Steam and Clockwork

Pitch Tuners (BG)
An innovation of James Bisley's, Pitch Tuners are fairly simple devices: when wound up, a hammer strikes a metal bar, creating a musical note, and does so over and over until the tuner winds down or is turned off. The pitch of this note can be adjusted, as can the frequency of srriking, and pitch tuners are therefore used mainly by musicians to help tune their instruments and to keep time when playing. You will occasionally get noble children "borrowing" their parents' pitch tuners and using them to break glass at a distance, but kids are like that...

Automatic Spear (BG)
A particularly vicious sort of clockwork trap, automatic spears are used by those who wish to keep a particular item secure. The device is built into the box, bookshelf, display case, plinth, recess or other container where the item is kept. If someone picks up the item in question without first deactivating the automatic spears (perhaps by tapping the side of the box with a particular rhythm, or pushing a particular book on the bookcase, for example) the spears shoot out - in theory, impaling the individual in question so that they cannot flee. In practice, victims of clockwork spears have been able to extricate themselves from the devices, but being obliged to do so hampers the burglary attempt greatly (is a Major Disadvantage).

Voorash Wings (SC)
Much prized by Skylarking enthusiasts, Voorash wings are - as the name implies - part of the Voorash Stash. They are sleeker, faster, and more compact than conventional clockwork wings, and can be concealed under a large coat or cloak. The Flying Squad now use Voorash Wings exclusively, and everyone's heard stories about cornered government agents suddenly doffing their coat, launching into the air, and flying to the Hive to report that their cover's blown.

Clockwork Alarms (BG)
A somewhat benign version of the automatic spear, clockwork alarms merely set off a loud bell if a particular item is moved without disarming the alarm.

Gun Canes (BG)
Invented by an anonymous member of the Broader Guild, Gun Canes are frowned upon by the authorities but are prized in the black market. They are exactly what the name implies - handguns disguised as canes - and certain aristocrats are known to carry them, especially those who are fond of duelling but don't want to alert the authorities to the fact.

Wristblades (SC)
Another item from the Voorash Stash, a wristblade are knives that are concealed in a metal bracer worn on the wrist - a specific movement of the hand releases the knife, placing it in the hand of the user swiftly. Another hand movement causes the blade to retract. The wristblade is thus a hidden weapon which can be deployed in a fight very quickly and hidden again just as swiftly, qualities which make them highly desirable to underworld figures.

They come in two varieties: combat wristblades are sturdy things that can be used in a fight without too much risk of damaging the mechanism. Quiet wristblades are small, have a quiet mechanism, and shoot in and out of their holders smoothly and quickly, and are thus used mainly as assassination weapons.

Legally speaking, civilians are not allowed to possess wristblades, but - like clockwork keys - plenty get onto the streets anyway.

Automatic Rifles and Sniper Rifles (SC)
As described in the list of types of gun above. Please note that there are only three licences to produce automatic rifles or sniper rifles within the city, and they tend to go to the most respectable Strict Clockworkers. Since your character is the sort of individual who hangs around the Riverview, you are unlikely to be the most respectable Strict Clockworker around - unless you have a very good reason, you will not be able to start the game knowing how to make automatic weapons or sniper rifles (although of course it can be one of your character's goals to win an automatic weapon or sniper rifle licence).

Steamworking

The Philosophy of Steam

Steam is of the people. It doesn't matter how many middle-class system designers or aristocratic investors you have supporting a project; if you want your machine to be anything other than a pretty blueprint and a nice idea, you need solid working class lads to build and maintain the thing. Often, this requires getting the Steam Union onboard; as ineffectual a lobbying force as they are, hiring scabs and strikebreakers is expensive in terms of both money and public sympathy, and the Union can make an awful lot of trouble for you if you cross it.

Steam is a sledgehammer. Steam machines are powerful. They make an impact. They are not at all subtle. And they are not at all precise. Pinpoint accuracy is not the order of the day; shock and awe is.

Steam transforms societies. Steam factories are bringing cheap, affordable, functional goods of adequate-but-not-brilliant quality within reach of the masses for the first time. The railways are forcing more traditional trade caravans to attempt ever riskier journeys in order to turn a profit. Steam technology always makes a huge impact upon the societies that adopt it - the Irgar owe their very independence to it.

Portfolio Items
The items in a steam designer's Portfolio - or that of a Grey Engineer with knowledge of steamworking - are as follows:

To produce a Portfolio item, the designer must spend a turnsheet action drawing up a set of blueprints for the specific machine to be made. They must then find the money required to build the thing - this often entails going cap in hand to the friendly neighbourhood loan shark. Once the money is available, teams of steamworkers must be hired (often via the Union), and it will take them two turns to build the machine. You may also reduce the time taken to produce the machine by 1 turn for each additional Staggering investment you are able to obtain for the project above and beyond the minimum required (though a steam machine will never take less than a turn to produce).

Modifying a Machine
Sometimes a designer will want to modify a machine. There's two ways of going about this:

Alterations to an existing machine require a Major investment.

Backengineering a Machine
To backengineer a machine, you need to do one of two things:

Inventing a New Machine
The process of inventing new steam machines is as follows:

1: E-mail the GMs and tell us what you want to do. We will e-mail you back telling you how viable the project is. We hope to be able to say "yes" to most ideas - the closer your invention adheres to the philosophy behind steamworking, the more likely this is to happen.

2: Spend 1 turnsheet action producing the blueprints for your invention.

3: Convince investors to fund your project and hire steamworkers.

4: Spend three sleepless turns hoping nobody sabotages the project before the steamworkers have finished building the thing. You may reduce the time taken to produce the machine by 1 turn for each additional Staggering investment you are able to obtain for the project above and beyond the minimum required (though a prototype steam machine will never take less than two turns to produce).

5: Have someone famous smash a bottle of champagne against the side of your machine as you throw the big lever to start the thing up.

It's that simple!

The State of the Art

Steam Ships
These vast, slow hulks can carry staggering amounts of trade goods over water - even the smallest are the size of several large warehouses. They are not perfect, however. They are slower than sailing ships, and less agile. Perishable goods cannot be carried great distances by steam ship, for they will be rotten in the hold by the time they reach their destinaton. Furthermore, any pirate ship can outmanoeuvre a steam ship with ease; the expense of hiring sailing escorts severely undermines the profits that would otherwise be making steamship operators rich beyond their wildest dreams.

Trains
Woo woo!

Steam trains are large, fast, and noisy. You can often hear the rumbling of the comparatively small subway trains beneath the city; out in the countryside, you can hear one of the gargantuan overland trains coming from miles away. Bandits can and do prey upon steam trains - there simply isn't enough soldiers and mercenaries in the world to guard every place the trains have to stop to refill their water tanks or drop off some mail.

Heat Factories
There's no getting around the fact that winter in Horizon is cold, even indoors. The only way to keep warm is to light a fire, with all the difficulty associated with that. Smoke, soot and the difficulty of obtaining fuel in a city all make an open fire inconvenient.

Heat Factories are a marvellous new invention. Water from a nearby river is drained into a huge underground tank and boiled (thanks to a workforce of men stoking huge furnaces with coal) into steam, the pressure of which pushes it along an underground pipe. The big pipe becomes a smaller pipe, the smaller pipe becomes a little pipe, and the little pipe (if you've paid the factory owner enough money for him to connect you up to the network) goes through your house, making the place snug and warm. In system terms, any player who lives in high-quality rented accomodation (rent of Notable or above per turn) or who owns their own house can assume - if they wish it - that their house will be warmed by a Heat Factory.

The biggest danger with these heat factories is the way that if the pipes get cracked, your house fills with scalding hot steam. But at least you'll be warm.

Steam Abbatoirs
These are the size of small factories, which indeed they are in a certain sense. Essentially a steam abbatoir comprises a steam-driven production line on which a number of semi-skilled workers can very efficiently butcher large numbers of animals. The cunning part is that the carcasses are then treated with waste steam to remove every remaining scrap of meat from the bones; this (generally very low quality) meat is then reconstituted by another section of machinery into desperately cheap "meat-based products". As a result the urban poor are able to afford regular meat in their diets for the first time in history, although it is of very low quality. Such abbatoirs require very good rail links to bring in the animals fast enough to make them viable, and also a ready market for huge quantities of meat, so as yet only large cities such as Horizon have them.

Recently, Baron von Liktinstein has expressed interest in building at least one of these in Vegdarbarra. Other governments try to avoid thinking about the possible reasons.

Steam Mines
Steam-based mining machinery has revolutionised mining. A central steam engine can power an internal railway, huge and powerful (though not especially delicate or easily-controlled) drills, pumps to empty flooded regions of a mine, and so forth. The largest steam mines can even incorporate huge refineries in which factory workers can melt ore down into metal and so forth.

Reputedly, the Land hates these things - certainly, Land shamen and daimons have been known to attack steam mines if they get the opportunity.

High Pressure Steam Cleaners
Invented around 18 years ago by Mr Nathaiel Hauser, the High Pressure Steam Cleaner combined two things he deemed necessary to maintain cleanliness: heat (as observed when cooking) and water (for washing, obviously). The HPSC consisted of a coal-heated brass sphere in which the water was boiled and the steam collected. The brass sphere had a single valved outlet at the top which was attached to a directional nozzle. This allows the build up of steam within the sphere and therefore an increase in pressure occurs – this allows the steam to become superheated and thus can be released at incredible temperatures.

The HPSC was used at the tail-end of the Versinya Plague to eradicate any trace of the disease from the homes and buildings that had contained the sick and to clean all items that had come into contact with them. This had some limited success with large mobile units being pulled by horses through the streets and manned by a group of steam workers who became known as Hausers. They were not always very popular for although the machine appeared to rid the building of the disease it also caused massive damage to anything inside such as furnishings, wallpaper, paintings and tended to crack china; the rich and poor were effected alike in this manner.

The HPSC really found its forte when immobilised in hospital buildings where it could be used to clean equipment and linen that had been used on the sick.

The other major disadvantage of the HPSC is the propensity of the brass sphere to buckle, burst or explode, thus venting superheated steam into the local vicinity. This has caused a number of casualties including several fatalities and extensive burning disfigurement.

The Revolving Restaurant
A famous Horizon landmark, the Revolving Restaurant is situated at the top of a high tower, built in the midst of the Imperial Ruins back when the land prices there were still cheap. Powered by a large Steam engine in the basement of the tower, the Revolving Restaurant turns slowly on the top of its column, enabling diners to enjoy a complete view of Horizon from the air. The tower itself, of course, is a terrible eyesore, a blight on the Horizon skyline for those who cannot afford to eat there.

The Steam Chair
There is no such thing as a humane means of public execution, but the closest thing yet invented is the Steam Chair. Located in the midst of the Steam, the Steam Chair is a large steel seat. A pipe has been connected to one of the main steam outlets from a nearby factory, and in turn has been subdivided into a myriad of small pipes which surround and are aimed at the individual in the Chair. Condemned prisoners are strapped in, the faucet on the connecting pipe is opened, and high-pressure superheated steam blasts the criminal from all directions, scalding them to death swiftly. Ghouls who have consumed individuals executed in this manner report that the individuals felt intense pain for a brief moment before the merciful release of death; it is still, however, vastly preferable to hanging or death by firing squad. Nonetheless, the spectacle is vivid and shocking, and many judges are reluctant to sentence people to the Steam Chair. There is a persistent rumour that the Steam Chair was designed by the Watchdogs and built in the Steam in order to strike terror into the hearts of the Steam Union and their Family backers.

Steam Airships
The most visually impressive steam inventions of recent years, Steam Airships are as large as the biggest steamships, and glide slowly and gracefully through the air; whilst they are slow (they tend to travel no more quickly than a fast sailing ship), they have the greatest range of any flying machine. They are kept aloft by vast steam-powered turbines on their underside, and take off with the assistance of powerful jets of steam; they must land on large bodies of water, partly for structural reasons and partly so that they can use the water to refill their tanks, and so they cannot take off using their turbines or the turbines will become waterlogged.

There was some concern that revolutionaries could take control of an airship and drive it into a major city. Military exercises conducted in the Jurican desert at the request of the Caliph have shown that there is little need to fear this happening: steam airships are slow and large and give off big clouds of steam and smoke, and thus rogue steamships would be noticed while they were still a long way off, and a large number of clockwork wing troops and military flying taxis could be deployed to take control of said airships long before they threatened a city. It is assumed that in wartime steam airships would be used more as mobile aerial headquarters than as weapons of war themselves.

Steam Artillery
Now these are weapons of war. Steam-powered artillery pieces have been developed by all military forces of the True Lands. They are about as effective in terms of range as First World War artillery, but are absolute pains to move around on a battlefield (you need large teams of horses, or powerful land taxis, or a train to shift them) and need large teams of men to load, reload and fire. Indeed, the deployment and use of artillery on a battlefield is one of the most hotly contested debates in modern military theory; it is generally assumed that many battles in the future will be decided by the capability of the armies in question to a) get their artillery in position and set up quickly, b) locate the enemy's artillery and put it out of action, and c) prevent the enemy from achieving b). Attempts to produce mobile artillery by mounting artillery pieces on train carriages have failed miserably - the recoil invariably derails the train, no matter how well it is secured, and wrecks the track in the bargain. It should also be noted that steam artillery fire is much less accurate than real-world artillery; while you can make rough estimates of where your shots will land, the huge recoil and the imprecise nature of steam machinery means that you can only narrow these estimates down to, say, an area the size of a football pitch - and that's if the firing conditions are perfect.

The Steam Union

Rank 1: You are a rank-and-file Union member. You have the membership card, you turn up to the lunches and don't listen carefully at meetings, and you down tools and take up placards when you're told to.

Rank 2: You are a minor but known member of the Union. Factory foremen and Union-affiliated steam designers hold this rank by default, simply because their jobs involve having authority over other steamworkers. Alternately, you could be a normal steamworker who happens to be enthusiastic about the Union, Richterism, and worker's rights.

Rank 3: Union work is now taking up a significant amount of your spare time. Should strike action occur you're probably going to be closely involved in organising the pickets and keeping an eye out for strikebreaking Rumblers. The Union will pay you a Poor income (this could come in useful should you be fired for your Union-related activities), and may make Trivial purchases for you from time to time.

Rank 4: At this point you are probably spending more of your time working for the Union than you are actually on a factory floor. You will have a Comfortable income from your Union work; you can also apply to get Minor purchases made for you through the Union. You're a bigshot in the Union now: you make speeches at meetings regularly and your motions may even be passed from time to time. If you're not on the Central Committee of the Union they still listen carefully to your advice, and you often get involved in heated debates about major policy decisions.

(As always, if you wish to play a Rank 5 member of the Union talk to the GM team.) Calling for strike action involves a complicated voting process which, for reasons of sanity, we'll abstract out. Your rank in the Steam Union is roughly equivalent to your popularity: the higher your rank, the louder your voice. A Rank 4 member calling for strike action will get much more support than a Rank 1 member. When a call for strike action goes out, we will let all players of Steam Union PCs know and ask them to make their feelings felt in the housekeeping section of their turnsheets. We will then add up the number of Ranks in favour and the number of Ranks against, and factor in the opinions of any NPC Steam Union members who might have strong feelings about the issue (for the most part we'll restrict this to NPCs directly involved with the issue at hand, or have been convinced to vote one way or the other by PC steamworkers). So, a Rank 4 Union member effectively has 4 times the voting power of a Rank 1 member. A simple majority is required for limited strike action (for example, strikes happening at a specific factory or project). A three-quarters majority is required for a general strike.

Grey Engineering