Veneris Shrine World

Written by Adam France

++ Excerpts from the Void Wraith Chapter Almanac Obscurus ++

Excerpt #1   -   Overview   -
See 'Footsteps of Drusus' - IH Page 210 -
An Imperial Shrine World located in the Drusus Marches Subsector of Calixis Sector, on the
Pilgrim Route known as the Footsteps of Drusus. Veneris is the Sixth Station of the Drusian
Pilgrim Route, after Endrite and before Tygress V, and thus offers pilgrims a welcome respite
and pause between the horrors and hazards of those extremely dangerous Feral Worlds.

Like it's sister Shrine Worlds of Maccabeus Quintus and Sentinel, the eighth and ninth stations
of the Footsteps of Drusus respectively, Veneris is a dry and desertified world. Veneris being
the second and largest of seventeen moons orbiting the huge gas giant Venia V, which
dominates the sky scape of Veneris for eight out of twelve months a sidereal year, a looming
pale orange white arc in the lower horizon above and below which the local star rises and sets.

Veneris is predominantly covered by a vast planet spanning poisonous desert known simply as
the Dessication, that was once the bed of a mighty ocean that the Imperium dried out through
vast unregulated industrial polution and exploitation, over a thousand years ago. Dotted with
the rusting skeletal remains of island sized drilling rigs, towering above the bare silt and salt
plains on two thousand meter tall collumns, long defunct and redundant promethium tankers,
prospection crawlers and submersibles, left behind when the seas first died, then evaporated

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away leaving the huge plains covered with salt and toxic chemicals – the results of enormous
promethium mining, weapons testing, industrial projects, pesticides and fertilizer runoff – which
are picked up and carried away by the lowland winds as toxic dust and spread around the
planet in lethal cloud storms.

In the northern hemisphere of the planet however the Dessication is broken by towering
highlands, which were once a small continent named Drususland and now form a thousand
kilometer long plateau known as the Mons Drusus. The plateau is ringed around it's steep cliff
edges by over a dozen vast and interconnected 'devotional hive cities', that cater to every
conceivable need or requirement of the endless millions of pilgrims who land here to follow the
set route and visit the holy sites of the Footsteps of Drusus. These enormous devotional hives
are each theoretically ruled by an Adeptus Ministorum Lord Eparch, however the planet as a
whole remains under direct Imperial governmental rule, through the office of a Lord Governor
located in the capital city of Neftwell, rather than as an autonomous Ecclesiarchy fief.

Estimates place the population of Veneris's hives at any given time as upwards of ten billion
souls, though well over three quarters of that number would theoretically be visiting pilgrims.
The devotional hives have a bad name even in some Ecclesiarchal circles, being rightly
regarded as voracious and ruthless engines geared towards stripping visiting pilgrims of
anything of value. All manner of fringe Imperial cultists are permitted by planetary law to
operate openly here for the most part free from even Arbites interferance or scrutiny, and
thousands of pilgrims every week are culled by sundry death cults, redemptionists,
blood-sects, and countless other murderous religious demagogues. 

Inland from the surrounding ring of hives that line the sheers outer slopes of the Mons Drusus,
is a flat utterly arid, and windless desert. Known as the Astudan Desert, named from a dead
language meaning 'the Place of the Bones', these parched lands are empty save for small
bands of scavengers and so-called Ossuaronauts - ghoulish pack-rats who comb the flats
collecting the bones of dead pilgrims who sought the so-called visions of Drusus said to be
found in the Astudan wastes by only the most pious supplicants, or destitute devotants driven
from the devotional hives when their money ran out. The Ossuaronauts load their ricketty
vehicles with the bleached bones and ship them back to the hives where they are sold to the
Ministorum priests to add to the vast ossuary structures that dot the cities.

