The Xanadu Sector
The Xanadu Sector
"All right ladies and gentlemen, here's the 101 on our current region of space.
"Imperial astrography divides the galaxy into 'segmentums' - Segmentum Solar centered around Holy Terra (as they call their Earth), surrounded by Segmentum Ultima, Obscurus, Tempestus and Pacificus. We're in the latter, but don't let the name lull you into a false sense of security.
"Each segmentum is divided into hundreds or even thousands of sectors. Our Solar System - remember to refer to both it and our native planet as 'Organitron' - happened to emerge on the far edge of the Serpentis Sector. Do not get in the habit of joking about the God-Emperor Of Man and Serpentor, loose lips sink charades that billions of lives depend on. Regardless, due to administrative politics so convoluted they make the Pentagon's inner policies look straightforward in comparison, the military authorities of Serpentis Sector have chosen to send us to the neighboring Xanadu Sector instead.
"Xanadu Sector includes 65 populated Imperium systems, and a larger number of systems that are not under Imperium control. Generally speaking, there are three major external threats in the Sector:
"The biggest is the aliens known as Orks - you'd think it was a Tolkien reference, but that's what they call themselves. Forget our Cybertronian friends - as much as Imperial propaganda likes to paint all aliens with a wide brush as existential threats, in this particular case our intel suggests they didn't need to make anything up. Orks live for the very purpose of war, viewing everyone as an enemy to be fought for the sheer joy of fighting, or at most as slave labor. Three quarters of the Imperium's fighting in the region is against Orks. Over the past century, two Xanadu systems that were contested by the Orks have been reclaimed by the Imperium, to the point where the alien presence there is limited to small guerrillas. Three contested systems have seen Imperials completely driven out. And two systems that were fully under Imperial control have become contested. In other words, the Imperium is losing ground faster than it's gaining. To make things worse, comparing numbers and logistics, it looks like the Orks would only need a third of their forces in this sector to fight Imperium forces on equal grounds - the only reason they are not crushing all the opposition is that they spend more time and effort fighting each other than fighting humans. Imperial intelligence suggests the largest single Ork faction in the Sector controls less than 25% of local Ork forces.
"The second biggest threat is the Ruinous Powers. Don't call them Chaos. Don't call them the Dark Gods. Call them either the Ruinous Powers or 'heretics'; knowing more about them than the bare minimum can invite suspicion. This faction is comprised of malevolent deities, literal demons, wizards, cultists, and a whole lot of Imperial defectors, including a significant number of former Imperial genetically-enhanced supersoldiers. While Orks are happy to fight anybody, these guys seem to prioritize destroying the Imperium, and their treatment of both prisoners and civilian populations is somehow even more brutal than that of the Imperium and Cobra.
"The Ruinous Powers have maintained a presence in Xanadu Sector for the past eight hundred years, when one of their armies invaded, and managed to take over twenty of the Imperium's systems in the initial blitz. They over-extended, though, and soon lost half of those systems - some to the Orks, some to an Imperial counter-offensive using reinforcements from neighboring sectors. The centuries since have seen an ongoing back-and-forth - every century or two, one side manages to launch a big push that reclaims several systems. The last such happened a hundred and ten years ago, when an Imperial Crusade - their term for it - used six billion Guardsmen, eight companies of Space Marines, a sizable contingent of Sisters Of Battle, and a significant Imperial Navy fleet to take back five systems.
"The overwhelming Ork presence makes it hard to quantify how many systems the Ruinous Powers currently control, save that it is far less than at certain other points. Nonetheless, they remain a major threat, and one that Sector Command is particularly eager to stamp down on.
"Third but still important comes the threat of the Tyranids. If the Orks are violence-drunk brutes who make the Dreadnoks look restrained and diplomatic, the Tyranids appear to be more of a hive mind that views everyone else as food. A tendril of one of their fleets was destroyed by the Imperial Navy less than two centuries ago, but enough survivors have managed to escape to invade three planets on three different systems.
