N18 Quinspirus and the Worldsump pirates

[Aulenback]

Our local campaign is set in and around (and under) the Quinspirus hive cluster, and here is everything that I have found thus far. Any additional sources of quotes etc would be welcome!

The Quinspirus Cluster is situated on the edge of a virtually solidified sludge sea called the Worldsump Ocean. At one time, when the sea was still navigable, the area included vast dockyards. These now remain buried deep within the undercity of the centrally located Quinspirus Hive.

This hive city has five great spires -- hence its name, which means "five towers" in the local dialect of Low Gothic and which gives its name to the whole hive cluster in the region.

The cavernous warehouses of the ancient waterfronts have been the scene of many savage gang wars, in particular between gangs subservient to Houses Orlock and Delaque. [N17 Core Rule Book, p15]

While many splinter Genestealer Cults exist out in the wastes, entering the hives only to raid or mine the rich mineral wastes of the underhive, some have become as hive natives themselves. The Guild of Ash passes itself off as a Guilder family, having long ago infiltrated hive society by infecting a guilder prospector of the Merchants Guild. Trading in the rare minerals of hive bottom, the cult has become embedded within the Quinspirus Cluster, members of its bloodline having spread throughout the underhive and forging alliances with not just the Clan Houses but also the noble houses, its ultimate goal elevation into the five spires of the hive. The influence of House Delaque within the Quinspirus Cluster has complicated the ambitions of the Guild of Ash however, and the time may soon come when one or the other makes their move to eradicate their rivals, or in the case of the Guild of Ash, convert them to the cause. [Book of Ruin, p39]

As hellish as life on the streets of a Hive City is, however, transit within it remains relatively safe and easy, the millions of industrial helots going about their daily labours heedless of the horrors that beset those who live below the Wall. Not so in the Underhive. Among the ruined foundations of the hive settlements are beacons of light and relative safety among collapsed domes, abandoned industries and rubble-choked wastelands. Beyond their walls, starving predators prowl the shadows and ancient machines rumble like dying gods in the dark. These are the Badzones. Travellers crossing these regions keep to well-used routes watchful for bandits and monsters, or else take backways and risk sludge rivers, toxic pits and carnivorous fungi. Only Guilder caravans can cross the Badzones with any degree of certainty, hiring local gangs or itinerant Bounty Hunters to ensure the trade roads are kept open. Settlements rely upon these trade routes and the Guilders for their survival, each one a gossamer thread across the wastes and lifeline to the inhabitants of the underhive. [Book of Peril]

Perched on the edge of the Worldsump, the Quinspirus Cluster was once a great Necromundan seaport. Despite the millennia of pollution that turned the planet’s oceans to sludge, sump-skiffs still embark from the sunken docks to seek out the riches of the Worldsump Ocean. The Ironbones Goliaths ply these toxic waters, gathering up sunken treasures and pillaging the free sump settlements. Their skin bleached white by the poisonous fog that hangs perpetually over the Worldsump, the Ironbones look like nothing less than giant revenants come to claim the living. To play up this terrifying image, the Ironbones paint skull features over their faces in soot, or press bloody handprints upon their chests. When it has filled its holds with plunder, an Ironbones war-skiff returns to the hanging forges of the Quinspirus Cluster. Suspended beneath the ancient dock works, these gantry factories glimmer in the toxic fog, their forges acting as makeshift lighthouses for the Ironbones’ vessels. Periodically, other clans and their gangs will launch assaults against the Ironbones’ hanging forges, fighters rappelling down from the abandoned shipyards above. To date, though, the savage Goliaths of Quinspirus have always seen them off, the bodies of their enemies doomed to sway in the poisonous winds beneath the docks as a warning to others. [House of Chains, p35]

