Editing Setting:Tri-Sector (section)

====Territorial Houses and Turf Gangs====
The nature of the few worlds in the Cloudburst Sector to have large cities means that relatively small numbers of places in the Sector are plagued by gang warfare. However, the few that do have endured vicious and destructive conflicts that have claimed hundreds of lives and millions of Thrones’ worth of property. While some of the gangs are purely local concerns, such as the piratical turf-trading thugs of Soak, others are gigantic crime syndicates or mercenary armies with thousands of troops. The largest are the massive noble-sponsored gangs on Thimble, which serve as proxy armies for the Thimblan nobility in their endless fights for prestige, manufacturing contracts, publicity, and wealth.

None of the organizations listed here have even a fraction of the power and wealth of the Cloudburst Mercantile Noble Houses. Any attempt by these lesser organizations to enter into direct warfare against House O’Neill or House Zhong, for instance, would end with the upstart organization butchered to the last with the full consent of the local law enforcement. However, to those denizens of the Spindle system who are not incalculably wealthy, some of these organizations are insurmountable forces of corruption and violence.

Because the population of Thimble is so much smaller than the population of the vast and ancient Hive Worlds of the Segmentum Solar, most of the populace of Thimble has managed to avoid being dragged directly dragged into the gang wars. However, the larger gangs are still thousands-strong, and some even control entire structures inside the hives. The lines between Noble and Hive Gang Houses on Thimble can blur when the nobles themselves partake of the gang warfare, for sport or to prove themselves.

=====Noble House Lienzo, Thimble=====
Lienzo is a prime example of how the aspirations of the poorer noble houses of Cloudburst are never enough to carry them to supremacy. Among the ruling gangs of the world Levitna before it was renamed to Thimble, the house was in prime position to rise to a position of rulership in the new Imperial order. However, they failed to kowtow to the new Adeptus Administratum reconstruction and integration officers as the ruling houses did. Now, Clan Ahad and Houses Zhong and O’Neill rule supreme over the Spindle system, with colossal wealth and power, while their former rivals scrabble about in their leavings for scraps of money.

So the embittered and weary leaders of House Lienzo imagine, at the least. In practice, the industrial and political power they wield here would amount to many times the amounts needed to become unassailable powers on worlds like Clegran, Obelisk II, or even bipolar Nauphry IV. Lienzo’s leadership are simply so engrossed in their tiny affairs that they can’t see the opportunities that knock upon their doors. They fund billions of Thrones’ worth of industrial activity in their home hives, their scions have helmed ships in the Imperial Navy, and their Clan-mates rule whole corporations of vast wealth. All of that pales beside the power of the Clans Ahad and Vorbach, which could crush Lienzo like insects at a whim. That, and that alone, is the subject of the musings and bitterness of House Lienzo.

This bitterness crops up at inconvenient times. While they are far subtler than most in this regard, the House Lienzo youth are often practitioners of the Cold Trade of proscribed xenos artifacts. Between that and their boredom, the House is directly responsible for some of the harder-to-explain reports of xenos weapon discharges in the underhives of Thimble. Much of the Ordo Xenos attention paid to the world stems to the volatile alien artifacts of the upper Highborn going out of control, or being used in petty squabbles. The House Lienzo use of alien weapons is more insidious and crueller. Bored scions of the family have thrown their lots in with the street gangs populated by the children of the House Lienzo factory workers. Startled Enforcer and Judge reports have reached the Arbites and Inquisition, concerning apparent battles between Craftworld Eldar and human forces in the underhives, fought entirely by weapons carried by Lienzo troublemakers.

As a result of this alien dabbling, the House Lienzo gangs are a force to be reckoned with in the underhive wars. The rank-and-file of these gangs are the commoners of the hives themselves, given a taste of the power of a Clanless House. Rising to become a member of the noble house itself is impossible, thanks to specific breeding requirements for membership. However, those commoners who acquit themselves well in battle in the service of the spoiled offspring of the House Lienzo can expect rewards bestowed on their families, perhaps in the form of shortened shifts in the Lienzo factories.