"That may not sound like much. To this date, the Tyranid threat has remained confined to those three planets. But sector authorities are legitimately terrified that, should the Tyranids win on any of those fronts, they will be able to multiply their forces exponentially, invade other planets, and become a sector-wide threat on par with the Orks.
"At the same time, all past attempts at sending enough reinforcements to a planet to finally root out the Tyranid presence have all been hampered by this simple reality: The Imperial Guard is stretched thin as it is, and removing threats from other fronts make them vulnerable to the Orks and Ruinous Powers. As such, all three Tyranid fronts have remained largely static for generations, only getting desperately-needed reinforcements when it looks like the Tyranids are gaining ground.
"That's the strategic situation in a nutshell. For intel analysis of each individual system, check the briefings on your HTB…"
Systems Of The Xanadu Sector
Anathema: "The Sector capital, Anathema includes two minor Industrial Worlds, one Hive World with a population of 1.2 trillion souls, and the largest stardock in the sector. Said stardock accounts for half the repairs and maintenance work required by the Imperial Navy in the sector, as well as constructing two battlecruisers and several smaller ships over the past century - which is apparently productive enough to be a point of pride.
"Anathema is a hard target, fortified and defended by a significant chunk of space and ground forces available to sector authorities. While this means a decapitating strike against the sector is highly unlikely, it also limits the forces that are sent to protect the rest of the sector."
Revelation: "Ask the people of the Xanadu Sector what its most important system is, and some would say Anathema, but most would say Revelation. Even though Revelation's sole inhabited planet holds a population of 'merely' 19 billion people, it holds great religious importance to the sector. Supposedly, millennia ago a host of demons was slain on its surface by the Space Marines; following that, the State Church - they call themselves the Ecclesiarchy - seized control of the planet and classified it as a shrine world. Millions of pilgrims come there every year, many of them joining the local PDF and the Imperial Guard.
"Revelation is a heavily fortified world, and despite the limited presence of the Imperial Guard, it has easily repelled three invasions in the past four centuries - two by Orks and one by the Ruinous Powers. Part of this is the significant presence of Sisters Of Battle forces; while they are fighting the Imperium's enemies all over the sector, Revelation is where they are headquartered."
Vectorime: "With five inhabited planets and multiple inhabited moons, all of them classified as industrial worlds, Vectorime is the unofficial manufacturing capital of Xanadu. If the Munitorum records I got my hands on are accurate, then over the past decade, Vectorime has exported out of Xanadu Sector 5.8 million Chimera armored personnel carriers, 3.1 million Leman Russ tanks, 1.7 million Hellhound flame tanks, 1.1 million Basilisk mobile artillery, 800,000 Sentinel reconnaissance walkers, 250,000 meltaguns and multi-meltas, and enough spaceship parts to account for the tonnage of a battlecruiser. That's beside everything that was used in-sector.
"While the loss of Vectorime would be disastrous to the Imperial military, no attack has reached the system in the past millennium. As such, its defenses are limited to PDF and SDF, which are admittedly better-armed than most local defense forces are."
Verde: "With a surface gravity of 2.6 G, this massive planet is at the edge of what humans can live on. That didn't stop the Imperium from turning it and its two largest moons into agri-worlds. This system forms the biggest of the five agri-worlds of Xanadu Sector, which, between them, account for 90% of the system's food production.
"From an economics and logistics perspective, it might sound inane to have a handful of planets supply the rest of the sector with food, especially given the inefficient and haphazard nature of the Imperium's interstellar travel. That's because it's not about economics, it's about domination: Most worlds that try to rebel against the Imperium can be forced to surrender simply by ceasing food shipments."
Cavitus: "As the Administratum views it, Cavitus only barely qualifies as a hive world. It has two continents. The first, about half the size of Australia, is located near the southern pole; the cold climes facilitate the dispersal of excess heat, which is probably a factor in why the continent is covered in hive cities with a population of 180 billion people. The second, roughly Asia-sized and separated from the first by two thousand kilometers of ocean, has seen enough urban sprawl to house fifteen billion people.
