Ice, Ice, Baby
Hrothgar is a nearly uninhabited system on the northeast rim of human space. It consists of a white dwarf star, three planets, and an asteroid belt. The first two planets are rocky and Earth-sized, and the third is a gas giant. The system is not claimed by any Imperial House.
Geography[]
Hrothgar I is very close to the star and tidally locked to it, so the near face is hot enough to boil iron and the dark side is cold enough to be partially covered by lakes of liquid nitrogen. The constant belt of storms along the terminator line render the only parts of the planet temparate enough for theoretical settlement utterly impractical due to extreme weather conditions.
Hrothgar II is significantly colder than Earth, and although a local form of algal life has put enough oxygen into the air to allow human settlement, those same algae secrete chemicals toxic to human life that suffuse most of the ice that nearly covers the planet's surface. A few hundred thousand people once lived in settlements along the equator, mostly domed colonies focused on mining and chemical processing. Since the Ascension War and the dismantling of the jumpgate network, however, the settlements were abandoned due to insufficient shipping resources to keep them supplied or export their output. A small Imperial Army garrison protects command facilities for the orbital defenses and the extensive network of listening devices and sensor platforms in the outer system and asteroid belt, manned mostly to prevent the system being used as a haven for pirates and smugglers, or as a staging ground for K'Nes operations penetrating Imperial space.
Hrothgar III is a gas giant, but the planet itself is prone to violent eruptive storms that make cloud farming impractical, and none of its moons are suitable for significant settlement. It and the nearby asteroid belt are used as live-fire exercise and training areas by the Imperial Navy and nearby House System Defense Forces, much as they were for the Earth Fleet in Pre-Imperial days.
History[]
Under the Earth Federation, Hrothgar's position near the edge of the Vampire-controlled Kingdom of Enoch meant that its substantial asteroid belt was heavly seeded with sensor drones and mine fields, and Earth Fleet ships frequently performed active patrols to watch for infiltration missions by Enochian ships. On one such patrol in 2242, the EFS Stornoway, under the command of Erich Von Shrakenberg on its shakedown cruise, encountered and destroyed the Enochian Navy heavy cruiser HMS Lilith.
In the early days of the Third Civil War of 2243, Hrothgar was briefly seized by Enoch, before being evicted by the forces of the Christian Federation a month later. It remained in Christian Federation hands until late in the war, when it was liberated by forces loyal to new Grand Council Chairman Arthur Clarke.
Following the Caal Invasion, it was one of the worlds briefly under the control of the Ministry of Public Safety, before the Ministry was re-absorbed by the Federation. During the Ascension War, Hrothgar was not one of the worlds with a major pro-Imperial uprising during the Red Spring, which is probably part of the reason it recieved a low priority for limited shipping resources once the Jumpgate network was shut down after the war. With no good way to bring in food for the civilian populace, or to export the chemicals they produced, the colony was abandoned and the starving civilians evacuated to other systems for resettlement elsewhere, mostly onto worlds on the other end of Human space such as Jennifer's Star which were nearly vacant after the Vin Shriak and Caal Invasions went through.
As a purely military system, there is no Noble House assigned to govern the system, and it is not even a fiefdom of one of the minor nobles within House Dane, instead being listed as a world reserved for eventual reclamation and settlement at some undefined time in the future, at which time a newly-created House will likely be granted fief over the system.
Behind the Scenes[]
Hrothgar was a legendary Danish King of the 6th century, whose lands were terrorized by the monster Grendel in the old epic poem Beowulf. Our planet was named for him not so much out of the players' great love for the poem, but because at the time we were eagerly looking forward to the supposedly-imminent release of a big-budget science fiction movie version of the story starring Arnold Schwarzenegger. Of course, that movie was never filmed, instead being developed into this piece of crap. Oh well, at least we got a cool name for an ice planet out of it.