Lienzo is no so flush with alien artifacts that they can afford to arm themselves with xenotech exclusively. House Vost are generous sellers of xenotech, but Lienzo doesn’t get much of a discount. The House equips its scions with alien weapons on missions for the House, but on expeditions of pure boredom, few House members would dare arm themselves so. The rank-and-file hivers equip themselves with shotguns and rifles in the main, with a few lasguns in the hands of those who earn them. Given the rising Ordo Xenos scrutiny levelled against the planet Thimble of late, the House’s internal security might start to crack down on obvious uses of xenotech.

The leader of the House is the decrepit, withered old banker Gareth al-Lienzo, who is so far gone in his old age that he can barely move. The battles to succeed him have ended, and his youngest son Saïd shall inherit his father’s throne.

=====Noble House Vost=====
Of all the houses and gangs of Thimble that do not control sprawling, interstellar merchant empires, the House Vost is the wealthiest. There is one reason for this. They are the source that feeds the hundreds of xenotechnological artifacts into the rest of the Thimblan combatants.

House Vost has spent centuries ingratiating themselves into the networks of Rogue Traders and Techpriests who ‘dispose’ of xenotech by selling them to others. While this is hardly a new trait for the Rogue Traders of the galaxy, the Cloudburst Sector’s long focus on corralling the Cold Trade has left those Traders with few options. The Inquisition’s best efforts can’t entirely overcome the natural proclivity of Rogue Traders to seek wealth by ignoring the Emperor’s strictures on alien science.

Originally, House Vost spent their fortunes as many lesser nobles on Thimble did at the time: buying up derelict buildings on the surface and in the hives, so that when the Imperium ordered them brought back online and operational, the nobles would profit. House Vost focused their efforts on buying buildings around the perimeters of hive footprints, where they could control entry and exit from the huge city towers. However, the exterior of Thimble is a very low priority for the Adeptus Mechanicus’s restoration teams. Even now that the planet’s hives are almost entirely back online, the outside wilderness remains almost uninhabitable. While roving gangs of hivers and scavengers do exist outside the glittering silver walls of the hives, most of the open world of Thimble is devoid of people. Thus, most of the buildings that House Vost spent their money on turned out to be worth little beyond their insulative capacity. Many were stuffed full of Adeptus Mechanicus life support and maintenance equipment, and little-used beyond that. There are external gateways to the hives that have not been opened in thousands of years.

That meant that House Vost, at the end of the initial surge of Levitna’s rebirth as Thimble, owned substantial amounts of access to something next to useless. While the house did manage to recoup some of their losses by turning derelict buildings into residential towers and landing assemblies for freighters and cargo ships, most of the holdings of House Vost have turned out to be almost useless.

However, in recent centuries, two positive developments have arisen from these early purchases. The first is that Thimble’s massive population increase has led to a squeeze on housing. That has helped to ensure that the space in the long-uninhabited outer shells of buildings has risen in demand. The second is that as more Rogue Traders have come to Thimble to sell xenotech they can’t turn a profit on elsewhere, House Vost is uniquely suited to accommodating discreet meetings and exchanges.

The House has enough experience in such things that they have been able to train appraisers to evaluate the worth of alien technology. Shielding such experts from the Inquisition is a real trick. With the elevation of Lady Inquisitrix Lerica from her previous role to the leadership of the Sector Conclave, Inquisitorial scrutiny has dropped somewhat, allowing House Vost to flood the market – chiefly House Lienzo, their largest customers by far – with alien weapons.

The alliance between House Lienzo and House Vost is a purely financial one. House Lienzo would sell Vost out in a heartbeat, and Vost would do the same. Their gangs have even gone to war against each other in the past, although that is a rare occurrence. The larger threat to both, besides the Ordo Xenos, is the spreading influence of the hiver House Kaung, which would no doubt leave either in tatters if it were to focus its full efforts against one or the other.

Most of House Vost’s fielded gangs are tenants of their buildings, whom they give discounts on for rent in exchange for service. Clan Ahad’s lax oversight of the residential districts of the hives means that they rarely bother to intervene in this technically-illegal arrangement. Vost’s residential gangs are not uniformed, but they can identify each other by the distinct curling geometric shapes of the house’s tattoo design.