"Of those fifteen billion, only eleven are still confirmed alive. Thirty-two years ago, Orks landed on the second continent, and the fighting has been going on nonstop ever since. The Orks currently hold the northern third of the continent, while the Imperial Guard is using 95 million guardsmen to hold them in check. This defense is admittedly somewhat hampered by the planetary Governor's insistence on keeping a massive contingent defending the untouched hive cities of the southern continent instead of sending them to the front."
Devoir: "Devoir is what the Imperium classifies as a 'Knight World'. Most of it is effectively medieval… except for a few thousand 'Imperial Knights', bipedal weapon platforms the size of a large house that are owned by the local aristocrats. The Knights of Devoir have a long history of being sent to assist Imperial forces all across Xanadu Sector.
"This changed two centuries ago, when the Tyranids landed on the planet. No Knight has left Devoir's surface ever since, being focused on fighting the hive mind.
"As the majority of Devoir's landmass and biomass is located in the tropics, much of the fighting there is jungle-based. The population of a mere 400 million (of the 500 pre-invasion) can only play a minor role in the fighting, which is mostly handled by 72 million Guardsmen with the Knights' support."
Fanatic's Joy: "This system used to house a hive world and a mining world. There's nothing left on the hive world's surface, not even an atmosphere - the fighting and multiple goes of orbital bombardment have seen to that. The mining world, on the other hand, remains an active battleground between the Imperium and the Ruinous Powers.
"This planet, from which both sides derive massive quantities of various metals (including uranium), is hardly hospitable - its oceans have been drained long ago, the water moved to other worlds for ecoforming purposes and to facilitate mining of the ocean floor. Surface conditions, while livable, are harsh everywhere - and that's before getting into the war itself. Fanatic's Joy was one of the systems taken by the initial blitz of the Ruinous Powers eight centuries ago - ironically, this was originally accomplished by promising freedom to the people working on the mining world, who were, let's not mince words, slaves. Unfortunately for them, it turned out the Ruinous Powers treated their civilians even more cruelly than the Imperium.
"In the centuries since, the system has changed hands multiple times. The crusade that pushed back the Ruinous Power in the previous century finally ran out of steam here, and the two sides have been battling and trading territory ever since.
"As things currently stand, the Imperium controls 40% of the planet's surface. Imperial territory includes 11 billion civilians (mostly slaves shipped from hive worlds after being convicted of major or minor crimes), who peform back-breaking mining work; they also include 110 million Imperial Guard soldiers engaged in endless trench warfare with the enemy forces, with the assistance of 15,000 Sisters Of Battle - assistance that they badly need, given the opposition and the vast number of demons at its disposal. While this semi-static war rages on the surface, starships chase each other in outer space as each side tries to shoot down ore convoys leaving the planet."
Kiboutan: "Shockingly enough, not every single planet in the Imperium is a fascist's wet dream - just an overwhelming majority. Kiboutan has a planetary charter that grants a few basic, inalienable rights to its citizens, a referendum system via which the people can remove officials from power, and the closest an Imperium world can get to freedom of religion (meaning that they tolerate multiple faiths, as long as they all recognize the Emperor as the one true god). It is by no means pleasant compared to our home, but in comparison to any other planet in this or the Serpentis sector, the 12 billion citizens of Kiboutan have more freedom, more economic breathing room, and better education.
"It should come as no surprise that sector authorities have deeply mistrusted Kiboutan for centuries, and would love to see its system of governance declared heretical and violently replaced with something more authoritarian - official Imperium policy is to leave planets be as long as they provide the tithe, don't deal with aliens, and avoid all forms of heresy, but in practice, fascists will always view any protection for the disenfranchised with deep suspicion. Supposedly, they almost got their wish three decades ago when an Inquisitor came to have a look, but events in the Serpentis Sector called the Inquisitor away early.
"The people of Kiboutan are aware of the razor's edge on which they live. It is because of that that the planet has invested in massive military academies and is constantly sending well-trained volunteers off-world - it is no secret that the best Imperial Guard regiments created in the sector, as well as the most capable Imperial Navy sailors, come from Kiboutan.
