40K: Do They Have Shopping Malls?
Pimpcron is wondering about civilian life in 40k.
Hey guys, gals, and sentient fungi. Your Pimpcron has a question for you:
What is civilian life like in 40k?
We have all read about the war-torn cities, the blasted battlefields, and crazy Death Worlds, but what about the local shopping mall?
This curiosity came to me when I was on the rooftop deck of a building looking down at the neighboring parking lot. Neatly trimmed rows of trees, shrubs, and mulch outlining and interrupting parking spaces with their curbs in neat patterns. From the top of the 6 floor building I thought what most of you would probably think: I want to make a battleboard like this! This is both beautiful and very interesting tactically to play on! And even though the parking lot I was looking down on was a hotel parking lot, I got the impression that a shopping mall or something similar would be really cool. Then the thought occurred to me: do they even have shopping malls or landscaping in 40k at all? Never once in my career of playing this game have I ever seen a picture of an Imperium building with landscaping or curbs like we see in modern times.
Conversion idea! I now want to make an army of servitors with weed-whacker and hedge trimmer arms. Maybe one with a leaf blower. I would program mine to intentionally not speak the local language of wherever they are working.
School of Hard Knocks
I can’t find any “official” descriptions of what civilian life is like from any sources I have. And it’s not really something that GW would ever need to delve into when describing a galaxy at war.
“The Guardsman’s heart sank as he peered over the trench line and across the brutal battlefield: Jimmy’s Shoe Palace had been hit with a stray Artillery shell. That was his favorite place to buy shoes. As the sorrow turned to rage, the Guardsman screamed and charged the enemy with his bayonet fixed, only to burst into a red mist a moment later from an enemy round. Without Jimmy’s Shoe Palace, there was nothing left for him to live for.”
So I think we all understand that the life of the average Imperial citizen is like life handed you a big bowl of turd soup and said you don’t get the sweet escape of death until you finish your dinner. You are nothing of value, own nothing of value, and the Imperium actually has rain storm generators to keep any ideas of relaxing at the beach out of your head. From what I can gather, there is the official Imperial coin system, that is used for interstellar trade and stuff. Then there is probably local currency that is unique to each planet, like on Shiva IV they use dried out mice heads as money, and on Krillin II they use eye lashes. So even if your life sucks and you work for the Imperium for free or whatever, I’m sure you have means of earning the local currency by trading or maybe just good old-fashioned lovin’ strangers for money.
Well you could always be a merc too.
It also seems like you are buried under a mountain of Imperial Bureaucracy, but with layers upon layers of massive regulations, they often miss the little transactions. Basically like any black market, I suppose. So where do the teenage girls with bionic eyes hang out? Where do the retired Sisters of Battle walk for exercise every morning? Where the hell does someone go to buy some mother-effin’ Auntie Anne’s pretzel bites?!
You’re Either Poor, Rich, or a Servo-skull
It seems like 40k is what the Occupy movement has been warning us about. It seems like 99.9% of everybody alive is poor. and 99.9% of everybody dead is either a Servo-skull or inexplicably used as filler for Imperial walls and roads. The other small portion of the population is crazy rich, living the life that all of the other people would dream of. So I guess what I can assume from all of this, is that the high-class sections of the cities might actually have something like a shopping mall. Meanwhile the rest of the city might be dotted with little bazaars here and there where poor people sell to poor people.
Fixing pot holes must be interesting.
So I guess the conclusion I have come to, in my limited understanding of civilian life in 40k, is that I can (and probably will) make a modern-looking parking lot board for my wargaming convention Shorehammer but it will be like a government building with a parking lot versus an actual mall.
But I reach out to you, the 40k community to explain what you know about civilian life in the comment section. If you can provide any references that would be great too, because this is really intriguing me.
So What Do You Know About Civilian Life in 40k?