The Astudan is also covered with bizarre geoglyphic patterns of interconnecting 'prayer-lines',
shallow straight routes made in the ground by the removal of the ubiquitous reddish pebbles
and uncovering the stark bone white rock soil beneath. These strange and mysterious
geoglyph lines are the work of the Xericae Tribes, primitive descendants of the long forgotten
original human settlers of Veneris and are connected to water summoning ritual processions
and their worship of 'the Sky Father', which the Ecclesiarchy have approved as a primitive but
benign interpretation of the Cult of the God-Emperor, the lines can and do remain clear and
visible for millenia thanks to the almost completely windless and stable climate of the plateau.

The Xericae, though greatly reduced in numbers since the days of early colonisation following
the foundation of the Sector well over two thousand years ago, still survive in small numbers to
this day, making their tribal camps in the xeric shrublands of the inner plateau and the foothills

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of the Great Spine Mountains which dominate the heart of the Mons Drusus. Though rarely
seen by the hive dwelling majority of the planetary population, the Xericae still walk their sacred
'water-lines', dressed in ancient drysuits and moisture-weave cloaks, chanting prayers for rain,
which falls perhaps a dozen times a year.

The Great Spine Mountains run a two hundred mile range at the heart of the plateau and are
regarded as holy to the normally peaceful Xericae. Imperial surveys report that several isolated
'sky islands' still endure in remote high parts of the Spine, where small pockets of the original
flora and fauna of Veneris cling to a precarious existence. Apparently unoccupied by the
Xericae, these Islands of life in the bare dry heights are however closely and jealously guarded.

Excerpt #2 -   History -

367.M39   - Official date of the Imperial conquest of Veneris, in the same year of the
Transfiguration of Drusus (which occurred of course on Maccabeus Quintus). Despite the
official Ecclesiarchal line that General Drusus himself led the conquest of the planet shortly
after his 'first death' battling and wiping out a Yu'vath occupation force in the process, it is in
fact unclear if the Crusade army actually fought to seize control of the planet at all.
Archeological evidence and partial existant records are very clear that Drusus remained on
Maccabeus Quintus for the entire year and there is no evidence or hint he in fact ever
personally visited Veneris, the records also suggest that the Xericae human tribes had in fact
not attracted the notice of the surrounding Yu'vath and were the only sentients on the planet at
the time, welcoming the arrival of a handful of Crusade navy ships with great celebration,
seeing them as 'brothers under the sky'.

Later stories and legends stating that Drusus led his army to Veneris after experiencing a
vision during his 'Transfiguration', and thereby saved his battle group from grinding to a halt
due to a chronic lack of promethium at that time are purest fantasy and lack any shred of
evidence. Investigation suggests this story was first recorded as late as 056.M41, during the
era when the world was being converted wholesale from a heavily industrialised mining planet
to the Shrine World it is today. It was and remains a fabrication of the Ecclesiarchy.

The first Naval teams that visited Veneris found it to be something of a minor paradise, despite
it's disconcerting proximity to the baleful orange disk of the gas giant Venia V. The moon's
single mid-sized continent was blessed with a calm and temperate climate, and covered in rich
meadow lands and beautiful mountain forests, it's opalescent world-ocean teaming with fish
and seal-like creatures that were extremely nutricious and tasty. The Xericae, despite their
location deep in the heart of Yu'vath territory, had somehow survived unnoticed and unscathed,
their origin lost in the millenia, but apparently connected to an early Imperial survey ship that
became lost in the Warp and crashed into the world's sea several thousand years before.

368 - 384.M39   - During the final two decades of the Crusade, in the years leading up to the
formal foundation of the Calixis Sector, Veneris become something of a boom-world, after
early exploration teams found huge deposits of natural gas and prometheum oil at many points
beneath the planet's great ocean floor and massive Munitorum funded and controlled drilling
and pumping operations were set up across the planet's seas and port hives began to be built

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around the coasts of Drususland, as the single continent was renamed. By the final stages of
the Crusade over a twentieth of the prometheum fuelling the Crusade battle groups was
coming from the sea-mines of Veneris.

400.M39 - 500.M40   - Throughout this long period of time Veneris grew to become a
massively polluted and smog-choked industrial hell, as hundreds of huge drilling and storage
platforms spread across the surface of the once clean and fecund seas, and port hives covered
the shores of Drususland. The Imperium, as it always does, sucked and consumed the mineral
wealth of Veneris dry over the passing centuries, shipping the gas and oil away into the greedy
systems of the Sector at large, heedless of the inevitable exhaustion and eventual total
collapse of the planet's ecosystem.