"Or at least, that was the situation until nine years ago, when an Ork army made landfall. The Orks have been slowly gaining ground ever since, as sector authorities are only sending minimal reinforcements to assist Kiboutan.
"As things currently stand, the Orks have already taken a quarter of the planet, opposed by 20 million Imperial Guardsmen and, perhaps more importantly in this case, five times as many PDF soldiers. Even so, Kiboutan knows it's years away from crumbling under the strain at current rates."
The Pit Of Damnation: "The concept of space hulks doesn't make much sense until you realize some of the larger military vessels in this dimension are massive enough for their gravity field to be non-negligible; ships wrecked in space battles end up drifting toward each other. This particular space hulk was formed toward the end of the Chaos invasion eight centuries ago; the Imperial Navy clashed with the ruinous powers, and by the end of it, neither side had enough power left to reclaim the previous wreckage.
By the time the Imperium returned, it discovered a vast army of demons, sorcerers and cultists had fortified itself within the hulk; they appear to be of a different sub-faction of the Ruinous Powers than the ones that have invaded Xanadu Sector, and constantly at odds with them. Both the Imperium and the primary Chaos forces in the sector have made many attempts at reclaiming the hulk - now named the Pit Of Damnation - but the independent Chaos faction entrenched within it always attacks whichever side appears to be winning. This has led to a centuries-long deadly equilibrium: The Imperial Guard and the Ruinous Powers both maintain an armed force within the hulk, fighting each other with little hope of victory, simply to deny the other side the chance to control it. While less than half a million guardsmen are usually located in the Pit Of Damnation, their life expectancy is short even by the Guard's standards, and reinforcements are brought in to replace them regularly.
"If this sounds incredibly wasteful in terms of lives, that's because it is. Nonetheless, Sector Command remains determined to, if not reclaim the hulk, then at least deny it to the Ruinous Powers. Partly because the precious ship parts could be used in the construction of new vessels… but also because one of the ships whose wreckage forms the Pit Of Damnation was carrying an invaluable cargo of 2,400 super-heavy Baneblade tanks, intended to reinforce the crusade and drive Chaos out of the Xanadu Sector."
Purgatorium: "The only non-gaseous planet in its system, Purgatorium is located far enough from its sun that even at noon the light is as dim as during the twilight hours on Earth. Intensive volcanic activity keeps the planet, if not warm, then at least warm enough to sustain life, mostly in the form of black lichens that account for the atmosphere's oxygen (which, while significantly lower than Earth's, still exists in survivable amounts).
"Remember when the British Empire decided to settle Australia by sending convicts there? Well, the Imperium took the idea several steps further with the concept of the 'penal planet': Purgatorium's population is largely composed of prisoners from high-population worlds who were sent there… and their descendants, who inherit their ancestors' legal status as convicts.
"In millennia past, Sector Command would make the worlds of the Xanadu Sector send their convicts to Purgatorium so that they could serve as slave labor in the planet's mines. These days, however, the mines are mostly spent, and while the population still toils at digging the ground for minerals, the returns are minimal - and as such, Sector Command no longer demands that planetary governors transfer their penal population there. Many still do, however, because the governor of Purgatorium is actually buying those prisoners now. Partly to maintain population levels and keep the planet relevant in the eyes of the Administratum, but mostly because Purgatorium pays its tithe in the form of penal regiments - armies of slave-soldiers fitted with explosive control collars meant to keep them in line, who are sent off to die across Xanadu (often enough, in the Pit Of Damnation).
"It may sound nonsensical, to ferry millions of people (many for very minor crimes, not that we can trust any of them to have been guilty in the first place) across interstellar distances just to drop them on a planet where their primary value is to be conscripted and then sent to yet another planet to fight there. One can only blame generations of precedent and Administratum inertia that have left this circuitous system in place, allowing both the governor of Purgatorium and those of several other worlds to profit from it.
"Purgatorium's total population is estimated to be a mere seven billion, and authority on the planet is largely maintained by a structure of locals who are recruited to serve as the governor's enforcers… though the governor also maintains a force of combat servitors as his personal guard, thanks to favors exchanged with the Mechanicus."