Judith Vost is the current leader of the House, and she has ambitions to rise higher yet. Joining one of the ruling Clans of the world would allow the House a measure of immunity from the further attention of the Inquisition, as well as chances to spread their business into areas where they are presently not welcome.

=====Hiver Gang House Kaung=====
The Imperial Creed is one of vicious intolerance. While its interpretations and factional sectarianism have waxed and shifted over time, many things remain constant. To follow the Imperial Creed is to deny the witch, abhor the thinking machine, deny the witch, scourge the demon, slay the mutant, and burn the heretic, in a litany of exclusion and violence that any loyal Imperial citizen knows by heart.

Thus, House Kaung is a true aberrance, in both senses of the word. The House is almost exclusively mutant in composition, and yet the public face of the House is as pious as the Ecclesarchy when it comes to denouncing the flaws in the Imperial hoi polloi and hoi aristoi.

This is not as contradictory as it initially appears. The many byproducts of Imperial industrial activity are highly toxic, and the general disregard for the wellbeing of its citizens that it holds ensures that many are exposed to them. Mutations that stem from exposure to the mutagenic power of Chaos are never, ever tolerated, but there are some small allowances made for mutants whose flesh-twisted forms are the product of their mothers being exposed to the Imperium’s own waste. The mutant members of House Kaung are among them. Technically permitted to live by Adeptus Arbites precedent, mutants on Thimble are forced to register with the government of their hive. Once they have done so, they can apply to attend Adeptus Ministorum-run education facilities, which have a well-deserved reputation for utter brutality.

Thus, the mutant population of Thimble live as second-class citizens in the guts of the hives. The thing that separates the mutants of Thimble from those of nearly every other hive in the Imperium is coordination. House Kaung is no mere rabble of gene-dregs. They are an organized and very public force in the life of Thimble. Their numbers are not clear to Clan Ahad’s authorities, but they might actually eclipse those of every other House that isn’t O’Neill. Members of the house go about in heathered grey tunics, tabards, and boots, with pants in colors that match the official colors of the hive they inhabit. More zealous members of the House don masks of the same material, to hide their faces from the humans they live beside.

The root of this elevated organization is that of a common piety. Since it is clear to the Genetors of the Thimble Mechanicus that the mutations of the populace do not derive from Warp exposure, but are instead a side effect of the Imperium turning the planet’s industrial equipment back on, its mutants are not in violation of the Imperial Creed. The mutants of Thimble may not be identical, but the grudging tolerance of the Ecclesiarchy has let them find a common identity in their second-class status. The leadership of House Kaung are elder mutants and rogue Adeptus Ministorum priests who have united in their desire to turn the mutant population to the Emperor’s light.

Unlike the other Houses of Thimble, House Kaung did not arise from the union of pre-Imperial scavenger Clans into a Noble House. House Kaung only came to be centuries after Levitna became Thimble. This means that the House has no sprawling financial base to turn to, as House Zhong did. However, through sheer force of numbers, the House is a genuine rival to the other Houses of the planet.

Behind its façade of total unity, however, House Kaung is riven by internal dissent. The mutants of the House are quick to show the public their commonality, but the leaders of the House are not of one mind about how best to expand and improve the House’s fortunes. Some of its members are simply grateful to the Emperor for letting them live in an Imperium that detests them and would happily burn them at the stake if given the chance. Others seethe with resentment towards the Imperium, but venerate the Emperor as a perfect and benevolent god, and believe they should destroy the local Imperial government to replace it with one of greater tolerance. Others yet think that holding the Emperor and His Imperium responsible for their status is a waste of time, and simply want to destroy the other Houses for making their lives hell.

The two largest factions are polar opposites in their approach to Thimble. One, which calls itself the Projectionists, believe that publicly professing their faith will make it harder for the human citizens of Thimble to curtail them as they take over the underhives of every city on Thimble. The other, dubbed the Revanchists, have no problem with expressive faith, but favors armed confrontation with as many of the other factions of the planet’s hive populations as possible, even if the Ecclesiarchy itself would condemn them for it. The Revanchist goal would undermine the Projectionist one, and thus they come into conflict more often than not.