500.M40 - 100.M41   - The Exsiccation Era. The great drying of Veneris takes many
centuries, as a great commulation of industrial accidents, unregulated chemical off-spillage
and dumping, and general industrial exploitation causes a terminal greenhouse effect and the
very ocean itself boils away in a series of massive cataclysmic ecological and atmospheric
disasters, finally evaporating at a rapidly escalating speed. At roughly the same time the
natural gas and oil deposits that brought the planet to Imperial attention are exhausted and dry
up to all extents and purposes.

For a time it seems likely the planet will be placed under an Eschatalogus Edict and the
population either euthanised or evacuated, however as is often the way with dying Imperial
worlds, the hives of Veneris experienced a massive upswing in religious fervor and belief over
the first century of the forty second millenia, culminating in the intervention of the Sepulchral
Brotherhood, a large and powerful Ecclesiarchy religious order that preached to the
downtrodden masses of Veneris's dying and dry promethium port hives that they were living
upon a world that was beloved of Saint Drusus, that had been shown to him in a vision and
which had saved the Angevin Crusade. The Brotherhood called for the dying world to be
renewed as a Shrine World, and a new station on the Footsteps of Drusus pilgrim route, and for
the people of Veneris to join the new coming pilgrims in raising their voices to the
God-Emperor and His Saint Drusus.

112.M41   - The First Sanctification of Veneris. Though they would have preferred to 'break'
Veneris, and strip it of everything of any value whatsoever before abandoning the planet
entirely, the Munitorum eventually caved in under increasing pressure from many quarters
across Calixis Sector to seed Veneris to joint Ecclesiarchy and Imperial Government control,
under the primary aegis of the Sepulchral Brotherhood, who were the main movers in the calls
for the blessing and sanctification of the parched world.

It was the Sepulchral Brotherhood who first shaped and converted Veneris into the utterly
ruthless and often bloody machine it remains to this day. Paterdomini Fraters sat in power over
each devotional hive, ruling their new fiefs like priest-kings, preaching the Sepulchral
Brotherhood's mantra that their serfs should be grateful to either live lives of backbreaking
labour in service to the Brotherhood and the God-Emperor, or to give their lives in service as a
route to the Golden Throne in death.

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In the following centuries the Brotherhood dubious myths of Drusus's visiting Veneris to rescue
the Crusade with it's wealth became accepted lore across the Sector, with the Ecclesiarchy
backing the Brotherhood, despite their distrust generally of the increasingly powerful Order in
their midst. By the third century of M41 Veneris was one of the Brotherhood's primary
strongholds and it's single largest source of monetary income, becoming in effect a nearly
wholly manufactured and fraudulent religious money making venture.

560.M41   - The Sepulchral Schism. Partly in response to the outrages of the Brotherhood
on Veneris, the Ministorum withdrew it's writ and adepts from the Sepulchral Brotherhood and
demanded that they cease preaching and transfer control of all Veneris's religious precincts to
mainstream Ecclesiarchy control, sighting the Brotherhood's wordly aspect and growing moral
turpitude. The Schism exploded into violence for several months on the streets of Veneris and
the Brotherhood's other holdings across the Sector, as fraters sepulchral tried to plunder
everything they could from the massively rich temples and cloisters of the devotional hives.
Sororitas battled the Martyrs Millitant, illegally hired mercenaries in the pay of the Brotherhood,
and mobs of Venerisian locals whipped into a frenzy by their unscrupulous masters.

However the Schism was brief and the Sepulchral Brotherhood contented itself with ceasing to
be a religious order and instead took advantage of laws allowing it to retain it's control over
billions of labourers and vast amounts of territory, evolving over several years into the
DeVayne Incorporation, a business consortium every bit as avaricious and greedy as the old
religious order had been.