"All right ladies and gentlemen, here's the 101 on our current region of space.
"Imperial astrography divides the galaxy into 'segmentums' - Segmentum Solar centered around Holy Terra (as they call their Earth), surrounded by Segmentum Ultima, Obscurus, Tempestus and Pacificus. We're in the latter, but don't let the name lull you into a false sense of security.
"Each segmentum is divided into hundreds or even thousands of sectors. Our Solar System - remember to refer to both it and our native planet as 'Organitron' - happened to emerge on the far edge of the Serpentis Sector. Do not get in the habit of joking about the God-Emperor Of Man and Serpentor, loose lips sink charades that billions of lives depend on. Regardless, due to administrative politics so convoluted they make the Pentagon's inner policies look straightforward in comparison, the military authorities of Serpentis Sector have chosen to send us to the neighboring Xanadu Sector instead.
"Xanadu Sector includes 65 populated Imperium systems, and a larger number of systems that are not under Imperium control. Generally speaking, there are three major external threats in the Sector:
"The biggest is the aliens known as Orks - you'd think it was a Tolkien reference, but that's what they call themselves. Forget our Cybertronian friends - as much as Imperial propaganda likes to paint all aliens with a wide brush as existential threats, in this particular case our intel suggests they didn't need to make anything up. Orks live for the very purpose of war, viewing everyone as an enemy to be fought for the sheer joy of fighting, or at most as slave labor. Three quarters of the Imperium's fighting in the region is against Orks. Over the past century, two Xanadu systems that were contested by the Orks have been reclaimed by the Imperium, to the point where the alien presence there is limited to small guerrillas. Three contested systems have seen Imperials completely driven out. And two systems that were fully under Imperial control have become contested. In other words, the Imperium is losing ground faster than it's gaining. To make things worse, comparing numbers and logistics, it looks like the Orks would only need a third of their forces in this sector to fight Imperium forces on equal grounds - the only reason they are not crushing all the opposition is that they spend more time and effort fighting each other than fighting humans. Imperial intelligence suggests the largest single Ork faction in the Sector controls less than 25% of local Ork forces.
"The second biggest threat is the Ruinous Powers. Don't call them Chaos. Don't call them the Dark Gods. Call them either the Ruinous Powers or 'heretics'; knowing more about them than the bare minimum can invite suspicion. This faction is comprised of malevolent deities, literal demons, wizards, cultists, and a whole lot of Imperial defectors, including a significant number of former Imperial genetically-enhanced supersoldiers. While Orks are happy to fight anybody, these guys seem to prioritize destroying the Imperium, and their treatment of both prisoners and civilian populations is somehow even more brutal than that of the Imperium and Cobra.
"The Ruinous Powers have maintained a presence in Xanadu Sector for the past eight hundred years, when one of their armies invaded, and managed to take over twenty of the Imperium's systems in the initial blitz. They over-extended, though, and soon lost half of those systems - some to the Orks, some to an Imperial counter-offensive using reinforcements from neighboring sectors. The centuries since have seen an ongoing back-and-forth - every century or two, one side manages to launch a big push that reclaims several systems. The last such happened a hundred and ten years ago, when an Imperial Crusade - their term for it - used six billion Guardsmen, eight companies of Space Marines, a sizable contingent of Sisters Of Battle, and a significant Imperial Navy fleet to take back five systems.
"The overwhelming Ork presence makes it hard to quantify how many systems the Ruinous Powers currently control, save that it is far less than at certain other points. Nonetheless, they remain a major threat, and one that Sector Command is particularly eager to stamp down on.
"Third but still important comes the threat of the Tyranids. If the Orks are violence-drunk brutes who make the Dreadnoks look restrained and diplomatic, the Tyranids appear to be more of a hive mind that views everyone else as food. A tendril of one of their fleets was destroyed by the Imperial Navy less than two centuries ago, but enough survivors have managed to escape to invade three planets on three different systems.
