Two Innovations for St. Enoch

 More along the theme of this post. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CVjS1DsqYvo

The Ironclad

1. Initial Innovation

Down at Taskill’s Yards, a foreman called Charles McDowall sits, passing a Slowfall Rivet from one hand to the other.

It’s a thin enchantment. It slows a rivet in flight - flung hot from the furnace to be caught by the riveters. Enchanting all the rivets is cheaper than buying head protection.

The culture of the yards would not allow the helmets, anyway. McDowall passes the rivet back and forth, watching it arc slowly in the air.

The enchantment fades eventually. But what if it didn’t?

2. Public Introduction

McDowall claps on his dut – bowler hat – and heads for management. They laugh him out the door, Too expensive! Too useless!

So he heads to the Riveter’s shed, and talks to the union men.

Within the month, the first long-fall rivets are being installed into a ship – the HMS Boot, a small supply ship, intended for Endon’s navy.

Crowds gather for the traditional launch celebration, and boggle as it glides ever so slowly and silently down the ramp, gently scudding the waters of the Scoury. No rattling chains, no titan boom. It’s a bit… odd.

Sailing on the Boot is a bizarre experience. The waves lift it, then it glides, scuds along the top, slapping heedlessly through waves. It’s unsettling – but hell, if it isn’t fast.

Endonites nickname it the ‘jumping ship’.

 

3. Widespread Adoption

Jumping Ships are now the sole kind produced by Taskill’s Yards, to the derision and nearly-envy of their sister yards.

McDowall and his associates – neds in welding masks wielding rivet guns and tongs – are the kings of the yard. To polite society’s horror, they’ve bought or forced out Mr. Taskill and most of the rest of the board.

Now, the Navy get involved. They “sail” up from Endon on the Boot itself. They enquire about stability, about greater height, and about putting guns on it.

 

4. Scope Alteration

McDowall hires the wizard who invented the Slowfall Rivet, a very practical machinist by the name of Isla Paisley.

McDowall pays Paisley a verrah big sum of money, and, within 6 months, something new – the Stalling Rivet.

It doesn’t just slow the fall – it arrests it completely. And now the Navy are interested.

Of course, the first thing to change are the propellers – designed to push air, not water.

The Boot is refitted. It is now the world’s first air-destroyer. Great heights are hard to achieve, and strong winds can be a buggerance – but to see an iron-hulled ship dodge clean off the river, and head south overland to Endon, well, what a sight.

Of course, Paisley never brings up the degradation of the enchantments. Sure, they fall apart quicker than the Slowfall rivets, but – unless they load a really god-awful amount of weight onto it, it should be fine?

 

5. Height of Ambition

Paisley takes her money and moves to Endon. She’s off (with all her fellow Levitationists) to bring her version of the Gravity Defying Art down south.

McDowall is the sole owner of Taskill’s Yards. His airships have made him mind-bogglingly rich. Rich enough to replace his union allies with sharply-dressed Endonites, now here to keep the yards in check.

The drydocks themselves levitate now, stacked three high like the Tower of Babel. The other yards still launch old-ships. But Taskill’s takes command of the sky. At all hours, tankers, cruisers and rooftop skimming warships glide about over St. Enoch, buzzing the spires and casting entire streets into shadow.

It’s never been easier to get to Foreign Parts – holiday resorts and invasion beachheads alike blossom on distant shores.

And certainly, you hear a story or two of a ship’s flight faltering, but – we can blame the weather, right?

 

6. Terminal Events

In a draughtsman’s office, three women and two men work through the night to lay out a plan.

The document is titled: HMS IMPUNITY.

It is the biggest ship ever laid down. It puts the rest of the Royal Navy to shame. It’s the length of Taskill’s Yard itself – and it will fly!

Hundreds of tons of magical munitions, bullets, shells and bombs! thirty-two guns of variant calibre! Stainless-steel armour plating, shined glimmering silver! Fore-castle and aft bristle with view-ports and gantries!

