GM Haddrack

Classification: Death World / Minor Forge World
Subsector: Drusus Marches
Sector: Calixis
Tithe Grade: Exactis Extremis (Militaris)
Climate: Volcanic, tectonically unstable, electrically volatile
Governor: Archmagos Solhym Keraphos, Divine Light of Sollex
Population: Unknown (Mechanicus register only)
Primary Exports: Directed-energy weaponry, advanced photonic systems, Sollex-pattern las-arms
Status: Mechanicus Controlled – Restricted Access (Red)

Overview

Both a Death World and a minor Forge World, it occupies a blistered, unstable orbit in the Drusus Marches, locked in eternal upheaval. The planet’s terrain is defined by colossal tectonic rifts, molten plains, and thunderous calderas, constantly reshaped by subterranean magma flows. There is no native life, no growth—only change, heat, and pressure.

And through this crucible burns the Divine Light of Sollex—a militant sect of the Adeptus Mechanicus that worships destruction as the purest expression of divine function.

The Divine Light of Sollex

Unlike other Mechanicus orders, the Sollex Tech-Priests do not seek preservation or balance. Their pursuit is singular: the perfection of lethal technology. They manufacture lasweapons, photonic blades, and hololithic war systems, and refine them with obsessive precision.

To them, the Omnissiah does not whisper through cogitation—it blazes through annihilation.

Their wargear is infamous across the sector:

  • Sollex Pattern IX Death Light – A compact, overcharged lasgun that melts through voidplate at the cost of stability.
  • Sollex-Aegis Energy Blade – A volatile melee weapon of coherent light, wielded in religious duels and battlefield purges.
  • Hololith Deceivers – Tactical projectors that weave illusions on the battlefield to misdirect and destroy.

All of it designed and tested in the fires of Haddrack.

Planetary Conditions & Infrastructure

Haddrack’s surface is in a state of perpetual reshaping. Beneath its fractured crust, magma currents surge and collapse with seismic fury, giving rise to sudden volcanic upheavals, yawning fissures, and the obliteration of entire ridgelines within days. Nothing on the surface remains still for long—except the dead.

The most distinctive and deadly hazard, however, is not heat—but lightning.

The planet’s vast tectonic rift networks act as colossal natural capacitors. As pressure builds and mineral strata fracture, they release storms of rift lightning—blinding, multi-kilometer arcs of raw energy that leap from cliff-face to valley rim, often with no visible warning. These strikes vaporize equipment, instantly incinerate servitors, and reduce whole excavation teams to blackened silhouettes etched into rock.

Surviving even brief exposure to the surface requires full environmental containment. The atmosphere is dense with ash, volatile gas, and thermionic residue. Standard-issue rebreathers and sealed environmental suits are mandatory for all surface personnel—failure to wear them is a death sentence, whether by inhalation of corrosive particulates or exposure to air flash-ionized by a nearby rift arc.

Because of these constant threats, the Adeptus Mechanicus maintains its most sacred and sensitive operations in orbit. Enormous crucible-forges, data-crypts, and pattern sanctuaries hang above the surface in geostationary lattices, shielded from groundquakes and rift activity. There, in the silence of vacuum, the Divine Light of Sollex perfects its most destructive innovations, far from the chaos below.

Hive Domes and Noble Control

On the planet itself, four massive Hive-Domes anchor what limited surface operations are possible. Each is built atop one of the few semi-stable tectonic plateaus identified during early colonization.

These domes are not governed by the Mechanicus directly, but by four ancient noble houses:

  • House Veltrax
  • House Molthis
  • House Iskadar
  • House Kasbalica

Each house holds exclusive excavation charters, operating private mining corps complete with servitor regiments and heavily fortified convoys. While officially subordinate to the Sollex forge-temples, in practice these houses run semi-independent industrial regimes, locked in a cold war of sabotage, resource denial, and strategic obstruction.

As Haddrack’s crust shifts, magma flows and tectonic movements reshape which zones are accessible from each dome. Plateaus and rifts open and close unpredictably, forcing the domes into constant logistical competition as they race to exploit newly revealed veins of valuable ore or buried crystal strata before they are lost again.