"That may not sound like much. To this date, the Tyranid threat has remained confined to those three planets. But sector authorities are legitimately terrified that, should the Tyranids win on any of those fronts, they will be able to multiply their forces exponentially, invade other planets, and become a sector-wide threat on par with the Orks.
"At the same time, all past attempts at sending enough reinforcements to a planet to finally root out the Tyranid presence have all been hampered by this simple reality: The Imperial Guard is stretched thin as it is, and removing threats from other fronts make them vulnerable to the Orks and Ruinous Powers. As such, all three Tyranid fronts have remained largely static for generations, only getting desperately-needed reinforcements when it looks like the Tyranids are gaining ground.
"That's the strategic situation in a nutshell. For intel analysis of each individual system, check the briefings on your HTB…"
Systems Of The Xanadu Sector
Anathema: "The Sector capital, Anathema includes two minor Industrial Worlds, one Hive World with a population of 1.2 trillion souls, and the largest stardock in the sector. Said stardock accounts for half the repairs and maintenance work required by the Imperial Navy in the sector, as well as constructing two battlecruisers and several smaller ships over the past century - which is apparently productive enough to be a point of pride.
"Anathema is a hard target, fortified and defended by a significant chunk of space and ground forces available to sector authorities. While this means a decapitating strike against the sector is highly unlikely, it also limits the forces that are sent to protect the rest of the sector."
Revelation: "Ask the people of the Xanadu Sector what its most important system is, and some would say Anathema, but most would say Revelation. Even though Revelation's sole inhabited planet holds a population of 'merely' 19 billion people, it holds great religious importance to the sector. Supposedly, millennia ago a host of demons was slain on its surface by the Space Marines; following that, the State Church - they call themselves the Ecclesiarchy - seized control of the planet and classified it as a shrine world. Millions of pilgrims come there every year, many of them joining the local PDF and the Imperial Guard.
"Revelation is a heavily fortified world, and despite the limited presence of the Imperial Guard, it has easily repelled three invasions in the past four centuries - two by Orks and one by the Ruinous Powers. Part of this is the significant presence of Sisters Of Battle forces; while they are fighting the Imperium's enemies all over the sector, Revelation is where they are headquartered."
Vectorime: "With five inhabited planets and multiple inhabited moons, all of them classified as industrial worlds, Vectorime is the unofficial manufacturing capital of Xanadu. If the Munitorum records I got my hands on are accurate, then over the past decade, Vectorime has exported out of Xanadu Sector 5.8 million Chimera armored personnel carriers, 3.1 million Leman Russ tanks, 1.7 million Hellhound flame tanks, 1.1 million Basilisk mobile artillery, 800,000 Sentinel reconnaissance walkers, 250,000 meltaguns and multi-meltas, and enough spaceship parts to account for the tonnage of a battlecruiser. That's beside everything that was used in-sector.
"While the loss of Vectorime would be disastrous to the Imperial military, no attack has reached the system in the past millennium. As such, its defenses are limited to PDF and SDF, which are admittedly better-armed than most local defense forces are."
Verde: "With a surface gravity of 2.6 G, this massive planet is at the edge of what humans can live on. That didn't stop the Imperium from turning it and its two largest moons into agri-worlds. This system forms the biggest of the five agri-worlds of Xanadu Sector, which, between them, account for 90% of the system's food production.
"From an economics and logistics perspective, it might sound inane to have a handful of planets supply the rest of the sector with food, especially given the inefficient and haphazard nature of the Imperium's interstellar travel. That's because it's not about economics, it's about domination: Most worlds that try to rebel against the Imperium can be forced to surrender simply by ceasing food shipments."
Cavitus: "As the Administratum views it, Cavitus only barely qualifies as a hive world. It has two continents. The first, about half the size of Australia, is located near the southern pole; the cold climes facilitate the dispersal of excess heat, which is probably a factor in why the continent is covered in hive cities with a population of 180 billion people. The second, roughly Asia-sized and separated from the first by two thousand kilometers of ocean, has seen enough urban sprawl to house fifteen billion people.
