Dark Heresy: A Life in Seven Parts
This page is for the PbP game, "A life in seven parts", run by me and played by eudaimonSteve. It is currently under construction. -Mr Adventurer
Contents
The Character
Gunpoint
Gunpoint is a hive world in the Calixis Sector, in the Hazeroth sub. It is a small world of unstable rocky geology that nonetheless houses rare and valuable minerals, and with two hives: Hive Vanguard, an Imperial hive; and Hive Sanctus Obscuro MCCVIX, a hive founded by the Adeptus Mechanicus.
History
According to the tech-priests stationed on Gunpoint, the planet is rightfully a forge world under the sole jurisdiction of the Mechanicus. According to the Planetary Governor Lucien Wrestus, the world belongs to him as an Imperial world proper. He claims that records show that the world was settled by the Hive Vanguard builders before the Mechanicus assembled their outpost; the Adeptus state the opposite, that they had claimed the planet before the Imperial citizen settlers arrived.
The Administratum, perhaps wisely, has yet to return a ruling.
It is thought that the contention of ownership is a result, in part, of the fact that the two authorities settled the planet and the sprawls grew with little to no interaction for thousands of years, into the hives they are now, until they ran out of space on the planet to claim for themselves and competition for natural resources made conflict inevitable.
Settlements
Because the majority of Gunpoint's surface is unstable and even fragile rock formations, there are only two major settlements, each placed on the only known stable points on the planet's crust: the two hives, Vanguard and Sanctus Obscuro, on points at opposite poles. Hive Sanctus Obscuro dominates the southern hemisphere, while the Imperial spires of Hive Vanguard lay claim to the northern hemisphere. Each hive is supported by a number of radial subhives, each in a position to make maximum use of the natural resources in the area - or at least, the natural resources that used to be in the area before they were exhausted: promethium pumps, metal mines, and harvest processors are the usual purpose of these radial spires.
There are no other settlements that are not built for industrial purpose; the nature of the unstable landscape makes them unwise. There are outposts, placed to oversee resource extraction or for military purposes, but these are small factory-like places built to withstand the frequent rock-quakes and spore-storms, whether through flexible, stilt-like legs upon which they stand or complete use of grav-repulsors or airbags to keep the settlement afloat.
There are rumours of exile settlements, people who have fled or escaped the hives to make their own way in the caverns that riddle the planet. The chance of such collections of people surviving any length of time is considered to be nil.
Hive Vanguard
Hive Vanguard on the north side of the planet soars up five miles into the sky, a black mass of structure that tapers as it goes, the upper spire well away from the thick, dank lower levels which are in turn beshadowed by the ring of nine subhives that sit radially around Hive Vanguard, each over a mile tall in its own right, and each connected to their looming parent by thick arterials pumping transports and power back and forth.
Look more closely at the lower levels, and you can see the densely-packed Imperial architecture that has grown up over a thousand years, gargoyles and lifter platforms and defense lasers littering the steeply-inclined surface. Behind these ferrocrete and plasteel walls teem untold millions of inhabitants, all of them packed away in thousands of dense hab-blocks each consisting of hundreds of individual hab-units stacked atop one another and looking out into the narrow streets that the neighbouring blocks also look out into, and which feed the inhabitants to the tramlines and mass transport trains.
Low in the hive city is Subsector T, which holds the workers for Factorum Level Theta, which produces the all-important Component Theta-436-T. The families of technomats and assembly line workers that live in Subsector T are each assigned a single hab-unit. Each such unit is 2 metres from floor to ceiling and has one bunk room, two metres square, with two sets of bunks; and one living room, with a total area of twenty-one square metres and including a one-square-metre shower pod and a food preparation area as well as a table and four chairs (unfixed). If you are lucky and your unit is on an outer edge of your block, you will have a window onto the street.
In Hab-block 9467-Green, there is one such hab-unit. It has four listed occupants: Frastus and Ethina Jakes, and their offspring Lazarus and Zee Jakes. The Jakes family are lucky - their unit not only has a window, but it also is on the very top level of Block 9467-Green, so that they have nobody living directly above them.
Life in the hive city
In the lower city, where Lazarus has lived and worked all his life, life is perpetually cramped and crowded and loud. Light is provided by chains of luminen glow-globes that dot the ceilings, brightening and dimming in 12-hour cycles to simulate the passage of a sun that the workers have never seen.
This low in the hive city, it not very rarely that the occasional gang brawl, sump monster, or Obscurus-funded insurrection comes up from the sump. Due in part to the ongoing cold war between the two hives, there is a cultural expectancy that every resident will arm themselves in case of sudden attack on the hive's resources. In practice this means pistols; anyone seen walking around with a longarm will be viewed with extreme suspicion and fear, and besides, it would get in the way of your work.
Hive Sanctus Obscuro MCCVIX
Often simply referred to by Vanguardians as "Hive Obscuro" or just "Obscuro", or even "Twelve-fourteen" after the numerals. More to come!
Politics
The two governing authorities on Gunpoint - the Adeptus Mechanicus and the Imperial Palace - are at a very uneasy standoff. Despite numerous attempts, neither can conclusively prove their right to rule the planet. However, they have both reached the limits of expansion: Gunpoint is small, and though it is seemingly endlessly rich in the rare minerals and ores which are the main export the two hemispheres are wholly under one or another authority's claim.
The tech-priests, as usual, are aloof and difficult to approach; while Governor Wrestus displays all the tenacity of a true servant of the Emperor. Neither side will budge.
And yet the competition goes on. A cold war often simmers over into internicine conflict along the equatorial borders, and sometimes raids are conducted deeper into foreign territory, or even insurgencies in the great hives themselves - whether by infiltrated agents, or carefully-manipulated elements of the native populace.
Elements of technology seep over from Obscuro, just as - it is rumoured - the Mechanicus occasionally gain insight into production methods from the industrious Vanguardians.
Geography
The whole of Gunpoint is a rocky mass, pitted and completely riddled with caverns both natural and the result of abandoned or completed mining operations. The unusual geology forms into bleak landscapes peppered with such excavations.
Mined ores and compounds are the primary export of both hives, and these naturally-ocurring strange minerals also give rise to the dominant flora and fauna of the planet: a multitude of different lichen and mosses, some useful, some instantly lethal, and the lifeforms that have evolved symbiotically with them.
Huge fields of nutri-lichen grow over geothermic hotspots, tended and farmed by gigantic crawler-harvesters. These fields feed the people of Gunpoint after they are collected and refined and, if you are rich enough, flavoured.
Links
IC Thread
OOC thread
Offical Dark Heresy Page - The Calixis Sector
For some information on hives, try the resources found on Necromunda at this GW page