The Prospectors’ Frontier

Beyond domes and land engines reach lies the unclaimed wilds—vast stretches of terrain too rugged for orbital auspex or too unstable for long-term excavation. Yet these uncharted zones offer treasures: unclaimed gems size of the mans head, extremely rare crystallized minerals and pure ingots of valuable metals.

Here operate the independent prospectors—scavenger tribes, independent tech-clans, and sanctioned opportunists. They live in inflatable, heat-resistant shelters, travel on servitor drawn sledges, and operate in absolute isolation. Many are killed by rift lightning, buried by collapses, or disappear without trace. Some return with priceless finds—only to be eliminated by a noble assassin team before they can sell their claim.

Their creed is simple:
“You can’t hoard what you die holding.”

Prospector Sledges and Rift Survival on Haddrack

In the molten scarlands and unstable rift valleys beyond the fortified Hive-Domes of Haddrack, survival is a matter of motion, ritual, and voltage. The tectonic surface is too volatile for tracked or wheeled vehicles, and conventional vox-auspex systems fail under electromagnetic disruption. For the independent prospectors who brave this chaos in search of unclaimed crystal ore, adamantium veins, or mineral strata, there is only one reliable method of transport: the servitor-drawn sledge.

These brutalist constructs are mobile bastions, workstations, and shelters, hauled across the wastes by heavily augmented servitors and armed with both tools of survival and weapons of deterrence. Two primary classes dominate the frontier:

Vulkr-Class Heavy Ore Sledge

“Let it creak, let it groan—if the servitors scream, you’re hauling good weight.”

  • Purpose: Ore transport from excavation zones to dome outposts.
  • Structure: Blast-armored ceramite chassis reinforced with plasteel plates and modular container bays.
  • Servitors: 12 bipedal haulers with power-lift augmentation legs, stabilization claws, and hydraulic tendon-locks for traction.
  • Features:
    • Servo-crane for chunk-lifting.
    • Cogitator-compensated pressure scanners for seismic predictions.
    • Void-lantern arc arrays to light the way or signal allied domes or sledges.
    • Emergency bio-seal tarp for storm entrenchment.
    • Monocline survey array—an ancient tech-relic backpack device that produces a 3D surface map in real-time.

Strider-Pattern Recon Sledge

“Speed is silence. Silence is survival.”

  • Purpose: Fast scouting, prospecting, and pathfinding missions.
  • Structure: Lightweight plasteel-alloy frame with shock-absorbent treads and articulated rear skids.
  • Servitors: 6 sprint-modified thralls with recoil-jointed shock legs, claw-foot terrain grips, and neural synapse linkages.
  • Features:
    • Collapsible drill-rakes, seismic hammers, and rad-scanners.
    • Monocline survey array: 3D resonance map projection.
    • Servo-kite drone for wide-range auspex sweep.
    • Deployable trip-mines and camo drapes for defense and concealment.

Tools for Rift Lightning Prediction and Survival

The greatest threat on Haddrack’s surface is not magma or quake—it is the phenomenon known as rift lightning: immense electrical storms that arc across the planet’s colossal tectonic rift walls, with no atmospheric source, discharging across kilometers in radiant death.

To survive these strikes, prospectors carry a sacred blend of practical gear, myth-shrouded relics, and Mechanicus-produced instrumentation:

Prediction and Detection Tools

  • Tectomantic Resonator Wands – Brass-iron tuning rods that hum as subsurface pressure nears rupture.
  • Electroscriped Auto-Flute – An auspex that decodes air ionization as harmonic tones; discord signals imminent lightning.
  • Auric Ground Vanes – Tripod masts that glow or arc in high ionization zones, used as early warning.
  • Soul-Tapper Beads – Ferromagnetic purity beads that spin or lift in dangerous electrostatic conditions.

Emergency Grounding and Defense

  • Copper Chain Arrays – Heavy-gauge sacred copper coils thrown onto conductive surfaces to anchor electrical discharge paths.
  • Grounding Javelins – Spikes fired into deep rock to create negative charge sinks; often used in panic.
  • Ground-Cairn Protocol – Emergency burial in improvised trenches laced with copper, soaked in oleum machinorum, accompanied by invocation chants.

