Stank Town: a History

The following is background info for my Necromunda campaign Stank Town Hustle. This covers a brief history of the region, some descriptive and geographical info, and the events that lead up to the first turf war.





The stink of rotten flesh, bleaching agents, and rust permeate all things in Stank Town. The sector earned its rep, over a period of months, following an entirely ordinary mistake.

You see, sludge processing was tightly regulated in the sector that was known as “Tank Town”. It was bustilg wih factories that produced imperial vehicle parts and repair shops that serviced decomissioned tanks from the Astra Militarum. Assembly and dissassmbly was the biz, and the contract for the disposal and pricessing for bodies changed hands to cut costs. New management they said, and two or three processes were cut. One such process was the removal and sale of the head of cadavers, which no longer sold for the cost of extraction. The other was scrubbing the bodies of grey matter. The end result?





People got sick. Prion infections caused some deaths, deaths get into the food, and since the sludge production process prefers to keep protien structures intact, Prions got back into the food and killed an order of magnitude more. Problem solved, a new bleaching sub-section was added to sludge processing, but the mix was off. Now the cleansing agents in the sludge got people sick. It tooks months to perfect the mix.





Meanwhile people in the street got hungry and desperate. Under bleached sludge could kill you with prions, over-bleached would make you sick or kill you. Folks would eat just about anything that didn’t come out of the sludge tanks, including other people. And bingo, more prions, more dead. Way too many dead to he exact. The body dispisal chutes pasted to the alleys every-other-block were jammed and over-full with rotten corpes unable to be processed. The factories stopped kicking out parts since the workers were either dead, mad with prions, or bed-ridden from cleansing shock. The smells of industry lost out to the stench of death.





But that wasn’t what let to today. The magistrate had been overlooking the districts productivity report for a full quarter chalked up to a missing zero, a simple records error. Two months is understandable, three was simply discraceful, but four months ending on a new low? You can bet that ze shat itself once the true nature of the problem was discovered. 90% of the factory units were dark and had been for months, and production continued to *decrease*. A task force was assembled to solve this issue.





Note that they did nothing to address the overflowing corpse chutes, that was corspe guild territory and their annual inspection was still many months away. Instead, they simply threw credits at the problem. Schematics were drawn to divert sludge from other districts. This required metal and welding contracts, and the less-than legitimate source of scavanged metal from the now dark factories was abundant. New hab blocks were slated with the same shady business opportunities. Plus with all this contracted labor and imperial money, this risked the newly established and unlicensed fungal food operations.





Easy money, abandoned goods, and a power vacuum in Stank Town led to the impending turf war, and now we’ll see the chaos it spins.