daedalus-templarius wrote:So, I am running a 40k campaign and my acolytes will be visiting a pleasure world filled with opulent high-rise districts surrounded by slums, within these privately owned cityscapes the Houses and Nobility reign supreme, with their own personal military at their beck and call. Now, that is fine and dandy, but am I doing it right?
I guess I need to brush up on some of my reading, but I am fairly certain that Guild Houses and Nobility are pretty powerful in the 40k universe, I mean, as powerful as they could get on a sector level, obviously nothing close to the manufacturing prowess of the mechanicus within their forge worlds or anything. So, we have these Nobles and Guilds, what the heck do they produce to make all of their money? They obviously don't just buy and resell the stuff the mechanicus makes.
The precise means to wealth of any nobility may vary depending on planet. If you go to the Necromunda rulebook, you can see how it works in Hive Primus of Necromunda as a potential sample of how hive worlds are generally organized. A planetary governor (and his house) rule the planet in the Imperium's name and hands out shipping, landing rights, etc... to the noble houses beneath. These in turn hand down various manufacturing contracts to the common houses of the hive city and pay for this in either local currency or perhaps various imports.
The Adeptus Mechanicus doesn't directly manufacture everything. They sometimes hand out licenses to others so long as they keep to the Mechanicus approved patterns and standards. That is how for example how Armageddon is described in the background as one of the largest Chimera manufacturers in its sector.
The other key thing to think about is that in
40K, there doesn't seem to be a massive consumer economy like the modern world. Most of the manufacturing appears to be the equivalent of vast milltowns producing various industrial goods, not consumer goods. The luxury goods consumed by the upper classes appears to be the result of small scale craftsman type production rather than assembly line mass production. A lot of the production appears to go directly to the Imperium directly in the form of either tithes or as paid for shipments to Imperial organizations or to other worlds to meet the web of supply and demand. A hive world might be making spare parts for tractors on an agri-world, which in turn might ship food to the hive world.
The existence of a generally entrenched upper class, whether noble or guild, means they likely siphon off payments and goods for themselves in the process. Although commercial entities like corporations and guilds exist, I would question whether they are truly like modern publically owned corporations. They may be more like closed circle oligarchies, with all share holders already nobles or other entrenched interests. With Chartist ship captains described as hauling the same cargo routes for generations, it may well be that contracts last for centuries, and assume more the guise of feudal obligations over time rather than just commercial transactions.
