Winterscale's Realm

[The Hive Mind]

Winterscale's Realm
"It is a place of graves and grinning skulls. Its wealth is its curse on all who seek it, for who could not look upon such wealth and not think to spill his brother's blood to posses it all?"
—Vilius Hope, voidsman

Winterscale’s Realm is one of the most explored and exploited regions, and one that has delivered both fabulous riches and early death for the unwary in equal measure. Winterscale’s Realm is a region of space defined by the stars explored and charted by Sebastian Winterscale in the early centuries of the 41st Millennium. It is composed of a few coveted worlds sitting like islands amongst the darkness of the unknown. Rogue Traders have traversed the Realm’s breadth a hundred times, but even so, its farther reaches and troubled Warp regions remain unmapped. Though only a handful of worlds within Winterscale’s Realm have been even partially explored, these have proven to be fat with riches and treasures. It has lured those whose goal is only wealth, and has become a battleground between rivals for its bounty. Gems, precious minerals, exotic Death World beasts, xenos artefacts, and many more rarities have poured into select coffers of merchant cartels and noble backers in the Calixis Sector and beyond, thanks in no small part to the Winterscale Realm’s tireless explorers.

Winterscale’s Realm is named for the Rogue Trader Sebastian Winterscale who first explored and charted many of its stars. Those who venture into Winterscale’s Realm do so in the main because of the legendary wealth it is said to harbour, but also because it is one of the most haphazardly charted regions of the Koronus Expanse. There are many Navigator clans who hold many more charts of Winterscale’s Realm; most such records agree in part, though some are wildly divergent. The few points of agreement between these charts thus indicate the worlds, stars, and Warp routes that are generally agreed to exist, at least insofar as the explorers of the Koronus Expanse are concerned. The other charts are considered to be flights of fantasy, and their navigational data to be nothing more than a vile trap to lure and destroy the foolhardy. Many believe that the reason for the profusion of misleading and contradictory charts of Winterscale’s Realm is simply a by-product of several centuries of Rogue Trader activity. But a few whisper in the obscura dens of Port Wander that all such charts are true, and if combined using the correct cipher, they would reveal the true extent of Sebastian Winterscale’s exploits and the hidden riches of his realm.

The proximity of Winterscale’s Realm to the Koronus Passage, the tales of its wealth, and the relative abundance of navigational charts -- albeit of dubious accuracy -- mean that explorers and merchant concerns and renegades are drawn to it, willing to fight for fortunes that might be no more than fancy. Winterscale’s Realm is soaked in the blood of rival claimants to worlds and resources, and every glittering prize carried back into Calixis Sector has to be bought in death and slaughter from those others who would claim it. Weaker Rogue Traders, fearful of greater risks, may come to Winterscale’s realm hoping to grow slowly wealthy from its resources while remaining close to the light of Imperial domains. Any who does not come armed and prepared for battle, however, is a fool who will not see the lights of Port Wander again. The graves of the naïve, arrogant, and unlucky litter the stars of Winterscale’s Realm and offer mute testament to this untamed cauldron of death and greed.

Burnscour
"Death dripping down in the rain, blood and the scream of beasts: that is all I recall of that place."
—Mesenicus Var, mercenary captain of the entourage of Rogue Trader Hiram Sult

Burnscour is a Death World of roaring storms, jungles, and strange beasts. It is no place for men, as the steaming rain alone eats at metal and breeds strange fungus on exposed flesh, and the sap dripping from plants is lethal or viciously toxic. Yet the beast trade has found a foothold upon Burnscour, carried there at exorbitant rates by Rogue Trader vessels and illegal, unsanctioned merchant craft. They come to Burnscour to stock the ever-hungry fighting pits of the distant Calixis Sector with saurian leapers, gargantipedes, and other horrors of fang and maw. Hunter retinues clad in bulky suits of vulcanised rubber stalk the jungles in search of exotic xeno predators for the fighting pits, ever watchful for creatures that will make the most lethal attractions on far-off Hive Worlds of the Imperium.

There are no permanent structures on the surface of Burnscour -- only the slowly dissolving metal carcasses of landing craft brought down by the planet's storms, the few melted ruins of structures built by fools, and the swaying jungles ever growing beneath the caustic rain. From the uppermost leaves of its canopy to the ground, the jungles of Burnscour are a choking mass of countless plants: trees with dark waxen leaves and trunks covered in barbs that weep thick sap the colour of bile, blooms of fungus as pale as milk, thick creepers from the branches of trees, delicate flowers the colour of livid bruises on pale flesh, which open at the touch to expose waving fronds that fill the air with a heady scent that dulls the mind -- all these and thousands more species swarm and choke the surface of Burnscour.