Located on the shores of the World Sump Ocean, the hives of the Quinspirus Cluster are a trade nexus for the eastern hemisphere of Necromunda. Goods from countless smaller hives are ferried across the toxic ocean to the cluster where they are then loaded onto trains and cargo haulers to cross the Great Ash Road to Hive Primus. It makes sense, then, that House Orlock has a stake here. At the behest of the Mercator Gelt, House Orlock runs the Quinspirus shipping fleets and keeps the tollway to the Great Ash Road open. While it is a lucrative operation, it is also a heavily contested one. Sumpsea pirates are a constant threat to the sludge-barges that must cross the World Sump, while the tollway runs right through the ancestral lands of the Syoeen Ash Waste Nomad tribes. The clan is forced to spend much of its profits on heavy weapons, armoured rigs and cloud-runners to keep the locals in check. However, many Orlock gangers savour working the Quinspirus Cluster as there are few things as satisfying as crushing an Ash Wastes dune-stalker under the wheels of your dune-crawler. [House of Iron, p27]

Several hives are owned outright by the Great House [Ulanti], such as the Skygelt Tower on the edge of the World Sump, or Hive Valkyria in the highest reaches of the Spoil. The Great House even owns the Necromunda moon of Juggerata, where its nobles go on safari, hunting xenos beasts brought in especially for this purpose. [House of Blades, p80]

Though none have ever proven it, it is said the Pisceans did not completely disappear, however. Rather they sought refuge in the watery heart of the subterranean oceans, far from the toxic surface seas. It was here, beneath the surface, that the Delaque first encountered them and discovered, like themselves, the aquatic aliens shared a connection to the Psychoterica. It is a silent partnership that has grown over the centuries, and, though the Delaque have never visited the cities of the Pisceans (if such cities even exist), the aquatic aliens sometimes make the journey to the surface to offer themselves to the House of Shadow. These are ancient Piscean warriors who come to the depths of the hives to die in enclaves of the Delaque and have their brains removed and placed into mechanical caskets. These, in turn, are fashioned into cybernetic hunters known as Piscean Spektors, who communicate with the Delaque via the Psychoterica, and aid them in their work.[House of Shadows, p16]

Even an immature sump spider is usually the size of a slave-Ogryn, with the largest as big as an Orlock battle-rig – gun turrets and all. With this in mind, serious hunters sail out in massive armoured scrap-ships, often with flotillas of smaller craft to act as lookouts and bait-men, to herd the spider toward the big ship’s gas-harpoons.

Of course, this is not always enough, and on the docks of Sump City, where hundreds of battered ships, barges and boats of all kinds hang out over the inky blackness of the sump, half-cut sump-sailors like to spin yarns of the ones that got away. [Apocrypha Necromundus: Sump CIty in Hive Primus]

[The novella Descent by Simon Jowett (2000) is a story of a Spyrer team below the underhive, and a noble aboard a Sump Pirate submarine, the Queequeg, searching for them in the Sump Sea below Hive Primus. It can be found in the anthology Status: Deadzone.]

Created from factory runoff, hive city sewerage, and toxic waste, this midnight realm is home to horrors uncounted – including the giant sump spiders, prized for their diamond eyes! [Apocrypha Necromundus the Sump Sea]

Few, if any, of the gangers had ever been out on the sump sea, and even fewer guilders – the merchants preferring to conduct business from the safety of more reputable settlements like Two Tunnels or Dust Falls and only visiting Sump City for brief stays. Among the spider hunters, the oldest and most experienced was a mariner known as Ismur Blackwater. If his grizzled voice, stained coveralls and stern gaze wasn’t enough to convince Jelena and the other gang leaders of his skill, then the missing leg and arm, both replaced with crude bionics, certainly spoke of a life of adventure on the black seas. Though he could not be certain, Ismur believed their fleet had drifted right through the Ghost Deeps and the Salvage Reefs beyond, where hunters came to plunder the nests of the oldest sump spiders. It was said that in the most remote parts of the reef there were spiders the size of hab blocks, who spun webs large enough to snare a sludge barge. In fact, Ismur claimed to have seen places where these webs stretched from sea to dome, a wall of strands a hundred metres or more in height hung with the rusted remains of lost ships. [Apocrypha Necromunda Spiders of the Sump Sea]

