Rak'Gol

The Rak'Gol are a savage, reptilian xenos species that emerged from the uncharted dark beyond the Koronus Expanse, known to human explorers only as a plague of raiders that fall upon the void without warning or reason. Tall, multi-limbed, and armoured in scaled hide, they mutilate their own bodies with crude bionic implants and jagged augmetics, seeming to worship pain and machinery in equal measure.

Rak'Gol war-bands descend upon settlements and voidships in howling frenzies, butchering every living thing and dragging away the wreckage for purposes no human has divined. They wield unstable radioactive weaponry that sickens their own kind as readily as their prey, and their ships are ramshackle horrors of scavenged metal and alien design. No diplomat has ever parleyed with them; no captive has ever been taken alive to explain their hunending rage.

What drives the Rak'Gol remains an utter mystery. Some Rogue Traders believe them a devolved remnant of a once-greater civilization, others a fresh horror boiling up from the galactic rim. Their reaches lie far from the light of the Astronomican, a frontier of dread where the Imperium's writ means nothing. For the void-farers of the Expanse, the Rak'Gol are simply death given scales and claws: a reason to keep the guns primed and the warp-drives ready.