Clan: Artificers

The Artificers -- the Free Artificers' Guild, the smiths, tinkers and gunpowder people of Dreamland. Where others pray for a miracle, an Artificer fits a valve. They sell their work for gold like anyone else, but they would rather sell you a machine than a sword: a machine keeps working after its maker has gone home. They honour Fili, who counts the coin, Prometheus, who stole fire for the forge, and Athena, who taught the hand to follow the mind.

Anyone who already knows a craft may join the Artificers, save for the druids, who cannot stand the smoke. On top of that, the general clan rules apply. A master of the Guild:

• may master all four crafts -- smithing, carpentry, jewellery and tattooing -- and with their own multitool crafts, tempers, digs, chops and drills two to three times faster than with a plain tool
• wears the steam jacket and carries the morphing multitool the guard issues on joining; lose either and the same guard at the hall entrance hands you a new one
• keeps the Guild's secrets and its forges, and the steam forge in the main hall never goes out
• grinds loot for free and fast in the hall's own steam cuisinart

CLAN SKILLS OF THE ARTIFICERS 10 armor use 10 steam compass 10 steam loupe 20 steam automaton 25 blasting 30 pneumatic post

THE KIT The jacket and the multitool start at tier 1 of the mechanism. Each piece climbs two more tiers, rebuilt at a lit forge from a blueprint the courier brings, and the blueprint says what the rebuild takes. Every tier makes the piece stronger and its devices better: the compass reaches the whole world from tier 2, the automaton fights harder in a better jacket. A tier belongs to the master, not to the item: a lost kit comes back from the guard at the same tier. The multitool works as an axe, a hammer, a knife or a shovel, one mode at a time: which mode serves which craft is in armor use. In axe mode it fells trees in a forest and chops wooden things (use multitool and the name of the thing), in knife mode it drills and sets sockets like a jeweler's graver.

THE SPLIT This hall once belonged to the Hunters. When the masters brought gunpowder into it, the old hunters walked out: a trap you set with your own hands is honest, they said, a charge that goes off far from you is not. Many of them went over to the Lions, and the Lions took up their grudge. Those who stayed at the forges kept the hall and the ghosts of its heroes. The Lions and the old hunters still stand against it -- nature and the old ways against the machine.

Clan ranks

• 0: apprentice
• 1: stoker
• 2: journeyman
• 3: riveter
• 4: machinist
• 5: mechanic
• 6: clockmaker
• 7: engineer
• 8: guildmaster