Atonement (Frontier World)

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Atonement is a broken world, yet it still clings to life. It's an old human colony, predating the Empire by many millennia. It was brought into the Jericho Sector of old and prospered for a time. The Long Night was not kind to it. But the time of the Crusade, only sad remnants of its once great civilization remained. It was decided to start over; the remaining degenerates were to be terminated and new, healthy stock brought in. And so it was that Atonement became a shining example of a colony world.

Fast forward to Hive Fleet Dagon. A massive Tyranid drop was in progress when the Imperial Navy arrived to break the siege of the planet. They managed to drive off the Hive Fleet, but could not stem the invasion. In desperation, the fleet turned all its guns on the most heavily infested areas. They kept at it for days and weeks, unleashing the God-Emperor knows how many Macrotons of ordnance. 

Yet still, the Xenos pushed forward, and so the bombardment continued... and then the planet broke apart. About one-fifth of the planet's total mass became a broken jumble of spinning rocks and red-hot lava. The rest of the planet clings on to life, but it's probably doomed in the long run. On the positive side what few Tyranids survived were easily purged.

Phaegis (Frontier World)

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Phaegis is a pleasant colony world well beyond the sector proper, pushed up against the rolling warp storms to Trailing of the Reach. Ten million or so people were settled here half a century ago, and according to early reports, they found the world most agreeable.

That was before the terrible truth was revealed: once you've settled on Pahegis, you cannot leave. There is something about the planet that binds you to it. If you leave, you get ill, and then you die. Is it a curse? A disease? Something altogether different? No one knows, despite attempts to find out why.

The planetary population has doubled since first settlement, but for all intents and purposes, it's isolated from the rest of the galaxy.

Scepter (Frontier World)

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Scepter is a Frontier World in the Orpheus Salient. When the Crusade arrived they found a heavily settled world, badly infested with mutants and completely without any form of law and order. The Adeptus Abrites took it upon themselves to return the planet to the fold without requiring ultimate sanction.

They never quite succeeded, but the planet was brought to a semblance of compliance. In the process, it also became one of the most heavily policed planets in the Reach. Despite this, it remained one of the most violent and criminal worlds of the Reach.

Crusade Command used to joke that the planet cost more than it was worth, but that it produced some damn fine Arbitrators.

Nyanthor (Frontier World)

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Nyanthor is an arid, desolate world in the Orpheus Salient. Barely fit for human habitation, and against the wishes of the Adeptus Mechanicus, it was nevertheless colonized, mostly due to a very large influx of refugees.

About 1000 pyramidal structures of ancient, possibly Xenos design dot the surface of the planet. It's believed more may be hidden in distant regions and beneath the shifting sands of the planet's many deserts. Tech-priests have examined many of the pyramids, and they appear to be made of a strange material somewhere between stone and metal in structure. They appear solid, with no passages or hidden machinery. Who built them and why remains a mystery - there are no other ruins on the planet.

Khyris (Frontier World)

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Khyris is a frontier world with a long history. It was settled by refugees fleeing the inner worlds of the Jericho Sector before the fall of Verronus, either late M36 or early M37. It was a time of increasing turmoil and hardship, and the conditions on the main hive worlds were going from bad to worse. Violence and starvation went hand in hand, and the Dark Gods were starting to be openly worshipped.

Khyris was a good choice for a colony world, except for its extremely long seasons. Ten years of summer, followed by ten years of winter, half of them utter dark and frozen. The local biosphere was well adapted, but for humans, it's a different story. The refugees opted for building massive stasis chambers where they would slumber while servitors took care of things. Then, as winter waned, they would wake up and resume their lives.

It worked well enough for a time until one winter the servitors turned against their masters. Tearing their overlords from their stasis pods, they ate them all in a twisted parody of a cannibalistic feast that lasted for five years. Only a handful of humans survived, forced into the wilderness, where they had to lead nomadic lives, moving around the globe, always staying ahead of winter.

