a liberation attempt, with one of the slaves happens to be a somewhat important person whose associates pay a good sum and offer a trade deal in thanks for his return.

Basically, they're villains going through a mid-life crisis of suddenly having 401ks and a business to run and suddenly being responsible adults rather than the freebooting teenagers they used to be.  The scary part (for them) is that they've actually gotten comfortable with their new situation, even if they'll never admit it. They're still ready and eager for fights, and their first question on running into a problem is "can we stab it away?," but the number of times where they decide the answer is "yes" has been declining.

Some in the Imperium, particularly the Inquisition, have figured out the truth behind the Sslyth on Cherys. The general reaction to said discovery is apathy. The Imperium doesn't care who is running the planet as long as the population is revolting, they aren't Chaos/genestealer corrupted, and they pay the tithe. Indeed for the Imperium, it's something of a social experiment; eventually the point is going to come where the Ssylth have an opportunity and either take it and resort back to their old ways- in which case there's a contingent of War Hounds within the galactic area, cleaning up the mess will be relatively easy - or stick to their guns and continue on the course they're going down, in which case it will be an example of why the civilized Imperial method is the correct approach to the world, or something like that. Basically proof that redemption is possible if you choose to pursue it.


The rulers of Cherys are known as Aesymnetes. The Aesymnetes are elected tyrants as decided by the voters, though only certain people are allowed the right to vote. The members of the gangs that sided with the Sslyth in their hostile takeover all were given the privilege and many have earned it since. If you want to be able to vote you have to do something to benefit the station (and therefore the Sslyth). Those that can vote feel that their voices actually mean something and they have a stake in the station and it's well being, a stake that they will fight for. The non-voters typically also wish that they could vote and the ones with some get up and go will get up and earn it with service to the station, those that won't don't deserve it and probably aren't worth worrying about. The system is also completely rigged and there's a glass ceiling non-Sslyth can't get past. Sslyth didn't escape one master to becomes servants to someone else. They only have the vote because it makes people the illusion that their leaders rule with the consent of the masses as there aren’t enough Sslyth to forcibly impose law.

Three Sslyth in particular are currently in charge. Not coincidentally, these were the three Sslyth who managed to organize the ragtag bunch of people who originally decided to set out from Commorragh. Laerhi is smart and quick-thinking, having the most common sense and good at figuring out risk management- namely, how to avoid risks when possible and saddle somebody else with them when not. M'hoh is practically a savant when it came to planning and keeping complicated systems running- with the downside of being prone to overly-elaborate plans that nobody else could keep up with. Caer-Li is the "muscle" of the leaders, but while dumb by comparison, was charismatic enough to get others to go along with him, and thus was the one they tended to need to get their fractured band to cooperate with their latest escapade. 



The Dark Eldar attempted to raid Cherys once. Emphasis on attempted. The Kabal was one the Sslyth knew, either having once worked for them or having fought them as mercenaries for another Kabal at some point. The Sneks worked for these "people" for a very long time. Knowing how they think and predicting their behaviour was a survival trait. The Dark Eldar come in expecting to encounter a lower end PDF. They leave the system with substantial losses and nothing to show for those losses, they return to their homes humiliated. The real kicker? They never even knew that the Ssylth were there. The outpost they went after had one Ssylth who never left any survivors to report back what they had seen.

This wasn't the first time that the Dark Eldar had gone on easy raids to Cherys in the 500 years of isolation. The place was practically a free range human farm crossed with a pick-and-mix. They haven't been back since as their reckoning of profit to loss no longer stack up favourably and there are softer targets elsewhere.

The Sslyth were still praised for it. If it wasn't for their take over security would have consisted of poorly trained gangs running protection rackets. Since moving in the Ssylth broke the gangs up, gave some of them some degree of training who then trained others, formed them up into mixed squads, shored up defences and generally got them to take their jobs seriously. When the Imperium came calling they provided them with new las-rifles to replace or augment the supplies of 500 year old hand me downs and improvised home made shit and gave them some flack jackets and other really basic gear.

None of this would have happened if the Ssylth hadn't arrived, beaten everyone into shape and eaten the worst objectors.