More than a few of the younger members of the House are unhappy with that status quo. Why, they ask, should the House concern themselves with the Ecclesiarchy at all? Is the Ecclesiarchy itself not the ultimate root of so many of their problems? Is it not the doctrine of the supreme, unaltered human that is used to justify every single purge and oppressive act against the mutant? Older members of the House preach caution, however, as nothing would unite the human population against the mutant population faster than the mutants turning on the Ecclesiarchy. Hives are vast places. The Ecclesiarchy are often the only large body of organized humans that encounter mutants in any significant number on Thimble. If the rest of the population, the part that has no allegiance to the Houses, were to suddenly find a great deal of rowdy mutants on their doorsteps demanding change, would the fact that they aren’t Chaos mutants really stay the hands of the superstitious normals for long?

Thus does the House Kaung exist in an uneasy peace with itself, with much of its internal structure defined by mutually exclusive goals under the cover of united means. The sheer numbers of the House, which continue rising unabated no matter what genetic control measures the hives enact, ensure that even with their low-tech weapons, they could easily throw down any other one non-Merchant House and give any two Noble Houses a run for their money. The fact that the House uses faith, whether genuine or false, as its cover for movement and organization, is part of the reason that Houses Vost and Lienzo strive to hide the sources of their xenotech from the House Kaung leaders. House Kaung despises those two Houses, with a bitter, seething hate. They flout the laws against xenotechnological use openly, and are rarely called to task for it, whereas House Kaung’s members live every waking moment in fear of a lynching by superstitious humans. If the House Kaung leadership committee, which contains several ordained Ministers of the Adeptus, were to capture unequivocal proof of the ties Vost and Lienzo have to xenotech smugglers, the hives would erupt in a war that could cripple them for generations.

Kaung troops make use of repurposed industrial equipment and military weapons in the main, along with ancient hunting weapons and the occasional looted grenade launcher. While the street-level gangs of mutants that the House uses as their muscle are numerous enough for maintaining their turf, the true might of Kaung lies in the overwhelming numbers the House could bring to bear if its own members were roused to battle. This has never actually happened, but if all of House Kaung were to gather in one place, they might outgun an entire hive PDF.

The House has few allies. The only body they can call true partners in survival on Thimble are the nomadic Clan Ironsights, in whom they see a common drive to live and overcome all odds. The fact that their territory doesn’t overlap helps keep the peace between the two. House Nailspitter sees the bond between these two difference Houses as a rising threat, and has taken covert actions in the past to split them apart.

House Kaung has no true leader. Decisions are made collectively by a committee of forty elder mutants, family leaders, and a few Ecclesiarchal advisors.

=====Nomadic Clan Ironsights, Thimble=====
The millions of farmers, scavengers, and nomads who live in the barren, hostile wilderness of the planet Thimble exist in an ugly equilibrium. Some settlements do not need protection from raiders, but many do, and the population of raiders near the south pole is high enough that the PDF sometimes sorties to shield the farms there from roving packs of criminals.

Clan Ironsights may not be a real Clan like Ahad and Vorbach, but to the occupants of the wilderness, that is a minor distinction. There is no middle ground on the opinions of Ironsights among the wastelanders. They are either in awe of it, loathe it, or don’t care at all.

The Clan’s huge crawlers roam about the wastelands, collecting scrap and loose minerals from the wastelands, and taking their fill of the ruins of the hives that were too badly damaged to bother rebuilding. The raider gangs that dwell in the hive ruins fight back often, and have long preyed upon the Clan caravans. The roots of their struggle go unrecorded, but the clashes between them have spanned centuries.

The Clan rarely has reason to engage with the Houses and Clans that dominate the hives, but that may be changing. In the past few years, the raiders that have assaulted Clan Ironsights fuel depots and crawlers have had better weaponry and vehicles. There is no source for this equipment in the wasteland itself, which means that it is coming from the hives. Covert infiltrations of the marketplaces of the hives has revealed to the Clan that the only probably source of this weaponry is House Nailspitter, which has been stockpiling munitions themselves.

