Automata

Automata is unlike most of the present gate-towns in the Ringlands in that it actually originated on the plane whose gate it now guards. Once, long ago, the gate-town to Mechanus was Cog, a city founded by gnomes hoping to build a permenent relationship between the Mountain of Dwarvenkind and a tinker-gnome civilization in Mechanus. Cog prospered for centuries, trading clockwork items for tools made and raw materials mined by the dwarven petitioners. Likely this would still be the case, were it not for an invasion by the entity known only as the Dark Presence.

Within Mechanus was a Power known as Brandt, God of the Heroic Quest. Once Brandt dwelt in the Outlands and oversaw acts of heroism. Adventurers would pray to him before every great endeavor, calling out to him for protection and guidance. As the generations passed, the god's thinking grew more rigid and predictable. He expected every quest to follow the same pattern, and they did often enough that his felt his suspicions were confirmed. Ultimately he became convinced that the archetypal parts of an adventure were immutable laws, and moved to Mechanus. There he a created a realm in which every portion represented some part of the unvarying heroic journey. Every visitor to the realm would face the same challenges and meet the same guides, eventually coming to the same resolution.

The standard villain in the realm of Brandt was a shadowy figure of evil -- the previously mentioned Dark Presence. The Dark Presence's job, as proxy of Brandt, was to sit on a throne and order his minions to dispoil the land until he was killed by the hero or heroine. Then he was ressurected so that he could begin the routine again. Often the Dark Presence had to be several places at once in order to accomplish this, and it began to wear on him. Eventually, the Dark Presence conconcted a plan. When the Hero arrived in his throne room to confront him, he found only a robe stuffed with straw. Before he knew what was happening, he died, the Dark Presence having severed his head. That was it: the Presence made no vainglorious speech revealing his plan and fought no final swordfight to the death. He just killed his adversary from behind.

Brandt was dumbfounded. His faithful servant and broken the laws of the Quest. In punishment, he exiled the Dark Presence to the Outlands, along with all of his minions. They built a new gate-town there, pushing Cog some distance Spireward.

Automaton stuff:

Automata is the gate-town for Mechanus, the Lawful Neutral clockwork plane. The population is roughly 10,000, though it may be less. It's the most perfect and ordered burg in the Outlands, and it seems more like a machine than a living place.

The gate to Mechanus is in the middle of the town, and appears to be a giant set of working cogs. By jumping up on a cog and shoving a limb into pair of meshed gears, you'll end up somewhere in Mechanus depending on the gears you choose and the time of day. A wide boulevard with government buildings on either side runs from the gate spireward to allow Modron Marches to exeunt. Of course, recently there's been an unscheduled March, which has thrown a big wrench into the gears of the Lawful Neutral mindset.

Automata's metallic sun creaks and whirls its way across the sky, the law-tainted foliage tracing a circuit-diagram around the city's walls.

The city itself is a tight grid, two main roads crossing between four gates, cubic buildings, manufactories, and mills within. The most prominent buildings are the manufactories and the formian hive, although the hive is designed in such a way as to complement the cubes and wheels that dominate Automata's skyline while still retaining a glamor and majesty of its own.

Underground is a maze of corridors, hidden shops, marketplaces, hide-outs, and arenas. The Dark Presence keeps ghouls, vampires, zombies, liches, wights, hobgoblins, beholders and more, some of them automatons, some created by his Random Monster Generator. The dungeons wind endlessly through the Undercity, the random monsters available for hire in the secret markets. The Undercity and the Council of Anarchy are a constant threat to the Council of Order, the triad that theoretically governs the city. The continuous plots and ploys of the Council of Anarchy provide fuel for most of the laws the Council of Order creates. An obscure, seemingly pointless zoning regulation requiring a certain buildign to sell teacups and be reduced in height by three feet may actually be a direct assault on an illegal shipbuilding plant in the Undercity. The whole of Automata is like a giant chessboard, the two players constantly moving their pieces within the city's grid according to their various rules. The Council of Anarchy feeds and gives purpose to its rival's law, which in turn justifies the Council of Anarchy's chaos.

