Setting:Cloudburst/Tendrils

System
Galactic Position	Cloudburst Sector, Uncategorized Region
System Overlord	None
Worlds in the system	Five, one inhabitable
World Type, Name	Xeno World: Tendrils
Tropospheric Composition	Nitrogen 81%, Oxygen 19%, Argon .2%, Water 1.6%, Unknown 0.1%
Religion	Unknown
Government type	Unknown
Planetary Governor	Yes
Adept Presence	N/A
Climate	Frequent heavy rain, wide tropical storms, acute hailstorms at poles
Geography	.99 times the size of Terra, mixtures of polar and sandy deserts, with bands of heavy vegetation and lengthy, frequent earthquakes
Gravity	1.04
Day Length	29 Terran Hours
Economy	Unknown
Principal Exports	N/A
Principal Imports	N/A
Countries and Continents	Unknown political arrangements over five continents
Military	Hostile aliens
Contact with other Systems	Never
Tithe Grade	Aptus Non
Population	Unknown alien race(s)

Description

Opportunity knocks early and loudly in the Cloudburst Circuit. Although many Rogue Traders have returned from the Circuit broken or defeated, many have come back fabulously wealthy, or armed with vast historical and technological secrets. The Rogue Trader who takes Tendrils for the Imperium will be wealthy beyond the mad dreams of avarice in the hearts of the most miserly Lord Sector or Lord Trader Dynastic.

Tendrils is an alien world. It is theoretically habitable by humans, although the atmosphere would be difficult to breathe, at the very least. The native race of aliens is unknown to human science. They have not yet achieved the technological advances required for sustained space flight. The population seems highly variable when counted from orbit. The Ordo Xenos suspects that this means the race either have an improbably short reproductive cycle, or at least some of the population lives underground.

The Imperium first became aware of the planet thanks to the efforts of Mechanicus Explorator ships under the command of Magos Explorator Lethicos, only a few weeks after the Sixth Glasian Migration. The Explorator detected artificial radio signals using an unknown encryption as soon as he entered the system, and flew his vessels to the world from which they originated. However, as soon as he arrived, his vessel came under fire from primitive cruise missiles.

Lethicos withdrew to beyond the missiles’ range and scanned the planet. He immediately detected that the race below were not human. Lethicos began earmarking the planet for destruction when the spectroscopic analysis of the world’s crustal composition completed. To his shock, the planet registered has having one of the highest concentrations of Adamantium ore ever detected, higher than even that of Night Lords Primarch Konrad Curze’s homeworld of Nostramo. The planet, which he named Tendrils for its strange, ugly plant growth, was too valuable to risk losing to cyclonic torpedo, or even atmospheric destruction.

The problem of the aliens remained. If they had surface-to-space weapons, they presumably had ground-side defenses as well. Further, they did not attempt to communicate with Explorator Lethicos, and targeted his ship the instant they saw it.

Lethicos concluded that they must have had hostile encounters with dangerous aliens before, or even humans. As he turned his ships to return to Cognomen and report his discovery, he began detailed scans of the worlds elsewhere in the system. He did not detect life on any of them; however, spectroscopic scans of two rocky planets near the star revealed traces of manganese, iron, copper, nickel, and artificial polymers, in quantities too vast to have come from Tendrils. He scanned the worlds further, and found the wreck of an Imperial freighter scattered across both of them, bearing damaged hull markings that named it the Last Tide.

When Lethicos returned to Cognomen, he cross-referenced that name with the world’s ship registry, and found that the only ship with that name anywhere near Cloudburst was a freighter of the House Hererra, which had loaded up with raw textiles from Septiim Secundus and flown off to Thimble, eighty years before. Lethicos did not have an explanation for why the ship would have approached Tendrils, or how they had come to blows with the people of that world. When he reported all of his findings to the Council of Magi, the Council lauded his decision not to destroy the planet.

Enough time has passed since then that a significant force of Imperial assets has assembled to conquer it, but the effort has been plagued with setbacks from the start. The arrival of the force of Orks on Oglith threatens to paralyze the sector’s defensive efforts in the face of the Seventh Glasian Migration. With the paranoia of Cardinal Lamarr drawing much of the freelance military power towards Jodhclan, and the urgent need for Stormtroopers or Throne Agents to secure the wreck of the Predator, the Tendrils Conquest Crusade has simply not been able to muster sufficient firepower to overcome Tendrils’s defenses. The added problem of many of the veteran regiments of the Imperial Guard in the Cloudburst Sector being tied up defending Foraldshold simply makes things worse. The Imperium has had at least one ship on standby in the outer reaches of AHG2452 for the past seventy years, and has observed the technology of Tendrils’ residents advancing at a horrifying rate. While the Imperium can still muster far greater forces to assault the world, the multiple pulls on its resources will prevent any immediate invasion attempts, for the time being.

Frustrating efforts is the fact that the Senate of the High Lords has taken an interest in the world. A chance to kill off a potentially annoying alien race and expand the Imperium’s supply of precious Adamantium is one the High Lords would very much like to take. The lack of free resources in Cloudburst to address this problem is a concern the High Lords do not have, and have threatened Cognomen and Cloudburst to take care of the issue before they send somebody to do it for them.