The Tinker-King of Klockworld

June 10, 2009 6 comments

The theme of this month’s RPG Blog Carnival is Steampunk and Klokworks. When I think of steampunk, I think of three things: the industrial revolution, people working under oppressive conditions, and anachronistic technology. It’s almost always set in Victorian England, but I don’t feel that it has to be. That’s why, over the next few posts, I’ll be presenting three alternate steampunk settings.

The player characters are London street urchins who, while fleeing from the police, hide in a warehouse. They fumble through the darkness, but emerge in the Klokworld. The Klokworld is a fantasy setting similar to L. Frank Baum’s Land of Oz, Lewis Carroll’s Wonderland, or C.S. Lewis’s Narnia, with a twist of Fleming’s Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. It is a giant city under a crystalline dome where everything is powered by steam and clockworks. Mechanical people similar to the Tin Woodsman and Tik-Tok of Oz wander about. Intelligent animals speak with the aid of eletrical boxes on their collars, and can manipular objects using mechanical gloves that simular human hands. Fantastic automobiles and flying machines convey people around in grand style.

The player character children are befriended by local adults, who seem surprised to see them and urge them to get inside and off the streets. Clockworld soldiers appear, in brightly-colored comic opera uniforms and armed with large butterfly nets, and begin kicking in doors and taking away sick children. They post an excessive amount of handbills on everything — doors, trees, automobiles – stating that by decree of the Tinker-King all children must be sent away to hospital. The player characters are the only children who are not sick. One of the adults turns out to be a kindly retired policeman, a little doddy, who knows that something nefarious is afoot but no one else believes him. He’ll help the player characters figure out how to get home and keep them from getting captured here if they help him sort it all out.

The player characters must stay one step ahead of capture, and encounter various fantastical persons who may help or seek to capture them. Their goal will be to get into the Workshop of the Tinker-King, a great rotund man with a huge white walrus mustache who isn’t evil and really does want to help the children. They ultimately discover that domes are keeping in all of the pollution from the industrialization, which is causing the children to be sick (wwhy only children? Why don’t the PC children get sick? It’s in the script!). If the player characters can open the dome, everyone will be miraculously cured.

Coming Soon:

The Chinese CoalPunk Revolution
In near-future China, a band of heroes fight to overthrow evil Capitalists and return power to the People!

Gears of the Golden Golem
A Biblical era clockwork mecha showdown between the Egyptians’ False Idol and the Israelites’ Golems!