Hive Worlder - Life as a Hive Worlder: A hive city is an ancient construction, each standard century slowly growing wider across the barren ground and higher into the polluted air. A hiver lives out their life never seeing the sky and often never even leaving the city level on which they were born. Most Hive Worlds have scores of hive cities, each existing in isolation and rising up from the toxic fog and cursed lands like monuments to its eventual demise. Hivers are often born into a house or family with their vocations decided. Thus they work endlessly at their task in the manufactoria and industrial habs of their hive, producing goods to be shipped offworld or maintaining the many systems of the hive city essential for its survival.Nearly everything is recycled and reused. The air a hive worlder breathes, the water they drink, and the food they eat has all passed through the bodies of countless others, endlessly restored to be consumed once again. When a hiver dies, their duty to the hive city and their house is not done, and most hives reconstitute their dead for what resources, such as corpse starch, that they can recover. All of their possessions, from the hab room where they live to the clothes on their back, likewise come from those before them.There is a definite class division in most hive cities, however. Resources become scarcer as one descends from the spires at the hive top, where the city's rulers enjoy all the wealth the Imperium has to offer, down through the guilds and houses where some live in relative comfort,to the lower levels where workers and dregs exist in crushing poverty. The farther downhive one goes, the more decayed and dangerous it becomes, the detritus of billions drifting down to rest among the darkness. The rule of law breaks down in the depths of these wild and deadly domains. Some come here to escape their lives above, but most find only death and despair among the mutants and violent underhive gangs.Hive Worlds are a perfect expression of life in the Imperium in many ways, and the result of what it has done to survive within a hostile and decaying galaxy. Hive worlders reflect this too, and are resourceful and hardy in a way that only those born into an overcrowded society with finite resources can be. Within a hive city, only the strong survive and only those who are both strong and cunning truly prosper. Even those who choose not to break the law are often forced to bend it to get their way; the oppressive nature of life within a hive city is often devoid of any opportunities that a person does not make for themselves.Positions within the system of control are one route a hive worlder can take, becoming part of the Administratum or Adeptus Ministorum in an effort to live above the law, or at least have some control over it. Equally, they might rise to the governance of their family house, trade cartel, or other group, though such a position is usually only coloured by another kind of obligation and duty. The alternative is to reject the trappings of Imperial society and embrace the criminal element or be branded an outcast. Both can bring great wealth and personalfreedom, but an individual does this at their peril, for the hammer of hive justice is swift and heavy.All of the great Imperial organisations have their place with the maintenance of a Hive World. The Administratum governs its resources and sees it meets its tithes, the Ministorum cares for the souls of its citizens, and the Mechanicum oversees the ancient machines that clean its air, recycle its food, and keep it running. Hive Worlds also contribute large numbers to both the Astra Militarum and the Navis Imperialis, and a hiver can often be found in these organisations.Where a hive worlder really comes into his own, and a path all too many of those who finally escape the hive take, is that of the Outcast. Whether they are a true recidivist or simply an antiauthoritarian, a hiver who rejects the world they have been given and tries to twist it to their own advantage starts down a path they can never turn back from. These Outcasts might be petty crooks or rise to become the heads of powerful organisations, controlling vices and illegal enterprises throughout their hive city. However, to really escape the shackles of hive life, he must travel away from structured hive society.This might be into the depths of an underhive, into the ash wastelands surrounding the city, or even offworld. Here they can live free, provided they are quick with a gun and willing to do whatever it takes to survive.