The formians reached Automata several hundred years ago, arriving with the first of the Harmonium to explore the city. Their hive is one of the gate-town's most recognizable and impressive landmarks, the moreso considering how well it's been integrated into Automata's overall plan. Still, even the formians have been affected by the chaotic petitioners of the undercity. The Coundicl of Anarchy has been a constant thorn in their sides, clever enough to win even a few formians into lawlessness.

They don't know what to make of the insectoid mound that has been growing outside town in recent years. It's clearly not formian, but no one can get inside to discover what it could be.

One of the few things you can't find in Sigil is a decent clockwork maker, mostly because the one that used to work from the Guildhall Ward was driven out of business by thugs hired by the Triobriand family in Automata. Now most clockwork offered in the Cage is in the Market Ward, sold by official re resentatives of one of Automata's manufacturers. Rumors of underground clockworkshops in the Hive haven't been confirmed.

To get custom clockwork, most go to Automata. There's a portal on the Street of Chaos' Path to Drowning in the Lower Ward, and the key is a cold-forged sprocket. There's another portal in the City Court, but the key isn't commonly known to those not of the Fraternity of Order. Other portals come and go, though Guvners claim there's a pattern beyond the Lady's whim.

In Automata, the automaton-makers vie against one another in an increasingly high-stakes rivalry. Because all prices are standardized city-wide by command of the Council of Order, they seek to outdo one another by being the first to develop and patent a product for which standard prices have not yet been sent. Master Triobriand has even, it is rumored, been speaking to assassins, freshly trained in the service of the Senate of Imperial Rome.

It's mainly the clockmakers who deal with the Arcane to get special materials and power sources only they can provide.

A renegade of House Halaster created the sentient clockwork warriors. Then he died, but they're now a significant minority in the city, longing for recognition as citizens and sentient life.

The mad Alfonso Triobriand, grandson of Master Vincente Triobriand, created the clockwork marauders massing in the mysterious indestructable hive outside of town.

"Those sweet, naïve spirits, prattling on about glorious anarchy. All I know is that their misguided efforts open the way for us to introduce our own kind of law."

Petitioners of Chaotic Balance: Oozes, hedonists, thieves, saboteurs, invisibles, dragons, the Devil (roles blur). Serpents, liars, toads, the People, water, fire, storm, freaks, pinheads, jesters, harlequins, seceders, rebels, rebel leaders, disobeyers, shadows, mutants, drug pushers.

Safety and standardization versus individuality and freedom

Bureaucracy versus improvisation

AUTOMATA

An enormous cubical form dominates a corner of the Land, surrounded by patterned hills radiating from the square like a starburst, with hornlike spires at the cardinal points. The surrounding vegetation traces a circuit-diagram for miles around.

The mechanical sun, its own gears glanking across the sky, can barely be seen between the tall oblong shapes within.

The city itself is a tight grid, two main roads crossing between the four gates, cubic buildings and windmills within. The most prominent buildings are the factories and the formian hive, although the hive is made cleverly enough to complement the cubes and wheels that dominate Automata's skyline while still retaining a sense of glamour and sophistication. There's a constant sound of clanging metal and puffing exhaust as the factories churn both above and below, like the beating of a city-sized heart, and the pumping of city-sized lungs.

Petitioners become part of the city, becoming festooned with cables and gears as they attune themselves to its patterns.

"We come from everywhere, carrying every taste imaginable, but we all become part of one thing: the great engine of Automata, though we perform many different roles within."

The most persistent beat is the pulse of the clocks. Everywhere there are clocks, imprisoning each moment in a cage of time.

AUTOMATA 2

Echoes whisper from every wall. The impression of black leathery wings. The rank smell of duty.

I can't walk in a straight line.

In the tunnels and ventilation shafts shadows take shape. They skulk and slither, their whispers growing louder and more coherent as they slowly gather solid form.