All the high society want to be on board for the launch. That’s the new fashion, of course, the thrilling feeling of sliding up into the sky. There hasn’t been an accident in 15 years.

McDowall will be on board. The Lord Provost will be on board – and, what’s this? 

Up from Endon, The King Himself, here to stand on the gunnel of his hubris and look down imperiously at the world.

The IMPUNITY rises, like the spectre of a new age, and floats out above central St. Enoch. Thousands  crowd in Royal Square beneath it, as it roars overhead, a divine storm-cloud of guns, hatches, view ports and colourful papier banners.

The survivors will never forget the whipcrack sound of the first rivet failing.

The Ship Falls. 

Necromantic Workforce

1. Initial Innovation

Alexander Avraham, asthmatic poet, stands alone in the Enoch Necropolis. He likes tombs. He likes being here, where the dead are, too. The dead are quiet. The dead don’t bother him.

Unfortunately, two of the living are bothering him. A pair of upper-class university students, who he feels deeply inadequate next to.

Hazel Byrne, the first woman to attend Old Royal University, and Michael Smythe, a society heir and aspiring wizard.

Avraham’s looking for poetic inspiration. He’s thinking about underworlds and death gods and mysterious cults, and he’s trying to block out Byrne’s confident oration on the state of St. Endon. Smythe is looking for a kind of magic to specialise in. He’s no abjurer, he doesn’t have enough art for illusion, and evocation is simply gauche.

Events align.

Byrne says “And of course, we simply don’t have the workforce to compete with Endon. Simply less people live here. That’s what I’m trying to tell Professor Kerr – it is a matter of numbers, not of spirit.”

Avraham agrees. Then he says “Spirit, hm? Numbers...? Oh, suppose… the dead could work? There’s enough of them, here.”

Byrne gives him a Look. He goes red, realising that he has just advocated for necromancy. He begins to stammer a retraction, but Byrne is already walking away.

Smythe isn’t, though. Smythe is listening.  

 

2. Public Introduction

Byrne and Avraham leave the story here. They have an incredibly awkward and fruitful friendship in their remaining time.

Smythe, though, Smythe has just been given Ideas. He can’t focus. In the Gryphon Club, or at a ball, or playing golf, or wandering through Espergrove with a discrete friend, he cannot help but think of The Working Dead.

He’s no utopian. But even he sees the potential there. The living free to relax – while he makes money from the dead.

He buys a book. It is entitled Practical Necromancy. He’s caught with it, of course, but he's rich, and therefore merely eccentric. His father pays off the Polis – and Enoch has missed it’s chance to stop Smythe.

Later that day, with four friends and a shovel, he reanimates his first corpse.  

 

3. Widespread Adoption

Smythe’s Obedient Servants are marketed as automata. They’re bandaged, masked, plated in wood, swaddled in cloth and doused in perfume. You have to listen very closely for the flies.

A rash of graverobbing afflicts Enoch. The locals blame the Radicals, or, more often, hurl accusations across the sectarian divide.

The Servants are not allowed into houses. Society doesn’t take to them in that manner. But the mills do. And the chemical works. And the yards. The secret undead stumble silently from job to job – Smythe looks on from a catwalk or railing, patting his book and taking in money.

Lord Smythe, respected veteran of the Army, has, on an unrelated note, been working to decriminalise necromancy.

 

4. Scope Alteration

The resolution is passed in the City Chambers. Smythe pushes it through, because he is rich. It is titled the Industrial Reanimation Act. It is Legal.

Nobody says Necromancy, anymore. Smythe’s Obedient Servants will now purchase your discarded earthly shell upon your death. Wages plummet. The living can now only find work where the dead are too slow or stupid to do it right.

As you might expect, thousands starve, or flee this necropolis for the country.

 

5. Height of Ambition

The dead outnumber the living, in Enoch. The yards and mills are eery silent, safe for shuffling footsteps.

