Xhorik Prime: Geography and Background Part 1

Xhorik has a large primary continent and less of the surface is covered in water than Earth. The interior is very dry and rocky. There is a fertile strip along the coasts where the main cities are located and a band of jungle near the equator, but much of the continent is bare and arid. Large storms of dust and radiation shield much of the central landmass from observation from space or high altitudes, meaning that much of the interior is only very roughly mapped.

The pictures below give a good idea of how I picture the terrain. Think Gobi Desert or Nepal. Arid, high altitude, cold and rocky.

There is strong evidence that the sea levels used to be higher and that the main continent was more temperate many millenia ago. The central deserts are dotted with the ruins of a past human civilization, that appears to date back to before the Great Crusade. When the current settlers arrived sometime in the last few thousand years and started to explore inland from their coastal cities, they encountered small tribes of abhumans. They appear to be the descendants of the former human civilizations, changed over the millennia by mutation and adaptation to the changing environment. At first, the new human settlers were happy to kill-off the natives living along the coasts and leave the interior to the nomadic abhuman tribes, but the discovery of valuable minerals and fuels in the central deserts has lead to new tensions.

Aside from the relatively new human inhabitants and the native abhumans, the other main civilization on Xhorik Prime are the feral Orks. No one knows how long they have been on Xhorik. It is possible that an Ork invasion may have helped cause the downfall of the original human civilization, either directly through war or by contributing to the massive climate change of the planet. Or perhaps the Orks were here even before the original humans. Whatever their origin, the Orks appear to be relatively few in number and backward in technology. They seem to be primarily concentrated in the northern mountains with a scattering throughout the interior deserts. They were driven from the coasts long ago by the might of the Imperial armies, but they were never eradicated and have continued to live in small bands in the in parts of the planet that are least hospitable to humans. With only the small tribes of scavenging abhumans to fight and very little land suitable to growing fungus, the Ork population and technology levels have remained low. They are far too few and low-tech to challenge the humans of the larger coastal cities. But workers returning from the mines and drilling operations of the central deserts tell tales of seeing Orks riding beasts that have never been seen elsewhere on the planet.

The main industry of Xhorik Prime is the extraction of minerals and fuels from the planet's crust. Much of this mineral wealth is traded and tithed to the nearby home planet of the Red Brotherhood chapter of Space Marines, making this planet of strategic interest to the Marines.

The biggest company on the planet is the local subsidiary of Interplanetary Heavy Industries. IHI is a massive conglomerate, possibly one of the biggest organizations in the Imperium. But no ones knows for sure just exactly how big it is, as it consists of hundreds of subsidiary companies spread across hundreds (or possibly thousands) of worlds. IHI is involved in dozens of businesses, primarily resource extraction, manufacturing, and interplanetary transportation. Many of the subsidiary companies are contractors and subcontractors providing weapons components to the armies of the Imperium. The Adeptus Militarum never contracts out the construction of full vehicles or weapons to a single company, viewing that much power in the hands of civilians as a security risk, susceptible to the traitorous influence of Chaos. Instead, they contract out single components to hundreds of separate companies, with no one organization building anything more complete than the most basic sub-assembly. The final assembly is always done at the Imperial Guard's own factories. But a vast multitude of IHI companies are slowly working to gain access to manufacture all the individual components of the Imperium's vehicles and weapons. The board of directors are secretly planning to use that knowledge to manufacture their own private army of Imperial weaponry. Due to IHI having an organization as opaque and complex as the Imperium itself and the companies being spread over the vast distances of space, the scribes in the offices of the Imperial Defense Contractors do not suspect they are all part of the same organization.

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Please add your own descriptions of the people and places of Xhorik, either on this post or a new one!