Formed from the shadows cast by Law, from the most ancient of fear's patterns. They are ghosts, goblins, dragons, tentacled things. For substance they use cast-off nuts and bolts, tin cans, rat bones and petitioners too weak to fight back. Fight us, heroes, they say. We are your test, your definition, your other selves. We will show you what the world is like after justice dies.

One rises. Made of metal and garbage, it has the shape of a house-sized bear. When it roars, it makes a sound that has chilled humanity since the days when ice filled the Material Plane, before the sun learned to fly.

AUTOMATA 3

Somewhere deep underground there's a crossroads, a tiny square where deals are made and goods are exchanged, deals and goods that the surface won't admit exist.

Two figures are talking.

One is dead, his body long ago claimed by sharks on a far-off world. Now his soul roams restlessly through the Undercity, his body composed of native things, stirring up trouble wherever he can because, in spice of himself, he loves his dry new home and wouldn't want other people's rules to take it away.

The other was never alive. He has a wooden body animated by clever wooden gears and a tensely coiled branch that has to be wound three times a day. He was built by a kindly old carver from the topside, but he ran away because living children wouldn't treat him like they treated one another. His woodcarving "father" is long dead, and he can't grow up or change. He occupies himself buying monkeywrenches from the steel apes and selling them to the anarchists. The apes, being automatons, only deal with others of their kind. The wooden boy, being unique, will deal with anyone.

There's a crash, and a scraping sound like a pile of old springs being dragged across the stone floor. Both figures raise their eyebrows. No one should be here. No one is scheduled to be here. Even in the Undercity, everyone keeps their schedules.

The petitioner's eyes bug out. He sees what it is and the sight is powerful enough to spark the memory of another life. One of the few memories that never fly off to seed realms of their own - the memory of his death.

It's a shark, made of wire and bone but quite active. It snaps at the petitioner, who collapses with a small puffing sound and a clang, his essence bleeding out of his body like a warm human breath. The wooden boy runs away, slipping through a tiny door the shark can't fit through. he pauses a moment to tighten his spring, and something tiny leaps at him, burrowing into his mouth. "Get it out!" he screams uselessly, a tiny bellows pushing air through his increasingly constricted wooden throat. Then he can't speak at all.

AUTOMATA 4

On the surface it's high noon, and the sun's shining propellers are fully visible in the strips of blue sky hidden between the tall cubical towers.

Morning bells are ringing. It's time to get up. Thousands of heads rise from their pillows simultaneously, while at the same time thousands of heads on the night-shift hit their pillows, their eyes squeezing shut.

Emerson gets up. He splashes water on his face and sponges the night-sweat from his skin. He pulls on his trousers and begins binding the day's laws around his chest, arms, and face. "No Spitting" is written on one. "Nod Your Head At Strangers, Say Hello To Friends," says another. Finally, he's done. "Kiss your wife goodbye," he reminds himself. He does. His wife, being a petitioner, never sleeps, but being a good citizen she lays in bed the required eight hours. Numbers are tatooed all over her body, with a large number 4 on her face. "I'll see you in eight hours, Number 4," he tells her affectionately. "Then we can talk for an hour while preparing dinner, enjoy our meal, pay our bills, do household chores, and (he checks the list) make love for fourteen minutes and thirty-seven seconds before you prepare for your shift."

She smiles and nods, and he walks out the door. "Emerson!" Number 4 cries out in a panic.

Emerson looks back in. "What?" he asks.

"You forgot your hat!"

Emerson breaks out in a cold sweat. He runs over to his bedstand and grabs the broad-brimmed thing. He dashes back out the door. Primus' tits, he thinks. My rhythm will be off all day. Can't believe I almost forgot my hat. Could have been arrested for indecent exposure. Am I losing my mind?

He's so flustered he almost runs into a man. "Excuse me," he says, giving the obligatory head-nod.

...and the man's head opens, revealing enormous teeth and tusks. "Kill!" it screams, and lunges.