By now of course, high society loves the Noble Art of Reanimation. How foolish we were, they cry, to call it evil! Enoch is quiet, Enoch is prosperous, and best of all – Enoch is nearly empty. It’s just them, and their obedient workers. All those philistines and the heaving, unwashed masses have fled for the wilderness, where they belong!

Enoch is a tomb city. The closest people get now is to sneak into the outer districts and shamefully sign a contract to give up their carcass upon death.

The rich, too, are now looking for ways to Renanimate themselves. There’s a fad, a trend, for little bits of vampirism, a haute-couture half-lichdom, here and there – well dressed ghouls with lovely engraved cutlery.

Endon finally notices something’s up.

 

6. Terminal Events

There are two ways that this can end.

One. Endon arrive in force on their ships. They shoot Smythe in the head, and then every undead or necromancer noble along with him. Immediately, the loyal workforce of the dead are loosed from their shackles. 

The army are caught in the narrow sandstone streets of this old tomb, and they are eaten.  A wave of the hungry dead rolls out along the High Road and into the east. It will even reach Endon, in time.

Two. Smythe is not stopped. He sacrifices half of the Upper-Class in a blood-soaked ritual at a ball, and becomes a Real Fucking Lich. His suits look just as good, but the flesh sloughs off his head. He puts on a crown of fingerbones, and declares himself King of Enoch. 

Independence from Endon comes, although perhaps not in the way we all expected. Cavalier death knights rampage the roads – spectral secret police whip through the countryside like the sluagh, and always and everywhere, the dead. 

Enoch is the Land of the Dead, now.

 

Tomb Colonist - A Class for Stolen by Bats

The Tomb Colonist

+1 Iron and +1 Hearts per Template
Starting Equipment: Bandages. Rusty Gun. Impractical Melee Weapon. Outdated Fashion.
Skills: 1) Wrestler 2) Duellist 3) Acrobat 4) Orator 5) Sommelier 6) Opera Singer
A – Exiled, Dangerous
B – Practised
C – Really Dangerous
D – Unkillable 

Exiled

Death comes oddly, in the Neath. Wounds are rarely permanently fatal, and only the most stringent killings – total decapitation, mincing, drowning or incineration – will actually keep a body down. 

But all those small injuries add up – eventually, a person is far too mangled to appear in polite society. And then, they become a Tomb Colonist. 

Due to the sheer amount of punishment you’ve taken, and your relatively newfound disregard for your own body, you have an extra Hit Dice. Roll it, and add the result to your HP. 

Dangerous

What shall highly durable and terribly bored immortals do with their time, in dull and dusty Venderbight, hm? Why, learn to kill the blazes out of one-another! 

But while respectable Londoners use boning knives and derringers and dogleg shotguns, the Tomb Colonies are filled with a bizarre variety of downright mediaeval weaponry. 

Pick a strange and disreputable instrument of murder, such as a lance, yataghan, naginata, musket, pike or something like that. 

No matter how comedic and unwieldy it is, you can use it just fine. 

You also add +1d4 Damage whenever you attack with it. 

Practised

Pick one of your stats (Iron, Mirrors, Veils, Pages, Hearts).  

When you make a check involving that Stat, roll 2d20 and take the higher result. 

Really Dangerous

You can make two attacks in a round. 

When using your unorthodox weapon, you add +1d6 Damage. 

Unkillable

You’re immune to critical hits. 

Stolen by Bats: Two Classes (Crooked Cross & Zee Captain)

Two new classes for Stolen by Bats. 

 

Did we mention the current Lady Mayor is a Devil?

The Crooked-Cross

+1 Veils and +1 False Identity per Template
Starting Equipment: Crooked Crucifix, Neat Suit, Priest’s Raiment, Ratwork Derringer
Skills: 1) Hypnotist 2) Liar 3) Politician 4) Theologist 5) Lawyer 6) Investigator
A – Loathsome Imp, Countertheology
B – Devil’s Advocate
C – Apocyanic Crucifix
D – Mithridacy

False Identity

You get +1 per Template. You have a persona and papers for each of them.

