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If your a regular man or women in the imperium not a Nobel or a soldier than garden world i think is about the best you can get cause if im not mistaken only nobels or heros get to live on paradise worlds and there descendants i guess.

I understand that the really protection of a determinated civillian poblation depend of the philosophy of the spacemarine chapter in his planet.
Exist diferents chapters with diferent opinions about non warriow poblation. In this way, the iron hands will be less worried for colateral damage than the salamanders.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
Besides the craftworlds and dark eldar, ¿You know anything about quality of life between alien races?. If my knowledge it´s OK, eldars and Tau must be the best life in all galaxy. In our standarts, all orkis are relative poor (no acces to good health and buildings for anyone , including the warlords).
Have the Tau poor neighborhoods foranother alin inmigrants (such kroots and gue vessa).
Idon´t know is the tau society are simillar to the BIONICLE matoran society in metru nui (compare Turagas with ethereals, districts with castes and etc. ) But a few years ago, I was read in a novel that the matoran had devastated neighborhoods in metru nui habitated by unwished guys by matoran society.

Look at the fluff descriptions for cultists (don't have it on me at the moment) where it's talking about the life of an imperial citizen and why so many turn to Chaos.

The best part about 40k and a million-worlds imperium means that everything is variable. I've always seen the Imperium as Stalinist Russia where life is cheap and conditions are oppressive and pretty bad. At the same time I don't think they're being worked to death but at the same time on a world like Armageddon I'm sure people were dying making Chimeras whilst the war was going on.

I just want to know what imperial citizens do in their down time. I'm sure there are inter-stellar performance companies, music tours and sporting leagues (Quidditch being played with jet bikes?).

Thats why I mentioned the pubs, brothels and bars. Bakeries etc. So they would do things similar to what we do. Each world probably has different forms of fun. Some world might be obsessed with a chess like game, while others may find it fun to hunt large game.

If you can think it, you can bet there is a world that loves it in its down time. But its pretty clear people definately have time to enjoy themselves.

 colonel584 wrote:
I've always seen the Imperium as Stalinist Russia where life is cheap and conditions are oppressive and pretty bad..

Well, it was bad... but at least they had vodka, rye bread, honey and salted gherkins. And free health care - the USSR had a lot of first-rate doctors and medical specialists working for the good of the people.

edit: and we sold them butter at nice prices, because they were our nice powerful but peaceful neighbor. :-)

 colonel584 wrote:
Look at the fluff descriptions for cultists (don't have it on me at the moment) where it's talking about the life of an imperial citizen and why so many turn to Chaos.

So many turn to chaos because chaos wispers to all. It's not about the conditions necessarily. People with terminal illnesses slowly turn to nurgle, people with addictions turn to slanessh, etc.

 colonel584 wrote:

The best part about 40k and a million-worlds imperium means that everything is variable. I've always seen the Imperium as Stalinist Russia where life is cheap and conditions are oppressive and pretty bad.

Depends on the world. As long as the Imprium gets it's tythe they don't really care how a world is run, as long as it sticks to some strict but simple laws. Keep your tythe coming, don't turn to chaos and keep your world under control. A planetary governor is just as likely to get a bullet in the back of the head from an assassins gun because he keeps having rebellions because the citizens of the world are fed up with the horrific conditions as he is for letting them be too unproductive through decadence.

The IoM is a strict and bloody regime, but they also don't take too much notice of what is going on on any particular planet as long as the tythe keeps flowing and the Arbites are not too overworked.

We have had real deathcamps IOTL, and they worked their prisoners far less than 20 hours a day.

A lot of GW/BL fluff is simply impossible if you want to keep a civilisation going, since everyone would die of overwork, starvation, suffocation, radiation, pollution or disciplinary punishment within a year. Women living under these circumstances could simply not get pregnant, keep the foetus and especially not raise the child to adulthood - while all GW/BL litterature rather describe cities as almost overpopulated.

My take on the IoM is this: take a chinese factory worker of today (2014), making no label sneakers in a gakky environment with low pay. Replace the Communist party with the Ecclesiarchy. Turn the political system back to early 1950s, with spies everywhere, and obligatory Party meetings/Church sermons each week. The news are also on the 50s level, state run and heavy on propaganda/indoctrination to be a good communist, distrust for anything that goes against The Great Leader and total xenofobia against stangers.

At any moment the Truth, Right Way or Leader may be switched á la the cultural revolution, and you man be enslaved, fined or executed for doing what everyone was forced to do two weeks earlier.

Big Brother is watching you, both in public (Church propaganda, Arbites patrolling etc) and in secret (the Inqusition, secret police etc) and likes to remind you about it all the time.