"Of those fifteen billion, only eleven are still confirmed alive. Thirty-two years ago, Orks landed on the second continent, and the fighting has been going on nonstop ever since. The Orks currently hold the northern third of the continent, while the Imperial Guard is using 95 million guardsmen to hold them in check. This defense is admittedly somewhat hampered by the planetary Governor's insistence on keeping a massive contingent defending the untouched hive cities of the southern continent instead of sending them to the front."
Devoir: "Devoir is what the Imperium classifies as a 'Knight World'. Most of it is effectively medieval… except for a few thousand 'Imperial Knights', bipedal weapon platforms the size of a large house that are owned by the local aristocrats. The Knights of Devoir have a long history of being sent to assist Imperial forces all across Xanadu Sector.
"This changed two centuries ago, when the Tyranids landed on the planet. No Knight has left Devoir's surface ever since, being focused on fighting the hive mind.
"As the majority of Devoir's landmass and biomass is located in the tropics, much of the fighting there is jungle-based. The population of a mere 400 million (of the 500 pre-invasion) can only play a minor role in the fighting, which is mostly handled by 72 million Guardsmen with the Knights' support."
Fanatic's Joy: "This system used to house a hive world and a mining world. There's nothing left on the hive world's surface, not even an atmosphere - the fighting and multiple goes of orbital bombardment have seen to that. The mining world, on the other hand, remains an active battleground between the Imperium and the Ruinous Powers.
"This planet, from which both sides derive massive quantities of various metals (including uranium), is hardly hospitable - its oceans have been drained long ago, the water moved to other worlds for ecoforming purposes and to facilitate mining of the ocean floor. Surface conditions, while livable, are harsh everywhere - and that's before getting into the war itself. Fanatic's Joy was one of the systems taken by the initial blitz of the Ruinous Powers eight centuries ago - ironically, this was originally accomplished by promising freedom to the people working on the mining world, who were, let's not mince words, slaves. Unfortunately for them, it turned out the Ruinous Powers treated their civilians even more cruelly than the Imperium.
"In the centuries since, the system has changed hands multiple times. The crusade that pushed back the Ruinous Power in the previous century finally ran out of steam here, and the two sides have been battling and trading territory ever since.
"As things currently stand, the Imperium controls 40% of the planet's surface. Imperial territory includes 11 billion civilians (mostly slaves shipped from hive worlds after being convicted of major or minor crimes), who peform back-breaking mining work; they also include 110 million Imperial Guard soldiers engaged in endless trench warfare with the enemy forces, with the assistance of 15,000 Sisters Of Battle - assistance that they badly need, given the opposition and the vast number of demons at its disposal. While this semi-static war rages on the surface, starships chase each other in outer space as each side tries to shoot down ore convoys leaving the planet."
Kiboutan: "Shockingly enough, not every single planet in the Imperium is a fascist's wet dream - just an overwhelming majority. Kiboutan has a planetary charter that grants a few basic, inalienable rights to its citizens, a referendum system via which the people can remove officials from power, and the closest an Imperium world can get to freedom of religion (meaning that they tolerate multiple faiths, as long as they all recognize the Emperor as the one true god). It is by no means pleasant compared to our home, but in comparison to any other planet in this or the Serpentis sector, the 12 billion citizens of Kiboutan have more freedom, more economic breathing room, and better education.
"It should come as no surprise that sector authorities have deeply mistrusted Kiboutan for centuries, and would love to see its system of governance declared heretical and violently replaced with something more authoritarian - official Imperium policy is to leave planets be as long as they provide the tithe, don't deal with aliens, and avoid all forms of heresy, but in practice, fascists will always view any protection for the disenfranchised with deep suspicion. Supposedly, they almost got their wish three decades ago when an Inquisitor came to have a look, but events in the Serpentis Sector called the Inquisitor away early.
"The people of Kiboutan are aware of the razor's edge on which they live. It is because of that that the planet has invested in massive military academies and is constantly sending well-trained volunteers off-world - it is no secret that the best Imperial Guard regiments created in the sector, as well as the most capable Imperial Navy sailors, come from Kiboutan.