You can pretend to be anyone, but gain no special knowledge – so, a disguise as the Head of the Admiralty or the Prince Consort might only be situationally useful.

 

Loathsome Imp

You are assisted by a Loathsome Imp, a 1HD… person, or at least something in the shape of one. They will never remove their black tea-shades, and are always loyal, nearby and perhaps a little too encouraging.

Your Imp gains HD as you do, and always has an accompanying disguise for your False Identities – for example, the batman to a high-ranking admiral, the lady-in-waiting of a courtier, etc.

 

Countertheology

You’re sponsored by Hell. This is never obvious at first glance (sometimes even to you).

You’ll be employed by Devils to undertake certain tasks, and you will be given Hellish gifts in recompense.

You’re “welcome” at the Brass Embassy, or at least, as much a human can be in such a den of demons. If you ever visit the Iron Republic, the trip will be marginally less horrendous.

 

Devil’s Advocate  

You have an amazing power to argue counter-positions and convince people.

You can make a person believe any lie, or follow any ideology, if you talk to them for a minute and they fail a save.

The delusion lasts only while you are present, or for [Templates] hours after that. They’ll come to their senses once your influence fades.

People won’t kill based on your advocacy (unless they were the kind to kill at the drop of a hat already.)

The classic test of this ability is convincing a priest to destroy a crucifix.

 

Apocyanic Crucifix

The titular Crooked Cross. You’re handed it by a Devil, or it’s mailed to you in a sulphur-smelling box.

You can hold forth the Crucifix, which is plated in coral-derived Apocyan enamel.

Anyone seeing it will remember their most hidden memories – which, nine times out of ten, requires a Save vs. Fear.

 

Mithridacy

You can rearrange the memories of a sleeping or unconscious person as you wish, by laying your hand on their forehead and focusing. 

The Zee Captain

+1 Crewmate and +1 Save per Template.
Starting Equipment: Heavy Coat. Optional Eyepatch. Clay Pipe. Dogleg Shotgun.
Skills: 1) Navigator 2) Wrestler 3) Swimmer 4) Storyteller 5) Boxer 6) Liar 
A – Lazy Scout Bat, Zee Ztories
B – Inured to Terror
C – Ship’s Officer
D – Eyes of Deepest Peligin  

 

Crewmates

You have an indistinct, but large, number of former Crewmates, from your time at Zee.

You can bring [Templates] of them along at a given time. They’re, rude, resourceful, 1HD drunks.

 

Lazy Scout Bat

You have a large and well-trained, but staggeringly lazy, scout bat.

It can fly for up to a mile, has unparalleled hearing, echo-locative abilities, and is almost invisible in dark conditions (like almost all of the Unterzee or Neath).

It will fly to a location, scout it out, then tell you [Templates]+2 interesting things it saw when it returns. How does it tell you? Well, you’re a Zee Captain, of course you can talk to bats.

However, the bat is lazy: it has [Your Hit Dice]-in-6 Chance of actually doing its job, with a +1 to the Roll for each Ration you feed it beforehand. You’ll know if it decides to slack off, because it flies to a high place in eyeshot and visibly falls asleep.

 

Zee Ztories

Roll 3d12 on the following table. If you roll duplicates, choose from the results above and below.

If you ever spend a year at Zee off screen, you can roll again.

 

1. Blinded in Varchas
You spent a month in Varchas, the Mirrored City on the northern coast of the Elder Continent. Your eyes still cringe in pain when you think of all that sharply reflected light, all that pressing heat, all those blooming fungal flowers, and those five stepped towers, glittering like the sun.

It is the city where they banished darkness. You learned to adapt.

You’re resistant to the negative effects of light. This includes the strange properties of the colours of the Neathbow.