The Clan’s forces in the wastelands are hugely diverse, with the numbers and equipment they can deploy being situationally dependent on the climate of their engagement zones. Near the poles, where they face more competition from raiders, they tend to deploy more outriders and foot units. Near the equator, where they alone can operate with impunity, the Clan tends to keep to their huge crawlers. If they get wind of a major find of archaeotech that their crawlers are needed to loot in the hot zones, they dispatch forth, leaving their escorts behind. The crawlers are generally quite safe, but the escorts and outriders need to fend for themselves until the crawler gets back.

The foot soldiers of the Clan generally carry a mishmash of Imperial, pre-Imperial, and kludged weapons as available. Not being in the hives, they have few options for replenishing their stocks of weaponry. With the rising tensions between themselves and House Nailspitter, the Clan has had to spend more and more on modern weapons, with an emphasis on burst-fire rifles that can be fired from mounts. This has led them to charge more for their protection efforts on behalf of the settlers in the wasteland. The conflicts between Clan Ironsights and their enemies have grown large enough that the PDF has taken notice, and has resolved to simply shoot any raiders or Ironsights people sighted near the polar farms until they learn their place.

The Clan doesn’t bother with identifying insignia. Their hyper-white crawler shells are all the identifying markings they need.

The leader of the Clan is elected on a ten-year basis from the Captains of the individual crawlers. The incumbent at the turn of the millennium is Rieka bint Malati of the Silver Turtles caravan, but her term will run out in under a year.

=====Hive Ganger House Nailspitter, Thimble=====
The Nailspitters plan for the long game. Although they are not one of the ancient familial Houses that dominates Thimble, the Nailspitters have risen quickly in firepower and money for the past several centuries, to the point that they are now posing a serious challenge to the territorial domination of House Lienzo.

The Nailspitters started as a turf gang, founded by an ambitious off-worlder named Ralgo. Ralgo, an expatriate of the Naxos Sector capital world of Asklepian, was one of many who moved to Levitna when it was rebuilt as Thimble. He and millions of others were flown in to resettle the planet and help bring the hives online. Unlike most of the expatriates, he had no particular logistical or technical skills. He was chosen by lottery, to escape the menial drudgery of the Naxos Sector’s endless attrition wars.

Upon arriving in Cloudburst, Ralgo began a campaign of subtle intimidation, blackmail, targeted violence, and robbery to impose his will over the people. The hives of Thimble, at that point, were still expanding back into their historical roots, and had far more living space than they had people to fill them. Ralgo exploited the circumstance to stake claims on ideal quarters, and slowly built a gang around himself.

The gang pushed around their neighbors, but also took control of some of the reconstruction and industrial efforts on Thimble, gambling that the ruling Clans would not be interested in the efforts of their social inferiors as long as quotas were met. Sure enough, no ruling clan nor the Arbites felt the need to dislodge them so long as order was kept.

The gang long outlived Ralgo, and probably would have continued to toil in their criminal and industrial workings – so commonly linked on Thimble – were it not for a stroke of fortune. A plague struck the world in M40.234, decapitating dozens of lesser criminal syndicates that did not seek aid for fear of doctors reporting them to local law enforcement. The gang that would one day become House Nailspitter quickly swooped in and took control of them, dectupling their territory without firing a shot.

The gang spread and spread, recruiting thousands of disaffected gangers to do their bidding. The group’s leaders quashed former tribal identities by forcing all of their new troops to submit to the Nailspitter initiation rites and hazing rituals. The gang swelled, and may have been brought low by the Arbites had the gang not shifted their focus.

With their new size ensuring them a measure of safety, the newly-minted House set their sights on stability. The Nailspitters take pains to ensure that those territories they control – usually the mass transit operations that connect the poorer parts of the hives to the outside and each other – are as stable and quiet as can be. They use steel-fisted brutality to ensure this, including against the members of the other Houses. Concurrently, the House uses more covert means to ensure that none of the other Houses attain the level of power that the ruling Clans do. This has extended in the past to outright murder and sabotage against the Clanless noble Houses, even some with formal titles of Imperial aristocracy. They use measures of stealth to ensure that no trace of their sponsorship remains on those they patronize to perform these crimes.

