Dark Heresy - logistics questions

[Braininthejar2]

I might need to GM some Dark Heresy in forseeable future.

I have two questions I need answers for.

1 Logistics of transportation. Since the party is likely one of many teams working for the Inquisitor, they can't expect him to ferry them on the black ship to wherever their newest lead directs them. (and in general, sending a mile-long ship just to ferry a single party seems excessive even for WH40K.

So, how is it usually handled?

2 A "dungeon ecosystem" question: what do underhivers eat and drink?

[shadow_archmagi]

I might need to GM some Dark Heresy in forseeable future.

I have two questions I need answers for.

1 Logistics of transportation. Since the party is likely one of many teams working for the Inquisitor, they can't expect him to ferry them on the black ship to wherever their newest lead directs them. (and in general, sending a mile-long ship just to ferry a single party seems excessive even for WH40K.

So, how is it usually handled?

2 A "dungeon ecosystem" question: what do underhivers eat and drink?

In general, I think scenarios are written such that a cohesive arc happens on one planet, and then in the epilogue the PCs essentially hitchhike to their next destination. If it's top priority, then ][ himself stops by, otherwise it's something like "Board the Penitent Rising, a cargo ship run by an old friend. You're going to the Calixis Sector next"

[Grim Portent]

In my experience the party usually hops on a commercial ship between planets/systems. Pay a small fee and get bunked in a spare room on a ship carrying bulk cargo kind of affair. Sometimes a smaller shuttle built for passengers.

What underhivers eat depends on the hive. The underhive is often full of materials that filter down from higher up, chemical waste, organic waste, and rubble. This is then the basis of feeding plants/fungi, and then in turn the various mutants and animals of the underhive feed on them. Food is sparce, but the area is large enough to support lots of stuff regardless. Sometimes animals enter the underhive from elsewhere as well.

More civilised underhivers have enough contact with the upper hive to get actual processed food. Usually corpse starch and other similar substances that would normally go to factory workers or servitors. Generally would come in exchange for menial labour or to keep numbers up for guard tithes.

[Dynodragon]

I might need to GM some Dark Heresy in forseeable future.

I have two questions I need answers for.

1 Logistics of transportation. Since the party is likely one of many teams working for the Inquisitor, they can't expect him to ferry them on the black ship to wherever their newest lead directs them. (and in general, sending a mile-long ship just to ferry a single party seems excessive even for WH40K.

So, how is it usually handled?

2 A "dungeon ecosystem" question: what do underhivers eat and drink?

1. It depends whether getting somewhere is the adventure or the adventure happens at the destination. If it’s important I’ve used a wide range of possibilities from a ship captain who knows some of the truth about the inquisition currying favours to the inquisitor giving them money to pay for transportation as required, or even an inquisitor using it as a test of the groups resourcefulness.

2. Each other, the polluted water dripping down from above, the beasts that crawl around them, the waste pipes that come from the Solyent Green facility.

[Sinewmire]

1 Logistics of transportation. Since the party is likely one of many teams working for the Inquisitor, they can't expect him to ferry them on the black ship to wherever their newest lead directs them. (and in general, sending a mile-long ship just to ferry a single party seems excessive even for WH40K.

So, how is it usually handled?

Depends on the party's approach. A puritan monodominant inquisitor lord will have a small fleet that broadcasts his name and purpose on all vox-channels and expects to be met with an honour guard. His acolytes will make planetfall on Black and Gold halo barges, surrounded by flocks of servitor cherubs and they will be accompanied by companies of the PDF.

A radical horusian inquisitor and his warband might stow away along the slave-wretches of a junk traders' bilge decks during a press-gang, and slip down to the world by stowing away amongst the illegal contraband cargo.

Black Ships are pretty unpleasant harrowing places filled with imprisoned psykers - I can't imagine anyone using one purely for transport purposes!

Either way, travelling between systems requires a ship, ranging from an ecclesiarch pilgrim route transport vessel (usually decomissioned military transports), a friendly rogue trader, or a commandeered Navy escort wing or grand cruiser.

In system they can use Dromon transports and other system ships - smaller, non warp capabale and much more common.

2 A "dungeon ecosystem" question: what do underhivers eat and drink?

Necromunda talks about Protein Sludge farmers who maintain vats of emerald green sludge to harvest, and a main objective in gang fights are water condensers. There's plenty of natural life too, from rats to, um, giant rats and other wierd vermin. As others have said, there's plenty of giant mushrooms and wierd flora for those with brave palettes.

Wealthy gangers might eat roasted Spiderlegs seasoned with Pipemoss dust, and drink Wildsnake. Poor underhivers will eat reformed sludge-paste and drink "Second-best". The poorest will eat grade C sludge extract and drink recyc-water of dubious qualities.

I imagine that Underhive Lighting must contain UV or people would die from lack of vitamins, so crops could grow, if you have enough dirt.

