Also, encourage PCs to reskin weapons to taste. I played a two-weapon fighter with clock hands standing in for a longsword-shortsword combination, and it was incredible. I’m sure that more can be done with this. I half expected at any time that a super-powerful Second Hand would turn up on some adventure as an alternate weapon for my character. Also a pendulum, or a giant pocketwatch on a chain would have felt pretty cool.

A good enemy that just feels really right in a steampunk type of setting is a big mechanical nutcracker that can bite off heads. Nutcrackers have the right kind of feel for clockwork, and are terrifying. They are terrifying in appearance, and their jaws are fearsome.

Also, definitely a great place to look for inspiration for stuff is Leonardo Da Vinci’s sketchbooks!

I just did a really long Steampunk campaign and it was incredible, so sorry for getting all excited here. I am trying to hold myself back from telling you how to do absolutely everything.

Fortunately, I am able to narrow it down to just these few suggestions, because mine was more steam-centric, and also had mutants, and most of the major NPCs were figures from Victorian literature.

So this is not going to be a Technology vs Magic campaign. It’s not going to explore industrialism and pseudo-Victorian values in a world where magic exists. I really don’t care about what it ‘should’ or ‘ought’ to be. I care about what it will be.

My creative process in designing a setting start from the elements of the game, in this case 4e’s highly quirky mechanics (encounter power anyone?).

Then I make a decision about how much upfront design work I want to put in that new setting to make it come alive. In my case: Low, I have other things to do with my free time.

Then I launched into a series of What-if questions which I answered keeping in mind the concepts of the game I wanted to respect (don’t screw with player powers, add one key mechanic to rope players in, add more later in the campaing, etc).

The alternative you propose is one way of seeing it which, while valid, doesn’t meet my design goals. And I know we’re both cool with that.

If you strip all extraneous elements from the game, you go back to the one thing I find paramount in what I want to play that campaign.

Clockwork technology is a crutch to allow living things (and mechanicals) to tap into the weakened magical energies of a Dying world.

Clockwork is a lever to lift the unliftable. I build everything else up from that concept.

It’s a widely different starting block than your proposed setting, both going in different direction. We would likely write 2 widely different Clockpunk novels because different elements are crucial to the genre for us.

Peace out!

I’m reading the clockwork flavors/themes/crunch and I just don’t really understand them.

Now, I do understand clockwork settings/steampunk. I’m pretty into that whole fashion/literary/rpg movement and I have run quite a few things as such myself.

But the rationalization for this watch technology and these powers just strike me as strange. What does a watch have to do with dealing damage?

Okay, sure, watches lead to bombs which leads to mad-bomber scenarios common to the setting, but this doesn’t really have any connection to that.

The point of clockwork and steampunk/etc. is to bring an end to the notion of material scarcity. Gears/watchs/clocks/etc. are all throw away objects. If they blow up, you replace it with a new one made at the factory.

Putting elementals into watches and having them deal damage and connecting them to souls…just seems rather arbitrary and belabored. The metaphors and imagery associated with clockwork and mechanics- complex machinery heralding the industrial age- simply don’t jive with the more spiritual tone you seem to be trying to impart upon them.

Don’t feel obligated to do anything (It’s your game) but here’s what I’d do..
***
Clockwork and other mechanical devices represents a HUMAN transition. It’s the triumph of intellect having dominion over physical strength. Suddenly people with knowledge are capable of doing things only what large groups of strong healthy expert laborers could do.
This is when the scientist became MORE important to war than the soldier.

This in some way conflicts with D&D because magic already does this to a large degree. Eberron substitutes magic for machine power in this manner, it works well. You need to explain why magic never replaced physical labor. Usually this is easy since, thematically magic deals more with soul and religion, and is unique, and not replaceable.

It’s also an issue of DEHUMANIZATION when the job of men is replaced by steel, wood and grease. The soldier is merely a warm body for holding the gun.

I think without some sort of overall, fundamental theme that resonates into social/moral bounds, your clockwork idea is a bit…lacking. It’s just fancy fluff that people wind up forgetting about.

Flavor wise, I would give everyone clockwork oriented equipment. NPCs, monsters, whatever. It would be the talk of the town. You might have clockwork-lazysusans in bars, or a postal service based on clockwork horses. Who knows.

Crunch wise, I would make clockwork equipment useful, but extremely prone to failure. A bomb may or may not go off if you make a bad skill check. Clock work weapons jam and fail dramatically on a roll of a one. Clockwork equipment would work like potions; extremely disposable, useful in certain situations, and carried and used universally by anything you’d stick a sword in.

***
Forgive my criticisms, but I had a real difficultly understanding the themes and motivations presented in this post. If you feel your stuff as it is works fine, don’t let me dissuade you!
.-= TarlSS´s last blog ..Star Wars:Restitution =-.

But today’s discussion brings a great alternative, what if PCs could knock rechargable powers out? Or rather? What if clockwork monsters had more powerful at-will attacks that could be knocked out of sync by PC attacks (making them rechargable instead)?