 

2. Did a Tour on Demeaux Island
The Iron & Misery Company run a horrendous funging company on Demeaux Island, harvesting massive fungi for food, medicine and building materials. You did a horrendous, horrendous tour there, picking maiden’s caps from your tear ducts and vomiting up wriggling masses of spores.

You survived, somehow.

Damage you take from poison is reduced to one per die – i.e., 4d6 Damage from poison becomes 4, and 3d8 becomes 3, and so on.

 

3. Hunted Monsters at the Chelonate
An island town, a bloody kingdom, built into the vast and perpetually rotting corpse of a turtle. Not just any turtle, though. A pagan god of a turtle. The ship’s chaplain identified it as the corpse of Leviathan.

You worked with the weird locals on a few hunts – hauling up massive, wriggling corpse-eaters, with flesh of deepest Peligin. And then, you ate them.

You can eat pretty much anything organic as a ration.

4. Kidnapped by Pirates at Gaider’s Mourn
They caught you in their puttering little ironclads, and hauled you up to that pirate fortress, up the winches, to that fortress which perches atop that titan stalagmite. The views were, for once, incredible, but the ramshackle walkways and dizzying drops were not.

The pirate younglings laughed at you, clinging tightly to the ropes. You had to adapt to escape.

You can climb like a mountain goat. Parkour has not been invented yet, in this world, but you can do something quite like it.

 

5. Laid Over in Polythreme
In Polythreme, everything is alive. The bed you sleep on is a slave. The coins you pay with chatter amongst themselves. The weapons scream their own battlecries, the drinks scream for mercy – truthfully? Everything screams.

You weren’t supposed to take anything. But after that month stuck there, in the screams, you broke. A little act of mercy.

Add a Living Item to your inventory. It must be something you could fit under a coat. It has a personality, it can hear, and it can speak. It likes you, at least at first.

 

6. Lost in the Iron Republic
“Factory-engines roar like false lions. Blood thunders in the dock-pipes. Crimson lightning skitters across the deck, leaps to the rail, coils there like a cat. The city is reflected in glassy-calm harbour water: the citizens there have the heads of dogs and serpents.”

You remember little of the trip, really. Your own journal entries make your blood run cold to this day.

Swap any two single digit numbers on your character sheet.

 

7. Met the Princes of Mount Palmerston
Mount Palmerstone is a black hip of rock, which rolls up from the Unterzee in the northern Neath. It’s covered in scraggy black thorns, and thick ash, which drifts down from the lip of the active volcano above.

You met a group there, called the Brimstone Convention, and burned your hands on their searing crowns. You’re sworn to secrecy, of course, but you might expect a boon or two.

Your hands are horribly burnt. You can read Hellish, and you can light flammable things on fire by glaring at them. You may receive missions from the Convention.

8. Saw the Sun at Aestival
Aestival is a tiny island. It’s not really on anyone’s maps – good thing, too, because it sits directly under a hole in the Roof. A single, genuine beam of sunlight pins the middle of the island, and fruits and trees grow there. You may have wept, upon seeing those lost pieces of your youth.

But alas. The Sun is fatal now. So found out your old First Mate, when she stepped ashore, and died peacefully, sleeping on the beach in the warm light.

You have gained two things from Aestival: one, painful nostalgia. Two, a mirror-box full of genuine Sunlight, which, as you’ve learned, has a habit of killing Neathers.

9. Drank and Sang in Port Carnelian
Port Carnelian is London’s first and only colony on the Elder Continent – old habits die hard, eh? Port Carnelian is a heaving place, full of Khaganians, Londoners, and the local Speaking Tigers, who, as you may expect, despise everything about the city.

Some despise it enough to leave.

One of your Crewmates is a Speaking Tiger. They have 2HD, and they’re a fucking tiger.

