Setting:Cloudburst/Liprel Shoal

System
Galactic Position	Cloudburst Sector, Rampart Subsector
System Overlord	None
Worlds in the system	Seven, one inhabitable, one moon terraformable
World Type, Name	Hangonne
Tropospheric Composition	Nitrogen 78%, Oxygen 20%, Argon 1%, Water .95%, Carbon Dioxide 0.05%
Religion	Imperial Cult
Government type	Local Republics
Planetary Governor	Yes, position presently vacant
Adept Presence	Adeptus Administratum, Adeptus Ministorum, Adeptus Astra Telepathica, Adeptus Arbites, Adeptus Mechanicus
Climate	Largely temperate, with arid grasslands at the equator and frigid glaciers at the poles
Geography	Flat plains with occasional sharp, dirt-less mountains, tidal basins, broad rivers with slow water, deep oceans with fast currents, .97 times the size of Terra
Gravity	Hangonne has .91 Terran gravity
Day Length	20 Terran Hours
Economy	Gelt Thrones and Silver Thrones
Principal Exports	Textiles, Magnesium, Coal, Nitrogen, Leather, Silver
Principal Imports	Complex Alloys, Military Equipment, All-Terrain Vehicles, Satellites, Teachers
Countries and Continents	Hangonne has eighty local governments over four continents
Military	Hangonne Rangers (high quality PDF), Hangonne Light Rifles (medium quality Guard)
Contact with other Systems	Uncommon
Tithe Grade	Solutio Prima
Population	69,820,000

Description

Hangonne is a place of peace and plenty, and is so thankful for it that it colors every aspect of its citizens’ lives. If there were a world that could be said to carry the Emperor’s personal blessing, Hangonne would be it. Of all the worlds in Cloudburst, none can be called luckier than Hangonne. Its people look at the stars every night and thank Him on Terra for their survival, and their underlying unease grows every time. Soon, change will come to Hangonne, and every occupant knows and dreads it.

Founded long before the establishment of the Sector, the Frontier World of Hangonne sits quietly in the edges of Imperial territory, minding its own business. Like Oglith itself, it is a Frontier World and pleased by that. Realistically, there are few ways the Imperium can physically expand past Hangonne, unless humanity tries once more to colonize the Oldlight Exo-zone. As such, it is a Frontier in the physical sense as well as in its logistical and infrastructural nature. While the world does have a few large cities, they are not the towering spires of Celeste or the sprawl of Maskos. Most Hangonne cities are neat, compact affairs with walls and sturdy architecture, more akin to Clegran than Septiim. The scouring wind whips past the cities on its way from the sea to the mountains, sometimes carrying rain or snow to water the hardy plants that emerge from the scratch and hardpack.

The majority of the population lives in the thousands of small towns and villages that settlers built all across the globe. These towns fish, hunt, farm, ranch, and dig for their food, and usually produce just enough for their own needs, a bit of storage, and leftovers to export. Politically, the planet’s settlers split into a patchwork of roughly eighty republics, each of which convenes every ten years to select a President who represents the world to the Imperium. That President serves as the de facto Planetary Governor. The system does not yet qualify for a System Overlord by necessity, although the Sector Administratum is free to select one for convenience any time they wish. Hangonne’s economic prospects for the future are limited by its anomalously low content of the elements needed to make steel (especially for a Cloudburst planet), and low-quality soil, but its population has ample room to grow, and may someday need a true System Overlord.

However, Hangonne’s own populace does not wish for that responsibility. Hangonne enjoys its isolation, for the most part, and its people have decided, collectively, that greater participation in the Imperium is not for them. The world has temples and cathedrals, of course, but election after election has shown that the Hangonne populace prefers to remain disconnected from larger affairs of clergy and state. Until, of course, the Glasians arrived.

