Periphery Subsector

Rogue Trader: Drake Dynasty
GM
Adam
Dynastic Power
Character Level: 31,250 XP / Rank 8
Profit Factor: 43𝖕
Command Crew
Lord-Captain Drake Navigator Primus Mordecai Arch-Millitant Winter Astropath Solarus
House Drake Fleet
Aurea Albion Hound of Albion • Abhorrent Fortuitous Purpose • Penance of Iocanthos
Drake Trade Empire
Damaris • Scintilla • Kulth Svard • Dross • Aurum Sepheris Secundus • Tennenberg Killian's Rest
Drake Expeditions
Open Missions
Grand Endevours
Personnel
Magistrates • Retainers Militants Svard 1st • Stormtroopers House Drake Expeditionary Army
Assets
Materiel Aerospace Craft • Ground Vehicles
Armoury Wargear • Relics and Artifacts
Other Estate Secrets and Contacts • Awards and Honors
The Galaxy
Locations Calixis Sector Koronus Expanse • Periphery Subsector Personalities Peers of the Imperium Rival Rogue Traders
Utilities
Rogue Trader Timeline House Rules Guide and Lore

"For an age, no one cared about the Periphery or the cold reaches beyond its borders. The light of the Emperor just never really shone this far. Now the Orks want it, the Secessionists want it, the Eldar want it, and even those powers we don’t name want it. Stands without reason that after all this time, after centuries of not caring, the Imperium should decide it wants the Periphery after all..." —Evidence submitted in the court-martial of San Durra

History

Almost two thousand standard years ago in the mid-39th Millennium, the Calixis Sector was hewn from the xenos-haunted depths of the unexplored region of the Segmentum Obscurus once known as the Calyx Expanse by the blood, sweat, and tears of the countless thousands of Imperial martyrs who prosecuted the Angevin Crusade. The endeavor was a mighty one and only made possible by the combined efforts of numerous arms of the Imperium’s military machine. The private armies of the most ambitious of Rogue Trader houses fought in the hope of one day ruling those worlds wrested from the dead grip of nameless xenos fiends. It was one of these militant Rogue Trader princes, Duke Severus I, that led some of the boldest thrusts into the region, so deep into the Calyx Expanse that he all but broke through into the Wilderness Zones beyond.The deeds of Severus I and his companions were so heroic that they should be known and celebrated across not just the Calixis Sector, but the entire Imperium.

Why then, are the deeds of Severus I unknown to the peoples of the Calixis Sector? The answer is simple and lies in that most basic of human flaws -- the sin of hubris. Duke Severus I had been promised much by the terms of his Warrant of Trade, but in truth, the High Lords of Terra had never expected him to survive the terrors that lurked in the Calyx Expanse. Before being granted his title, the duke was a senior courtier of the Senatorum Imperialis on Terra and his political trajectory was carrying him towards a seat on that highest of councils. His numerous rivals found this greatly disconcerting, for they believed Severus to have murdered numerous of his compatriots during his rise to power. These rivals engineered the granting of the Warrant of Trade, forcing Severus to embark on a Crusade they hoped would end his ambitions, his career, and his life. Severus was fully aware of the High Lords’ intentions and when he succeeded in carving the Periphery from the darkness of the Calyx Expanse, he interpreted the terms of his warrant to justify him claiming it as his personal realm, exempt from the laws and demands placed on the rest of the Imperium. In essence, Severus installed himself as the exclusive ruler of his own private empire within the boundaries of the Imperium, which in his eyes he had earned by the spilling of his blood and that of countless thousands of his followers.

In other circumstances, Severus I might have been allowed to realize his ambition, for the frontiers of the Imperium are often expanded by men with similar dreams of avarice and power, only to be absorbed into the greater mass of sectors generations later. This might have been the case with Severus, were it not for the simultaneous rise of a man who regarded him as a vainglorious and self-interested robber baron interested only in expanding his own domains off of the blood, sweat, and tears of millions of the God-Emperor’s faithful servants. This man was Lord General Militant Drusus, the man who had succeeded Lord General Militant Golgenna Angevin as the leader of the Angevin Crusade that conquered the Calyx Expanse. While Severus had been conquering the Periphery for his own ends, Drusus had been leading the armies of the Imperial Guard in a series of victories every bit as glorious as those earned by the duke. While Severus set about consolidating his power after the Second Battle of Kulth, Drusus fought on, claiming untold worlds for the God-Emperor of Mankind. Following his apparent death at the hands of the agents of rivals (which may, or may not have included Severus) and subsequent resurrection, Drusus was beatified by the Ecclesiarchy as a Living Saint and is celebrated to this day as the patron Imperial saint of the Calixis Sector.