When the Achilus Crusade made contact, some of the original servitors were still operational, fuelled by the powers of the warp. Forever hungry, these ghoul-servitors roamed Khyris seeking always flesh to sate their hunger and machine parts to keep themselves functioning.

Both ghouls and nomads were declared heretics, and the planet was resettled by refugees from Calixis. Without access to macro-scale stasis chambers, these settlers must endure the long winters locked inside their settlements. According to reports now twenty years old, there are signs that murder and cannibalism are becoming widespread during the cold spells. Let's hope the story doesn't repeat itself. 

Nullholm (Frontier World)

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Nullholm is a frontier system way off the beaten track. In fact, there is no stable route here at all - instead, navigators must feel their way here, slowly and with great effort. 

The system contains a minor Imperial colony that struggles to get by from day to day. What the colonists cannot make themselves they must do without - even before the end of the Crusade, the system was visited only once or twice per year, usually by Rogue Traders seeking to extort or exploit the locals.

The planet Nullholm has one moon, a dead orb, perfectly spherical, that gives of no radiation of any kind, and registers as being colder than absolute zero. The Adeptus Mechanicus had an exploratory ship here for quite some time, but the moon yielded up no secrets, and the ship was moved elsewhere.

Karbera (Feudal World)

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Karbera is a Feudal World that's undergoing a rapid industrial revolution. It was cataloged less than 50 years ago due to its obscure location beyond Ossua. It was never fully claimed by the Imperium, but a small orbital station was left there to monitor the situation. In that time two major continent-spanning wars have gripped the world, and the technological progress has been nothing short of astounding. From air balloons to fixed-wing aircraft. From full-rigged sailing ships to ironclad steam-ships. From muzzleloaders to rudimentary breechloading rifles. The death toll has been equally impressive: full 25% of the world's population have died in battle, or of diseases and famine.

Kaziana (Death World)

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Kaziana is a barely-cataloged Death World just off the Parino-Khazant route. It's a desolate place, with a minimal biosphere. What it does have is heavy gravity, wild weather, volcanoes and earthquakes, and freakish electro-storms. The world is, as far as can be told, fantastically rich in rare elements, but the few expeditions that have managed to land here have been obliterated in hours by freakish acts of nature.

Parino Secundus (Hive World)

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The world of Parino lies close to the Iron Collar in physical terms, but can only be reached by a convoluted trail that leads through the system of Khazant. It retained some semblance of civilization when the Achilus Crusade arrived, but after millennia of isolation and hardship it's peoples had forsaken the God-Emperor and taken to trusting "logic" and "progress". The population was wiped out and their heretical ways obliterated before the planet was heavily resettled by refugees from a number of Calixian worlds.

When the Stigmartus sent the forces of the Acheros Salient reeling, Parino became cut off from the rest of the Reach. When the Imperium finally returned after a decade of absence, they found the population already slipping into twin heresies: one group openly worshipped the Dark Gods, another had rekindled the lost faith in machines and "research". 

A third faction clung still to faith in the Emperor but it was deemed too difficult to separate the groups from one another. It was decided to call in Exterminatus and let the God-Emperor sort out his own. There is no record of the order being carried out. Actually, there are no more records of Parino Secundus at all.

Skaura III (Hive World)

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Skaura III is a Hive World only in the loosest sense of the world. When the Achilus scouts arrived here, they found the remnants of a failed human world, with only a handful of techno-barbarian tribes. The world was a bleak place, heavily scarred by millennia of industrial exploitation, and almost without accessible mineral resources.

The world was brought to compliance around 100.M42, and settled by a few hundred million Scintillan refugees. Several hive structures were constructed as the nuclei of the new settlements, and some light industries and agriculture were in place when suddenly a minor warp storm engulfed the system, cutting it off from the rest of the Crusade.

The storm has raged for more than a century, showing little single of slowing down. Indeed, if anything it has grown in potency over the past few decades and threatens to engulf the penal world of Xyan.