The Moon in Dragonmech

[Makfire]

Well in the book it says that the moon is the predominant feature in the sky at night and can still be seen in the day.

So, again i was thinking, what would this do to the people affected with lycanthropy.


Well, with the trigger for theyre affliction high in the sky, it would create a new race, of wearfolk who live in an actual village on the surface.


And.....

yet another idea for a hidden city:)

The city of the sleeping (Wizard\sorcerer\mage)

Generations ago just as the lunar rain was start a great and powerfull mage decided to proctect his house and property so he cast a spell on his home which cover it in a protective bubble, but the spell went wrong and covered an area the size of a medium city.

over time people/refugees came and settled under the bubble, where the mage had cast a sleep spell on himself only to be woken when the battles on the planes had died and the lunar rain had stopped.

Ideas?

Comments?

thanks!

[goodmangames]

There's a brief mention of the impact of the moon on lycanthropy on page 181 of DragonMech. There's definitely room for expanding on that... your own idea of a were-race living on the surface could even be the basis for a campaign.

The protective bubble idea is a funny coincidence... that was the idea behind Dungeon Crawl Classics #3: The Mysterious Tower, which I originally wrote for my DragonMech campaign. I covered this somewhere else on this forum already, but basically, yeah, I think there's definitely the potential for force magic to be used as protection of some kind. Though producing enough protection to encase an entire city might require an awful lot of 20th level wizards!

[Reese]

or a ton of cog layers with force generators...

you'd need to build up to have enough volume to house enough coglayers to supply the force generators nessesary to protect a city, though...

a force generator supplies a 2' x 2' field, and the size increases arythmetically with added steam powers, a town that fit into a 1000' radius would need... 2(pi)r^2 square feet of protection, so...

1,570,800 square feet... at 4 square feet per generator(or generator enhancing steam power), that's... 392,700 steam powers

likewise, suce a construct would only ahve a certain volume available to support it's inhabitants

total volume the above hemisphere would be...

261,800,000 cubic feet

if each cog layer got a roughly 10*10 room(10*10 less the width of the walls and 10 feet high less the width of floor and ceiling), and said city completely filled the volume of the shpere with such rooms for living, said city could house...

261,800 cog layers

hey, wow, this one's actually feasible, assuming each cog layer has atleast 1.5 powers (on average) devoted to maintaining the shield, no space is wasted on anything other than housing, and only coglayers maintaining powers lived in the city...

of course, the larger the city is, the more space can be spared to non-shield uses, though farming would not be an option except at extremely large sizes...

though, i have no idea where you'd find ehough cog layers to build and populate this thing, or how you'd protect it from the lunar rain durring construction... (yeah, magic force is definently a better option, especially since magic force fields, while being vulnerable to dispelling attacks, are larger and stronger than coglayer counterparts AND can have permanency cast on them, so would not nessesarily require mages to maintain once placed ^_^ )

--edit--

that leads to another question... lunar rain is the actual surface of the moon raining down on the terrain of the planet... how quickly does the dust and sand that is raining down accumulate? i realize that it wouldn't sit on top of a force field, but the field would have the effect of concentrating everything that fell in it's area at it's edges, leaving a mound of dust at it's rim
(if any portion of the field was shapped flat or concave, there could also be pockets of dust and sand in those areas, if the field isn't perfectly spherical/hemispherical, though wind would most likely shift anything that didn't fall into a deep pit in the field)

also, the fields from coglayer devices could be placed with gaps, so they would take fewer devices, and only stop the larger particles of lunar rain...
(perhaps, say, downgrading any lunar rain effects on un-protected creatures by one levels, or just negating meteor strikes (up to a point, based on size))

[Makfire]

doesnt have to be a wizard or mage or coglayer, maybe its just a few objects, that were created by a powerful person, together have enough force to hold back the lunar rain, but now theyre power fades for some reason and the people of the city have sent out groups to find people strong enough to find out whats happening ....

Boom Adventure hook!

"the crystals of power are fading and we need your help... will you help us?!"

[cssmythe3]

A much simpler method used by a powerfull mage in my game was he created an underground lair using a bunch of stone shape spells, a quarter mile of bedrock is a bit easier to maintain than than steam powers and less exensive than permanent walls of force.