[UA] The Metal Eaters (was Steampunk)

[Greg Stolze]

>However - OK, here's the real question - if Mechanomancers cannot create
>Machines capable of magical effects, then what kind of artifacts would they
>build?  (I love the artifact rules, BTW.  Simple, elegant and sensible.)

Well, pretty much all the clockworks I've described in One Shots and LGM.
I just like the idea of blurring the boundary between "living" and
"machine" by making machines that have living properties (which machines
usually can't have).    "Steal memories" is not a quality of a living
being.  Eating, healing, reproducing, genuinely thinking, adapting to
something not previously experienced or prepared-for -- those are all
things that animals can do and machines generally can't.

Though -- damn -- the idea of a procreating clockwork gives rise to some
nasty possibilities.  Imagine a clockwork about the size of a lunchbox.  It
can do about three things: Walk around, gather metal, and reshape the
gathered pieces of metal into another clockwork like itself.  Then there
are TWO clockworks gathering metal and recreating.  When they don't find
any metal, they wander off searching until they do.

Toss one of those in the unexamined back of a junk yard and you've got a
Sleeper nightmare of apocalyptic proportions.  The geometric progression
makes it monstrous if you don't nip it in the bud.

It depends, of course, on how long it takes the gadget to duplicate.  If
it's eight hours, that's a lot less menacing.  It's still an item with
tremendous potential for harm though.  Imagine some zany mechanomancer lets
one loose out int eh desert by some abandoned military base.  By the time
the PCs roll through  a couple years later, the boxes are eating one
another, just waiting for fresh meat(al)...

-G.

If the reinstatement of capital punishment was clearly doing nothing to
reduce the number of murders in those states permitting it, it certainly
appeared to be cutting down on the number of confessions.
        -Dr. Douglas Ubelaker

www.waylay.com
www.thehungersite.com



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