You have no privacy and no rights. China had/have their limits on children, rules about internal migration (from the poor countryside to the rich cities) etc. IoM have all kinds of heresies, acts of treason and obscure laws that almost no one is unable to not break, and the punishments are harsh.

You may be conscripted to fight in foreign wars or as forced labour with no warning or preparation.

On the other hand - you have a home, if only a bedroom you share with three other factory workers. You have it better here than in the countryside (with warlords/robber gangs, starvation, floods etc). You work 12 hours a day with one day a week of - but that was standard for our ancestors in the year 1900. You may advance - either in work, or the equivalent of the Party, or even in the military. The government want you obedient and productive, not dead, so if you break the rules by mistake they may let you go with a warning (two weeks of unpaid evening works, for example).

And todays China is going through both industrialisatiion and urbanisation at the same time. It will look very different only in 25 years time. But the average IoM planet have not gone through any big changes, so they should have better housing situation than todays china.

I usually think of Russia under the tsars and the Soviet Union. The Cities of Death passage was truly dark, beyond reason or practicality. I imagine that laboring 20 hours a day, sleeping under he benches is more reserved for gulag equivalents with prisoners, or maybe when the Hive or planet is under immediate threat.

The Necromunda book description makes the most sense. There is a tiny, wealthy oligarchy of noble families, a small group of "middle class" merchant families, lots of laborers (prolly like the industrial revolution, working 16 hour days in awful conditions, but still some time for family and hanging at the bar), and then the underclasses who are outcasts and mutants living in the underhive.

I imagine most worlds have similar social structures, very feudal in nature with a pyramid scheme.

I can imagine a Tau controlled human world would be nice.

they supposedly help improve quality of life for those who convert. (i dont consider the whole sterilization thing cannon (i mean honestly why kill off your own citizens when they could go die for the greater good in combat))

it would be nice until the imperium comes back

 Desubot wrote:
I can imagine a Tau controlled human world would be nice.

they supposedly help improve quality of life for those who convert. (i dont consider the whole sterilization thing cannon (i mean honestly why kill off your own citizens when they could go die for the greater good in combat))

it would be nice until the imperium comes back

Lies from the heretical filthy xenos.

Wyzilla wrote:To be a man in such times is to be one amongst untold billions. It is to live in the cruelest and most bloody regime imaginable.

Sure, the regime may be bad, but that says nothing of the scope of the regime.

There are still vast, uncounted swatches human-settlements that have never been rolled back into the imperium yet (why they're still crusading), and there are tons of worlds where the presence of the Imperium is very weak. The governor and his batch of commissars may be brutal, but if you never see them, then so what?

You mention the Nazi party, and that's actually a really apt analogy. They appeared to be everywhere (propaganda churning out from all corners, swastika flags everywhere, etc.), but behind the veneer of totalitarian control, you're faced with the stark fact that only 15% of people were part of the nazi party, and that figure is grossly over-inflated by the fact that only a small percentage of those were active members, and they did artificial number padding (like automatically enrolling youths when they came of legal age).

And there's plenty of fluff to back up this idea in 40k. The Imperium has nominal control of everything, and there aren't any serious sources of internal dissent, but just because they have the pretense of total control doesn't mean they actually do everywhere all the time.

It's a brutal regime if there is enough of the regime around you, and, of course, if you step out of line or cross it in any way, but for most people, they're not going to notice much more than the surface level stuff (being required to venerate the Emperor on feast days, filling out tax forms in triplicate, etc.)

Now, of course, 40k is also, on the other hand, a socialist dystopia wrapped in a theocracy, so unless you happen to be one of the lucky ones in charge (union bosses, priests, etc.) then you're not going to have a great life either.

In any case, I imagine life in the future not terribly dissimilar to life now or life in the past. You're born into a set of circumstances, you try to improve yourself, but mostly get what you get, and have some sort of worldview, likely religious, that helps you put a positive spin on your lot in life.

Except, of course, you might get captured by dark eldar...

... or have your planet eaten by dinosaurs.

 Ailaros wrote:

Wyzilla wrote:To be a man in such times is to be one amongst untold billions. It is to live in the cruelest and most bloody regime imaginable.

Sure, the regime may be bad, but that says nothing of the scope of the regime.

There are still vast, uncounted swatches human-settlements that have never been rolled back into the imperium yet (why they're still crusading), and there are tons of worlds where the presence of the Imperium is very weak. The governor and his batch of commissars may be brutal, but if you never see them, then so what?

You mention the Nazi party, and that's actually a really apt analogy. They appeared to be everywhere (propaganda churning out from all corners, swastika flags everywhere, etc.), but behind the veneer of totalitarian control, you're faced with the stark fact that only 15% of people were part of the nazi party, and that figure is grossly over-inflated by the fact that only a small percentage of those were active members, and they did artificial number padding (like automatically enrolling youths when they came of legal age).