561.M41   - The Second Sanctification of Veneris. Following the chaotic spasm of violence in
the devotional hives that marked the expulsion of the Sepulchral Brotherhood from the
Ministorum, several Lords Eparch and their retinues arrive guarded by several hundred heavily
armed sororitas to cement the change of rulership theoretically to mainstream Ministorum
orthodoxy. The world welcomes the Lords Eparch with a celebration that is still remembered on
the planet in folk tales and devotional art as the Second Sanctification.

In the years that follow the new Ministorum city governments basically follow a policy of
business as usual, often even working hand in glove with ex-Sepulchral now DeVayne
Incorporation officials. Contrary to their stated reasons for expelling the Brotherhood the
Ecclesiarchy continue all the           
Excerpt #3    -   The Dessication     -

The vast majority of Veneris's surface was once covered by rich oceans teaming with life, it is
now the horrific, practically lifeless and wholly poisonous desert wasteland known only as the
Dessication. Beyond the soaring cliff faces of the Mons Drusus, where the devotional hives
cover the sloaps, save for those parts covered by enormous statues statues of various Calixian
saints cut from the black granite of the old continental shelf itself, there is only the Dessication.

The receding sea has left huge plains covered with salt and toxic chemicals – the results of the
enormous millenial long industrial project to suck Veneris's sea bed gas and promethium
deposits dry to fuel first the Angevin Crusade, then the creation of Calixis Sector, as well as
vast carpets of pesticides and fertilizer runoff from the old Drususland farms and the creation of

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the great hive cities – all of which are picked up and carried away by the wind as toxic dust and
spread around the planet in lethal storms.

Though the devotional hives, clinging to the outer edges of the great plateau and the desert
interior of the Mons Drusus are mostly located in high enough altitudes to remain largely free
from the impact of most of these dust storms, which sweep across the old low lying sea bed,
particularly strong storms sometimes reach the lower regions of the devotional hives, and
small amounts of particulate matter get into the city depths. The Dessicate's dust is heavily
polluted and poisonous enough to kill anyone venturing out into the region without an
environment suit and rebreather mask of some kind. Even the people living in the lower depths
of the devotional hives suffer from health problems connected to inhaling low traces of the dust,
including high rates of certain forms of cancer and lung diseases. Respiratory illnesses
including tuberculosis (most of which is drug resistant) and cancer, digestive disorders,
anaemia, and infectious diseases are common ailments in the region. Liver, kidney and eye
problems can also be attributed to the toxic dust storms. Child mortality and birth deaths are far
higher even than is usual in low hive regions.

There are no permanent residents in the Dessication, but extremely tough and brave salvage
teams known collectively as Outriggers, criss cross the planet spanning deserts based out of
roaming Caterpillager Engines, vast multi-tracked sealed industrial vehicles, moving from wreck
to wreck, whether old ship's hulls or rusting 'Big Rigs', seeking abandoned scrap metal,
archeotech, and anything else of value they can strip down and collect, before returning to the
devotional hives to sell their hauls. Outriggers tend to be individualistic and moody, many
claiming to descend from the old deep sea oil mining clans of pre-Sanctified Veneris and are
typically scornful of the pilgrims that flock to Veneris, and the Ecclesiarchy priests that fleece
them. Even sealed in their great Caterpillagers, and wearing full environment suits when
outside, Outriggers tend not to live long, usually falling to the cummulative effect of small
amounts of inhaled Dessication dust after a few years working in the wastes. As such they
maintain a certain grim glamour and romance about them, and tell tall tales of dust storms that
can strip a man to the bone in seconds, or of haunted big rigs. The most frequently voiced
Outrigger tale however, is that of the Last Mine, which speaks of a still functioning promethium
rig, somewhere out in the deepest stretches of the Dessication, being run by a crew of
servitors, that has been constantly drawing promethium oil up from the last deposit on the
planet since the time of the Exsiccation. They say there are millions of gallons stored there, a
king's ransom just waiting for the right Outrigger to find it.

Naturally there are no native life forms to be found now in the Dessication, save for the most
hardy lichens and microbial lifeforms clinging to rocks here and there.

