Reliquary Studios
The Character Sheet… and more to come!
This is it. The good stuff is finally rolling out. Here is the beta version of the character sheet (a dynamic fillable PDF). It should give some clues to the mechanics of the game until the Quick Start Rules and Clockwork Cards are released later this month. Until then, feel free to leave feedback in the forums.
ClockworkEmpire_CharacterSheet
The original game design included a character bloodline called beastfolk, a race of animal-human hybrids based on the novel The Island of Dr. Moreau. The bloodline was very popular with early play-testers and added a grotesque underdog quality to the larger storyline that allowed for interesting drama. However, as the game world developed, this bloodline became a bit of a hard sell for the design team.
We’d been towing this line of hard-science fiction where nothing absent from historical reality would exist in the game world. Obviously that means that there was no place for beastfolk in the Clockwork: Empire game. However, a few concessions were made for complex technologies that would have existed if disparate extant technologies were combined (i.e. they could have existed had people thought to put the pieces together). That opened the door for the question “Could someone actually have made a beastman with nineteenth century science?”
Of course, our original answer to this question was, “No.” However, a couple of contributors and designers refused to leave it at that. They really liked the role beastfolk had in the setting of Clockwork: Empire and the future setting, Clockwork: At War. So one contributor, Dr. Lisa Coughlin, a general surgeon by trade and education, set out to prove that xeno-transplantation was possible with nineteenth century medicine. To our great surprise, she came back to us with an entire treatise of notes, medical rationale, and historic precedence that gave us the answer: “Beastfolk could have happened.”
It turns out that the secret to xeno-transplantation is severe immunosuppression, which is very possible with nineteenth century medicine. One widely used immunosuppressant is the drug Ciclosporin, which was originally isolated from the entomopathogenic mushroom, Cordyceps subsessilis. In reality the importance of this fungus was not fully realized until just a few decades ago, yet it existed in a form usable to nineteenth century medicine, and it grew, among other places, along the pacific rim in areas close to where the beastfolk originate in the Clockwork world. With the proper medicines, surgical procedures we thought to be wholly in the realm of science fiction were actually possible. Cited surgeries in Dr. Coughlin’s work start with the repairing of a human skull with the bone of a dog in Russia in the seventeenth century and conclude with the grafting of two heads onto the same animal in Cleveland, OH in the twentieth century. Once we proved access to immunosuppressants was possible and had a list of bizarre historical surgeries to cite, beastfolk were back on the table for discussion.
The final draft of the beastfolk bloodline included the curse immunosuppressed as a result of this research. This state added an even more tragic quality to the story of the beastfolk’s plight and gave them an even more interesting role within the world of the game. We believe this results in fertile ground from which great stories can emerge. While admittedly a bit of a stretch, these fantastical creatures were not so far outside the realm of possibility as we had thought. So thanks to Dr. Coughlin and her research, we have included beastfolk as a bloodline in the core rules.
While we took a very “hard science” approach to technology within the Clockwork World, we obviously didn’t have that option with respect to the supernatural. Rather, we took a “hard mythology” perspective. Keeping with the “a single step from reported history” methodology that runs through the whole setting, we exhaustively researched the supernatural beliefs of the time. The result is a mixture of obscure biblical references, apocryphal texts, ancient lore, unearthed fairy tales, occult writings, and reports from less reputable newspapers.
Natural Magic, Ceremonial Magic, and Alchemy are based largely on the writings of contemporary mystics such as A.E. Waite and Francis Barrett, medieval mystics such as Heinrich Agrippa, ancient mystics such as Hermes Mercurius Trismegistus, and people involved in the Spiritualism movement such as Thomas Edison and Cora L. V. Scott. The Faith Miracles system is based on the writings of the Christian Bible and other holy texts, while the Glamour system is based on legends and period folk and fairy tales. The source material allows us to ground the flavor of the magic systems into the beliefs and suppressions held in the historical 1896. Again, this moves toward our goal of creating a believable “unbelievable world.”
This source material solidifies into two different types of transcendent powers. The Faith and Glamour systems offer straightforward abilities with narrow applications. This interpretation holds true to the source material and offers a way for characters to have access to a single supernatural ability or a collection of them. Natural/Ceremonial Magic and Alchemy each offer a systematic method for creating very specific results from very broad building blocks. Also, while Faith and Glamour offer more immediate results, the Magic and Alchemy systems tend to emulate the lengthy ritualized processes from Victorian fiction and mysticism.
In the end, these transcendent powers offer a mystical flavor to the world without overwhelming it. These rules help your players explore the mystical aspects of the Clockwork World without swallowing up the mundane aspects of Victorian society that make it so full of drama.
One of the players in a game at TempleCon said, “I really thought I wasn’t going to like the card mechanic. I love my dice and I thought the cards were going to take away my control and make me feel like my fate was sitting on the top of the deck waiting for me to draw it. That wasn’t my experience at all! The cards really worked! The way special damage is resolved by flipping multiple cards and then picking one, the way attacks could cause random conditions and didn’t require tables to do so, the way the card-based initiative system allowed conflict to flow non-linearly … it all flowed seamlessly. The system ended up giving me much more control rather than less. I loved it.” We hope you love it too!
What we love is the quality of these cards produced by DriveThru! They really exceeded expectations. The stock and lamination is better than most of the card games we’ve seen, and a bit more like a high-quality poker deck. They will be available from DriveThru’s website soon and will come with a free copy of the Quick-Start Rules.
The Clockwork World was born out of a desire to create a kind of setting that we hadn’t yet seen. We wanted to make a world that was only one or two steps removed from actual history, rather than a world with one or two leaps and a windfall of changes in their wake. Hence, much of what we did wasn’t imagine up new things, but rather extensively research the oddities and inventions of the real world of 1896. We didn’t dream up much at all, but rather took what really did exist as either unique or unknown and make it ubiquitous. The result is a highly believable “unbelievable world.”
I had a conversation with our editor about the ‘Photophone,’ a sort of wireless telephone invented by Alexander Graham Bell that encoded sound on light. The editor had read about it in the source material and suggested that we call it something else. I had to inform him that Bell really did invent the photophone just as we had written it. In fact, it was the invention of which he was most proud. You’ll find all sorts of things like that in the Clockwork World: voice synthesizers, and automatons that stand upright and run at nine miles per hour. We didn’t have to make Babbage invent a Difference Engine in the 1830s, because Per Georg Scheutz truly did invent one and displayed it at the World’s Fair in 1885. Our own real world of 1896 was brimming with fantastic technology, thus we try to create a more believable Steampunk World by simply making extant technology more widely available. We hope that it creates a more immersive world with much less of a fantasy feel, and provides players and Narrators a framework into which they may seamlessly insert their own ideas, research, and historical knowledge.
There are supernatural qualities to this setting, but even they are heavily researched and based on period documentation. We will talk about them in the next post.
On November 29, 1875, Thomas Edison held a press conference declaring that he had discovered what he called “etheric force.” In the two decades that have passed, this mystical energy has become the missing link to the ancient art of alchemy. Now upheld as a proper field of scientific research, alchemists study the ability to harness etheric force and use it to transmute matter. This nascent science has found its way into industry, being used to strengthen building materials and create rare elements from more common ones. However, alchemy’s true potential is still being discovered.
The picture below depicts an alchemist at work in her laboratory. It will be the cover art for the Quick Start Rules that will be released next year.
November 6, 1896
Westminster Abbey
20 Deans Yard
London
My friend,
In the beginning there were only the waters of chaos. It was an endless and formless primordial void that we have since named the Pontus. This was the scene upon which the Clockmaker first stepped to utter the words, “Let there be…” Thus creation was made. It is so splendid a work of order that many have forgotten that it was from out of the void that it was called into being. The cogs and gears of the Clockwork were made from the Pontus, but they did not remain as such. Whether it is because of human action or natural decay, the elements of this world are breaking back down into the chaos from which they were made. Physical and natural laws such as life, death, and even gravity cease to hold meaning when the Pontus rises. To all who are willing to observe it, it is obvious that the Clockwork is being dismantled, and the question we are left with is, “Why?”
The ability to answer this question may be all that stands between us and oblivion. While some ignore the problem, seeking their own pleasures, and others speed the decay through violence or intrigue, there are those of us who investigate the Clockwork, trying to determine the nature of its unraveling. If there is any hope left for humanity, it lies in stabilizing this crumbling Clockwork World; and if that is ever to happen, it will be through our efforts. If we fail, the Pontus will devour us all.
Join us.
With meet gravity of thought and intention,
Valdis
Here is the current incarnation of the cover art for the Quick Start Rules by artist Ameen Naksewee. More to come.
The Clockwork Roleplaying Game uses cards rather than dice to provide random elements within the game. We found that this allowed us to completely control our bell curve for skill tests, allow for our more dynamic initiative system, and produce random attack effects without cumbersome tables that slow down gameplay. Here is a first glimpse at what these cards will look like. The front of each card displays information necessary for play, while the back of each card displays a beautiful rendering of something very rare to the Clockwork World: two fully manifested nephilim. Both sides were painted by staff artist, Michelle Mullen. These cards will be bundled with our first Quick Start Adventure and be available on www.DriveThruRPG.com after the new year.
One of the design goals for the Clockwork physical conflict system was to allow for simply organized combats where characters were always on the edge of their seat, never knowing who would act next. We wanted players to be constantly engaged with the fight rather than simply waiting for their turns to act. Creating a fair and balanced initiative system that allowed for this was the most challenging part of the game design and took years to finish. The rules that will be revealed in January accomplish this goal perfectly! Our card based initiative system uses multiple actions and reactions per Initiative Sequence for a fair distribution of turns without having them occur in a structured order that is visible at the time Initiative Cards are dealt. The result is order in chaos: a fair and organized flow of turns that is easy to follow, but constantly changing, creating a feeling of anticipation as each character finishes her turn.