WH40K: Hive Worlder

Name: Hive Worlder
Dice: 12D
Dexterity: 2D / 4D
Knowledge: 2D / 4D+1
Mechanical: 2D / 4D
Perception: 2D / 4D+1
Strength: 1D+2 / 3D+2
Technical: 2D / 4D

Move: 9 / 11
Size: 1.55 - 1.8 m
Weight: 40 - 80 kg

Special Abilities:

• Accustomed to Crowds: Hivers grow up surrounded by immense herds of humanity. They are used to weaving through even the densest mob with ease.

• Benefit: Crowds do not count as Difficult Terrain for hivers, and when Running or Charging through a dense crowd, hivers take no penalty to the Test to keep their feet.

• Caves of Steel: To a hiver, surrounded at all times by metal, machinery and industry, the arcane mysteries of technology are not so strange.
• Hivebound: Hivers seldom endure the horrors of the open sky or the indignity of the great outdoors.

• Penalty: Hivers take a -1D penalty to all Survival Tests, and while out of a “proper hab” (e.g. places without manufactured goods, solid ceilings and electrical power) the hiver takes a –2 penalty to all Knowledge and Technical Tests.

• Wary: Hivers are constantly alert for the first hint of trouble, be it a gang shoot-out, hab riot, or hivequake.

• Benefit: All hivers gain a +1 bonus to Initiative rolls.

Description: “The great hives are not like other worlds in the Imperium, and you are not like the common man. Technology has surrounded you all your life, and you find its rarity elsewhere bemusing. You are an adventurer, an opportunist—more inquisitive than your fellows and certainly quicker on the draw!”

Hive worlds are home to countless teeming millions. The population is so dense that frequently the entire surface of the world is covered with enormous cities stretching from horizon to horizon. Many hivers labour in thankless obscurity, manning huge factories that churn out endless streams of weapons, chemicals or other vital goods. Others run with violent gangs in the dark of the underhives, living off their wits, guts and firepower.

Hive worlds are vital to the welfare of the Imperium. They are industrial worlds, producing munitions for the Emperor’s armies in vast factories, mining valuable minerals and refining fuel for the Imperial fleet.

These planets are usually barren and hostile with the much of the hive world’s surface inhospitable, sometimes deadly to human life after centuries of pollution. The hives themselves are astonishingly large—massive urban conglomerations, spires of adamantium and rockcrete that can cover continents and stretch for miles into the sky. Each hive houses millions, even billions, of Imperial citizens, and is a nation in its own right, with noble houses ruling mini-empires, trading and sometimes fighting with other hives.

Palls of thick, acrid smoke cling to the lower portions of the hives below the upper sections—those gleaming spires that rise above the cloud cover. Only the wealthy can afford to live in the upper sections of a hive, and the working classes never see the light of the sun. Within the spires reside the noble houses—decadent, wealthy members of great Imperial families, or the richest merchant overlords. Spires contain broad, airy spaces and splendours unimaginable to those who dwell in the darkness below.

Below the spires, heavy gateways and security patrols regulate passage between the upper levels and the rest of the hive. Beyond this point lies the vast bulk of the working hive—the hive-city. The populations are often so large as to be unmanageable, and the hives rely on constant recycling and imports to provide food and basic materials for the teeming masses. For most people, life in the hives is tough. Conditions are squalid and unsanitary. The very air breathed by the countless hivers is recycled from the spire above and pumped through the rest, growing ever more bitter and poisonous the further down it filters. Even the water is distilled from the discharge of the upper hive, and food is factory produced, sometimes algae-based or spun from corpse starch.

Pollution and overcrowding are the least of the hivers’ worries, as gang violence and outright anarchy is part of everyday life, particularly in the lower levels. Most hivers know only their own hive-city and do not leave it during their lifetime. They never see the sky or set foot on the surface of their own planet. Their life is one of servitude in a manufactorum, coupled with a struggle for survival in the increasingly crime ridden hab-levels. Those few that do manage to leave the hives are often of a nervous disposition, and suffer terribly from agoraphobia.

Beneath the hive-city is a lawless frontier known as the underhive. These underhives are creations of catastrophe—explosions, water pollution, power failure and collapsing access tunnels are common occurrences in the lowest parts of the hive-cities. Sometimes the damage is repaired, but more often than not the appeals of the refugees fall on deaf ears and the underhive expands. In this area, normal habitation is impossible, but the underhive still serves as a refuge for hive scum, outlaws and the mentally unstable, though in some rare instances entire sub cultures manage to develop and subsist in this inhospitable realm. It is a region outside the formal social structure of the hive, though some people are forced to live there as entire levels are accidentally cut off from the hive-city. Heavily barricaded settlements form the only havens of order in the underhive, though even here the law of the gun is the only recognised authority, and those who go unarmed are rare.

Underhives are frontiers in more ways than one, and are often seen as a necessary evil. They separate the hive-city from the hive bottom—a desolate, polluted waste, long since abandoned, and partially flooded by centuries of effluence and industrial waste. In the hive bottom, the only living things are the most monstrous mutants. Sometimes these foul creatures find their way into the underhive, and in a hive-city, parents scare their children with stories of sump spawn and plague zombies. Minor mutation is common in the underhive and is often overlooked by the desperadoes who reside there. However, sometimes fanatical cults, such as the Redemptionists, launch one of their crusades into the underhive to cleanse it of mutants. Some are never seen again.

Source:

• Warhammer 40,000 Wiki: Hive World
• Dark Heresy Core Rulebook (pages 16-17)
• thedemonapostle