Also Sekropss was especially well praised or leading the defences and turning the raid inside out. Sekropss is an extremely clever bastard. That wasn't even his real job, he was just keeping the seat warm for someone who was moulting, his actual job is trying to create a judiciary and the rules for a constabulary system from whole cloth.

==Kiavahr==

Megacorp hell. A planet entirely ruled by megacorps and other corporations, like a planet of maximum [[Shadowrun]]. At some point in time [[Nobledark_Imperium_Primarchs#Corvus_Corax|Corvus Corax]] and the [[Raven Guard]] applied a metaphorical spanking to their leadership to get them to rein in their more heinous and inhumane practices.<br>

Raven Guard, when they first landed under the command of former downtrodden peasant Corvus, went absolutely ape shit about the place due to the conditions of the average pleb and the utter disregard those higher up the food chain had for them. They were seen as an exploitable, expendable and totally renewable resource and were therefore totally disposable once they had expended their usefulness.

Kiavahr was not yet contacted by Mars and so was not under the aegis of Mars. Corax gave them the opportunity and suggestion to amend their behaviour but the lords of Kiavahr laughed at his offer. Theirs was a prosperous system that had done well for itself in the anarchy of the Age of Strife and would be a valuable addition to the Imperium. It's carry on just fine how it was and Corax could deal with it. The lives of a few peasants and slum dwellers was worth by any measure what they were offering the Imperium. Corax, as soldier man of peasant stock, obviously wouldn't understand what it was to lead a functioning society to prosperity and should leave things beyond him to those better suited to the task.

At that point the lights started going out and shit started exploding.

The suggestions were made again to the surviving spire lords and the hastily elected new branch of CEO's in the same calm voice. This time they did not mistake his calm for meaning that he wasn't planning on killing them all on the basis that he'd eventually find a crop of lords more reasonable to his demands.

Kiavahr as it stands since then is still mega-corp hell with such government as exists composed of the heads of the biggest corps, but it's not as bad to live in. This isn't because the heads of the mega-corps are actually any nicer, it's because the Raven Guard set up shop on the moon of Deliverance in the old and exhausted mining tunnels. There are no slums on Kiavahr, the Tenements are about as far down as you can officially sink and although the tenements are not what you'd call pleasant you can live in them.

Tenement dwellings typically consist of a large sturdily built, but ugly, structure like a square colosseum but far larger. Tiered galleries of one room dwellings that can hold maybe four "comfortably" and six cramped. Communal toilets and wash houses are on every tier and are shared by the people living on that tier. There is a large communal kitchen and dining area in the centre on the ground floor.

Ground floor also contains a doctor's office and basic surgery, some shops for basic essentials, laundry and other such things.

This is where you end up when all else fails or you want to save money by living very basically. Because of the nature of Kiavahr society there are a lot more low end workers than any other group by a very great margin and the majority of the population (tens if not hundreds of billions) live in similar conditions.

Due to the Raven Guard recruiting from all strata of society weight of numbers demands that the overwhelming majority of the chapter were raised in these vast habitation structures and many still have family there. To this end the chapter acts, as well as an elite branch of the local Imperial Guard, as watchdogs for the poor.

Biggest complaint about Kiavahr for the lower classes is that the place is bleak and boring in the extreme.

Businesses can engage in all backstabbery and shitty underhanded behaviour they want, but if the peasantry get targeted by the nobility the nobility become a training exercise.

'''The Harlequin of Kiavahr'''<br>
Deep in the underhives of Kiavahr there is a lone [[Harlequin]]. They have been down there quite some time and claim to have been forgotten there many years ago by the other members of their troupe. They claim to be stranded on Kiavahr, Kiavahr’s Webway gate is off-planet and they do not have the money to book passage on a spaceship.

To this end they are well known among the inhabitants of the underhives, always looking for people to help out with a job often of semi-legal nature, and by proxy finally earn them the money to get off Kiavahr. People in the underhives are always on the lookout for a well-paying job, especially in the megacorp hell that is Kiavahr. The Harlequin’s story is highly suspicious which sets off the well-honed sense of paranoia most gangers have, but they pay well. However, people can’t help but notice that most of these schemes in the long run seem to end up with most of the megacorps at each other’s throats and the worst of them gutted and have their dirty secrets dragged into the light.

