[campaign] Stargrave Warhammer - Campaign Background - The Ragged Marches

This is my starting Stargrave Crew to play the Hope: Eternal campaign solo. 

Far beyond the Imperium’s reach, in the warp-shrouded Ragged Marches, a Lone Wolf, a fading priest, and a handful of desperate allies fight against the pirate cultists that ravage the sub-sector, for if they do not intervene, no one else will.

The Ragged Marches, a half-charted string of star systems trailing the eastern edge of the Segmentum Ultima, beyond the furthest stable Astronomican corridors. Warp storms regularly occlude the region from Imperial navigation, effectively placing it outside the Imperium’s stable grasp for centuries.

This is a place where:

• Communication is unreliable.
• Astropathic messages are swallowed.
• Rogue traders rule by their wits.
• Local cults rise and fall unseen.
• Scattered Imperials cling to survival rather than doctrine.

"A Lone Wolf needs neither a chapter nor a war to keep fighting." – Sigvir talking to Ergil

Sigvir Red-Hand – Lone Wolf Grey Hunter (SG: Biomorph Captain)

Sigvir bears the mark of a Lone Wolf: a Space Wolf who has lost his entire pack and seeks an honorable death in battle. White Shadow, his half-wild Fenrisian wolf, is his only close companion.

Sigvir’s saga had taken an unexpected turn decades ago: his entire pack was annihilated investigating void-cults operating beyond the light of the Imperium. He followed the trail off-sector, deep into the Ragged Marches, until warp storms sealed the region behind him. Extracting was no longer an option; the hunt had become a vigil...

• Loadout: combat armor, bolt pistol, power fist.
• Powers: Restructure Body, Regen, Adrenal Surge, Armoury, Quick-Step, Void Blade.
• Role-wise, I built him to be a melee anchor — essentially a lone wolf bruiser intended to wade into the fight.

Ergil the Hermit – Wolf Scout (SG: Commando soldier)

Ergil is a survivor of the same campaign in which Sigvir lost his pack. The two share an unspoken oath: to hunt the cult until its root is burned out.

While Sigvir embraced the Lone Wolf path, Ergil drifted into the long-shadowed life of a “Hermit Scout” – a patient tracker more comfortable in the underhive tunnels and feral moons of the Ragged Marches than aboard a Chapter vessel.

Ergil follows Sigvir out of loyalty and because there is no one else in the Marches who even remembers the original cult they fought.

White Shadow, a fenrisian wolf (SG: Guard Dog soldier)

Erogar, the Half-Saint – Ministorum Priest (SG: Mystic First-mate)

Erogar is a Ministorum priest who once served in legitimate frontier missions. Years of isolation and the decay of Imperial authority have worn him down to the point where he drifted towards the Ragged Marches...

Locals now call him the Half-Saint: a priest whose visions may be genuine or may be the product of a mind fraying from age, hunger, and psychic strain.

However – his fractured visions have recently aligned: He has seen glimpses “wolf-marked warrior” walking toward an imprisioned woman, freeing her. So when the local Rogue trader contacted the priest to give information to Sigvir, his arrival convinced him the vision is real.

He lacks the strength and surety he once had, but his psychic sensitivity – amplified by desperation – gives him genuine insight into the cult’s movements.

This makes him valuable, even if he is no longer stable.

• Powers: Dark Energy, Heal, Puppet Master, Suggestion, Energy Shield, Psionic Fire.
• He brings the supernatural toolkit and battlefield control.

Witch-hunter Grekka – Erogar's personal aide (SG: Burner Soldier)

Erogar's mute acolyte, Hunter Grekka, follows him with absolute devotion. Some say Grekka’s tongue was taken by the cult as punishment; others insist Erogar cut it out during a fevered vision. Neither confirms the truth.

Graff and the Enforcers – a Rogue Trader’s Hand

The Rogue Trader dynasty operating in the Ragged Marches – the Vorn Halectra Charter – maintains only a thin thread of authority in the region. Their reach is limited, their manpower stretched across multiple half-abandoned mining worlds and drifting trade stations. When Chella Rean, the dynasty’s embedded spy-master, vanished during an infiltration run on the cult known as the Waning Choir, the dynasty could not spare a full expeditionary force to retrieve her.

Instead, they dispatched a small but capable crew: Graff and his Enforcers.

• Graff, enforcer leader (SG: Sniper)
• Runner, Graff's cyber-mastiff (SG: Runner)
• Trooper, Chiseler, Hacker

Needleboat – Their Ship “Warp-Capable,” Barely

 

The Needleboat “glides” would be a generous term. It stutters between pre-mapped warp lanes like a stone skipping across black water. No navigator guides it, no astropath choir anchors it. Only Graff’s stolen charter-codes and the half-rusted cogitators keep it from vanishing into the storms for good.

The expedition operates from the smallest void-faring vessel that can still technically be called warp-capable: a stripped-down courier corvette known as a “Needleboat.”

These craft were never intended for sustained warp travel. They were originally designed for:

• Message-running between Rogue Trader advance stations,
• Short-range supply hops,
• Emergency medical extractions 
• Very rarely, single-use warp escapes through pre-charted apertures.

This is a stripped-down to bare essentials craft:

• No navigator.
• No astropath choir.
• No warp observation blister.
• Barely enough Gellar shielding to keep the worst of the empyrean at bay.

The only reason this Needleboat can jump at all is because the Vorn Halectra Charter once used it for mapping interior routes within the Ragged Marches — places where the warp is thin, predictable in short bursts, and threaded with ancient, half-forgotten waypoints.

These waypoints still exist, burned into cogitator slates and memory-cores.
They are the ship’s only lifeline.