Duke Severus was soon eclipsed by Saint Drusus and his plans to establish his own realm were cast to ashes. With every one of the leading lights of the Angevin Crusade openly worshipping Drusus as a paragon of the Emperor's justice, none would support Severus in his own ambitions. For a time, Severus turned his back upon his former peers amongst the Angevin Crusade. By the time Drusus was pronounced the first Lord Sector of Calixis, Severus was a broken man. He died in 417.M39, less than a month before Drusus himself passed away. To the last, he was a resentful, bitter man, turned by the cruelty of fate from a noble merchant-admiral to a paranoid recluse.

A Fateful Deal But Duke Severus I did not die the last of his line. Before he passed, he recounted his sad tale to his first-born son, and in the telling, it must surely have been distilled into a hateful story of lesser men allying against one of whom they were jealous. The son passed the tale on to his son, and again the story was filtered in the telling until all that remained was a twisted kernel, only barely resembling the truth. Generation after generation of House Severus heard, and then repeated, this tale of doom, until in 779.M41 Duke Severus XIII assumed power over what little remained of his house. Unlike his predecessors, Severus the Thirteenth had managed to claw his way up the rungs of power in the Calixis Sector, drawing upon methods and means yet to be fully revealed. In 799.M41, he assumed the appointment to which he had worked his entire life, the position from which he might finally realize the dreams of his entire line. He ascended to the position of Lord Sub-Sector, the Adeptus Administratum prefect of the region his eponymous forebear had founded -- the Periphery.

For over a standard decade, Severus and his cruel agent-allies worked tirelessly to cut the ties between the Periphery and the sector at large, one at a time, so that none even noticed as it was slowly transformed into his personal realm. Planetary Governors resistant to corruption or subversion were quietly removed, but always the eight worlds closest to the border with the Malfian Sub-sector were maintained in a state of outward normality. The worlds spinward of them were entirely in the sway of the noble, who had at last attained his ancestor’s dream of an independent stellar empire of his own in all but name.

None can tell what might have come of Severus’ fiefdom had events continued unchecked. Perhaps he would have grown so bold as to risk openly declaring secession, or perhaps his shadowy allies would have turned upon him in his hubris. Instead, it was a xenos species that decided the matter. An Ork invasion under the Warlord Ghenghiz Grimtoof, the self-titled “Git-Slaver,” came crashing out of the darkness and fell upon the outermost fringes of Severus’ pocket empire, slaying millions in a few short months. Not yet geared for war, the Planetary Defence Forces of these worlds were unable to mount anything like a capable resistance. World after world slipped from Severus’ grasp as the Git-Slaver’s Orks rampaged all but unchecked through his realm. There was little either he or his allies could do to halt them.

Severus XIII brooded upon his granite throne as millions perished. His closest advisors counseled him to beseech the Imperium for aid, yet all were silenced by the executioner’s blow. At the last, his counselors all dead or fled, Severus was left alone and his empire all but fallen. In a moment of grim revelation, he saw they had all been correct. He dispatched his own kin to the court of the Calixian Lord Sector Marius Hax on Scintilla to beg for aid against the Ork invasion. Though most of the messengers were intercepted by unknown assassins or fell prey to other, equally deadly fates, one got through. Severus’ own granddaughter went before Sector Lord Hax and delivered the plea for aid. Hax simply laughed at her.

The patrician Calixian Sector Governor had been watching the Periphery from afar for years and knew well the treachery of Severus XIII. (Later hearsay implied that some link between Severus and Hax, some dark tie, perhaps even a blood tie, stayed his hand as Severus built his own private realm.) Yet, when the Orks attacked, it was to Hax’s own benefit, for it humbled Severus and forced him out of the wilderness in a very public manner. At length, Hax agreed that the Orks must be checked and the Calixis Sector’s military reserves were mobilized.

Kulth, the capital of the Periphery Sub-sector, was relieved, though in truth the Imperium never committed sufficient force to truly turn the tide against the Orks. The worlds beyond the Periphery descended into a churning cauldron of total war, yet to many in the highest Imperial circles of the sector, the endeavor in the Periphery seemed to have little hope of success. Some whispered that those who prosecuted the distant Achilus Crusade had need of a war closer to home to mask the huge drain on resources, and so a deadlock in the Periphery was at best convenient, and at worst deliberately maintained.

The Severan Succession

While the situation on Kulth was stabilized, the war beyond the Periphery was going badly for Severus XIII. While the Orks plundered the worlds of Deluge, KW-9, Pertinax, and a score of lesser star systems, a myriad of other threats rose up. Beset upon all quarters, Severus XIII announced his personal annexation of a chaotic zone of space beyond the Periphery into what he termed the “Severan Dominate” until the crisis had passed. Lord Sector Hax was incensed, declaring Severus a Secessionist and a Traitor, and the war escalated to a previously unseen pitch.

The Orks have now entered the second phase of their WAAAGH!, the focus shifting from slaughter to enslavement. The Ork Warlord has established his own bastion world at Avitohol and enslaved its populace so that countless millions of tons of ramshackle war materiel are being churned out to feed the greenskinned species’ incessant hunger for weapons and munitions. The lines are drawn and the pressure on the front is increasing, and it is only the far more pressing needs that keep the Imperium from flooding the Spinward Front with so many regiments of the Imperial Guard that all resistance is crushed. Each year that the Severan Dominate is not brought to heel is another year it spends reinforcing its core worlds, and another year the Orks’ strength becomes ever more established.