Excerpt #4   -   Veneris's Water Supply   -

Save for a very few deep wells, underwater rivers, and mountain water courses at the heart of
the Mons Drusus and the Spine Mountains, since the final days of the Exsiccation Veneris has
been almost completely dry and waterless. Thus the importation of vast amounts of water from

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elsewhere is vital to feed the billions of souls that are on the planet at any given time.

Each of the planet's devotional hives has large resources given over to the planning and
execution of importing water from off-world, with one or more water magnates ('the
Aquadomini') controlling and overseeing the operations for that hive. The water is typically
shipped in to the planet in the form of either mountain sized blocks of stellar ice (comets or
asteroids), or in liquid form from water rich worlds aboard enormous hydrotankers. The flow of
interstellar and interplanetary shipping required to maintain this flood of off-world water, or the
'God-Emperor's Tears' as it is known locally, is vast and easily outnumbers the constant flocks
of liners and galleons that ship in the pilgrims following the Footsteps of Drusus, thus the water
magnates are unanimously wealthy beyond the dreams of avarice.

Excerpt #5   -   Criminal Gangs of Veneris      -

The devotional hives of Veneris are plagued by crime committed by semi-organised street
gangs and armies such as the Tabernucklers, the Hooliguns, Roodboyz.   

Drusine Reincarnationist Cults

Hooligun Street Gangs

The Temple of the God-Emperor Arisen

++ ARRIVAL AT MIRACULUM ++

A bit of flavour text I gave the pc's at this week's adventure - it's based heavily upon a
description of a Shrine World in the 2nd HH novel, which I particularly liked;

++ 15th Week, 809.M41, Miraculum Hive, Veneris, Drusus Marches Sub, Calixis Sector ++

Swept along by the crowds you are driven by the heaving mass of people into a huge central
plaza surrounded by soaring towers and magnificently appointed buildings of marble.
Thousands of people fill the square around you, and due to your height you can see many
thousands more choking nine arterial boulevards waiting to enter.

At the centre of the plaza a cluster of giant statues stand, and droning chants drift from
coroded voxcaster horns set in buildings, a pealing clangor of bells tolling from a dozen or more
gilded spires crested with massive Imperial aquila emblems. Their vaulting walls pierced by
colossal stained glass windows, each building seeming to vie with it's neighbours for
supremacy of height and ostentation.
You note the outer ring carved from glossy milk white marble, each a warrior clad in Astartes
battle plate. They surround a central statue of the Emperor, which is likewise armoured, though
in a more elaborate and magnificent suit of filligried golden armour that gleams and sparkles

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with precious gems. The figure carries a torch, lit with an actual flickering flame of fiercly
burning blue white light, which illuminates the statues with a cool tinted aura.

The outer statues are Primarchs all, winged Sanguinius, the Lion, stern Dorn, wild Russ, and
there beside Vulkan and the Khan, your own forebear; the paragon; Guilliman himself. You
move robotically the Betchers Gland in your throats sensing your own rising choler produces
stinging acidic venom that you are forced to swallow hard, as you are driven on with everyone
else by Ministorum confessors and adepts in hooded red and brown habits, on and around the
statues in a circuit. You gaze up at your genefather's statue, his proud features, bolter raised
in symbolic defence of his father. A fine scene, were it not being peddled by religious
charlatans and tricksters. Abusing the truth of both the Emperor himself and Guilliman and his
brother Primarchs. Whoring their names for the coffers of the Ministorum.

A fat bellied missionary approaches you aggressively, a tall mitre of silk and gold atop his
sweating head as he cries aloud from an open book, his words amplified by vox-horns held
aloft by two winged cherubim, their child-like faces fixed in rictus grins, their tiny wings raven
black feathered and fluttering.

"Every man is a spark in the darkness. By the time he is noticed he is gone forever. A retinal
after image that fades and is quickly obscured by newer, brighter lights.
Put aside your pride, put aside your lust, your greed, your self. Submit to the God-Emperor
and go into his light content. Follow the path laid down, follow the Footsteps of the Saint, go on
brothers and sisters, go on your way, move on, move forwards, follow and be cleansed."

