Warhammer 40K Subsector Overview and Kastor's Folly

 I wrote these up having been inspired by The Retired Adventurer's own concept: The Tellian Sector.

A place where the sheer scale of thousands of years of human cultures and religious diversity in the Imperium of Man was on display, even for the many worlds within each inhabited system. Now I don't have any of the 40K RPGs currently going, so I could only write a smaller knock-off. My version tends to have only a few inhabited planets per system, with only a few pertinent issues on each one.

To make the subsector (3d6/12 planets, a sector is really big at 12 x subsectors), I drew on the old Battlefleet Gothic rolling system. It did leave the subsector without a lot of weird places, but that's OK. Some places in the galaxy can be boring.

The overall theme is about how even "small" 40K style events can throw whole balances out. Thirty years ago, Waagh!! Gaddzmax tore through the neighboring subsector and petered out only two planets into this one. This still has disrupted everyone and create all kinds of issues.

First up is Kastor's Folly.

A Hive World now in ruins.

Kastor's Folly was named after the Rogue Trader who first scouted the subsector during it's colonization some six thousand years prior. It was one of two in the sub-sector and the first port of call.

Waagh!! Gaddzmax hit it but stopped, unable to gain a foothold outside the salt pools that used to be the oceans. So they dumped a quarter of the orks and told them to follow up. The ash-blown landscape was too sparse to grow squigs in larg numbers and the main body of the hive cities were behind a continental ridgeline, the Gargarentis Mountains (formerly the uplands of the same continent) and two unintentionally well-placed hive cities turned fortresses. For 7 years the orks were unable to get in, so the Warboss decided to try a human tactic and make a virus bomb to clear out the defenders. Crude yet calibrated by Painboyz for ork's robust physiology, it wiped out 90% of the planetary popualtion and nearly all the orks.

A successfully defence by the standards of the Imperium.

Most of the remaining human population lives in the tunnels beneath the Gargarensis Mountains, where secondary mining and processing used to occur. While more than 2 billion people live there, it's cramped and that's testing the authority of the Bishop, the highest surviving authority.

He's at odds with the Ash Nomads, who live in the wastes and never really bowed down to secular or religious authority, maintaining their own Imperial-Cult acceptable Deacons. They don't live in the mountains but around the salty pools. Though nearly wiped out, they persisted in caves and now see this as a new golden age where the authority is gone and the empty cities are full of scrap.

The Bishop and the survivors are also at odds with the now past retirement age Imperial Guard regiments from  Ajax and Chiron. Kastor's Folly was mostly Emperor's Divine Specter sect, Ajax tended to follow the Third Holy Ministries sect and Chiron is Holy Body sect. Couple with the differing cultures depsite Ajax being a mining world and Chiron being the other Hiveworld means they are accused of trying to establish their own separate societies while the planet is weakened.

Some Ajax regiments want to return to fight the orks who stalled there but it's been 30 years real-time and only slightly less for them with a Warp delay.

Kastor's Folly was orbited by the Red Moon, which contained mining operations. Very few people survived the ork attack. 500 million people reduced to only 3 million and irreparably traumatising their culture. And the few scattered survivors have to fight squigs in the tunnels, who are growing in the corpse-choked facilities, few food areas and waste systems.

Further out are the asteroid belt miners, who have mostly survived by turning to piracy and clan warfare without any authority from the planet. Finally out on the dark periphery is Valkyrie Station, once the lighthouse and checking station. It's been completely ransacked and now is nearly a spacehulk, with bits of drifting ships slowly crashing and fusing into it.