The Nailspitters don’t constrain themselves to just attacking those higher on the Thimble pecking order, however. The House also attacks weaker targets, including independent gangs and even Clan Ironsights. Their aim is to capture any source of wealth, labor, or property that other organizations could use to ape their own success. The Nailspitters, in their long wisdom, know that a group as large as theirs could be brought low with another plague, a Glasian Migration, or some other event entirely outside the planning of their rivals. Thus, they ensure that at all times, a clear line of succession exists for their leadership.

Nailspitter exists on two planes of operations. The first is their public facing, with their own troops and the street gangs they employ maintaining order on their levels of the hives. These are the Nailspitters that the people of Thimble are familiar with, and to whom the locals pay their protection money. They employ a mixture of slug, shot, and las-weapons, and use highly visible insignia on their arms and clothing. The abundance of cheap, quality fabric on Thimble allows them to get quite creative with their gang insignia and costumes.

By contrast, their private forces are quite invisible. Using camouflaged equipment and clothing, hand signals to keep silent, Stormtrooper-quality suppressed weapons, and a mixture of bribery and stealthed aircars, they terrorize and murder those the Nailspitters expect to get in the way of their eventual goal: overthrowing House O’Neill.

Indispensability is the key to the House’s long-term survival. The House managed to avoid being slaughtered by the Arbites and the local Enforcers during their takeover of their rivals by virtue of playing a role in keeping order in the hives during the plague. House O’Neill is playing a super-high-stakes game of chicken with the Adeptus Mechanicus. There is no way the O’Neills, for all their wealth, can win a true tariff war with the Adeptus Mechanicus and its infinite wealth. Thus, to displace the O’Neills, the Nailspitters can either try to bring down their rivals with sabotage, or else stir the Mechanicus to action.

However, the long history of the Adeptae ignoring the day-to-day life of the human race on Thimble has suggested to the Nailspitters that the Mechanicus will not be prompted to take the O’Neills down unless something catastrophic happens to the Mechanicus. The only way that the Nailspitters’ leadership can think of to do that is to start destroying Mechanicus facilities on the planet.  However, to do so would surely cause the planet to collapse into anarchy, since the Mechanicus is the only faction around that can maintain Thimble’s overtaxed life support and terraforming devices. Thus, the Nailspitters have begun a campaign of attack and bribery against the customers of the O’Neills, its family members, and its less-guarded assets, while publicly appearing to be a force of stability for the world. They have even begun arming the enemies of the other Houses on the planet while using their black-ops teams to kill off their own enemies. The Nailspitters know that Clan Ahad doesn’t give a damn who is in charge of the transit stations as long as they work.

Presently, the Chief Nailspitter is Nikkyo Kasumoto, who has led the House with an iron fist and a taste for the finer things. He rose from the private face of the House, and it shows, with his taste for resolving problems with bribery and kidnapping instead of street battles.

=====The Waveriders, Obelisk 2=====
The piratical gangs of Obelisk 2 are the dominant force outside the core of the floating cities. Convoys of cobalt freighters and other tithe-bearing ships sail unmolested thanks to the protection of the military, but pirate attacks and raids on non-tithe assets often claim whole ships. There are hundreds of these gangs, in addition to the sanctioned ones that get deputized as city militia and the PDF.

The Waveriders are a typical, if large, example of these gangs. Most such gangs have a few dozen to a thousand riders, all of whom get around on the oceans using combinations of smaller jet skis and larger boats, with a few submarines here and there and a drone or two. The gangs also typically have a foot contingent as well, either stationed on cities they have conquered or in large boats used for boarding actions. The Waveriders are no exception.

The Waveriders are one of the older gangs, and have maintained their position of relative strength by virtue of being smart enough to extort significant sums of money from the processing and waste management hubs that handle the tithe goods. They don’t interdict the goods directly, but instead bleed those who produce the goods dry, knowing that a little problem like monetary loss will not be an acceptable reason for the tithe-producers to use to explain to the Administratum why they’re behind on production.

The gangs generally operate one of two ways: either democratically electing the four highest officers with each larger vessel captain getting a vote, or through a battle royale of all those who want a shot at the title after the old one dies.

The Master of the Waves is the self-styled Admiral Eiler Gustavsson, who cut his way to the top, in the way of the piratical gangs with no formal democratic structure.