The Temple

“Aah... the Temple... very auspicious, yes? Signifies that the God-Emperor Himself watches over you... that your mission is blessed by the Master of Mankind...”
–Astropath Kinneth Reed, casting the Emperor’s Tarot
At the very outskirts of the Great Warp Storms, closest to
Port Wander (a short warp jump away), the station called the ‘Temple’ resides. The most
unusual feature of the Temple are the multitudes of perfectly
spherical rocks---several hundred meters in diameter---spin in
many complex orbits around the star. The star itself is simply
a dead cinder, a feebly glowing husk of
dense matter. Nothing else exists in this oddly serene system:
no gasses, no dust, and no planets. Nothing exists aside from
the dead star and its family of perfectly round and seemingly artificial spheres---no dust, gas-streams, or worlds.
==Spherical Nodes==
No one is certain who or what created the nearly perfect rock
spheres that orbit the dead cinder of the Temple Station. Some
speculate that the warp storms somehow shaped the rocks out
of the remains of long lost planets that once inhabited the
world. Others claim some elder god placed them here for
some unknown reason, though few reasonable individuals
put stock in such tales.
Over the millennia, many expeditions have tried to explore
these void rocks. Auspex scans reveal these spheroids to be
nothing special; just ordinary rock, completely inert and
unresponsive to all scans. However, no expedition has ever been
able to drill more than a few centimeters into the stones before
the mining equipment mysteriously failed. It is said that one
Rogue Trader even tried to fracture a rock with lance-fire to no
avail. Perhaps as a result, most voidmen claim that to interfere
with the spheres brings ill-fortune and an untimely end.
==Temple - The Emperor's Tarot==
The Temple’s name is associated with the Emperor’s Tarot of
the Transubstantiates, a Sybillan derivative of the Emperor’s Tarot. The
Temple signifies the commencement of a blessed endeavor,
and voidfarers often hold up within the Temple station when
the Maw begins to grow restless, rather than making the
relatively short return trip to Port Wander. Some Rogue Traders
even go out of their way to spend a day within the borders of
the Temple station, regardless if a storm has swelled or not in
the hopes of gaining some sort of blessing for their ventures.
A superstitious few even go so far as to have their senior
Astropaths (or some other psyker on board) conduct a casting
of the Emperor’s Tarot just to see if the Temple card appears
to them while they are within the boundaries of the Temple.
Should this happen, then the captain considers his endeavor
to be doubly blessed by the God-Emperor Himself.
==Using the Temple==
The Temple has nothing of worth within it---its
worth is its value as a Station of Passage. It provides
an area of calm amongst the warp storms of the Halo
Margins. More importantly, it is close enough to those
same warp storms that Navigators can plot unusually
accurate jumps when passing through the Maw. Any
Navigator plotting a warp-trip through the Maw in
the Temple gains a +10 bonus to all related tests.
Passing into the inner regions of the Temple can
be extremely dangerous, however. Most ships remain
at least 1 AU from the star. Any closer, and the ship
must pass through the orbits of the spheres. Should
a vessel wish to do so, treat this like an asteroid
field that requires a Difficult (–10) Pilot (Space
Craft)+Manoeuvrability Test to navigate, rather
than the usual Routine Test.
Category:Systems
Category:Koronus Expanse
Category:The Maw