Ravacene

You wanna know who's in charge, sir? You see that? Yeah, the little guy with all the legs crawling over your shoe. He's in charge. He's the only one knows what the hell he's doing, anyway. –Specialist Vynes, 11th Ornsworld Regiment

Ravacene is a volcanic Jungle World within the Jericho Reach's Canis Salient. Contested by the Imperium and from the T'au Empire's Kroot forces.

For the Astra Militarum, few assignments are less welcomed than a posting to Ravacene. The ash-choked forests are said to have given the Greyhell Front its name, and the Imperial Guard battling to wipe out the Kroot on this world fight a bleak, horrific battle against the planet and their alien foes alike.

Ravacene's ecology is based on the volcanoes covering its single planet-wide continent. The toxic ash spewed by these volcanoes feeds the dense black-grey jungles covering its plains and valleys.

The jungles are resistant to the most enthusiastic attempts to burn or defoliate them, and provide the perfect environment for the Kroot to fight a fluid war based on ambush and misdirection.

Ravacene chews through Imperial Guard regiments at an appalling rate. Only Death World veteran regiments can expect to last more than a few weeks before being withdrawn.

Worst of all is the psychological effect of fighting through its dense jungles, expecting Kroot ambushers behind every tree or fending off the illnesses that result from the ash-choked toxic atmosphere. Even with respirators and chem-suits, every soldier eventually suffers from the corrosive and poisonous air.

Imperial Guard objectives on Ravacene are simple. Ravacene is ideally placed to act as a staging post for a push into T'au space, and its several moonlets would make ideal orbital dockyards. Before the planet can be used in this way, the Kroot must be exterminated.

The dense jungles mean this task must be carried out on the ground, one Kroot at a time, no matter how many Guardsmen it takes. For their part, the Kroot have evolved to match the ash jungles of Ravacene.