And there's plenty of fluff to back up this idea in 40k. The Imperium has nominal control of everything, and there aren't any serious sources of internal dissent, but just because they have the pretense of total control doesn't mean they actually do everywhere all the time.

It's a brutal regime if there is enough of the regime around you, and, of course, if you step out of line or cross it in any way, but for most people, they're not going to notice much more than the surface level stuff (being required to venerate the Emperor on feast days, filling out tax forms in triplicate, etc.)

Now, of course, 40k is also, on the other hand, a socialist dystopia wrapped in a theocracy, so unless you happen to be one of the lucky ones in charge (union bosses, priests, etc.) then you're not going to have a great life either.

In any case, I imagine life in the future not terribly dissimilar to life now or life in the past. You're born into a set of circumstances, you try to improve yourself, but mostly get what you get, and have some sort of worldview, likely religious, that helps you put a positive spin on your lot in life.

Except, of course, you might get captured by dark eldar...

... or have your planet eaten by dinosaurs.

I really doubt that the Imperium is big on unions. Attempting to unionize would probably get you shot or lobotomized.

Unions? The first step to a Chaos cult!

 Ashiraya wrote:
Unions? The first step to a Chaos cult!

I've stood through far too many union meetings to disagree with that.

My interpretation of the canon is that there's a great amount of autonomy and many differences between life on the different planets in 40k. So you could live on a peaceable and well-ordered farm world, a nightmarish hive where you're expected to slave away in massive factories, a shrine world where you spend nights and days transcribing ancient texts and building massive monuments, etc.

I think the Army is like this too- divided between guardsmen posted in impossible circumstances with terrible casualty rates, bored PDF troopers guarding peaceful planets, forces being used to pacify smaller threats, etc.

Kid_Kyoto did a couple of articles about civilian life in 40k, part one and part two. A lot of it touches on quality of life for the typical worker/infantryman, as well as a lot of other stuff. While I can't vouch for it's adherence to 40k canon, it's well worth a read.

Unions are run by commissars, but they're still there. You've got to organize your workers to be able to control them more effectively.

The Imperium is a corporatist state if ever their was one.

I'd say it's not to bad for the IoM but its not spectacular either (depends where you live), but if I had to say the best would be paradise worlds and argi- worlds and worse would be feral world and war world. But for the most part it's not bad if your lucky.

Better believe the farmers are over worked and under paid, some things never change with the passage of time!

I find one of the best examples of normal human in 40k lore is the book called Necropolis by Dan Abnett. At the start he describes the upper echelon and the lower classes quite well.

For the others, in Fire Caste it described that the Fire Caste are described with disdain with the Water Caste, and both are in disdain with the Earth Caste, and then lowest are the auxiliaries.

Knockagh wrote:
Better believe the farmers are over worked and under paid, some things never change with the passage of time!

Depends if they have their own version of the common agricultural policy. Then their farmers would sit around all day doing bugger all and throwing away billions of litres of milk

 Ailaros wrote:
Unions are run by commissars, but they're still there. You've got to organize your workers to be able to control them more effectively.

The Imperium is a corporatist state if ever their was one.

The term "organized labor" is generally used to refer to an organization put together by the workers to represent their interests. While the Imperium certainly organizes people for labor it's not at all the same thing. And I'd say it's much less corporatist and much more feudal in organization. While the interests of groups within the Imperium may differ, the High Lords of Terra have absolute power over the armies and offices, just as planetary governors have absolute authority over their people. The Imperium basically runs on a slave/caste system with laborers born into their jobs.

Hey, where'd my post go? I worked hard on that!

I have only read novels written by Dan Abnett so far. In his works, humanity is not quite as grim as some have proposed here. Mostly normalcy with occasional stark horror and calamity. Many people live and die without interruption quite often. It is how I prefer to imagine the 40k setting.

Seriously, if I don't get an explanation for why my post was removed, I'll recreate it here and now.

The average life of a standard imperial citizen is poor. They are hard working and live in miserable conditions. They also eat their own dead. That wonderful little cracker/nutritional bar your eating for your daily ration tastes good right? It better, because your 85 year old neighbor died of a heart attack this morning to make that for you, so that you can continue to live and do the same thing years from now for little Timmy who has yet to be born.

To every hive city there are a economical hierarchy measured based heights of the hive towers.

Underground hive: absolute crap and scary. Cannibal mutants whom live in the dark.
Ground level: your typical workers. Hard days of work. Algae based food, recycled water from the top. the worker may never see day.
Mid level: middle class. I dont know much about them
top: the freshest water. Best food. Aristocrats