40K System - Sandaaina

 An Agricultural World, or rather an Aquacultural World.

The oceans of Sandaaina are broad but shallow, the result of intense asteroid bombardment by the Holy Writ. This has filled the oceans with nutrients and reduced any outcropping to islands to house the facilities too large for the processing platforms.

The Holy Writ dictates the Emperor’s allocate of authority, called mana. The Fullholders (locally known as Hokukai), each maintain one of the precious void freighters. The Sub-holders, or Ihokai, grow the thick smothering kelp and harvest the oversized cleaner lice below. All belong to the Four Holy Ministries sect.

Greater recruiting targets are met by pressgangs stopping tribal warfare to sweep up whole aquatic warbands and combine them with specialised starkillers from among the Fullholders.

Increasing demand from the Vito stockpiles has led to more visitors from the Shrineworld. Who live in and are influencing the sole hive-island of Sur-Orb. Millions of dissident Sub-holders are abandoning their responsibilities at their rusty platforms and nomadic trawlers to experience this new city culture, leaving many clans weakened against their rivals and so impeding the Holy-Writ set quotas. Including the hereditary rote Machine-Tenders, increasing the delays and breakdowns on Factory-Islands.

Other islands are beginning to be influenced by off-world things like Vox casters. There is a growing fear among the local priesthood of music-based heretical cults developing from the melding of clan hymns.

The underhive wargangs are filling up with people who only have a non-aquacultural skill of tribal warfare, many are cannibals. Unscrupulous Fullholder clans are using them as deniable assets.

Rumors the Council-Board on Star Island, the void station above Sur-Orb, are plotting war upon the Sub-holders until there is only enough left to maintain the Holy Writ. And tear Sur-Orb down to just the space-elevator. The Shrineworlder emissaries and traders on the surface are going to be martyrs which is worrying those who have to bunk on Star Island. The Shrineworlders have turned their entourages’ priests into impromptu missionaries, using vox-sermons to denounce the authority of the Fullholers as religiously superfluous.

Outcast tribes don’t get large supply runs to insure speedy exports. The Sub-holders of other worlds are devolved Fullholders, stripped of their status, labouring on the frozen and molten planets and want it back. The Tribes of the Frozen Reaches are pirates whose Writ started with comet water and now demand the liquid inside a person if not paid. Supposedly to feed their mutant lords.