Around you pilgrims in sack-cloth wail and beat their foreheads, some bleading from self
inflicted cuts, their eyes wild and raised to the towering statues above them. Others are mute,
terrified seeming to pass around the mighty demi-gods and their father deity.

Keen to be away from this abominable plaza, you barge firmly through the crowds of wailing,
sobbing, shouting, laughing pilgrims without heed or care for them, two smash down onto the
stones, squalling in pain, but quickly swallowed by the throng. You move out into the wide
boulevard Hectaon indicated, noting ranks of tall brass and iron posts each holding a boiling
chalice of water running down each side of the great smooth stained glass and ouslite canyon
walls, the towering steeples that soar up out of your vision, the prayers inscribed into ever
cobblestone under your feet. To the right of the boulevard crowds queue and wait, singing and
chanting to enter the plaza, here on the left you are free of the press somewhat and hurry on.

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Passing several cathedra you cross a square with a kilometer high ossuary tower made of gold
plated bones, and surrounded by a small forest of marble columns, each with the statue of a
saint upon them. Random fanatics and demagogues roam amidst the pillars, one you see
mortifying his own flesh with a cat o'nine tails, blood and flayed flesh spraying with each
shuddering swack.
"For you Drusus, for you." He repeats gasping as he throws his arm back once more.
Somewhere there is a corpse burning, you never forget that smell, and smoke wafts across the
square. Above there is a sudden jarring blare of what sounds like a fog-horn, as a vast prayer
ship drifts above, a monstrously bloated seeming dirigible, with sweeping brass sails and
enormous but silent seeming prop driven motors. Long drifting prayer banners hang from it's fat
silver hull and hymns blare from enormous hanging voxcasters shaped like gaping jawed black
iron skulls. The hymns are varied and clash with each other, jumbling and confused, a din, a
clangour, an unsettling pandemonium.

"The Prothesium Mauseleum," Hectaon calls out pointing ahead, to where a great mausoleum
temple stands to the south, encrusted with carved skulls, bones, skeletal eagles, and death
urns, beyond which a vast arcology hab block looms, you recall your mission briefing and the
maps. You're on the right track. Another vast crowd is gathered outside and as you watch,
trying desperately to control the rage this supersticious hell rouses in you, a small flock of ivory
skinned angels with brass feathered wings fly from dark archways and high alcoves. Servitors
you think, but very finely wrought creations of the fleshwright's craft. They sweep down over the
crowds, occasionally gathering together in order to jointly lift up an ecstatic soul from the
throng and carry them into the gloomy portals into darkness.

Death is the one constant theme here, it is venerated in the coloured glass of every window,
celebrated in the carvings on every stone, every marble pillar, every brass and wood door,
revered in the funereal dirges that echo from the trumpets of gaggles of winged cherubim who
giggle like real children while circling over the heads of crowds like chubby pink birds of prey.
Flapping banners of bone clatter, and the so soft wind whistles lightly through the eye sockets
of skulls set into shrine caskets on bronze poles, leather clad cenobite death cult priests cry out
to you as you walk on by, offering you release from the pain of life, offering to kill you quickly
and painlessly, to send you on to the Golden Throne and bliss at the God-Emperor's side.
Morbidity hangs like a shroud here, every bit as cloying and unpleasant to your senses as the
fugue of incence, sweat, effluvia and fanatic fervour, a sick gothic solemnity casting a
permanent and ever present gloom across this mighty, but terrible hive city.

You pause, the Martyrium Gardens are located half an hour's walk down the Evangelion
Canyon, where two of the great templum stacks of the hive base meet. Focusing your mind on

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the mission you try to ignore the offensive ignorance and supersticion of this place and the
throngs that crowd and jostle at every side.

Honest combat would indeed have been easier to bear than the reality of Miraculum. Slapping
your brother on his shoulder you head down the Evangelion, past the street preachers, the
paperists, the harangelists, the redemptionst firebrands, and the mass of other shouting,
praying, singing, screaming fanatics that give the echoing canyon it's name. The mission lies
before you.

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