Adeptus Administratum

•  You gain +5 Intelligence and +5 to either Perception, Willpower, or Fellowship.
• You have 5 Advancements to spend on Dexterity (AG), Linguistics (INT), Logic (INT), Lore (INT), Medicae (INT), and Navigation (INT).
• You gain +1 Influence with the Administratum and a Contact.
  
• You gain the Data Delver Talent.
• You gain a set of Robes, a Dataslate, a Writing Kit, 800 Askels.
• You gain your choice of an Auto Quill, a set of Chirurgeon’s Tools, a Pict Recorder, or a Vox-Caster.

Duties

You can choose one of the following duties to quickly create your character. Additionally, you have +1 Influence with the Administratum, a Contact in a Faction of your choice, the Data Delver Talent, a set of Robes, a Dataslate, a Writing Kit, and 800 Askels.

Clerk

Your duty is to preserve the data-vaults and archives of the Administratum, maintaining a working knowledge of huge amounts of information and applying it when required.

• Characteristics: +5 Intelligence, +5 Fellowship
• Skill Advances: Dexterity (1), Linguistics (1), Lore (2), Navigation (1)
• Equipment: A Pict Recorder

Officio Medicae

Your duty is to ensure an acceptable baseline of health in the Imperial populace, ensuring that Medicae are stocked and patients seen, in order to keep up productivity.

• Characteristics: +5 Intelligence, +5 Perception
• Skill Advances: Dexterity (1), Logic (1), Lore (1), Medicae (2)
• Equipment: A set of Chirurgeon’s Tools

Scrivener

Your duty is to correctly and meticulously record the ceaseless stream of data that the Administraum uses to manage the titanic bureaucracy of the Imperium.

• Characteristics: +5 Intelligence, +5 Willpower
• Skill Advances: Dexterity (1), Linguistics (2), Lore (2)
• Equipment: An Auto Quill
  

The Adeptus Administratum, as the name implies, administers the operation of the Imperium. The Imperium survives on a system of tithes, where each world gives men and resources to the Emperor for the protection of all Mankind. The Administratum decides how to use the tithed goods, whether it is to raise an army, evacuate a world, or eradicate a xenos species, all for the betterment of the Imperium. So closely are the workings of the Administratum woven into the fabric of the Imperium that none can escape its attention, and every world has hundreds, if not thousands, of officials and adepts devoted to overseeing its obligations. In many ways, the Imperium is the Administratum, and more than the stern faces of Astra Milites or the zealous gaze of Ecclesiarchy clerics, it represents the hand of the Emperor and His control over all men throughout the galaxy.

The Administratum observes a rigid hierarchy within its ranks to carry out endless tasks. Some adepts are charged with record-keeping, living out their lives in huge data tombs. Here they might spend their days cataloguing endless new texts, carefully recording everything so that after they are dead, another can catalogue their catalogues, and so on in an eternal cycle. Some may do the reverse, burning records deemed heretical or no longer in compliance with the Imperial truth. Most Administratum adepts spend their time sifting through reams of information or completing endless reports. They pass these on to other adepts, all in small ways contributing to the Administratum’s greater—but still greatly limited—understanding of the Imperium and its status. This is still only a poor glimpse of factual reality, and usually so out of date that it is worthless for practical use. Some lords within the Administratum are acutely aware of this, but still work on as they cannot imagine any other method to maintaining the Imperium. Many others blindly operate the same way, blissfully ignorant ofthe futility of their work.

Because the Administratum works on all levels of Imperial society, and processes such enormous quantities of information, those within its ranks can sometimes gain understanding of the workings of the Imperium unlike any other. However, this can be as incorrect or antiquated as the data they process. Often possessing talents unknown to others, such as the knowledge of arcane languages, data cyphers, and numerical manipulations, an Administratum adept can detect meaning where others only see random scribblings or base nonsense. This is due in part to the slow decay of knowledge into rote learning on many Imperial worlds, but it is also due to the Administratum’s secretive nature. It jealously guards its holdings, and uses specialised codes, insular lexicons, and technical cant. An Administratum adept is the key to unlocking this secret world of records and information, and bringing its considerable might to bear can be vital to finding a single citizen among millions, clearing important cargo through quarantine, unravelling a strange local weather pattern, or performing any one of a thousand other tasks.

Members of the Adeptus Administratum can come from any world or station. A certain degree of intelligence is desired, though a devotion to assigned tasks and an obsession with their completion is more essential. Advancement is, of course, only as fast as the Administratum itself; those who start by merely laying out parchment next to autoquills might one day have their descendants carry the completed scrolls away for filing. Even lesser worlds can have many scores of Administratum officials to oversee them, while larger worlds might have entire cities of scribes and adepts working tirelessly to review its government and maintain its tithes. Sometimes this might be done locally via Administratum datavaults maintained within planetary capitals, while some planets are so remote or uncivilised that only a scant few scribes labour in small, forgotten sector-level offices to watch over the far-distant world.

The most common kind of Adeptus Administratum character is the adept or scribe who has lived out his life surrounded by records, toiling in a data store or as part of the apparatus of governance and only connected to the outside world by the reports he receives and processes. They can develop an almost preternatural relationship with data, able to sift through endless piles of information and find key words, phrases, and lines, which they can then weave together into in a coherent picture often invisible to others. Exceptional adepts like this know how the Imperium functions on a level unknown to even its sector and system lords, and are able to work their way into the great mechanisms of the Administratum to turn the wheels in their favour.

Less common, but also possible, are those who have fallen, discontent with their lot, who tried to enrich themselves or gain illicit power over local dominions. Even disgraced Administratum workers can have their uses, though, and can find new purpose and service elsewhere.