Im a little confused on this. I know they have hive spires up into the heavens where the rich and nobles live, and I know there are various levels of habs, factories, underhive etc.

What I do not get is how.

I am having problems grasping how this works with roads, travelling between the spires etc? Anyone got any ideas? I have read all Eisenhorn, Ravenor, and a few of the Dark heresy books, but still no real idea how.

My players are bugging me as to how they travel between places that are pretty high up the hive and I am unsure what to tell them. If the hive city was literally one level on top of another, past the first two or three levels there would be no sunlight at all, apart from on the outer edges, but no background information I have ever read has suggested that.

Are hives mostly at the ground level, but all the high rise buildings are for work, or for living, like modern day but more over the top?

In my opinion the movie "Blade Runner" showns good how a Hiveworld could look like.

Hives like Necromunda are massive termite mounds of humanity. Most levels do not have direct sunlight- thats what artificial lighting if for. Travel between different levels is done by huge elevators or stairs. The connections between the Underhive to mid hive are well guarded to keep the scum in their place and the same between the mid hive and Noble spires.

I work in a skyscraper, so its not too hard to imagine what a Hive would look like- each floor has its own company, identity, paintwork and logos. The highest levels are restricted to special passes or seperate elevators and only the staff, security and post room dwell in the utilitarian, sunlightless corridors beneath us.

SJE

So each floor, or collection of floors would be a level?

I guess that makes sense of a kind, but surely this would mean factories, especially with heavy machinery, would be logically down at the bottom, as not to put unrealistic weight on the lower sections.

I am thinking it would look like a typical cyber punk-esq city, but with even more emphasis on being higher up?

Any idea how roads or travel between the blocks higher up the hive stack would go? Or would they simply not exist?

The classic image for an Imperial hive looks like this:-

See one in a movie at

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=gZBplpT3Iy4

Yeah, thats kind of what the pictures usually look like. I am happy with the external but surely something like 99% of the hive never sees daylight, wont have ease of travel etc.

Thats my biggest problems at the moment. If a hive city is 100 miles in diameter, how on earth do acolytes move about it without roads to cross the city?

You can have roads - I rather like the idea of roads spiraling up the hive like a helix.

Or imagine the whole thing as an enormous multi-story car park with cities built on each level.

Shades of Minas Tirth:-

Otherwise, enormous elevators like a cross channel ferry that goes up and down. Or cable cars running on wire criss-crossing the hive. Vertical Trains. Any kind of baroque and impractical method of changing elevation is fair game.

Crimsonsphinx said:

Logically, that make sense.

Except you don't build a hive logically. It just happens, growing over centuries, even millennia. It's urban sprawl taken to extremes. Imagine several dozen towns and small cities, dumped in a rough heap, piled higher and higher until the uppermost levels sit above the pollutant clouds that wreathe the planet, or even reach to low orbit in the case of the tallest of cites. In many hive cities, the richest districts will be near the top, where they can see the sky or the stars from palatial mansions that take up the majority of a level, but this placement is solely because the sight of the skies is a commodity, and in a different context, the rich would make their homes in different sections... on frozen hive worlds, wealth might gather towards the warmer districts, for example.

Imagine a massive, crowded city like New York or Tokyo. Now, imagine that instead of a sky, there's a roof, studded with vents and floodlamps, and above that roof is another city just like it, and so on and so on for miles into the sky...

That's a hive city, IMO.

Crimsonsphinx said:

IMO, the free adventure Edge of Darkness shows a small hab-section of a hive quite nicely. It's a run-down collection of tenements and utility buildings, inside a dome or artificial cavern, lit artificially, connected by a single transit arterial (a major road) and the far end of a tram system to the rest of the hive. More important sections would have more routes in and out as needed.

Of course there are stability issues at times. Deeper into the Hive, you get areas long since fallen into disrepair, domes that've collapsed, areas where the sewer systems have burst, overflowed or been breached, where the vent systems are failing or have failed, rendering the air toxic with industrial fumes and carbon dioxide, where vast lakes or even seas of effluent bubble and churn in lightless caverns of steel and plascrete. These areas are colletively known as the Underhive in most conventional hives, and they're the least habitable, oldest and closest to ground level, with layer upon layer of newer, more habitable and usable sections piled on top. Sometimes old support structures give way, causing Hivequakes as part of the city above them shudders, sinks or even collapses into the space below.

I imagine the cities look somewhat different dependent upon the environment in which they are set. A hive world on a desert planet is not going to look the same as one on an ice world, or an ocean world. The important thing is that they grow organically, fitting as well as they can in the space they have, and tend to be incredibly difficult to navigate unless you know the area.