In reality, the Harlequin of Kiavahr is a plant by Cegorach, to keep the megacorps of Kiavahr honest and feuding among themselves. The Harlequin could actually leave Kiavahr anytime they wanted, the tale of them being stranded is just their cover story. There is even the possibility that the individual changes from time to time but the role remains. The show must go on, after all.

==Vordic-Taal (possibly needs new name)==

There were many different religions on Carlos McConnell at the time of its discovery, but the most popular was some kind of ancestor worship, usually a form of syncretic paganism that picked and chose the best gods to worship out of whatever sounded interesting. One of the most popular was Camazotz, the goddess of warfare and the hunt (kind of like a mix between Bast and a Mesoamerican jaguar god) due to her portfolio’s universal appeal among the felinids. Camazotz worship is all about taking pride in your abilities and the nature of the hunt, honing your skills to a razor’s edge so you can be the best hunter you can be.

Following the arrival of Rogue Trader Carlos McConnell to the planet and the uplift of the People of the Islands from medieval to modern technological levels, Camazotz worship mostly declined in popularity but never completely went away, remaining popular among soldiers, law officers, and fishermen in particular. And, of course, the Continental Tribes, who retained more of their hunter-gatherer lifestyle, still worship Camazotz fervently.

If you're thinking "this sounds an awful lot like Slaanesh worship", you'd be half right. Camazotz worship also involves a significant degree of self-restraint (often deliberately), never killing more than is needed, respecting the prey for its sacrifice, and giving up the best cuts of the prey for the good of all, something that would sound ludicrous to any excess-craving Slaaneshi. Camazotz is your stereotypical hunter god that in folklore shows up to kick the crap out of hunters that kill for pleasure alone and don't respect their prey. However, this does not mean the worship of one cannot be easily subsituted for the other.

One of the earliest attempts at setting up a felinid colony by Carlos McConnell was the Vorlic sytem, a primising system containing five potentially life supporting moons and one dead one. The Carlos McConnell corporation bankrolled the initial colonization effort but had almost no involvement in setting up the colony. They wanted self-sufficient colonies to ensure the felinids weren’t wiped out, but they didn’t want a bunch of worlds that needed the backing of the Rogue Trader group to get anything done (or worse, be a drain on their resources).

Almost immediately, things began going wrong. The felinids on the colonies began behaving increasingly aggressive, almost feral. Eventually, the five colonies declared open war with each other, igniting a conflict that lasted for nearly a decade. It was only when one colony travelled to the sixth dead moon of the planet that the “truth” of the matter was revealed to it and granted the power to subjugate the other colonies. I’m sure you can guess what that was.

Eventually, the Imperium wondered “what ever happened to that felinid colony” and sent an IG force to investigate. They ended up walking into a Slaaneshi-themed version of Predator being hounded by crazed felinids who only exalted and took pleasure in the kill, who worshipped a corrupted version of Slaanesh-as-Camazotz.

==Other Notable Planets==

'''Istvaan V''' - The Istvaan system was once inhabited by the [[Nobledark_Imperium_Member_States#Kinebrach|Kinebrach]] several hundred thousand years before the rise to humanity. The Segmentum Obscurus was far outside of the Kinebrach's normal sphere of influence, and at some point they eventually abandoned the Istvaan system, leaving only their molecularly-superdense fortifications behind. Istvaan V was habitable, but was eventually terraformed further when the people of [[Nobledark_Imperium_Notable_Planets#Istvaan_III|Istvaan III]] decided to expand further out into the stars. It was later scoured of life in a later (read: post-War of the Beast) battle. It's been suggested Nimina Demthring and the Conservators of Isha were the ones responsible.<br>
'''[[Nostramo]]''' - A twilight Hive World, it was once a nightmarish hellhole until Curze used it as his thesis that his tactics could bring law and order to even the worst worlds. At one point Nostramo's main export was adamantium mining, but most of the mining industry dried up when it became apparent that any more risked causing what was left of Nostramo's surface to completely collapse. Today Nostramo is a rusted out world full of ancient derelict industry and home to an ancient, distinguished, but impoverished society that mostly services and provides recruits for galactic law enforcement. Nostramo's main export to the Imperium seems to be Arbites officers and precious little else.