Editing Setting:Cloudburst/Rogue Traders (section)

====Rogue Trader Dynastic House Atongwë====
The House Atongwë is a decorated one, and its great and public piety made it the darling of the Ecclesiarchy for centuries.  Its name decorates the halls of office for many Imperial institutions on Maskos and Drimmerzole.  Indeed, a relative of this sprawling family reigns from the seat of power on Oglith as the Lord of the Subsector.

However, in more recent years, the House Atongwë has fallen on hard times.  The family is still wealthier than most Imperial families could ever be, and its political ambitions are still strong, but the Rogue Trader branch of the family is on the rocks.

By no means a spent force, House Atongwë regardless has lost hundreds of millions of Thrones’ worth of money in the last few centuries, to a variety of sources.  Costly labor disputes, legal wrangling, property damage, shipwrecks, jurisdictional battles, alien troubles, and even a few high-profile deaths and social gaffes, have conspired to make the House Atongwë a diminished presence in the dynamics of Cloudburst Sector.  Some whisper that that is more than mere hyperbole: there actually is a conspiracy against House Atongwë, and may even have had some sponsorship from jilted rivals or envious Administratum personnel.

However, if there is a hidden hand at work in the damage done to the venerable Atongwë dynasty, there is no evidence for this.  Indeed, nearly all the parts of the family have taken a beating lately, including the distant and barely profitable packaging businesses the family owns on Delving, that have no bearing on the greater family holdings.  It is as if the entire Sector has turned on them, by no conscious choice.

The greater Cloudburst Sector has reason to be worried.  House Atongwë has a hand in many of the great discoveries of the religious fleets and Missionary convoys of the Sector’s past.  It was an Atongwë who discovered the entire Maskos Subsector (except for Lorelei), after all, and carried Maskos himself to the planet that would later bear his name.  The Atongwë family also hold high station on Celeste and Cloudburst itself, and though it will likely never be proven, there are whispers that an Atongwë even served as a Blue Dagger.  The House’s incredible run of bad luck lately is seen by some in the superstitious Imperium as a sign of the imminent collapse of the entire Sector.

Others, including the Inquisition and other Rogue Trader dynasties, are far more realistic.  The House has made some poor decisions, that’s all.  Their explorations into the Cloudburst Circuit keep stumbling over worlds already picked clean by their predecessors, their expeditions into the Oldlight Exo-zone were grossly underequipped to explore the most hostile region of explorable space, and Darren Atongwë is an imbecile.  The businesses that the House patronizes have suffered immense losses not because of curses or conspiracies, but because they are based on Delving, a planet of catastrophic volcanism.  Even the faux paus that have damaged the family’s reputation on Celeste have been nothing more than overeager family scions taking their competition to succeed their patriarch too seriously and in public.

The House is not exhausted yet.  Despite the losses of several of their ships in the voids beyond Imperial territory, they still have much of their core fleet intact, including the Exorcist Grand Cruiser Messenger from on High.  The current family patriarch is ailing from age, but is determined to restore his family’s glory.  Named Moloarch Atongwë, he has a fiery determination to claw the family back from the brink of disaster, through grit, determination, and piety.

Piety is core to the worldview and outlook of the Atongwës.  Their family were originally little more than commissioned officers on the Battlefleet Ultima Oberon Battleship Impressive, until they were awarded a Warrant of Trade for saving the life of Solar Admiral Belquist twice during the Rupture Nebula War.  Belquist noticed the ambition and utterly unbreakable faith of his rescuer, and awarded the former pressedman a Warrant, sensing the potential for greatness in the young Lieutenant.

This was a prescient decision on Belquist’s part.  The Atongwës immediately took ship in the upgraded frigate they had been granted, and within fifteen years, the family had crewed the vessel to bursting with eager voidsmen who were ready to carve up the stars in the Emperor’s name.  The Atongwë family captured pirate ships, sunk the Traitor Cobra She’s One of Ours, Sir with a brutal ramming strike, and even located the future Imperial colony world Azreid for the Explorators.

Flush with success, the family tackled the edict given to them alongside their Warrant: when the House was ready, and had the proper means to do so, they were to secure the passage between the Naxos Forge World of Fabique and the Ecclesiarchal Shrine World Cinma’s Glory from the vicious pirate flotilla of Ironboots da Gitshoots.  The Atongwës did not merely adopt a patrol route, however, as the Navy was sure to have tried already.  Instead, the family spent a fortune on a small, decommissioned freighter, the C-153b, and loaded it with over eight hundred gigatons of aluminum, cesium, and magnesium thermite, thousands of bottles of compressed oxygen, and fifty thermobaric warheads, and then spread the rumor that the freighter was instead carrying ammo for the Sisters of Battle stationed on Cinma’s Glory.  Lurking in a dispersed escort around the ship at one of its ‘routine’ navigation stops along the route it would have to take to get from Fabique to Cinma’s Glory, the Atongwës watched as the freighter was taken by Ork pirates that swarmed out of nearby asteroids, then gave chase.  Using the skills of the Navigator assigned to their flagship, the flotilla chased the Orks to their hidden moon base in a nearby dead system, waited until the freighter had docked on the ramshackle Ork base, and then pushed a button.  Some few weeks later, a Mechanicus patrol ship discovered an anomalous thermal bloom on a scan of an uninhabited moon near the appropriate Warp lane, and the Atongwës popped the corks.

Freed from their primary burden, the Atongwës have since been able to leave a token patrol garrison on the Star Gilt, and focus the remainder of their time becoming filthy rich.  The House grew and grew along with their fortunes, and expanded hand-in-hand with the Ecclesiarchy into the Cloudburst Circuit after the initial Gold Rush.  The Atongwë family did not partake in the former, but the second Gold Rush had the Atongwë family at the head of the pack, surrounded by hundreds of thousands of Ecclesiarchal personnel.

Today, the Atongwë Rogue Trader House keeps their wealth in a series of bank vaults across the Maskos and Rampart Subsectors, while investing the majority elsewhere.  By law, part of their fleet is tasked with providing escort along the Warp conduits between Fabique and Cinma’s Glory.  However, this is a pittance of their true force, especially since the fleet has already wiped out the Orks.