Greetings loyal citizens and welcome to this month's Chapter Approved. This issue sees Scrivener Hoare bringing us details of a new alien force selling their mercenary services across the warzones of the galaxy. Adept Hoare is currently under observation by the Inquisitors of the Ordo Xenos for his traffic with such creatures.

The Kroot are expert jungle-fighters and trackers, who can be found fighting as mercenaries across the Ultima Segmentum and beyond. The majority of Kroot warriors fight as mercenaries in the armies of the Tau. Their integration into the Tau empire requires them to provide troops to the Tau military, and furthermore attempts to prohibit them from fighting alongside the armies of other races.

Kroot evolution depends on their absorbing the genetic traits of other races, selectively inheriting the most desirable. They do this through eating specific prey animals to ensure that the next generation take on certain characteristics of that animal. Unfortunately, the Tau insistence that the Kroot fight exclusively for them would lead to a disastrous stagnation, as they have absorbed the traits of most of the creatures from within the Tau region. To collect as wide a range of characteristics as possible, they secretly despatch entire armies of mercenaries to fight alongside other races in order to expose themselves to creatures and environments not found in Tau space.

The result is that each of these mercenary bands develops separately to the mainstream of Kroot society. When they periodically return to the Kroot home world of Pech, they bring with them a wealth of new traits to be absorbed by the race at large. These itinerant bands often appear radically different from the standard Kroot, having absorbed all manner of outlandish genetic data.

Kroot society is based on the kindred, and each mercenary army mirrors this in its organisation. The kindred fulfils the battlefield role of a squad, but represents something far more fundamental. A kindred is an extended family group, who develop together under the direction of the Shaper; an individual who is able to guide the group down a particular evolutionary path by determining their diet.

Senior Shapers form councils, whose role is to oversee a group of kindreds, thus insuring a level of homogeneity within the species. An individual known as the Master Shaper, who sits at the top of this pyramid-shaped organisation and guides it in all matters, leads each council. Kroot mercenary armies are led by Master Shapers who seek the infinite variety of the galaxy, leading their kindreds into every warzone imaginable in an effort to absorb the abilities of the lifeforms occupying those war-torn areas.