[Braininthejar2]

Oh, I had an idea for a gang that grows most food in the neighbourhood, and buys dead gangers to use as fertiliser... but actually is a Nurgle cult turning them into zombies. The green vats will work great with that.

[Sinewmire]

Oh, I had an idea for a gang that grows most food in the neighbourhood, and buys dead gangers to use as fertiliser... but actually is a Nurgle cult turning them into zombies. The green vats will work great with that.

Yeah, people makes good fertiliser. I can see that working. Dead marshes style!

There's all sorts of horrible chemicals and wierd mutagens in the Sump too...

[Spore]

Ah, 40k, where "corpse starch" is considered not the worst of meals. :D A pity our group never came to be.

Honestly I would not put too much thought into how the eco systems of Warhammer work because usually they don't. It's just another flavor of "fantasy economics". If real world equivalents are your thing, I'd say most highly populated worlds heavily rely on importing food.

A world like Scintilla (25b people) is not going to sustain itself, even with perfect filtration. A world like Iocanthus (5b) has a much better chance at doing so. An industry world like Sepheris Secundus (12b) will heavily rely on trading (can't refine metal to food).

[Sinewmire]

Ah, 40k, where "corpse starch" is considered not the worst of meals. :D A pity our group never came to be.

Honestly I would not put too much thought into how the eco systems of Warhammer work because usually they don't. It's just another flavor of "fantasy economics". If real world equivalents are your thing, I'd say most highly populated worlds heavily rely on importing food.

A world like Scintilla (25b people) is not going to sustain itself, even with perfect filtration. A world like Iocanthus (5b) has a much better chance at doing so. An industry world like Sepheris Secundus (12b) will heavily rely on trading (can't refine metal to food).

Quite right, Hive Worlds import huge amounts of foodstuffs from Agri-worlds.

It rarely sees the Underhive though, as beyond the Guilder caravans, there's rarely much trade with the rest of the hive.

Hydroponics and vat-grown nutrient sludge. It's the breakfast of champions!

[Spore]

Quite right, Hive Worlds import huge amounts of foodstuffs from Agri-worlds.

It rarely sees the Underhive though,

It does. Just not in the form it arrived in.

[Sinewmire]

It does. Just not in the form it arrived in.

Ha! Well yes, uh "trouble" rolls downhill I suppose.

The Hive my guys play in has a huge "water"fall as a landmark. Waste, biological and idustrial falling from a flaw in the Firm (which is what I called the ceiling - the Firmament). There's all sorts of farms around it.

[Malak'ai]

Ha! Well yes, uh "trouble" rolls downhill I suppose.

The Hive my guys play in has a huge "water"fall as a landmark. Waste, biological and idustrial falling from a flaw in the Firm (which is what I called the ceiling - the Firmament). There's all sorts of farms around it.

Does this fungus taste nutty to you?

[xroads]

I might need to GM some Dark Heresy in forseeable future.

I have two questions I need answers for.

1 Logistics of transportation. Since the party is likely one of many teams working for the Inquisitor, they can't expect him to ferry them on the black ship to wherever their newest lead directs them. (and in general, sending a mile-long ship just to ferry a single party seems excessive even for WH40K.

So, how is it usually handled?

2 A "dungeon ecosystem" question: what do underhivers eat and drink?

1. With my group, the first time they had to travel space, I had them get rides on a commercial transport. But I made the sure ship was attacked by orcs, giving them an excuse to "confiscate" (in the name of the Emperor of course), a small private luxury yacht that was attached to the ship. That way they had a ship they could use to ferry them around (even came with a convenient servitor to pilot the darn thing).
   
   
2. Depends on their income I suspect. Most working class probably eat regular food, but not much in the way of fancier foods unless they're smuggled in. Those who aren't so lucky probably eat whatever they can get their hands on. This might include vermin & fungus. Then there are the mutants, some of whom probably eat whatever doesn't move fast enough... including people!

[Wraith]

2 A "dungeon ecosystem" question: what do underhivers eat and drink?

You may be familiar with a game called Necromunda? It's a skirmish-sized wargame set in the Underhive, so the sourcebook and scenarios give you lots of descriptions of this sort of stuff.

In the upper-levels, imported food is standard, albeit extravagent fare which becomes more and more of an expensive luxury the lower down you go. By the time you reach the Underhive - the bit where gangs vie for territory and where outlaws flee the Arbites - that's where people fight and kill over dried military rations, and unprocessed food is all but a myth.

At that point, food tends to come in three varieties.
Commonly, there's meat hunted from feral animals. There's enough wildlife down there that giant rats and lizards are the least of it, though there's always the problem that animals which flourish in toxic and radioactive conditions are going to be toxic or irradiated themselves.

