40K System – Vito

Paranoid religious capital

Vito is the system, and Vito Secundus is the planet, second rock from the orange star. A Shrine World, Vito Secundus has the distinction of being crowned the de facto head of the subsector.

Some 2000 years ago, the sector core was wracked by a heresy which proclaimed the time was right for the Emperor’s return. Imperial authority should be devolved to divinely inspired and fundamentally local Judges. Governors and minor Bishops on developed worlds who felt the best was being siphoned off. The subsector was too new to run out of growth and the two millennia old Civilized World of Vito Secundus was the origin of Bishop Nefarius Porpus, who resolutely preached against heresy in the halls of the Ecclesiarchy.

When the time came for a crusade, after pleading from a much-boycotted synod. The martyred bishop was elevated to a saint and Vito Secundus was diverted from it’s future as a Hive World. Since then, many of its citizens have developed the dogma and the ecstasies to become valued members of the Adeptus Ministorum or even minor saints themselves.

Since then, Vito has amounted to a lead weight on the subsector. More imports than a civilized world, with its greater population of 15,000,000,000. Especially office supplies and constant physical reports on the moral health of the sub-sector. It throngs with pilgrims and as such its economy remains local and insular.

Since the advent of WAAGH!! Gadzmax, the Archbishoip has become fearful of external threats. The chaos wrecked in the sub-sector threatens to teether it over the edge. The venal other worlds lack moral fortitude. Belonging to some other lesser sect or consumed by their own issues. The wider sector is still reeling from the orks’ path and the Archbishop is privy to reports from across the galaxy. The sheer scale of the problems is clear and has given rise to nihilism, to let the rot wither away and a new dawn come.

So, Vito stockpiles, filling vast caverns with machine parts, foodstuffs and promethium. It promises sheltered harbors for Charterist Captains, threatened by increasingly irritated demands from other systems to stop the outflow.

This paranoia is starting to seep downwards as admonishments to the flock to observe for deviances, especially among the pilgrims who come from unknown worlds, bathed in unknown lights. Setting up increasing dissatisfaction with the priests of those pilgrim communities which have settled.

Pilgrim neighborhoods or whole cities have always been a sore spot, since popular imagination assumes pilgrims will leave eventually, even though it takes several decades to cycle to and from.

Though increasing self-isolated, Vito does possess a rudimentary extraction economy. The Belters have been neglected for some 2500 years and the tribes trade among themselves or to the planet. Vito is self-sufficient in promethium, with the Tech-Priests operating refineries around Vito-Aqua, the last planet and gas giant. Vito even used to export promethium until the arrival of the orks on Ajax. The resumption of which is a key concern for the other planets.

The local variation of the Four Holy Ministries sect holds the conditions on Vito-Aqua to be a physical embodiment of hell itself, or at least an understanding of the punishing parts of the Warp. Convicts are sent there to be transformed into servitors and much fear is ascribed to it. The conditions are hellish but no more than normal for the galaxy. The Tech-Priests complain they are being demonized or associated with evil iconography.

In order to bolster the system against both internal and external threats, the Archbishop has invited the space marine chapter, The Fire Unicorns to rebase to airless and molten Vito Primus. The Fire Unicorns are normally based on the former Mining World Ajax and many long to recapture their home world. Furthermore, the Fire Unicorns are an Iron Hand successor chapter and do not mesh with the Imperial Cult. The Archbishop has promised they can recruit from among the Belters. The Belters have not been informed.

Inspired by the crusade which cleansed the wider sector, Vito Secundus has long cultivated its own holy warriors. But given the distance to ship girls off to the sector core where the orders reside, it has turned to the fringe. Rapturous eunuch cults are long prospered, seeking their “future martyrdom” as Saint Porpus achieved in full. Though remaining functional and influential within the bureaucracy. Mindful of an adverse sector synod that eunuchs under arms are still men. Female hustreks possess the same loophole and are assumed to be even more devoted to the Ecclesiarchy and the Archbishop than Sisters must be.

While there are bands of eunuch warriors, they must remain outside the structure and so naturally form their own semi-sanctioned militias with their own authority. Leading to occasional clashes when local priests and organisations become intertwined with their radical influence.