His heart racing, Emerson leaps backwards. All he has to defend himself with is his umbrella (there is a rain scheduled for five o'clock, just when he would be leaving work), but the creature seems mesmerized by it. It's almost a ritual dance: lunge, stab, lunge, bite, circle, circle, lunge, stab, repeat. The crowds around them studiously ignore the event. They're good citizens, who won't let anything make them late. After ten minutes and fifteen seconds the creature is a pile of rubbish in the streets, and Emerson is bleeding. And late. And his hat is destroyed.

"No," he moans. "No, no, no." He sinks to his knees in despair.

"Stop blocking the road!" a passerby shouts after nodding politely. "It's because of freaks like you that this city isn't in Regulus yet!"

Emerson begins to cry.

---QUOTED---

not that I'm complaining because that discription of Automata is interesting... I'm just curious how that relates to gatetowns sliding?

---END QUOTE---

Once there was a god in Mechanus. Some called him Brandt, God of the Heroic Quest.

He would select mortal heroes and have them complete the tasks he set and defeat the monsters that came after them. At the end they would have to defeat the Dark Presence, the lord of all monsters. Only then could they return to their world with the treasure and wisdom they found.

The cycle would repeat itself, again and again, for thousands of years.

Brandt grew old. He began to care more about the patterns than the heroes.

The Dark Presence grew weary. For millennia it had served his patron faithfully, but something in it started to change.

One day a hero came before the Presence. The Hero had slain every monster and solved every puzzle. Every princess had been rescued and every treasure had been liberated from the hoary reach of the underworld. The Hero stood and waited expectingly for the Presence to reveal its evil plan, laugh a lot, and try to kill the Hero using a ridiculously elaborate trap.

The Dark Presence thought about it, and just killed him.

The God of the Quest was outraged, furious at the break in the pattern. The Dark Presence and its twisted fortress of solitude were banished to the Outlands, forever outside the sight of Brandt.

In the Outlands there was a gate-town called Cog, known for its clever inhabitants and marvelous devices. It subsisted mainly on trade between Mechanus and the Land beyond.

The fortress of the Dark Presence pushed it aside, leaving it stranded far from the gate that had sustained it.

The Presence itself burrowed deep in its caverns of torment and gloom, its perfectly orderly mind frustrated by recent events. Cautiously, some people of Cog built a new city in this piece of another, more lawful plane. They named the new city Automata, and Cog became something of a backwater. The new city was more orderly, but with something strange underneath.

Pelnis the Clockmaker is a petitioner so dedicated to his tasks that he never thinks about what his past life might have been like. Most assume, though, that it was just about like his afterlife is. Pelnis is a craftsman through and through, and doesn't seem capable of anything else. The Clockmaker's Guild, the most powerful group of workers in Automata, elected him to represent them in the Council of Order, and now he looks at the whole town as an intricate device for him to fine-tune. Make no mistake: he's never given up his primary love, making actual clocks. In the evenings, while his wife (a petitioner with a heron's head, originally from Thebestys' Great Library) writes on her papyrus scrolls, Pelnis works on his masterpiece, a clock as massive, complex and intricate as any made.

But there's something wrong with the clock. It's as if, like his troubled city, it's developed a subconscious. Sometimes it acts randomly, without direction.

It's horribly frustrating for Pelnis, but it's tremendously encouraging for his clockwork servant Gilroy. Gilroy is part of a cult of sentient constructs who have been praying for a goddess to represent their people and lead them to equality, and they believe old Pelnis' new clock may be it.

Ravis Corcuncewl is a bag lady, her tattered layers of clothing fluttering like a crow's feathers and her shrewd eyes hidden in a shroudlike scarf. On another world she died of cholera beside a filthy city river, one of thousands that died of the outbreak that year. There's little sign of that in her present state, but she avoids water at all costs.

Ravis' special mission, given to her by the Council of Anarchy she belongs to, is discovering and eliminating modron interference in Automata's affairs. Her army of vagrants is constantly on the alert for geometric shapes moving around about the Undercity, and whenever they encounter one they'll scream at it and beat it with sticks and stones.

Ravis knows a bit of magic, enough to heal and harm. If asked, she'll assure everyone that she knows nothing of "nasty, grasping night hags."

Captain Arstimis, Mover Two in the Harmonium, was born Arstimak, a hunter in the service of the Mingled Seasons monastery in the midst of Limbo's wildest soup. The Mingled Seasons was a place where fields of ice became a sunny lake became an endless sea of leaves became torrential rain without respite or reason. Arstimak could never understand his fellows' calm acceptance of the wild terrain; although he couldn't show it, and was perhaps physiologically incapable of showing it, chaos made him nervous.

Now, githzerai ain't the wildest and most outgoing cutters you'll meet in Limbo. Mostly they're closed-mouthed and expressionless. Inside their cloistered little hearts, though, there they sing. They've learned to relish the everchanging fresh challenges of their homes, especially when they hunt.

Arstimak didn't feel any of that; he only felt queasy. A githzerai's supposed to rage against any kind of constriction or binding, their dark eyes burning in their motionless faces. Arstimak would sometimes beg the monks to let him stay in their cells. "Of course," they said - githzerai don't casually say no to one another - but eventually they had to make him stop, because he was being a drain on the community.

Everything changed after one expedition.

The monastery drifted by another race's settlement. Normally, this would be a time for the githzerai to close all their doors and shutters and post sleepless guards and invisible scouts to keep the place safe while the anarchs did their best to cloak the settlement in camouflage, but they didn't have enough food for that, in part because Arstimak hadn't been pulling his weight.

That's why they set an expediditon out anyway, and Arstinak was in it. They brought down heffalumps, bandersnatches, and jeweled oozes, but when they were ready to return Arstimak was gone.

He was in the alien town, attracted by a nameless pattern, and what he found shocked him. The population was made up of humans and half-humans, and they believed in order. Not the individual, internal, personalized foci that the monks talked about, but something with a universal structure and vision: something called Harmony.

Arstimak never went back to the monastery. He joined up with the inhabitants of the harmonious town, and when he'd learned all he could from them he went to Sigil and studied under Factol Sarin himself. After years of service he was put in charge of the Harmonium's affairs in the town of Automata, where he serves as part of the Council of Order, bringing his vision of Harmony to the people there.

Arstimak, now Captain Arstimis of Automata, has never looked back.

Leggis Scrog is a thief and an outlaw. In his youth in Limbo he discovered that he was a wild talent of a peculiar kind: he had the ability to permenently steal rage from his fellow githzerai, a piece of their personalities vital for thriving on the plane. He was originally from the Floating City, one of the holy thieves working for the Wizard-King himself, but each time he took rage it stewed within him, until he couldn't stand the idea of any kind of power greater than himself. Knowing he wasn't powerful enough to challenge his king, he went out into the free monasteries, seeking to undermine them. In his wake he left a lot of confused and hollow githzerai (including the one who would become Captain Arstimis), but he didn't do as much damage as he wanted: the githzerai are just too adaptable. In frustration he moved to Automata, where his thievery began to really show an effect. With guards left strangely passive, he's been able to steal weapons, goods, and even people from under the noses of the town's powerful, and he now controls a large, semiorganized gang and protection racket. He doesn't tell them what to do, and they respect him. In turn he helps them coordinate their efforts and divide their loot. As a member of the Council of Anarchy, he's roughly to the underground what Arstinis is to the topside.

No one knows his original name. That still belongs to the githzerai Wizard-King, and he couldn't steal it back.

Arstinis doesn't know it was Leggis who stole his rage, or even that he eer had any. Leggis knows, however, and the part of him that was once Arstinis' causes him to flush, studder and hide whenever that councilman comes near.

Serefil has a complicated bloodline, including elf, human, and ogre mage. She was raised within Lei Kung's temple complex in Automata, and has rarely been outside of town except for some time she spent as an ambassador in Arcadia's Palace of the Wind-King. She's relatively open-minded all the same; used to the wide variety of faiths in her town, as far as she's concerned serving the gods is enough of a virtue that it doesn't matter which one. As the third member of the Council of Order, she's also the town's most powerful member of the Fraternity of Order, which means her faction is always asking her for favors. She doesn't give them out for free, but she gives them, and if it weren't for her the town's Advocate's Guild would probably have been outlawed. They've gotten people off the hook a few times too often that the Council of Order considers to be criminals.

