My GM is starting a new Dark Heresy campaign and I have taken it upon myself to make the most awesome terrain possible for him to use. For the most part we will be adventuring in HIve Sibellus (sp?) on Scintilla. The problem is, when I flipped through the core book (the only one I have) I found very little in the way of hive architecture. The only two motifs I can find are "skulls" and "tall". So my question: what does a hive world look like?
Hive World Architecture
I suggest checking out the industrial terrain on Necromundicon . It looks phenomenal, can inspire a lot of great work, and was built with 40K in mind.
Go watch Bladerunner. The industrial fly over combined with the mega city from Judge Dredd should give you a very good idea of what hive worlds look and feel like. Just add "skulls" and "tall".
These two sites should bring you all the inspiration you need, along with pictures to use in your games:
thenonist.com/index.php/thenonist/permalink/hugh_ferriss_delineator_of_gotham/
Those are all very helpful, thank you!
Necromunda is a pretty old tabletop game from GW. It takes place in the lower and shadier places of the hive Necromunda. They have rulebooks and some more resources free to download here: www.games-workshop.com/gws/content/article.jsp The main rulebook in particular can give you some inspiration as to what life in the underhive can be like, not many good pictures or drawings in these books though.
For further inspiration I would rekommend checking out the modelling and painting boards on dakkadakka.com That is also a good place to look for modelling tips.
Well, as architecture goes, there are some scattered references to how the hives are constructed and their outstanding features. Some things are drawn from conjecture regarding the two major hives:
Tarsus: Something of a "reverse" hive, the lower and deeper in one goes, the more affluent the populace. It is constructed from large buildings being constructed on or around massive rods which rise up out of the ground in a massive grid covering a portion of the inhospitable scorching desert which surrounds it. It contains the main spaceport of Scintilla seeing ships launch to and from it to the geo-synchronous station in orbit above the hive.
It's outer skin is crawling with the poorest of the poor who burn in the unforgiving sun and are pocked with radiation burns. The outer areas of the hive are like an oven but the further in and downwards one goes the cooler the hive gets until you reach the nobles deep olds which are kept at freezing temperatures with magnificent ice sculpture just so each noble house can prove how powerful they are by living in the most frigid of conditions even in such a blistering dessert.
The Taurseans are a very religious lot and a massive number of ossuaries are constructed here with bits and pieces of saints bones worked into them. however, given their habit of excarnation of the dead, who's to say really who's bone fragments are worked into a lot of the alter pieces they construct. Alters and ossuaries would dot most surfaces in the hive and be seen in most all hab-holes as would, I imagine, a copious amount of ones ancestors bones. They really seem to like bone.
The hive is very vertical and most movement through it will be climbing stairs and ladders to new highs or descending to new depths. There is very little opportunity to move horizontally.
In summery, it's grid like with many spires built up around massive rods that rise high into the air and deep down into the hard dessert crust. The outside it hotter then blazes and probably a bit scorched while the interior is just hot. It would be very dry and dusty, but with a lot of "tourists" and visiting mercantile dignitaries tanks to it's position as primary spaceport.
Sebillus: Ma massive sprawling hive, it covers about as much land as all of Europe dose. It is a stone hive constructed primarily from indigenous stones either laid by and or turned into rockcreate. The hive is an organic hive, meaning it grew up and out with no central plan or intent, just urban sprawl gone mad. The bulk of it is actually the cast-offs and waist of the noble houses which sit at the top of the spyre. As the hive is continually crushed under it's own weight, the nobles keep building their palaces up to avoid the slow sink. This results in mid-hivers living in the once grand noble palaces turning their ballrooms into manufactoria, their dinning halls into hab-blocks, and even carving holes for themselves into the fallen statuary. The entire look of the midhive is that of fallen grace and broken grandeur. Boulevards are halls and streets are just paths that wind on broken tile floors through and around long fallen statues of epic proportions, columns, and masonry. As one goes down into the lower hive, the statues left behind are almost indistinguishable from the buildings, walls, and rough structures built buy the low-hivers.
Everyone collects tings in Sebillus. This descends from the nobles love and pride they take in their hive. They show this love and pride by collecting exquisite antiques and treasures from is past, each house hosting massive museums of Sebillus' past to sow their status and effluence. The common citizens on the mid and low hive ape the nobles as all peasants are want to do in a shabby show of an ill-conceived attempt to better themselves. They collect odd tings, but only within their means. This leads to a very pack-rat like mentality with the commoners as they horrid massive collections of bent and broken spoons, chipped and cracked glassware, left shoes of supposed hive-heroes, and massive button collections.