"Or at least, that was the situation until nine years ago, when an Ork army made landfall. The Orks have been slowly gaining ground ever since, as sector authorities are only sending minimal reinforcements to assist Kiboutan.
"As things currently stand, the Orks have already taken a quarter of the planet, opposed by 20 million Imperial Guardsmen and, perhaps more importantly in this case, five times as many PDF soldiers. Even so, Kiboutan knows it's years away from crumbling under the strain at current rates."
The Pit Of Damnation: "The concept of space hulks doesn't make much sense until you realize some of the larger military vessels in this dimension are massive enough for their gravity field to be non-negligible; ships wrecked in space battles end up drifting toward each other. This particular space hulk was formed toward the end of the Chaos invasion eight centuries ago; the Imperial Navy clashed with the ruinous powers, and by the end of it, neither side had enough power left to reclaim the previous wreckage.
By the time the Imperium returned, it discovered a vast army of demons, sorcerers and cultists had fortified itself within the hulk; they appear to be of a different sub-faction of the Ruinous Powers than the ones that have invaded Xanadu Sector, and constantly at odds with them. Both the Imperium and the primary Chaos forces in the sector have made many attempts at reclaiming the hulk - now named the Pit Of Damnation - but the independent Chaos faction entrenched within it always attacks whichever side appears to be winning. This has led to a centuries-long deadly equilibrium: The Imperial Guard and the Ruinous Powers both maintain an armed force within the hulk, fighting each other with little hope of victory, simply to deny the other side the chance to control it. While less than half a million guardsmen are usually located in the Pit Of Damnation, their life expectancy is short even by the Guard's standards, and reinforcements are brought in to replace them regularly.
"If this sounds incredibly wasteful in terms of lives, that's because it is. Nonetheless, Sector Command remains determined to, if not reclaim the hulk, then at least deny it to the Ruinous Powers. Partly because the precious ship parts could be used in the construction of new vessels… but also because one of the ships whose wreckage forms the Pit Of Damnation was carrying an invaluable cargo of 2,400 super-heavy Baneblade tanks, intended to reinforce the crusade and drive Chaos out of the Xanadu Sector."
Purgatorium: "The only non-gaseous planet in its system, Purgatorium is located far enough from its sun that even at noon the light is as dim as during the twilight hours on Earth. Intensive volcanic activity keeps the planet, if not warm, then at least warm enough to sustain life, mostly in the form of black lichens that account for the atmosphere's oxygen (which, while significantly lower than Earth's, still exists in survivable amounts).
"Remember when the British Empire decided to settle Australia by sending convicts there? Well, the Imperium took the idea several steps further with the concept of the 'penal planet': Purgatorium's population is largely composed of prisoners from high-population worlds who were sent there… and their descendants, who inherit their ancestors' legal status as convicts.
"In millennia past, Sector Command would make the worlds of the Xanadu Sector send their convicts to Purgatorium so that they could serve as slave labor in the planet's mines. These days, however, the mines are mostly spent, and while the population still toils at digging the ground for minerals, the returns are minimal - and as such, Sector Command no longer demands that planetary governors transfer their penal population there. Many still do, however, because the governor of Purgatorium is actually buying those prisoners now. Partly to maintain population levels and keep the planet relevant in the eyes of the Administratum, but mostly because Purgatorium pays its tithe in the form of penal regiments - armies of slave-soldiers fitted with explosive control collars meant to keep them in line, who are sent off to die across Xanadu (often enough, in the Pit Of Damnation).
"It may sound nonsensical, to ferry millions of people (many for very minor crimes, not that we can trust any of them to have been guilty in the first place) across interstellar distances just to drop them on a planet where their primary value is to be conscripted and then sent to yet another planet to fight there. One can only blame generations of precedent and Administratum inertia that have left this circuitous system in place, allowing both the governor of Purgatorium and those of several other worlds to profit from it.
"Purgatorium's total population is estimated to be a mere seven billion, and authority on the planet is largely maintained by a structure of locals who are recruited to serve as the governor's enforcers… though the governor also maintains a force of combat servitors as his personal guard, thanks to favors exchanged with the Mechanicus."
Last edited:
