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HORIZON IS OVER!The webpage remains up as a permanent archive of game material, mainly for the benefit of nostalgic players - although if you'd like to run a Horizon-inspired game for your friends, that's wonderful too. Horizon will be succeeded by Legacyin Trinity term of 2006.If you like you can look at the (sketchy, incomplete) GM notes as well. |
Transport In the CityThe Subway: The subways have been around for a long, long time. Designed and implemented by the genuis inventor Otto Richter just as the Empire's reign was starting to falter, this network of tunnels serviced by steam-powered carriages shooting about at high speed connects pretty much every district of the city. The addition of the subways to Horizon is widely regarded as one of the high points in a period where the Emperor was becoming ever more and more unstable and destructive.Today the subways still exist, and (largely due to their exceptionally robust design) still work just as well as when they were first built. They are owned and maintained by the Ministry of Public works, who are the ones who provide oil for the wheels and employ members of the Steamworkers' Union to do the routine maintenance on the carriages. Wings: Clockwork metal wings, complete with a control glove which responds to minute movements of the right hand, are the status symbol of the rich and powerful. Many models are available in a variety of styles - large feathery wings for benign philanthropists, frightening bat wings for those who simply must look frightening and diabolical, garishly painted gossamer wings for fashion victims... One mustn't leave one's wings unattended on the street for long, mind. They'll get stolen: wing-theft is common, mainly because the target of the theft is also a handy getaway vehicle. Sabotage of a man's wings is very, very wrong, but also very easy. Simply pulling out a gear or two will prevent them from functioning. Taxis: The devastation wreaked by the end of the Last War meant all the streets of the city had to be re-paved. This provided an opportunity: the Grey Order had produced wonderful steam-and-clockwork powered horseless carriages which chug along marvellously so long as there are special grooves on the streets to guide them. The repaved streets had the correct sorts of grooves added, and the Ministry of Public Works duly rented a number of taxis from the Grey Order to sublet out to taxi drivers - keeping a small number back to provide civil servants with a handy car pool. In 4000 HR, the invention of the flying taxi meant that taxis were no longer bound by rails - as a result, the flying taxi became the preferred mode of transport for the upper classes (or, at least, those of them too lazy to use clockwork wings), and the ground taxis had to lower their rates, making taxi travel more affordable to the middle classes. The Taxis do not go into the Slums, but most other districts have at least a certain amount of coverage - in general, districts which are either well-off (like the noble quarter) or have a lot of places that people are liable to want to take taxis to (like the craftsman's quarter or the government district) have better taxi coverage than those that don't. Flying taxis come in a number of sizes - the smaller ones are used within cities to carry passengers, but the Grey Order have produced larger ones to carry passengers or small amounts of cargo cross-country. As far as comparisons with other flying machines go, flying taxis are faster and more manoeuvrable than steam airships and have a greater range than clockwork wings, but are slower and less manoeuvrable than clockwork wings and have less range and carrying capacity than steam airships. A Quick Note About Flying: Flying machines don't go beyond the cloud level very often - nobody is known to have done so and survived. Steam airships are simply too heavy, and clockwork wings can't get enough lift. Flying taxis could, theoretically, go beyond the cloud level if the driver were to take out the altitude limiter, but those few taxi drivers who have had the knowhow and foolhardiness to try this have come to bad ends - their taxis fall out of the sky, smashed beyond repair. It is said that the Sky does not appreciate trespass... Rumours about transportThe subways are haunted. If you step on the wrong train, it'll whisk you away to the land of the dead forever. |