M39 The [dark eldar] Cabal of the Jagged Blade raid Necromunda, striking at the Quadrus Spire of the Quinspire Cluster. Their ships cloaked by shadow fields to appear as an Imperial delegation, the Drukhari slip past the Eye of Selene, and drag hundreds of men and women off to their dark realm. While the other Quinspire Noble Houses divide up the spoils of their fallen brethren, the few Quadrus survivors band together and hire a cadre of bounty hunters to find their kidnapped kin, both nobles and gunmen vanishing into the void. [Core Rule Book timeline]

“Bad weather on most worlds is heavy rain and a bit of wind… on Necromunda it’ll take your skin off and cook your bones – and that’s on a good day!”
– Captain Quynn Torl, Chartist Fleet Master

MERCATOR GELT (GUILD OF COIN)
Few individuals may travel a hive freely, most citizens destined to spend their lives bound to the levels in which they were born. One of the ancient rights given to the Merchants Guild is the freedom to traverse Necromunda in the execution of their business, and extract coin from other travellers. The Guild of Coin are the gatekeepers of the hives and the roads between them, overseeing the transportation of all terrestrial cargo and even a portion of the goods sent out through the Eye of Selene to the greater Necromunda solar cluster. Masters of Coin forge keys for the Clan House convoys, each token a powerful seal allowing passage past the many waystations, ash gates and hive fortresses through which a convoy must pass. The key is a potent symbol of the Guild of Coin, and each Master carries with them staves, rings and shackles hung with keys of all shapes and sizes; each one cast from the steel of a different hive or stone of a different road, and granting rites of passage for the Guilder who bears it. [Book of Peril]

OILSHIP NINETEEN
Legend tells of a great oilship, supposedly impervious to all attacks and unstoppable. Shortly after leaving Hive Primus on its maiden journey however, it was ambushed by a wasteland gang [just northeast of Hive Primus] and crippled. The inhabitants of Oilship Nineteen claim that the remains of this great vehicle still lie at the heart of their settlement, something that has proven impossible to verify as the settlement is home to outlaw road gangs and the site of many running battles as convoys try to pass by. [Aranthian Succession Vaults of Temenos]

Phew! Oilship Nineteen as a settlement is nowhere near Quinspirus, but is along the Great Ash Road toward Quinspirus, and had "ship" in the name. Some of the others are really about the Sump Sea beneath Hive Primus, rather than the Worldsump itself. But that's where I am at. Missing anything else? Did the Worldsump or Quinspirus show up in any of the short fiction from Inferno! magazine, for example?

 

[Aulenback]

Some more Worldsump bits, these from the Hall of Beards:

HELMAETH MINING CLAN
When the ancestors of the Helmaeth Mining Clan came to Necromunda, their massive bastion ship set down at the bottom of one of its vast sump seas. From their underwater holdfast the mining clan has made themselves wealthy harvesting the chemical riches of Necromunda’s poison oceans, their surface ships and submersibles journeying anywhere the sump flows – through underground rivers and run-offs into the depths of the hive cities themselves. Not content to be miners, the Helmaeth Squats also have a well-earned reputation as pirates and raiders, travellers on the toxic seas rightly wary of their ironclad craft and the bands of cunning Drill-kyn who crew them. [Hall of Ancestors]

906 M33 HORRORS OF THE DEEP Deep beneath the surface of the Poison Sea, the Helmaeth Mining Clan bore through into an ancient subterranean ocean. There they discover strange and ancient creatures eager to reach the surface and wreak havoc. Fleets of Helmaeth ironclad submersibles battle tentacled sea beasts in a war that eventually sees the mining clan sink a floating hive over the tunnel, sealing away the horrors beyond. [Hall of Ancestors]