Imagine a world in which your city is founded on the only reliable continent, about the size of Australia. You are relying on water for power, cooling, living requirements, etc. so you build your initial residences near the shores and rivers. After a time the immediate water supply begins to grow foul from industrial pollutants, not only making the old water system no longer useful for drinking, but creates a very unpleasant smelling environment.

So, the wealthy build large floating platforms to live away from the polluted city, from which they can also mine deeper for pure water. Quickly it becomes apparent that moving between the old city and the platforms is inconvenient by boat, so roadways are constructed ... likewise, undersea tunnels are created connecting each platform to the others ... so the wealthy can visit one another quickly and in style. Some of these tunnels sustain damage during any number of possible accidents and are flooded or savagely damaged - at the same time the increasing populace makes keeping the lower classes on the mainland difficult - so the wealthy build outward again and the middle classes move into the old platforms, employing people to patch up the damages.

In the mean time some of the factories have broken down and because they were too difficult to repair, or the architecture is outdated, they are left as derelicts, which the homeless and lower classes claim for their own. The newer factories are not only taller, but some brainiac decides it would be more efficient to combine a factory with a living module - so it is built tall enough to perform its duties and house the workers. Well, once you start getting buildings too tall you need ways to get between them that don't involve descending to the road, then crossing the street, only to take a long elevator ride back up ... assuming the streets aren't flooded from seasonal rainfall and backed up sewage systems.

Now you have buildings with bridges running between them ... vast bridges large enough to drive equipment across. The shorter buildings still in use have bridges extending from their roofs, while the new have two or three connecting to every near building they need to do business with - road travel becomes all but unknown to any save the very poor, homeless, or those looking to vanish in the derelict buildings and forgotten streets.

In the mean time, the wealthy continue moving outward, taking the middle classes in their wake ... well soon it becomes inconvenient for the upper middle classes to construct more buildings on the mainland, so they start building upward - and potentially downward - as well.

So, here you have a city on many different and confusing levels at its center, radiating outward from the early structures seeing - consistently less use - which will eventually fall into ruin and not be repaired as new factories are built on better and better floating platforms. (a few of which initially suffer instability and damage severe enough to make abandoning them more cost effective than repairs.) Eventually the center of the city is home to only the criminal and down trodden, while more and more problems cause the rot to spread, sending the ruling class and those beneath them ever outward, upward and downward. Eventually the place is a confusing mess for anyone not native to the planet, filled with all the vile depravities a city breeds, connected by an array of different roadways, tunnels, rail cars, elevators, and so forth.

To most people it really would feel like a hive.

Thanks for all the well explained replies! I appreciate the time taken to reply to me.

I am liking the idea of fast moving trains or trams, rather than motorised personal transport for the masses. That will help highlight the differences in social class to my group. They can stop asking for transport and use trams themselves now to travel the vast distances in the hives. Throw in some hive quakes and it could lead to an interesting plot diversion.

I guess a lot of my confusion comes from the fact I play warhammer 40k and the cities/hives in that and necromunda do not accurately represent the same thing as they do in dark heresy. I have avoided too much contact with hive cities up to now, usually having the players go to more feral or western [think cowboys!] type planets, with a few ships and space stations to provide the sci fi parts. Might have to change that now.

Crimsonsphinx said:

That's mainly because Necromunda focusses on the low-hive and Underhive areas - lawless wastelands filled with rats, criminals, giant spiders, outcasts, toxic seas and "frontier towns"... specifically because that's the kind of place that gang warfare is most abundant, and thus the ideal setting for the game itself (indeed, the game's second edition was renamed Necromunda: Underhive as a means of pointing this out). It was never really there to depict the rest of the hive - the hab-stacks and manufactoria, the crowded transit systems, functional atmosphere recyclers, etc.

Thats true N0-1_H3r3, but necromunda also has a flat table top which I always presumed to be a bottom level, where as the buildings never went particually high due to limitations of the terrain pieces.

I guess I need to try to get this across to my group, of which two of them have played necromunda since the mid 90s, that a hive does not look like that.

Tactical Thinking in the Hive

I try to convey the multi-layered nature of Hives by making sure my players are aware of stairways. I'm constantly mentioning balconies, overlooks, bridges, gantries, catwalks, ducts, railways, sewage pipes, effluaries (not a real word, BTW, I made it up to describe the rivers of sludge that move waste around the underhive). They face attacks from all directions in a hive. Clever enemies will encircle the intruders, attacking from several angles at once. And there is always cover available!

