So my group is on a former hive world, where cities carved from the hearts of mountains were abandoned centuries ago for the open plains. They have managed to get inside one of these forgotten hives, but I am at a loss to describe it. I am familiar with hives presented in the books and in Necromunda, but those are all inhabited and thus not real conducive to exploration.

Obviously, it hasn't seen people in a long time - and there needs to be some event to have forced people out in the first place. How would you go about having them explore such a place? What would they see, where could they go?

for lack of a better word, you have a dungeon crawl. Think of it like one,

What forced the people out? A "Chem or Bio Mistake"??

I know there was a free module that followed Edge of Darkness, The Price of Knowledge that has the PC going to an abandoned Hive looking for a noble tomb.

That module and the Module on the Space Hulk would provide you with some challenges for the PC to overcome.

I would picture it as an Imperial version of the Mines of Moria from Fellowship of the Ring : largely intact, but crusted with dust/cobwebs/filth, eerily silent and pitch dark. Also, the ruins if New York from the old movie Beneath the Planet of the Apes might provide some good visual inspiration.

As for why it was abandoned: plague! Everyone who could get out, did; the rest were sealed inside when the Lord Sector ordered the hive to be quarantined for 100 years for the plague to run its course. That as centuries ago, and the population is long-since dead, but the hive has become such a symbol of legendary dread to the locals that no-one has tried to repopulate it...

Excellent recommendations for the flavor and feel of the place, which I am going to mix with a crumbling baroque sort of description.

I am debating whether or not a "dungeon crawl" or a limited "free roam" experience is better - on one hand, a crawl would be easier to run, but my group doesn't respond well to endless hallways and rooms, with only a few ways to proceed. Letting them have a free run of the first few levels (there was a ground door) would leave the agency up to them, but make things vastly more difficult for me.

Either way I will have to populate rooms and describe the general layout of the areas they are in, which won't be easy in such mind-boggling scale.

I think there is a description of Hive Tenebra, the abandoned hive that is on Scintilla, in the IH under the Journey of the Hives. I know Hive Tenebra is part of the Journey of the Hives, just not sure if there is an actual in depth description of the abandoned hive.

~ alemander

I couldn't find anything about Hive Tenebra, but Edge of Darkness proved to be an excellent resource for setting the right sort of mood. I have a lot of interesting locations described, I am interested to see how everyone takes an "exploration" session over one based around combat or social hi jinks.

How do you like to handle expansive settings to explore? I have the locations and the travels in-between described, but not necessarily how to connect each location without making them seem too close together.