The Tantalus Campaign - Tantalus Prime

There are only a few cities on the surface of Tantalus, each fairly modest affairs, with barely a billion souls apiece. The largest of these cities is known to the locals as Tantalus Prime, although its official designation is Sector 23, Sub-Hive 11, Precinct Zeta-Thassius 3.

Tantalus Prime is a sprawling plascrete jungle, a microcosm of humanity where the ruins of the older city vie with the soaring towers of a burgeoning metropolis. The outskirts of the city are ruined and overgrown, with larger structures springing up with increasing density as they approach the centre. 

Within the central segment of the city, the spires cluster together, reaching far into the sky. Visitors in recent years have seen the beginning of a new hive, as populations have begun to explode in the wake of the increased industrial activity. 

Here the dregs of humanity interact closely with the up-and-coming, the opulent and the despondent a hair's breadth apart. The sheer difference between the classes causes no end of problems in the underworld of Tantalus Prime - violence in the streets and causeways is common, and many of the more affluent members of society have taken to carrying weapons of increasing ostentatiousness as both a form of defence and a symbol of stature.

The outskirts of the city are broken and in many places little more than rubble, blending into the blasted landscape surrounding it. There are several rivers flowing into the area, but these are sickly and polluted from the heavily mined and damaged soil. Packs of lesser mutants and other less pleasant fauna roam this wilderness, while to the south one of the few remaining forests in the area struggles to hold off the encroaching wasteland, the outermost trees gnarled and twisted, little more than withered mockeries of the deeper copse. 

To the east, the city nestles against the coastline, turbulent waters abutting the crumbling necropolis that marks the underworld of the Tantalus Prime, the skeleton of the old city subsumed by the growing spires of the new hive.

Unlike other areas of the city, where access to the sub-levels is difficult at best and suicidal at worst, here the catacombs break the surface, allowing a steady flow of water into the city. This is where the city draws its water and most of its power, as the constant torrent of seawater fuels hydroelectric stations and desalination plants, hurriedly constructed to service the needs of the exploding population.

Whilst not the most comforting of places to live, at least the inhabitants of Tantalus Prime are mostly safe from the ravening hordes of beasts that have risen up in the wake of Tantalus' brutal and rapid industrialisation. 

Those horrors are reserved for Delta and Epsilon.

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