The Culture of the Sledgemaster

Each sledge is unique—a sacred extension of the master’s will, maintained with chants, machine-oil anointing, and hand-etched tech-runes. Many are passed down between generations, with servitors ceremonially renamed when passed forward.

In the wilds, there are no resupply routes. No patrols. No backup.
Only your servitors, your tools, and whatever light the Omnissiah grants you.

Heritage Hammers of Haddrack

“The Emperor grants us strength. The Omnissiah gives us light. But the hammer… the hammer gives us providence.”
—Common prospector proverb

Among the scorched stone valleys and quake-riven fault plains of Haddrack, there exists no greater badge of honor to a prospector than their heritage hammer—a personal, precision-crafted tool that serves not as a weapon, but as an instrument of knowledge, sound, and stonecraft.

These hammers are neither standardized nor mass-produced. Each one is unique, fashioned from forge-salvage, smelted relic alloys, or heirloom materials passed down through families, prospector-lines, or stolen from the dead. Some are assembled with care over decades; others are claimed in desperate barter, but every hammer bears a lineage, whether storied or cursed.

Function and Craft

A heritage hammer is not built to crush. It is an instrument of delicacy, used to:

  • Chip fragile crystals without damaging their integrity.
  • Tap exposed veins to draw out tonal feedback, revealing the grain, fracture density, or hidden voids beneath a surface.
  • Listen to stone, a near-sacred act called “the silent strike,” wherein a prospector places the hammer’s shaft against their temple and reads the micro-vibrations of the tap as if hearing the crust itself whisper.

Hammers often include:

  • Forged-alloy heads tipped with shock-absorbing gel grips or resonance-channeling ferrite.
  • Multi-angle faces for various acoustic pitches.
  • Inscribed runes or purity filaments that dampen background noise or filter false echoes.

Some incorporate Mechanicus micro-augurs, spirit-level cogitator chips, or servo-stabilizers for balance. Others are purely manual and handed down unchanged since their production.

Culture and Legend

The importance of a heritage hammer is cultural as much as functional. Entire mining corps and frontier camps speak of legendary finds in terms of the hammer that made the strike.

Some prospectors swear by a single hammer, refusing to trade or upgrade, claiming it has “learned their hand.” Others become hammer-chasers, constantly bartering and gambling for a tool with “better tone,” “sharper song,” or a rumored kill note—a strike so perfect it shatters the outer shell and reveals a whole fragile crystal in bloom.

Notable hammers are named and catalogued:

  • God-Ear – Said to detect hollow quartz at ten meters depth.
  • Saint Virex’s Whisper – Allegedly used in three successful strike zones now buried under molten collapse.
  • Bone-Tap – Forged with a connection to servo-skull which is said to hum with premonition.

Some hammers are adorned with feathers, skull beads, or crystallized litanies. Others are plain, worn to smoothness, marked only by the sound they leave behind.

To the Prospector, the Hammer Is Truth

While rifles and sledges guard a prospector’s life, the hammer guards their future. It is the divining rod, the fingerprint of stone, and the final judge of whether the risk was worth the journey.

And on Haddrack, when a discovery is made—be it a rich crystal vein, a gem shaft, or a buried ingot—the first question is never “who found it?”

It is always: “Which hammer found it?”

The Land Engines of the Nobility

In the ever-shifting crust of Haddrack, where no settlement is safe and the terrain devours permanence, only the noble houses possess the wealth, authority, and machine-rights to deploy the colossi of excavation known as land engines.

These massive crawling fortresses, each hundreds of meters in length, are equal parts strip-miner, mobile base camp, and sanctified beast of burden. Armored in heat-baffled plating and moved by titanic gear-wheel tread systems, a single land engine houses a crew of over one hundred men—miners, servitor handlers, cyber-mechanics, and haul scribes.

Each noble house—Veltrax, Molthis, Iskadar, and Kasbalica—maintains several of such engines, directing their courses based on seismic augury, magma flow forecasts, and Mechanicus tithe data. These machines are in constant slow motion, repositioning week by week to keep ahead of tectonic collapses and lava flows.