Gates

There are also massive gates that close off various portions of the hive. These are most common at the spire/hive interface, but even then, there must be a few hidden ways up into the nicer areas. Also, I imagine some areas are off limits for other reasons, or once were, and the gates have been repurposed. Perhaps, a thousand years ago, there was a reason for a certain gate to close and lock for 12 hours at a time, but that's been forgotten, now there is a lockdown imposed on an area. No one knows where the cogitator is that controls the gate, so the dome in question has adapted to their imposed lifestyle. Perhaps they are unaware that no one else has such a limitation. These gates were intended to hold off armies, no force the Acolytes can muster can break through them.

Bridges

I can also see massive bridges across great chasms between building blocks. The bridges themselves have buildings on them. The folks on either side of the hab-canyons occasionally get riled at one another for reasons known only to them. Every once in a while, a krak missile is launched across the void to avenge some slight. It escalates, and the bridge areas become warzones. Certainly, they can't take too much of this, and might eventually fall into the abyss between hab-zones. Of course, that's where the Acolytes have to go to collect some important scrap of information, just as a hab-war breaks out over breakfast...

Effluaries

Being a made up word, it should have made up rules. Perhaps falling into one counts as taking a toxic hit. 1d10 wounds, no armor or TB allowed? Drink up!

Interesting Battlefields

The Gallery of Knowledge

A large cylindrical room, there are galleries, forty layers of bookshelves, desks, cogitators, data vaults and cases of scrolls, books and ancient data slates. High above, an auto-choir intones "Blessed Ire Fall Upon Thy Enemies" loud enough to rattle your teeth out of your head. A firefight in here will most certainly be a tactical challenge, with attacks coming from just about anywhere, and plently of flammable or explosive cover.

Grinder's Bridge

A catwalk that runs across a massive air-circulating fan. Anyone falling from the catwalk faces 15 30 foot blades spinning 80 times a second. Gangs use the area to settle disputes, with the both contestants frequently falling into the Grinder at the sudden end of a wrestling match. Acolytes had better hold on to the railings, the wind generated by the fan makes any action Challenging to perform. Perhaps this includes walking across it? "Make a Challenging Agility Test to walk forward, Cleetus. Them winds is fierce!"

The Spiral of Gaunt's Palace

This is a great spiral stair, once a lofty processional to a grand palace high above. Now, the shine has worn off, the nobles have moved up to the spire, leaving their former habitation to crumble and fade. The palace is now used by the local arbitrators to house the insane while they await trial. These trials never seem to occur, and the numbers of inmates at Gaunt Palace grows larger... it is now a community of mentally deranged souls, each more insane than the last. The acolytes have a name that bears a clue... seems he was picked up by the local judges and incarcerated at Gaunt Palace. Should be easy, just get up the stairs, get their quarry, and interrogate him. No problem...

I'm sure I can think of more examples...

Caution: Falling Saints

There is a place deep in the hive subjected to a bizarre fate; falling saints. The construction of a munitorium several hundred years ago has placed undue stress on the underlying shrine-zone. A newer shrine-zone was built long ago and now the place is home to thousands of citizens. The stress from the manufactorum above causes a saint's statue to work loose every few weeks and tumble to the floor of the shrine-zone. The last one claimed the lives of several workers and a small dog, but a lot of thrones were won by those who bet on Saint Ancillus being the one that fell. Now, smart money is on the statue of Drusus Areaus (Drusus the Warrior) to be the next to fall... any second now....right where the acolytes are standing.

Effluary's End

Every effluary in the Hive leads down here, every trickle of waste, every dripping pipe, every bit of liquid squished 'tween the toes of every scalie in the Downhive warrens ends up here. Floating on this toxic brew are communities of mutants, scalies, scavvies, twists, scarpers, scrappers, grifters, tox-heads and worse. It is to this steaming ocean of waste the acolytes must go. Cargo containers, lashed together with ligatures of the less fortunate, form the buildings, and one moves between them on rickety catwalks of rusting metal.

Sniper's Paradise

The random vagaries of Hive Architecture lead occasionally to areas seeminly purpose-built for assassins. Such is the case with Sniper's paradise. High, smooth walls, plenty of cover, and excellent sight-lines to the alley below. The alley is used by locals for business deals and hostage exchange, as the participants know they are being watched from on high by hired killers whose presence guarantees good behavior. Perhaps the acolytes must meet a contact here, or maybe it's a trap?

This is good stuff, keep it coming if you have more. Perhaps we should start a thread on this very sort of game flavor. (though, it might fit best in the GMs section)

More? Okay...

