Slagshard

An idea I had for a world in the Warhammer 40k universe.

The imperium is a vast machine of war, one that sprawls across the galaxy like the reaching arms of some industrious insect. Many planets have been converted to the task of creating the millions of weapons for the emperor's armies, and thousands more have been stripped bare of all valuable resources. Mesuvian III is one such planet, stripped bare by the resource hungry Mechanicum of mars. It's ancient strip-mines lay barren for many centuries, until the nearby world of Vaultaun was declared as one of the many Forgeworlds presided over by the red-robed priests of mars. Soon, the demand for resources from other planets outstripped any capacity to harvest resources at a fast enough rate. soon, many more planets within a few lightyears lay as barren as Mesuvian III had. Until, that is, a large merchant-house conglomerate decided to cash in on this. they offered to other planets, a large garbage disposal service, choosing Mesuvian III as the key planet for their trash to be dumped.

Thousands of tonnes of steel iron and other scrap metals were hauled to Mesuvian and their cargoloads were dumped into the vast strip mines of the planet. This continued for decades, until the mercantile conglomerate (now named as Mesuvian Metal Reclamation) had gathered the funds to requisition large-scale land crawlers that could be retrofitted to process the excess of scrap metals into usable material. This was then sold to the mechanicum at an exorbitant rate. MMR has turned their venture into an extremely proffitable enterprise, essentially dominating the market for raw materials in the region.

The planet of Messuvian (now know colloquially as Slagshard) had, before the large scale processing of raw ores, been a somewhat arid, but mostly habitable planet. The imperium had no concerns over the destruction of the planets fragile environs, and ravaged it to a barren rockball. what little surviving ecosystem there was mostly adapted, but even as they were beginning to thrive, the MMR dumped a tomb of scrap metal and slag on their heads. The once-verdant plains are now seas of razor-sharp shards of metal and radioactive decay. Completely uninhabitable outside of the land crawlers that roam it's surface, stopping every so often to be unloaded by monstrous cargo spacecraft.

Crime thrives on Slagmetal's crawler-cities. Illicit trade; such as narcotics, weapons and foodstuffs is mostly ignored by the largely inept and corrupt police force. making it not to dissimilar from many of the planets in the imperium at large. This has allowed for the spread  of heretical cult activities on some of the seedier crawlers. This has not been helped by the largely uncaring MMR corporate executives pushing for more work hours in the hellish foundries and forges aboard the cities.

Several foundry-cities have been lost in the throes of rebellion as MMR sent strike teams into their hearts, only for the atomic stacks powering the cities to be overloaded by rebels. This has resulted in a loss of production of metals, leading to the loss of production of war materiel on the nearby forgeworld, leading to the current string of failures in the Devaairn crusade. Most of this knowledge has been suppressed, but the Inquisition is currently investigating MMR and several of it's crawler-cities.