Beasts stalk through the nightmare jungles of Burnscour. Things of every sizes, all perfectly adapted to the hellish environment, live here in vast numbers, from beetle-like creatures who gnaw through flesh or bark to feed on blood or sap, to the strange six-legged stalkers the size of three grown men but scuttle silent and invisible though the branches of the middle canopy. Almost all are capable of killing any human that steps onto the surface of Burnscour. The lethal nature of Burnscour’s native creatures is both the planet’s curse on any who might wish to establish surface habitation on there, but are also the prize that draws many to it.

When men come to Burnscour, they come for the beasts. So little does the jungle and rain tolerate the presence of man that beast-hunting parties are usually dropped onto the surface of the planet and remain for as little time as possible before hailing their waiting drop craft with a homing beacon. These hunters and their ferocious harvest are often hauled off the surface into hovering dropships that never touch the surface. Others defoliate the jungle with anti-plant bombs and Heavy Flamers to create brief landing clearings—which are swallowed again by the jungle within days. Dangerous it might be, but the price commanded by hunters for living beasts of Burnscour is enough to blot out the tales of hunting parties vanishing, never to be seen again, or the whispers of the things that stalk unseen beneath the dark leaves and hissing rain. It is said that even the feared Beast House of the Calixis Sector has invested a small fortune to secure constant supply from Burnscour. Such are the prices that its predators can command from the wealthiest and most discerning patrons.

Egarian Dominion
"If proof were ever needed that some darkness best left undisturbed lurks amongst those haunted stars, then I could offer no better than those dead and dry worlds. To the wise they would suggest that curiosity is indeed the greatest of sins."
—Inquisitor Marr, speaking of the discoveries of Rogue Trader Sebastian Winterscale

The Egarian Dominion was once a populous xenos domain that spanned a handful of close stars. Many millennia past, the alien civilisation that dwelt in this domain fell victim to a nameless doom that left only empty, desolate worlds and crumbling structures in its wake. The principal worlds of the Dominion are dry, cool desert planets, covered by tightly packed structures that form a vast maze in three dimensions, walls and corners hundreds of meters high and extending in belts for thousands of kilometres across the desert plains. These claustrophobic xenos complexes are buried by windblown sand and dry soil, their borders ragged cliffs that mark the edge of lowland deserts. Egarian building materials glisten with rainbow light as though oily, even as they crack and crumble with age. They somehow channel the light of Egarian stars, and even the deepest regions of the xenos hives are lit with a disturbing, shifting glow. The passageways are cramped for humans, and the hive mazes are empty, as though the xenos and almost all their works simply vanished overnight. The only sound is the moaning of the wind as it blows through enclosed maze-spaces and across desert outcrops.

Murdered World of Jerazol
"There is no crime too terrible, nor act so monstrous that man will not commit given a sufficiency of conviction and self interest."
—ancient Terran proverb

Jerazol is a desolate world of ash and charred bone. It is a world, tales say, murdered for greed and spite. Discovered by a pious Rogue Trader whose name does not survive in Imperial records, Jerazol was verdant, fertile, and supported a population of humans whose culture had regressed to the level of a primitive tribalism. The unnamed Rogue Trader was determined to bring the population back into the light and dominion of the God-Emperor. He began the process of tutoring and civilising the population, while purging it of any trace of deviancy or corruption. Not long after Jerazol was discovered, it was also found by other explorers, who believed that the primitive humans where hiding wonders of lost technology in warrens beneath the earth, built by their forgotten ancestors who first came to the world from across the stars. These machines, they said, were worth any price in blood and death, and when the nameless Rogue Trader stood against them, they destroyed his vessels, letting their wrecks fall to the surface of Jerazol like the burning tears of a god. Then, it is said the murderers bombarded the world, burning its surface to ash and choking its atmosphere with smoke. The tales do not agree as to whether the despoilers found the technological treasures they sought. Some say they unearthed such wonders that they rose to the highest tiers of power within the Imperium, others say that they only found ash, bone, and mud and that they cursed the dreams that had brought them through void and madness to murder a world for naught. No matter the truth of the tales, the burned and Dead World of Jerazol exists as testimony to the price that can be paid in search of the riches of Winterscale’s Realm.