“The foolish view them as dangers to be eradicated. The wise view them as profits waiting to be grasped.” – Rogue Trader Gal Maximoff

It is the 41st Millennium. For more than a hundred centuries the Emperor has sat immobile on the Golden Throne of Earth. He is the Master of mankind by the will of the gods, and master of a million worlds by the might of his inexhaustible armies. He is a rotting carcass writhing invisibly with power from the Dark Age of Technology. He is the Carrion Lord of the Imperium for whom a thousand souls are sacrificed every day, so that he may never truly die.

Yet even in his deathless state, the Emperor continues his eternal vigilance. Mighty battlefleets cross the daemon-infested miasma of the warp, the only route between distant stars, their way lit by the Astronomican, the psychic manifestation of the Emperor’s will. Vast armies give battle in his name on uncounted worlds. Greatest amongst his soldiers are the Adeptus Astartes, the Space Marines, bio-engineered super-warriors. Their comrades in arms are legion: the Imperial Guard and countless planetary defence forces, the ever vigilant Inquisition and the tech-priests of the Adeptus Mechanicus to name only a few. But for all their multitudes, they are barely enough to hold off the ever-present threat from aliens, heretics, mutants – and worse.

To be a man in such times is to be one amongst untold billions. It is to live in the cruelest and most bloody regime imaginable. These are the tales of those times. Forget the power of technology and science, for so much has been forgotten, never to be re-learned. Forget the promise of progress and understanding, for in the grim dark future there is only war. There is no peace amongst the stars, only an eternity of carnage and slaughter, and the laughter of thirsting gods.

It is the year 816.M41 and yet still the galaxy continues its unrelenting spiral into madness, darkness and entropy. The teeming quintillions of average citizenry, the denizens of countless planets know nothing of this titanic struggle for mankind’s very survival. The ignorance of the masses means next to nothing in the grand scope of the Emperor’s vast domain. Indeed, even the most powerful of planetary nobility can hardly hope to amount to more than infinitesimal speck of dirt in the Emperor’s light. Even still, there exists a special breed of persons gifted with the power of a warp capable starship, the effeciacy of an administratum granted warrant of trade and a purpose taken from an unbound destiny. These unrestrained mavericks are the men and women known as Rogue Traders, whose warrant of trade has granted them the right to ply the stars in search of profit and greater stance in the universe so long as such profiteering benefits the Imperium’s wishes.

In the Koronus Expanse, a vast stretch of unclaimed void in the Halo Stars of Segmentum Obscurus bordering the Calixis sector and shrouded by a near impregnable warpstorm known as the “Maw,” these Rogue Traders have found their ultimate challenge. Innumerable xenos artifacts and vast swaths of profitable resources await those foolhardy or greedy enough to venture forth past the Maw, but not only do the explorers therein life, limb and ship, they risk losing their souls themselves. Whilst the forces that besiege mankind, malleus, hereticus and xenos alike perpetuate their endless destruction, an even still deeper and intrinsic force lies in wait, infinite in scope and unending in it’s potential.