Ag World filled with mutants
Nazgool is slightly more distant than Terra around a slightly more active star. The abundant foliage has evolved to harness the radiation as well and is harvested for nutripaste processing. The radiation-drenched ecology poisons the more fragile humans, and the deradding process creates vast pools of toxic waste.
Much of the population of Nazgool has been condemned over three and a half thousand years to suffer mutations.
The nobility, deep within the bunker-mountains of the Nine Capitans, remains pure and interact via a series of increasingly tainted chain of administrators.
The nobility doesn’t want to admit to the Imperium at large that 2 billion people are outnumbered 5 to 1 by the mutants. They insist that the radiation merely makes it impractical for extermination and so purification is used to ensure mutant serfs’ touches are removed from food.
The governing family has been replaced four times in its history, as each has failed to address or deal with the mutant problem with violence or diplomacy. The first was a mere 300 years after colonisation, when mutations became an issue and much of the popualtion including the governing family was exterminated except for the mountain people.
The second was some 900 years later when they tried to eliminate the muatnts and replace them with sevitors. Incurring the wrath of the Administratum for late production, the techpreists for subordinating their workforce and the bunker population for being preyed on to become sevitors.
The next family was overthrown some 800 years later for attempting to negotiate with the mutant administrators for higher quotas and was slain in a religious civil war as heretics.
One thousand years later, the next dynasty attempted to make sevitors of the mutants themselves and found they could not effectively subjugate without leaving their mountains and the tech-priests refuse to operate upon unwholsome flesh. Forcing a coup.
The current one, some 500 years old, ignores the issue.
Most formal aspects of Imperial society are restricted to the bunkers and tunnel-voidport Ramga, meaning the mutants have been left to grow and thrive in moderate ignorance. They know they are mutated and hated, but they also have a dozen PlantNations with separate cultures and traditions, though still stratified and feudal. With a variant of the Emperor’s Holy Body sect, which pertains to the redemptive power of consuming blessed food and so in a way, deradding themselves. Becoming closer to the Emperor in spirit and also body for those of the eastern sects.
As Tech-Priests do not concern themselves with mutants, the maintenance has been left to the cult of the Pure Machine, a Omnissiah-derived monastically order which delivers demonstration-sermons in the name of Saint Khamool, an acolyte who fled into the wilderness in the early days when mutations were just starting to be detected as a widespread issue. Their control of the domestic bio-fuel makes them indispensable, even for the nobility. They believe in replacing mutated body parts with cybernetics to maintain purity of form. While the sermons are highly specific, enough general knowledge has accumulated in heretical codices to give the limited middle-class an esoteric knowledge of mechanics and sciences.
These codices are the illegal export alongside the toxic waste surreptitiously used by Magus Biologius to hasten the evolutionary process (mutating) of test animals.
The worse mutations come from the void-miners, where mutants are used in even more unsafe conditions than normal because it’s expected they have higher radiation tolerance. A dozen station-cities hover over the moon and asteroid belt, refining the minerals for simpler needs. Here the Tech-Priests huddle in sealed quarters and dispatch increasingly mutated servitors with directions. A fierce hatred exists between the mutants and the Mooners, whose underground mines were sealed before the mutation issue was prevalent and don’t have more than usual. No other atmospheres exist.
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