When the aliens assaulted Hangonne in the Third Migration, the planet was barely prepared. The destruction of Chlorit in the previous Migration weighed heavy on the minds of the planet’s defenders, which consisted of eight regiments of the Imperial Guard and the world’s own PDF. The possibility that the planet could fall to the Glasians informed every decision the planetary government made. Every chapel, every church, every shrine on the planet crammed with Hangonnians desperate to avert their fate. Fate listened, or perhaps the Emperor, or just simple luck. Regardless of the source of their fortune, the Glasians never even arrived on the planet. As their ship, a lesser Cylinder, emerged from FTL, its presence lit up every single sensor in the outer system. This was the first sign that something was different; usually their vessels arrived in stealth. Hours later, the report filtered in from Mechanicus fueling platform minders at the termination shock of the system: the Glasian ship had collided with an asteroid as it emerged from its mysterious Faster than Light mode, and had triggered a catastrophic overload of its reactor. Seven hours later, the glare from the blast reached orbital telescopes. Riotous cheers erupted across the planet, as Cloudburst celebrated the first casualty-free (and to date only casualty-free) defeat of the Glasians.

Understandably, piety and thanks were the order of the day, month, and decade after that. The Ministorum had no need to parlay this unexpected deliverance into a message from the Emperor, as the relieved people did that by themselves. Of course, the fact that the Emperor had not seen fit to deliver every other system the Glasians had ever targeted went neatly overlooked. Still, regardless of the source of their rescue, the planet survived, and the Glasians have not targeted it since. The regiments on planet quickly shipped off to other worlds to help alleviate the strain of their own invasions, while the preparations Hangonne had undertaken to survive the Migration sat fallow and unused.

In the aftermath of the abortive invasion, the Mechanicus undertook its various data-takings, visiting the site of the wreck and attempting to learn more, which ultimately failed. The Glasian technology that had survived the impact and explosion was still too heavily tainted to attempt to reverse-engineer, and had to be disposed of by flinging it into the sun.

Still, while the relief on the planet was evident in its inhabitants’ every action for years after, the question lingered in the hearts of the local government. How had their level of readiness been so low that they had needed eight Imperial Guard regiments at least, just to have a hope of drawing even?

Hangonne is a world of cultural stasis, even stagnation, by its own choice. While that suits the tastes of its people well, it does not lend itself to defense from hostile aliens. The world was born from the desire of many of the Naxos economic elite to escape the combination of hostility and pollution that hangs over that sector’s few remaining worlds that have not yet been the site of Nurglite cult uprisings. Hangonne colonists were early all travelers and settlers from rich worlds in Naxos, and they came to Hangonne to escape the lives they lived. On Hangonne, the people don’t live in harmony with nature so much as cloister themselves from the rest of the Imperium’s assault on it. Cities on Hangonne never take up more land than needed, food never goes uneaten because people never grow more than they need to eat or export, and most of all, the people do not force technological niches into their lives that they need mechanisms to fill.

The people of Hangonne don’t identify as holistic in their lifestyle, but the world could certainly export more than it does and import orders of magnitude more than it does. This does not go over well with the Administratum, of course, but the planet’s unshakable piety and loyalty do allay concerns in Cloudburst’s subterranean halls that the world’s leaders are simply being greedy, and denying Terra her Due.

The world’s government is an inefficient one from the perspective of the three Adepta that require resources from the Imperium’s worlds, however, even accounting for its deliberately primitive technology levels. The Ecclesiarchy is generally happy with its collections and level of thankful piety, though the small, humble religious institutions the world builds are a bit too small for its liking. The choice of ejecting all unneeded technology from daily life is a hostile one in the eyes of the Mechanicus, but they tolerate it thanks to the world’s exports of high-quality metals (except steel) and food to Cognomen. The Administratum dislikes any world that doesn’t have a single, centralized government with which to negotiate and from which to collect taxes, but generally puts up with it to avoid unnecessary jurisdictional battles. All of that may change. Although the Glasians show no sign of returning, it would be naïve in the extreme to assume they will never do so in the future. Despite the comfort and peace it usually brings, the Hangonne lifestyle leaves the world terribly vulnerable to attack by enemies. What if, the Officio Munitorum has asked, the Glasians had sent multiple ships? What if instead of a single Cylinder with its escorts riding on the hull, it had instead been a convoy of Orks, like the one attacking Oglith? Or, perhaps, a Chaos warfleet, which always arrive in a new system in a dispersed formation to prevent just such a disaster? Isolationism and primitivism served Hangonne well when its biggest concerns were privacy and overreliance on the Mechanicus, but against the foes of man, it will just make their tasks harder.