The Severan Dominate

As a political entity, the Severan Dominate exists only in the head of its titular figurehead Severus XIII, and in the hearts of those of his followers who fight to maintain its tenuous borders. As far as the Imperium is concerned, it is nothing more than a collection of rebel worlds dominated by an arrogant Secessionist, its peoples having betrayed their very humanity. Despite the Imperium’s refusal to acknowledge the entity’s existence, its troops on the ground have come to refer to the rebels they fight as “Dominates,” investing them with an identity and a cause, against which the Guardsmen can rally.

The core worlds of the Severan Dominate lie along the Calixis-Scarus Warp conduit, while a number of subsidiary worlds are located on lesser spurs of this great route. None of the core worlds are untouched by war. At various times, they are being attacked by the forces of the Imperium or those of Grimtoof Git-Slaver. The nature of Warp travel is such that war can, and frequently does, ignite almost anywhere within the Severan Dominate. Imperial vessels can drop out of Warpspace at any point along the Calixis-Scarus conduit, making defense against such assaults all but impossible to coordinate in any meaningful way. The bulk of long-term operations on the Spinward Front are concentrated on those worlds nearer to the Calixis Sector’s borders, where thousands of troops are fed into the meat grinder of total war.

The Severan Dominate faces enemies at all quarters, yet somehow, it continues to withstand them all, if only tenuously. Its populations still rally to the cause of their despotic master and willingly renounce the rule of the Imperium. Severus and his agents have been able to separate the rule of the High Lords of Terra from religious devotion to the Emperor of Mankind in the hearts and minds of the people of the Dominate, supplanting the High Lords with Severus XIII while maintaining the worship of the God-Emperor of Mankind. Thus, Severus’ agents preach that the High Lords are the true Traitors to the Emperor and to Mankind, while Severus is the rightful leader of the Dominate. The Imperium’s brutal suppression of this notion is held up as evidence of Severus’ creed, evidence that can scarcely be denied.

Phenomina

• Cthulgha Nebula: Beyond the spinward marches of the Periphery Sub-sector, the void seethes with the nucleonic fires of dozens of slain stars. What processes led to the creation of this burning nebula are unknown, and the region is the subject of cautionary tales told by those few void farers who have traversed its outer fringes. At the heart of the region lies a zone of relative calm sometimes referred to as the Heart of Cthulgha, about which countless superstitious stories are uttered. Something is said to lie deep in the heart of the Cthulgha Nebula. A silent, tomblike structure is said to drift through the raging fires, protected by the most potent of Void Shields and the holiest of wards. Some claim it is some manner of sentinel and that it watches over the infernal nebula, ever vigilant for the return of some ancient nightmare that even the Orks, who hold no fear of death, flee from in abject horror.

Notable Worlds

• Karlak: Once a fairly unimportant world, Karlak's fate changed by virtue of being the last easily accessible, firmly Imperial planet along Calixis-Scarus Warp conduit. This once frontier world is now rapidly becoming consumed by the massive Munitorum administration and logistics center that has arisen in the shadow of its capital city. It has also become home to several Astra Millitarum training camps and a mysterious city beneath the southern ocean.

• Kulth: Kulth is a War World and the former capital of the Calixis Sector's Periphery Sub-sector. It is currently both the capital of the Secessionist Severan Dominate and the High Command Post for the Imperial forces, making it by far the most important theatre of the Spinward Front. Kulth is also a strategic lynchpin of the Spinward Front, for it occupies a unique position in relation to the great arcs of the subsector.

• Karacallia: The population of the Karacallia System is scattered across three-dozen and more satellites of the various gas giants and represents the descendants of the first wave of Imperial colonists dispatched there five standard centuries ago to populate the system. The system has fallen largely to the Orks, as it was in direct line of the Waaagh!, though a handful of both Imperial and Dominate settlements scattered across the worlds at the most critical points.

• Aurum: A beautiful world rich in rare decavane crystals, promethium, and other natural resources and inhabited by human population with a fierce and proud warrior culture who direct most of their worship to the Primarchs in a pantheon system. Only recently accessible due to shifting warp routes, the Drake Dynasty managed the first stable imperial contact with the world.

• Helena: Now known as much by its Imperial Designation (Warzone Epsilon), Helena contains two important resources for the Severan Dominate - the highly productive agriworld of Helena II, and the Ramillies-class Star Fort Lycurgos. The planet has already resisted three planetary landings and two attempts to assault the station.

• Grace: A distant world on the edge of the Cthulgha Nebula, Grace is a beautiful but unhospitable world claimed by the Chorda Dynasty and set up as a hidden refuge world for the wealthy who wished to escape Imperial attention. It has subsequently fallen to a flesh-eater Chaos cult and is populated largely by roving bands of cannibalistic humans.