Clockworking is a new art in Freeport. It uses the Student: Mechanics skill, which is a fairly rare thing to know about in the world of Heluso and Milonda. Far more common is Student: Trapmaker which can be used for less complex devices.
To build clockworks the clockworker needs access to materials and must spend time building. The clockworker decides how complex a device he's building, each point of complexity adding a day to the build time. After one day's work he rolls his Knowledge+Mechanics. On a success, he's built a basic clockwork.
If the clockworker is making something he has never tried before he has to roll for each day's work. Failure means he's hit a snag and it will take longer. These rolls can be split up. Once he's made something once, however, all that's necessary is one roll after the first day's work and then it will simply require the clockwork's Complexity in days to finish. If it's something very routine, the time is halved for every extra point of width on that roll, as long as it beats the Complexity as a Difficulty number.
Example: Zov is building a Jewellery Polisher so he doesn't have to buff that moonstone ring of his by hand. That's a Tiny stationary item that does one simple thing, so its just a Complexity 1 Clockwork. The first time he builds one he rolls his skill of 8+MD and gets 8,5,4,4,3,3,3,1. He sets his MD to 8 for a 2x8 Success so he has an eight word description of what it can do. "Quickly polishes and cleans jewellery." If he starts building a lot of these things it becomes routine. Then he spends a day working on them and rolls 10,7,6,6,5,4,3,2. This time he sets his MD to 6 for a 3x6 success. That halves the time it took so he managed to churn out a couple of them that day. If he'd managed a 4x6 then he could have gotten four done that day.
Complexity 1 Clockwork
1 HP, Tiny, Stationary, Can do one thing describable in as many words as the height of the Clockworker's roll.
Options:
Each of the following options adds to the complexity of the clockwork. Each point of Complexity adds a day to the time needed to build the device.
Complexity +1
+5 feet movement (15ft is standard for a person)
+1 HP
Complexity +2
+1 AR
+1 task skill
install ranged weapon (size dependent)
Complexity +3
+1 Attribute
Increase size (from Tiny to Small, or Small to Human-sized)
Example: Now Zov's building a clockwork lock. It's tiny and stationary but he wants it to be difficult to break so he decides it will have AR4. That makes it a Complexity 9 device. He's made a bunch of them before, so technically it's a routine task. He rolls his skill of 8+MD and gets 9,8,6,4,3,3,2,1. Setting his MD to 3 for a 3x3 wouldn't cut down the time at all, because it's lower than the clockwork's Complexity. Instead he sets it to 9, crafting his lock well, but having to take the full 9 days. Also, being a fancy lock that 9 acts as the difficulty for picking it without the key, so higher is definitely better.
Costs
These things aren't cheap.
| Complexity | Cost |
|---|---|
| 1-5 | Wealth 1 |
| 5-20 | Wealth 2 |
| 20-60 | Wealth 3 |
| 60-150 | Wealth 4 |
| 150-300 | Wealth 5 |