Foamy Falls

Downstream from a major Effluary (I love this word) a small town has grown around the industry of Chem Reclaimation. The inhabitants of Foamy Falls scoop waste chemicals from the flow, and process it into various substances. Alcohol, chemical propellant for stub- and autoguns, a particularly tart food wafer and a combination industrial lubricant/dessert topping. Settlements for miles around count on Foamy Falls for their survival. Now a new drug has hit the underhive, letting its users experience the mind-shattering effects of the Warp first hand. This drug, BrainFist, is expensive and totally addictive. Are the users actually making contact with the Warp? After all, the average hiver knows nothing of the Realm of Chaos... they can't possibly understand what's happening. How long before this drug actually summons a Daemon?

Why do all the clues point to Foamy Falls?

Rust Wars

Abused machinery is stored in vast warehouses, awaiting reclaimation by Tech priests in the service of the Machine God. At the far end of one of these warehouses, a different kind of cult has grown up. A cult born of the thrill of twisted steel and the crunch of metal upon metal. They have taken to stealing parts and materiel from a forgotten corner of the warehouse and have built a culture of dreadnought combat. Most days, the cultists busy themselves with tinkering on their abominations, but once a month, they meet in an abandoned granery and partake in gladiatorial combat to the glory of their twisted vision of the Machine God (who, in their iconography, has red flames on his blue carapace, and lots of chrome). This has gone on for decades, and now some one has noticed the missing machinery. The acolytes are sent in to investigate this Rust War cult, and perhaps face their dreaded Machine Gods in direct combat.

The Great Outdoors

The vast wastelands between hives are home to various mutant tribes, obscure cults, road-warrior bands and pirates. One of the stranger groups lives on the outside skin of the hive, living off the waste products that flow out of the immense cities. The Para-sites are twisted beyond understanding, living their whole miserable lives on ramshackle balcony-habs affixed to the walls like fleas on some great beast. Some have accessed the hive's infrastructure, leeching electricty and water like ticks. These are the most sucessful Para-sites, and often the largest. They are not subject to the Imperium's laws, being that no one actually knows they're out there, but signs exist... unusual power drains, odd water usage statistics. These are most often seen as clerical errors, and more than one scribe has been executed for such sloppy cogitation. Good help is hard to find.

For those that know about the Para-sites, they can be a haven away from the laws of the hive and the scrutiny of the Arbites. They are a kind of open secret, no one risks talking about them, lest they draw official attention. For now, they remain hidden, and so, too, their secrets.

Day Trips

This hive has particularly lax labour laws, and so fac-worker are given the positively generous allowance of one day off a year. On this great day the workers are unshackled from their machines and the limbless orphans who crawl inside the working parts to lubricate them with sacred oils are rounded up and herded in to a mass-transit vehicle headed for the surface of the hive above the principle pollution layers. Here, clad in heavy radiation suits and with their sensitive eyes protected by thickened smoked glass, they will spend an exciting day walking the peirs which jut out hundreds of meters from the spires, and making castles in the volcanic dust which lies deeply on the outer terraces of the mega city.

The Necromunda series of novels are a good inspiration for how to visualise a Hive, I especially recommend 'Salvation' as you get to see all levels of the Hive described. It seems that from these books areas of the Hive are almost seperate areas with single or multiple routes in or out of them, as per 'Edge of Darkness'. Moving between these areas requires the correct pass, so you can imagine an area in the lower hive with a hab block and a factory. Any factory workers would have no reason to leave their dome so will not have permission to do so. They will spend their lives in indentured service, probably never seeing sunlight or rarely, if ever, leaving their particular area. Even more difficult is the strict rules regarding social mobility between the lower, middle and upper Hive. Only a select few are able to pass freely between the main levels.

There is a nice scene in 'Salvation' which describes the massive security door between the middle and lower hive. One character passes from the middle to the lower and is genuinely fearful that he will ever be able to return to his relatively comfortable life in the middle hive. I'm sure there are more then one of these main security doors as well as countless secret ways amongst the labyrinth of conduits and pipes interlacing the Hive. Certainly I imagine these main routes between levels as huge elevator shafts with security posts at either end manning the massive doors.

On the same level I envision a scene from Bladerunner or 5th element (or even the lower bowls of Coruscant) with roads supported on gantries, criss crossing each other in a asphalt hell (bit like Spagetti Junction in Birmingham, just far bigger and higher).

When describing hive cities to my players I often say "it's LA on top of New York on top on Detroit peppered with London. There was probably never a an STC template for a hive city. I've figured they have always develop in an organic fassion. A wealthy guild builds a new spire here. A noble to wants to increase his work force builds a hab-level there. The Arbites clean out a slum and the Cult Mechanicus guts is and instals a generator-temple in it's place. You probably only get major renovations after a hive-quake or a deterred xenos invasion. Tube trains and massive freight elevators are the most common forms of transportation in my campaigns, though the further from the spires you get the more these systems fall victim to power outages and mechanical failures.