I’ll think about this.

I hear what you are both saying… and I would agree, if I was going to publish the campaign. Holes in ‘logic’ are only important if the players care about it… which I’m fairly certain they don’t.

The ‘don’t attack gear’ is, as you put it a purely artificial conceit that I put into place to increase the trust between my players and myself that I will not go and screw them over on something that is dreadfully easy to do.

Now, that doesn’t mean I won’t play the implied setting. If the PCs are captured, they would likely get their watches confiscated… but I would also not play an escape scenario with conventional encounter rules, I’d likely make a skill challenge that would end with the players having their watches back and outside the prison.

That being said… the idea that PCs are actually the complete opposite of the rest of the denizens of this world… that they actually are fonts of that Elemental Chaos energy that the world lacks is absolutely brilliant. As you say, it makes the ‘don’t touch that watch’ conceit more credible.

That’s not to say you haven’t created something stupendously cool, because I’d be pumped to play in this setting. And you seem to be an excellent DM. But a little bit of setting-logic seems necessary to fix this.

Ideas:
- The watch is bound to a character, either physically or spiritually. I.e., will explode violently if tampered with.
- Characters who are conduits for magic are kind of like Cyclops of the X-Men: they can’t control it. The clockwork acts as the ruby visor, and lets them keep a lid on their powers. Removing the watch would be very, very dangerous. (Of course, this leads to potential PC exploitation… but it seems a very interesting Faustian bargain–especially if the watch cannot easily be put back on!) This also could lead to very interesting scenes where the PCs find a bunch of magic users all hooked up to some big clockwork MacGuffin, bound there by Evil McBadderson. There are no watches in sight… how do they rescue these people?
- Watches all come with built-in defense mechanisms: whoever damages one without disabling it takes the Break Time attack that you list above. Like #1, but more specific (and less likely to get your PCs blown up). You run the risk here of villains sending some ignorant mook to remove a PC’s watch, though depending on their ubiquity it might be realistically hard to find someone willing to do that.

Anyway, enough outta me. Hope these ideas help make your campaign richer. I look forward to hearing more about it!

The Tweak would be stuff that works with trying to coax an elemental to ‘do more’. However, instead of describing a clear cost upfront, the use of the power would make the item more likely to fail in a spectacular way during the fight. If they roll a 1 with the ‘tweaked’ item during the fight, the DM is free to Mouse Guard it, including triggering the ‘Escaped Elemental’ effect.

If the power the PCs wants to coax from the item is especially powerful and above the ‘power curve’ then I’d say ‘Sure, but now whenever you fail a check for the rest of the encounter, the item may play tricks on you or explode’

That would be simpler mechanically speaking and let the burden of adjudicating it to the DM. As is usually the case, I would inform the Player of the likely outcome of failure before they use their item.

But this is just another way to look at it… Yan’s approach or mine are, in my eyes, equivalent… they just reflect different play styles.

However allowing freeform tweeks to powers while maintain a minimum of balance is not as evident.

Here are a few idea of costs that could added to gain some additional benefits from a power/item:

-Spending another non-at-will power ‘slot’ of the same type.
-Gaining a new status effect after using the effect. (i.e. -5 to all defense (save ends), immobilized (save ends))
-Spending HP or Healing Surges (loss of 1 healing surge or 25% of HP)

The hard part is adjudicating what a boost is worth and note them as you go. Obviously gaining a reduced defense is not as high a price for a range guy then for a melee one.

While you may not attack/destroy player gears, you should think about if you’re going to stop your players from doing that. You could use called shots on clockwork to not do damage, but to slow down a creature’s regen power or cause other status effects. Perhaps on a critical, the extra damage comes from hitting a clockwork component and releasing some of the elemental. (like slashing a cybernetic arm and seeing sparks and a small explosion a few seconds later) This would work well for rethemed zombies- mindless clockwork creatures that attack everyone to devour their elemental energies or incorporate their clockwork items into themselves. On a critical, you shatter their central gear and the whole thing falls apart or explodes. Exploding gears are also great for response attacks. (ie. attack when first bloodied, deathstrike, etc.)

I like the ‘recharge at a regular interval’ idea. I could take full control of monster recharge powers and I could maybe allow PCs with Thievery a way to deactivate the power with a minor/move or standard check.

I’ll also think about Balard’s suggestion… letting PCs tinker with their gear for temporary boosts, at the risk of busting the item could be interesting… I’ll see what my players think of that… in fact let me get Yan…

If you were going for straight out fantasy instead of a real-world analog, instead of firearms have a variety of clockwork crossbows as your ranged weapons.

Also, will you have clockwork familiars? Think of the owl from the old Clash of the Titans movie. Also you could have clockwork war-forged, either as a PC option or an NPC/monster race.
.-= Oz´s last blog ..Deathly Hallows Teaser =-.

Great idea, thanks!