What is the structure of Commoragh?

i have an extremely hard time visualising the dark city and what it would like from afar.

Some pictures of the dark city depict it as the towers like stalagmites and stalagtites of a cave, (the cave being the webway)

whats your opinion?

Well, the webway is rather difficult to explain (I really dont understand it very well myself).
Basically, the idea of stalagmites in a cave is actually pretty good.

If you mean of what the buildings are built, I would think that varies a lot. Different kinds of rocks and stone, steel, maybe concrete at some places?
Since Commorragh is not one place at a single location, you cant really see all of it at a time. And if webway has walls, I dont think you could even get to any good position to view it.
I like to think of it as a lot of separate bubbles, all of which are connected through a chain (that somehow goes through the bubbles), linking them all together. Not sure does that help!

Mngwa wrote:

Well, the webway is rather difficult to explain (I really dont understand it very well myself).
Basically, the idea of stalagmites in a cave is actually pretty good.

If you mean of what the buildings are built, I would think that varies a lot. Different kinds of rocks and stone, steel, maybe concrete at some places?
Since Commorragh is not one place at a single location, you cant really see all of it at a time. And if webway has walls, I dont think you could even get to any good position to view it.
I like to think of it as a lot of separate bubbles, all of which are connected through a chain (that somehow goes through the bubbles), linking them all together. Not sure does that help!

i was refering to the original city, basically not the satellite realms. I find it hard to figure out is there a distinct up and down? are the large structures based upon some captured planet thats been moved into the webway? or is the city simply floating in the middle of its webway realm? like cloud city in star wars episode 5?

Heres another concept: the realms of the dark eldar as being something akin to a neuron network in the human brain? basically several structures orbiting a captured star or planet. i remember in path of the incubus the tower where the kabal of the white flames was a part of the force sent to capture a tower on the net like structure containing the illmea, the captured suns that power the dark city.

http://wh40k.lexicanum.com/mediawiki/images/thumb/4/4e/Commorragh_View.jpg/400px-Commorragh_View.jpg

The Path of the Renegade book does have a scene where Dark Eldar ships depart Commorragh and we get a look at the shape of the place. The impression I got from reading it that Commorragh is built on a more or less disc-shaped foundation, with towers both on the "up" and "down" side (gravity presumably always points towards the disk), rimmed by docking spars. It's described looking sort of like some big spiny sea-creature. It's also described elsewhere in the story as being composed of tiers, kind of like a big spiky wedding cake.

That's just Port Commorragh, ie. the original city. Looking at Commorragh from the inside would make the place look completely different, since you have portals all over the place conntecting to not only different parts of the city but to various satellite realms. So walking down the street might actually have you travel a distance of several thousand miles, and turning around the corner land you in a location hudreds of lightyears away.

i guess one of the satellite realms must be the one pictured in the link i posted.

That picture is from the 5th edition rulebook, and is titled "Port of Lost Souls: gateway to Commorragh". Port of Lost Souls is mentioned in the codex as being the most violent port in Commorragh. Based on the codex description it is also part of Commorragh proper. My quess is that the picture is from the webway tunnel leading in to Commorragh, with the pointy things being various docking spars and spires.

It's basically a huge city, composed of sub realms, spread of a galatic size space. All the sub realms are connected by portals. Though in pure distance, the sub realms are spread over enormous distances, it means nothing when you cross over from one realm to another. it's described in the codex how you see one realm very far away, but you take one step and you're there.
Realms are separated, but as far as practical view, they're not. Consider it like this: each realm is a major city on earth, all spread over a fair distance, but it takes 1 second to get from one city to another.

It's a city, as far as structure, but it's more an infinite world/realm, you have everyhing in it, living quarters, factories, weapon facilities, food production facilities, training grounds, astro ports, arenas. All this does you've got different looking neighbourhoods in Commorragh. The centre looks a lot nice than the out realms, with the 13 pillars of vengeance of Vect.

Buildings are basically build on top of eachother, there is no real height, it's described in the codex and they just keep building higher and higher. No height, though there seems to be somekind of a limit of size for every realm, but height doesn't seem to have limits. On the base you have old foundations of the Old Eldar empire buildings, and on the top, forever growing towers, constantly growing higher. Materials are very peculiar, even flesh and bones are used sometimes.

You've also got the underground where the Heamonculi live, beneath it all. It's actually a fairly mysterious place, not much is said about it, it's where the heamonuli do their stuff, possibly where testtube babies are grown, not mentioned whether this undergrounds expands of stays the same (because of no replacements due to permanent death)

Now you've got the dark suns illuminating city, several of them, they can be seen and give off some heat, but they're apparently in another dimension, it's a weird eldar tech thing no human can probably understand.

Laws of phisics aren't the same in the webways, not to forget, like I already said, distances aren't the same, time isn't the same either and a lot of other laws of Newton are broken too, it's another dimension after all.

Commorragh is very big, no real size, just described as very big, but what you should keep in mind is that it has a huge number of dark eldar inhabitants, not just dark eldar, from a lot of other races. Like I said, training ground, factories, etc... take a lot of space. Thousands possibly millions of ships, meaning huge space ports everywhere. The fact that they make testtube babies and have ressurection just add to the huge pile. it's a lot easier to ressurect in Commrragh , that's why the dark eldar go mad and put their mind to mode strategy = 0 when there's a an invasion. AS I've said, COmmorragh just keeps growing nonstop.

Like Swindon

So, roundabouts?

My view was the webway is more like a cave / tunnel system.
So, Commoragh proper, is one large cave, which branches off in to hundreds of tunnels.
(Some of) The tunnels link the different sub cities, long tunnels dont necessarily link distant places, and vice versa.

If the "cave" was made by picking a point in a tunnel, and expanding equaly in all three dimensions, the "roads" would enter the caverns half way up, rather than at the bottom, So the docks would have to be in the middle of the city, and the waste would fall down. So rich people would move up.