Editing Setting:Cloudburst/Rogue Traders (section)

====Rogue Trader Dynastic House Rowsdower====
The Rowsdower dynasty traces its way back to an ocean of blood.  The battles the House fought to claw their way near the top of the pecking order in the Cloudburst region are among the bloodiest in the history of the Sector.

Many Rogue Traders that hail all the way back to the beginning of the Imperium have historical records of Adeptus Astartes being called to serve alongside, or even under, Rogue Traders.  Sometimes these Marines were simply advisors, or perhaps field commanders.  Other times, Rogue Traders of a particular skill were actually given command over combined forces of Imperial military power, including Astartes.  The Rowsdower House has had many chances to command Astartes in battle, including Blue Daggers, and this rare honor stems from their glorious history of service to the Officio Munitorum.

Although Rogue Traders are members of the Imperial peerage, and not the Officio, they often have militarized functions as a part of their duty.  The Rogue Trader Houses that interact with the alien cultures of the galaxy may well bring fire and ruin with them, enact judgment against cultures deemed too deviant to survive, or even nip potential xeno problems in the bud before they have a chance to grow out of control.  House Rowsdower has on the retinue of several of its Captains experts from the Adeptus Mechanicus Biologis divisions.  These experts excel at identifying alien races and their weaknesses.  The House has also worked alongside the Deathwatch, carrying individual Kill-Marines on secret missions to scope out alien holdings in the depths of the Oldlight Exo-zone.  Forts Excalibris and Pykman have sent Kill-Marines to Rowsdower ships, and so has Fortress Dascomb.

House Rowsdower doesn’t spend all of their time waging costly wars on the behalf of the Sector or Deathwatch, of course.  Much of the House’s time is spent on the lucrative business of scrap and salvage.  The House Rowsdower fleets often travel in what the Imperial Navy refers to as ‘Dispersed Net’ formations.  These vessels exit the Warp in a tight cluster with overlapping augury and auspex instruments, then slowly drift apart until each ship is at the absolute edge of the next ship’s sensor ranges.  In the relatively dense primordial soup of gasses and dust that constitute the great Cloudburst Sector hypernova remnants, this is not a great distance at all, but it has still netted the House some success in finding their true goal.

The House Rowsdower fleet, using these techniques and more developed by the Navy or their own Paz Rowsdower many centuries ago, has been able to salvage over one hundred rare metal asteroids and twenty shipwrecks using this technique, and mark the locations of several hundred individual ship pieces flung away from long-past explosions.  Of course, this barely breaks even in terms of the money it takes to run such a large fleet, but the fleet isn’t just looking for scrap.  The use of such far-distant sensor webs also allows for the ship communications experts to precisely locate the sources of light-speed communication, thanks to the onboard Fabique Mapping Clocks of the Rowsdower fleet.

However, the true goal of the Rowsdower fleet isn’t research, or even really for money.  The House Rowsdower fleet is always looking for more opportunities to expand.  Many of the ships the Rowsdower fleet has found on their searches of Warp navigation stops and asteroid fields have come right back to the House once salvaged and put the service of their flotilla.  They have added ships as disparate as a promethium tanker barge and a Gothic cruiser to their fleet in this way.
Of course, sometimes the original owner of the ship is still alive, or the vessel belonged to the Navy.  In that case, the House is sometimes dragged to court to press their claim to the ship, and Cloudburst maritime Judges are brutally even-handed.

The House Rowsdower maintains a very large percentage of the Clog station, larger than any other House.  There, they can sell the cargoes of their salvaged ships, or haul the wares they have bought from primitive worlds of the Sector to visitors from more advanced ones.  The House reaps a tidy sum from this trade, and is eager to spend more money there.  The House also funds some of the small gas mining fleets that drift into the gas clouds that streak the entire Cloudburst Circuit, harvesting the primordial gas of the void.

Of course, the House are still Rogue Traders at heart, even if they often feign a more military air.  The mightiest and most long-ranged ships of the House fleet often trawl the dark places of the map, seeking lost worlds and alien treasure.  The Glamour anomaly was co-discovered by a member of House Rowsdower and a Mechanicus Magos.  The House was also the first to sound the alarm that the Rot Souls had returned, and were heading to civilized worlds.

The recent history of the House has been a strange one, marked by the House coming to blows with factions it didn’t even know existed.  For example, routine work in the Circuit on the behalf of the Sector Administratum turned into an unexpected delve into a lost pre-Imperial city on the planet AVR285.  That in turn led to a battle between the startled House forces and the feral cult of black-clad killers that dwelled there.  Mercenaries of the House had to slaughter dozens of these strange cultists, who apparently had no ties to Chaos or Genestealers at all, and the House is still not entirely sure why they were in the derelict city in the first place, or how they flew there.  The Ordo Hereticus is investigating, but has higher priorities at the moment.

At times, the House’s Warrant clauses will come into effect, and the House must lend ships to an evacuation or colonization effort on the behalf of the Adeptus Administratum.  The House generally does not begrudge this, since the money is usually good, and it allows the House to establish contacts with the populations with whom they work, potentially opening up new recruitment opportunities.

The current holder of the Warrant is Marcus Rowsdower, who does not appreciate that there is another House in the Sector that has the same family name as his given name.
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