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A cyber-gothic role-playing game for mature players.
The Imperium of Man stretches across the galaxy almost from rim to rim, encompassing over a million habitable worlds and untold billions of people. It is the most extensive and populous empire that has ever existed in the history of humanity. It is ruled as it has been for the last ten thousand years by the Divine Champion of Man and the Protector of the Human Race, The Emperor of Mankind.
The Emperor is the greatest of all human psychics, his mental energies are godlike and his powers incomprehensible to ordinary humans. It is his mind alone which projects the Astronomicon throughout the galaxy, the psychic homing beacon which enables spacecraft to navigate through the fabric of warp space. Without the Emperor the Imperium would collapse and human unity would be destroyed, leaving the remaining pockets of civilisation isolated and vulnerable to the infinite enemies of mankind; creatures that seek to destroy or enslave the human race.
The Emperor has long since ceased to live in any normal sense. Ten thousand years ago, following his titanic battle against the rebel Warmaster Horus, Primarch and Arch-Champion of Chaos, his mutilated and barely alive body was installed inside a sophisticated life-support machine known as the Golden Throne.
The Emperor no longer speaks and it is doubtful if he comprehends events which take place in the material universe, as his powerful mind stalks through that nefarious region of pure energy known as the Realm of Chaos, hunting the enemies of mankind. The actual administration of the Imperium is therefore undertaken by a vast bureaucracy known as the Adeptus Terra - or Priesthood of Earth.
The World of Necromunda
The galaxy is a vast spiral, ninety thousand light years across and fifteen thousand light ears thick, containing four hundred billion stars. Only a fraction of the stars have habitable planetary systems, and only a tiny fraction of these have been investigated by humanity or any other spacefaring race.
The initial human colonisation of the galaxy lies in the distant past, separated from the present by twenty thousand years of regression and rebuilding. Human worlds are' scattered throughout the galaxy but their distribution is not even. The greatest density of human worlds is in the galactic west, close to Earth. In the galactic east, in the area known as the Eastern Fringe, human worlds are few and often far apart.
Many human worlds benefit from mutual contact and a comparable level of technology. Others have become primitive and barbarous, often as a result of periods of isolation. New human worlds are being discovered all the time, and there remains an unknown number which have been isolated and forgotten for hundreds, if not thousands, of years
One of the millions of planets that are a part of the galaxy spanning Imperium is Necromunda. It was settled 10 000 years ago before the Horus Heresy and the ascension of the Emperor to the Golden Throne. It was a planet rich in resources that have been mined, harvested and stripped from the planet since. Its metals and minerals are now exhausted. Its flora and fauna have had their genomes mapped and filed and have since died in the toxic waste left by the encroachment of humanity upon the planet. Millenia of industry has reduced the mountains to rubble and the seas to sludge. Huamnity has had to retreat from the pollution it has created behind huge sealed Hives. These are cities that have built up over this period, upon the ruins of the previous century.
Necromunda is a dying world. It orbits an old moribund star, a Red giant, on the outer edge of the galactic north. The temperature outside the sealed Hives is below zero, always freezing or frozen. Necromunda is too far away from its sun to receive any real warmth, and despite the clogging clouds above, the temperature is never high enough to allow life to live in comfort - if it could live at all. The chemical rivers and sludge sometimes freeze over into huge, icy mirrors which the Tech-Nomads may sometimes safely cross. The planets rocky crust is scarred by the shifting corrosive ash that is the ground down waste of eons. Water is found only in deep wells, geothermal steam or the bodies of humanity. The atmosphere is poisonous and irradiated by 10 000 years of toxic gas and waste from the Hives and the constant deadly solar rays from the Red Giant. No life lives there without the aid of high-tech., life support or sealed vehicles.
Necromundas natural resources are exhausted. The Hives survive through constant re-cycling of wate materials. There is little left on Necromunda that is useful to the Imperium - except the slag factories that turn waste or recovered metals into ammunition and the roving gangs that make Necromunda's brutalised people born warriors for the Imperial armies.
"No one knows who will live in this cage in the future, or whether at the end of this tremendous development entirely new prophets will arise, or there will be a great rebirth of old ideas and ideals, or, if neither, mechanized petrification, embellished with a sort of compulsive self importance. For of the last stage of this cultural development, it might well be truly said: "Specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart; this nullity imagines that it has attained a level of civilisation never before achieved." - Weber