After that there's sludge farms - reasonable sized facilities roughly equivalent to modern farmsteads where nutritious algaes ("sludge") are cultivated in large, open pits. This also includes farming mushrooms and other subterranean plant life, and while you can also forage for such things it's generally not advised - the Underhive is a dangerous place, and edible specimens are few and far between even if you know what you're doing.
There is also the foodstuff common across the entire Imperium; corpse starch, aka Soylent Green. More on that in a moment.

The newest edition of Necromunda has introduced new factions called the Guilds; Power, Water and Corpses being the main ones. They are powerful pseudo-Mafia-style groups who control the supply of resources in a given area - the Water Guild, for example, controls everything from distribution of bottled water, to access to community standpipes, right up to owning enormous treatment and purification plants where waste water is recycled.
Any settlement bigger than a small hamlet is beholden to such Guilds, and they don't take kindly to intruders on their turf.

On a very tiny scale, individual households and small groups of settlers can have access to a water-still; a device with condenses water out of the humidity in the air. Supplying enough for a couple of dozen people, stills are nonetheless expensive to maintain, difficult to repair and always vulnerable to sabotage - one of the game's scenarios involves one gang defending their own still from attackers, potentially causing lasting problems for the gang if it is destroyed outright!

The Corpse Guild, as I suggested above, collect and disposes of cadavers in the traditional manner; disassembling them into usable components, which is everything from harvesting internal organs for transplant to rendering down the leftovers into something called corpse starch, the 40k equivalent to Soylent Green (though in this case it's grey, like a block of off-colour tofu).

So in other words, go play Fallout for a few hours, then imagine that but underground. You won't be far off

[Braininthejar2]

I think what my mental image of a typical Underhive lacks is the sense of scale.

Just how densly populated it is? the industrial levels of a hive would house millions, but the lower you go, the less available the resources get.

[Grim Portent]

I tend to imagine the least hospitable parts are populated by hunter gatherer bands with a density similar to pre-agriculture real world humans in less fertile areas, maybe slightly higher.

[Wraith]

I think what my mental image of a typical Underhive lacks is the sense of scale.

Just how densly populated it is? the industrial levels of a hive would house millions, but the lower you go, the less available the resources get.

From the Necromunda rulebook, there was Hive Primus; a single structure which is the home of the Planetary Governor and thus nominally the 'biggest and most important' Hive on the planet.

The Hive itself is roughly cone shaped. It's ten miles tall, and the diameter of it's base at ground level is either two or three miles. The civilised 'middle' section of the Spire is named Hive City, about 5 of the structure's 10 miles, and it alone contains 'billions' of people.

The Underhive itself, however, is virtually desolate. Again, I refer you to Fallout, or possibly the American Frontier in the early-mid 19th century for a comparison.
There are small towns and trading posts dotted here or there, and individual "farmsteads" sometimes established near trade routes, but at other times it's possible to walk for days, or even weeks, without seeing another human being. There are even analogues to the First Nation/Native American tribes who tend to live down there - they're called the Ratskins on account of them using giant mutant rats in the same way that our real-world contemporaries used buffalo - but if they're not openly hostile to trespassers then they're utterly secluded from them.

What ELSE you'll see is harder to account for, of course, and it only gets worse the further down you go until you reach a point which is intolerable by anything resembling human life, even for the Ratskins who otherwise ignore the conditions that would kill Uphivers.

[Braininthejar2]

Another question:

An adept is usually your data/logistics technician, researcher and law expert.

But on higher ranks he has an option to develop psionic powers.

Won't that put him in a lot of trouble? or is someone of such high station implicitly trusted or something?

[Grim Portent]

The usual assumption in my groups has been that the Adept is subjected to an official process to become a psyker by awakening their latent abilities by the Inquisition. By this point in his career he's already going to have such a web of contacts and personal authority that anyone of sufficient rank to question him in his field of work is probably familiar with dealing with psykers in positions of authority* already, and everyone of lower station is assumed to be obediant to any superior outside special circumstances. As long as he doesn't start screaming about his brain melting no one's going to be concerned, though some in the know may refer to him with slurs like witch if they're of a puritanical mindset.

Other option is that it was the first implementation of a sorcerery mechanic into DH, which would make some sense, but then it was never explicitly stated so I'd assume the former was intended. If so then the Adept would probably keep it secret. Many psykers are impossible to recognise for what they are until they start shooting out lightning bolts, and the same is true for some sorcerers.

*Psykers are often involved in command staff for the military, are vital to communications and have their own official organisations which are often represented by psykers and Rogue Traders/Inquisitors often have them in their retinues. Everyone who's anyone in the Imperium is used to dealing with them in some capacity.

[Sinewmire]

Another question:

An adept is usually your data/logistics technician, researcher and law expert.

But on higher ranks he has an option to develop psionic powers.

Won't that put him in a lot of trouble? or is someone of such high station implicitly trusted or something?

Yes, it absolutely will. However, those tasked with judging how safe a psyker is are the Inquisition, so it should be simple enough for a higher level member of the Inquisition to get himself officially sanctioned.

Or they're so heretical it doesn't matter!