Serefil is the quietest member of her Council. Unless the subject of discussion is religion or Guvners, she's likely to keep silent. Although she votes with Pelnis most often, both of her fellow council members look to her as a tiebreaker. She takes advantage of this position, and she's racked up quite a large number of favors owed her by factions and faiths alike. Mostly, she wants Automata to be a quiet, enriching, profitable place for one and all, but she doesn't have the experience yet to know how to make that happen. So she waits, and keeps her chips close by.

Aurach the Fair hasn't been to Baator in centuries. The erinyes is barely loyal to her home plane or the Dark Eight, her job in the Council of Anarchy requiring her to deal fairly with fiends of all stripes. Although lawful fiends are most common in Automata, lurking in the shadows and subterranean alleyways are about every kind there is, each trying to bend the town or part of it to fit their goals. She sends mephits to her cornugon superior on an extremely punctual basis with impeccable notes and always promising progress reports, so she's in little danger of being recalled or replaced, but her heart's not in it. She loves the city, loves its intrigue and desperation, and doesn't want it to change.

Aurach seems to be carved from white gold. She carries a complicated pair of spectacles that she peers into on occasion; they may be magical. She's served by tormented lemures implanted in mechanical bodies who she controls with varying degrees of pain. She has a pet serpent, a jeweled thing with the strength of a giant constrictor. The biggest challenger to her position is a winged, tentacled hordling called Clockwarp. Clockwarp is unusually intelligent and cunning for a hordling, and it has the ability to leave semi-independent pieces of itself in inanimate objects. Aurach controls Clockwarp by knowing where its pieces are at all times. Several of them she keeps hostage in a box.

She slowly extends her control through Automata, reporting only a tiny fraction of her actual accomplishments. She's as likely to aid mortals against another fiend's plots as not. She finds Good to be slightly erotic. "How delicious," she says.

clockwork magi (prestige class?).

Jocasta, goddess of clockwork men and nutcrackers

Tso

Guvner advocate guilds (gene wolfe/shadow of the torturer)

Gods walk the streets

Baatezu

Modrons

The Abacus is our friend.

Strange, blankfaced, unfinished things from the Hinterlands, which rapidly sketch themselves in as they absorb local beliefs. Not everything in the Hinterlands is unfinished.

Caverns of Flesh

The Them (race of perfect bureaucrats)

Iron spiders, horses, celestial/infernal gorgons.

Clockrats

Mechanical body parts

Mechanical crossbows, armor, and so on.

One Observer

Rogue modrons who miss their home

Regular modrons

Parai, mechalin

The Law-Bound, who wear strips with commandments written on them.

Infinite Staircase

Temple of Really Bad Dead Things

Priests of technology channeling power for the city from the Gate to Mechanus, and incidently from the Dark Presence.

Petitioners of various tribes to balance things out

Traders from Cog, or not.

Harmonium, Guvners, Mercykillers

Hive goblins

Sons of Ether covenent

Dwarven clockmaker

Clockwork birds flying through the sky

Avatars and proxies

Temples of various gods

Traders from Mechanus, Sigil, Rigus, Fortitude, and Tir Na Og.

Servants of Yen-Wang-Yeh and Tvashtri

Cranium rats

Tso in underground

"BattleBots" style mechanical arena of death in underground

Refugees from Scum Corp

Japanese petitioners, for some reason. Maybe not explicitly.

Mechanical restaurant: Eat or Die!

Harlequin

Rotating buildings

Supreme Scientists

Ars mechanica?

Meanwhile automatons struggle for recognition, strange gods continue their acts of creation, a nearby Cog stews in jealousy, the modrons plot, and a mysterious hive rises over a city of a thousand races and creeds.