Mobile Camps, Shifting Lifelines

For many independent prospectors, these land engines are vital anchors in a deadly landscape.

Though not officially affiliated, veteran frontier crews often follow the common routes of the engines, using them as:

  • supply nodes for water, oxygen refills, or rations (sold at extortionate prices),
  • relay points for transmitting discoveries to dome cartels,
  • and occasionally, emergency shelters when storms of rift lightning overtake the wastes.

Prospectors refer to the area around a land engine as “the iron shadow”, and base their expeditions within a few days’ trek of its projected route.

However, seismic upheaval, magma vent bursts, or tectonic shearing frequently force these engines to divert suddenly. Their new path may not be known for days or weeks. Those who stray too far in search of a promising vein risk being cut off from their supply chain, forced to survive in complete isolation—or die with a full ore cart and no one to sell it to.

The Forge Above the Fire: Haddrack’s Orbital Stations

Suspended in geostationary orbit high above Haddrack’s ever-writhing crust are a series of Mechanicus void-structures, each fulfilling a specific function in the sacred cycle of extraction, refinement, and weaponization. These stations are the true heart of Haddrack’s technological might, shielded from the chaos below and maintained with absolute quota precision by the Divine Light of Sollex.

Each station is shaped by Sollex design doctrine—sharp, angular silhouettes, radiant lens arrays, and void-hymn speakers that transmit binharic chants across the vacuum.

The Ore Procession Station: Heliostation K-27

Heliostation K-27—commonly called the Ore Procession Station—is the only Mechanicus installation in Haddrack’s orbit open to non-Mechanicus traffic, and serves as the primary intake node for raw planetary output.

Primary Functions:

  • Receives ore-haulers and sledge-pods launched from the planet via magnetic mass-lift.
  • Conducts initial purification, refinement, and separation of raw photonic, iridite, and plasma-core-bearing minerals.
  • Acts as a trade port and inspection checkpoint for Imperial vessels collecting tithed weapon components and refined materials.

Structure & Design:

  • A cathedral-sized docking array, ringed with multi-tiered cargo harpoons and pressurized umbilicus arms.
  • Six rotating crucible silos contain gravity-forged refinement vats, glowing red and violet with purified plasma residues.
  • Giant cogitator obelisks process tithe manifest logs, overseen by servitor scribes suspended in fluid tanks.
  • The central dome, known as the Chamber of Separation, houses the purification crucible where unclean ore is flash-burned in machine-rite flame.

Access & Security:

  • Visiting vessels are restricted to designated docking halos. Armed servitor-inspectors and turreted sentry-servos enforce strict compliance.
  • No weaponry may be powered while docked; disobedience is met with sanctionary decompression.
  • Unauthorized individuals are not permitted past the Red Cog Gates, which divide the shipping sanctum from the inner Mechanicus sancta.

Other Stations in Orbit: Mechanicus Sancta

Beyond Heliostation K-27 lie the true strongholds of the Divine Light of Sollex, sealed bastions of martial research, pattern-lab preservation, and weapon calibration.

The Perdovault

A void-dark fortress containing prototype las-constructs, plasma edge weapons, and unstable photonic relics. Entire sections of the station are warded with hexagrammic null-fields to contain hostile resonances. Only Archmagos-level clearance grants entry to the deeper vault layers.

Heliologion 5-Theta

A sprawling optical observatorium and hololith analysis spire, where the Light of Sollex studies weaponized wavelengths, bending-light technologies, and illuminant cloaking fields. Multiple test ranges simulate environments across the Imperium, including Protasia and Skartha’s Wound.

Red Ascension Array

An ancient cruciform-shaped structure used for the calibration of spaceborne las batteries and long-range planetary excision weapons. The array’s central pylon is rumored to house a auto-logis targetting matrix— cogitation engine of past era.

The Cathexis Vault

A sealed data-sanctum orbiting at a higher altitude, containing STC fragment matrices, weapon pattern algorithms, and banned experimental treatises. It is said that no vox-echo can escape the Vault, and only the most devoted Tech-Priests, their tongues ritually removed and replaced with dataspikes, may serve within.