As such, there is a gradual, somewhat resentful shift in the world’s politics, toward centralization of some governmental bodies and infrastructure. The planet has opened a Schola Progenum, for instance, as well as a few larger Mechanicus-owned factories to produce local weapons. Like many Frontier Worlds, Hangonne depends as little as possible on commerce with other worlds, but what it can export to Cognomen, it does, mostly silver. It also exports some textiles to Thimble, which it grows on its wide, windy plains where no vegetables can take root.

Each of the planet’s dozens of republics controls one or two large cities, a few towns and manufacturing centers, and hundreds of villages and small ranch holdings, with none having a population larger than a million. Most have far fewer, and the exceptions are all larger as a result of having built up around rivers and seas, where more opportunities for farming and trade exist. Most of the world’s power comes from geothermal and wind turbines, with the Mechanicus only bothering to install other sources in places that need round-the-clock power in great volumes, like the world’s few vehicle factories. Economically, the Imperial Administratum does not believe Hangonne will need such a low tithe grade for much longer, as long as its population continues to expand at its current rate.

The Hangonne military uses the opposite approach to warfare as Oromet or Lorelei. Those worlds depend on masses of lightly trained militia and the largest number of professional soldiers it can afford, trained to reasonable levels, while Hangonne deploys small teams of professional PDF and Guard as different branches of the same service. The Rangers serve as the PDF, and select small numbers of each republic’s own forces as the pool for their own numbers. Rangers train under a cadre of full-time instructors, learning things like balance, pain tolerance, how to identify edible plants, and riding. Officers train further in various morale and leadership roles, while enlisted men train on heavy weapons and vehicle operation, sharpshooting, and field encamping. The Hangonne preference for not using unneeded technology extends to Rangers, who only employ electronic devices when the mission profile calls for it. Despite this, the Rangers do use whatever weaponry they have on hand when fighting, usually various slug rifles and lasweapons, with the usual assortment of vehicles for a PDF, albeit a slightly low-tech one.

The Hangonne Light Rifles, however, are a more generalized force, and use a mixture of Ranger tactics and Guard tactics for their task of augmenting whatever force they’re attached to. As a Light Rifle unit, they prefer the use of man-portable weapons and fast vehicles, usually Chimaeras or Tauroses, and only field tanks when the need is dire. Being from a world without much wealth or high technology, the Hangonne Light Rifles prefer subtlety when the option exists. There is no denying that they are not a particularly capable force outside their mission profile, but this is often the case for Frontier World Guard units. The discrepancy in their noted quality profile stems from the fact that Guard are often called upon to participate in a wider variety of missions than a PDF, and although they are even better at serving as a stealth recon force or light small-unit tactics asset than the Rangers, they are simply not good at garrison or boarding actions. This does limit their deployability. On a world with more wealth or love of high technology, or a world with a larger population, the recruitment pool may be large enough to allow for multiple specializations in their Guard forces. Instead, Hangonne military forces choose to do one thing very well.

Hangonne’s barrenness and open plains make for great practice space for its armed services. Recently, the Hangonne PDF has begun importing hundreds of all-terrain vehicles for its units to practice on, to augment horse cavalry in its Rough Riders. It has also continued the program of satellite launches that the Navy employed to harden up its orbital defenses in advance of the arrival of the Glasians, which sat unused for centuries after the aliens failed to reach them. The only real military activity the planet has seen in hundreds of years was a single Ork vessel arriving in orbit after scattering from the destruction of its fleet in the Drumnos Sector, which was promptly destroyed by the Blue Daggers.

The outer reaches of the Liprel Shoal include a handful of uninhabitable worlds, including 6-19, a moon of a gas giant. The moon is large enough for gravity and atmosphere, and the Administratum has plans to make it into a terraformed breadbasket world, to feed extra food and textiles into Thimble’s and Cognomen’s never-full warehouses. The system draws its unusual name from the abundance of heavy metal molecules in the primordial soup of dust and gas left over from the hypernova that gave birth to the Cloudburst region, which makes navigation at sub-light speeds more difficult, but provides a stunning display of lights at night as sunlight reflects from the diffuse clouds in nearby space.