The Sebillions also have a tradition of preserving their dead for display as if their ancestors were yet another thing one could collect to show the history of the hive. Needless to say, there would be a lot of corpses about in corners and watching over the living in varying conditions from the horridly and sometimes laughably botched and nightmare inducing taxidermy attempts of the low-hivers to the grand vistas of a noble houses ancestry that stretches back for over 100 generations in massive columns that one must pass before being able to approach and petition the house.
In summery: lots of intricate stonework. Everything found was once something more grand but has been cannibalized and repurposed. Massive collections of odd junk anywhere and everywhere it can fit. Cluttered boulevard-halls that involve much climbing and clambering over obstacles. Statuary, both standing and fallen everywhere and then built on top of and through.
I actually have a bit of a gripe over the way Sibellus is portrayed in Dark Heresy art: the write up for the hive (as set out above) was intriguing: a vast, sprawl of stone spreading out into the sea. Plus that great picture of the hive with the Tyrant Star appearing aobve it in the DH Core Book.
But in Purge the Unclean it was protrayed as just another Necromunda Spire: a huge traffic cone shaped single building tens of miles high.
Now I don't think all Imperial Hive Cities should look the same. Just because Necromundan Hives look like that, why should Hive Sibellus? The background argues that hive worlds go through a lifecycle whereby cities eventually have to become enclosed to keep the inhabitants alive in light of massive external pollution. OK, fair enough, but why do they all have to look the same?
Good 40k writers don't portray Hive cities in identical terms: Ian Watson talked about how Stalinvast's Hives resembled vast coral formations, not witches' hats. So why do 40k artists just reach for Necromunda and parrot out another Hive Spire when portraying a hive city?
I'm not saying that there's anything wrong with the Spire Hive concept per se , but I'd love to see visual representations of some other, innovative and interesting hive cities.
One reason is that it's the easiest way to get the art approved by GW's licensing department. Invention takes time that you often don't have when you're up against deadlines.
(Speaking as an artist who's been through the process with GW, though I've not done anything for FFG. Perhaps their process is different.)
Stirring stuff, Reason, but again, if someone were to illustrate your fine prose, there's a 94.7% chance it would have a Spire Hive in the Background. (Bearing in mind that 72.6% of statistics are made up on the spot...)
I've always loved Reasons interpretation and it had influenced my descriptions of the hive a lot. However, in my view of it, Sebillus would have spires... lots and lots of spires like the peaks of a long running mountain range, each spire housing one of the more important noble families with lesser houses clinging to them, their effluent waist tumbling down the sides into the massive jumbled, polluted, mutant infested valleys of the slump-zones.
As for the whole Necromundian hive thing, I think what happens a lot is art depicting the necromundian styled hive isn't new art, it's some of that recycled art that appears in most GW type books which might have originally been produced for necromunda or something close.
Very few hives in Calixis would be like necromunda. Hell, from what i gather, most of the hives in Calixis aren't fully enclosed structures. The ones on Sebillus certainly aren't. Gunmettal and Sebillus might be the closest, but the air isn't poisonous (or as poisonous as elsewhere folks have to breath it anyway) so the upper reaches of those two hives very well could be open to let the nobles breath fresh and enjoy the sky. In Sebillus' case, the mid and lower hives are barred from the sky not because of a hive skin but just because of the palace tat was built on top of them. In the description of Tasus, which sits in the most inhospitable place on Scintilla, it mentions the mid-hivers being plagued by scorching sunbeams which sows that even tarsus isn't fully enclosed.
Solomon has some serious pollution problems and it's hives are just massive open urban sprawl. Even on Fenksworld, a hell-pit of a place, the hive of Nova Castilla is mentioned as having enclosed hab-blocks. Since it explicitly mentions the hab-blocks being enclosed, ten not everything in the hive is enclosed and it can be surmised that one might have to travel in the open (or semi-open, or kind of open) to get from one to another.
In the end, I think most depictions of hives is recycled from necromunda or art that came about durring that time with necromunda as the main thing to look at and consider. Getting new art into the books seems a lot harder then recycling old art.