Necromunda is one of the great hive worlds of the Imperium, its continents buried beneath colossal hive-cities that climb kilometres into a poisoned sky. Ten thousand years of unrelenting industry have long since stripped the planet bare and choked its air and water with pollution, yet still its furnaces roar, for Necromunda is a world-factory whose output of munitions and materiel is too valuable ever to let fall silent.
Its society is stratified with brutal rigidity. At the summit, in the clean air of the spires, dwell the aristocratic Houses in decadent luxury; below them toil the teeming masses of the hive-sumps; and far beneath, in the crumbling darkness of the underhive, sprawls a lawless wilderness of scavengers, outcasts, and gangs who war endlessly over scraps of territory, salvage, and pride. Gang-feuds flare and die in the dark without number, and a fighter's whole life is measured in credits, ammunition, and hard-won reputation.
The great Houses, part noble dynasty and part industrial cartel, feud constantly among themselves through trade, assassination, and open gang-warfare, even as they compete to feed the Imperium its endless appetite for weapons. This ceaseless internecine violence, far from weakening the world, forges a population inured to hardship and hungry for a way out.
That hunger makes Necromunda a rich recruiting ground, and it supplies soldiers and munitions beyond counting to the Astra Militarum, sending its hive-toughened sons to die on battlefields they will never see the reason for. Life on Necromunda is cheap and cruelty commonplace, a existence measured in gang-feuds and factory-shifts beneath a sky no one remembers being clear. Yet its people endure, scrapping and scheming in the dark, because on Necromunda endurance is the only victory anyone can hope to win.
The atlas continues