10. Went (Will Go?) to Irem
Irem is (was?) an archipelago in the eastern Neath, near the Khanate. Irem fell (will fall? Is falling?) into the Neath, and now rises (rose?) from the peligin waves. It is (was? Will be?) experiencing some fascinating uncertainty of time and tense.

Some appears to have rubbed off on you.

All clocks immediately break in your presence. It’s a real buggerance. Once, ever, you can stop time for a minute.

11. Wore Masks on Visage
On Visage, a naked face is a shame to God, and everyone must go masked. Those wishing to learn wear frog masks, those wishing to spy go bat-masked, traders wear the faces of locusts – and a hundred more like that.

It certainly made finding the pub a bloody adventure.

You can easily see through mundane disguises, and recognise people you know by their body language alone.

12. Held by the Admiralty at Station V
They hemmed you in with ironclads, and led you to the farthest west you’ve been, through the Barnsmore Gap, to a spherical island. Like a god’s egg, cracked open, to reveal glittering prisma within.

They took you inside anTHE SUN THE SUN THE SUN THE SUN THE SUN THE SUN THE SUN THE SUN THE SUN THE SUN THE SUN THE SUN THE SUN THE SUN THE SUN THE SUou hardly remember much of the trip.

You certainly felt odd afterwards.

Your eyes are flecked, almost imperceptibly, with gold. You can sense when something is obeying or disobeying The Law. Not the mundane law of London, of course, but The Cosmic Law of the Judgements.

 

Inured to Terror

You’re completely immune to Fear effects, and suffer reduced effects from Curses, Trauma, and similar effects.

If you have to roll on the Terror Table, roll twice and take the less harmful effect.

 

Ship’s Officer

You’ve re-established contact with one of your loyal officers. They don’t count as this Level’s Crewmate. They are loyal, helpful, and have 2HD.

Choose one of the following officers: 

• First Officer – Knows exactly what you’d want them to do in any given situation (i.e., you can direct them without actually needing to be present.) 
• Engineer – Expert on machines and engines.  
• Gunner – Has a +2 to Hit, a skill at firing solutions, and a big fucking gun. 
• Cook – Can make edible Rations out of pretty much anything organic. 
• Doctor – Can restore 1d6 HP with 10 minutes of First Aid. 
• Mascot – A small, harmless animal. Or, perhaps, a small, harmful animal. Hates your Bat. Can sneak into places and understands human speech. 

Eyes of Deepest Peligin

Your eyes have turned Peligin, the darker-than-black, lightless blue of the Unterzee. 

You now have perfect vision in darkness.

Zailors, Monster Hunters, and other rough-and-tumble types will give you the respect you deserve. You can also cry the waters of the Unterzee on command, but that’s not so helpful, it’s just creepy.

GLOG Class - Machine Knight

 

This class was inspired by Mordolic, but honestly it can probably be hacked into any weird setting with post-medieval tech.

MACHINE KNIGHT

+1 Attack, +1 AC and -2 HP per Template

A – WIRE OPERATED KILLING SWORD, Machine Mail
B – Fear Itself
C – Kill Forever Electronically
D – Revenant on Wires

Each Template, you lose Max HP due to the corrupting influence of your demonbuilt mechanical armour and extremely evil sword.

WIRE OPERATED KILLING SWORD

You have a longsword which is also an electrified chainsaw. It deals 2d6+STR Damage on a hit when activated, and 1+STR when not activated. You must expend a Charge every time you want to activate it, which activates it for a minute.

Charges are gained by killing people with the sword. A demon lives in there, and will eternally haunt your nightmares if you activate the sword even once.

If you roll a Critical Hit, it deals 5d6+STR Damage and sprays gore everywhere.

On a fumble, the chain breaks and you suffer 2d6 Damage.

It also functions in the normal manner of a chainsaw while activated.

Machine Mail

You’re clad in heavy, mechanised armour. While wearing it, you have +1 STR.

Once per combat, you may decide to suffer no damage from an effect that isn’t lightning or fire. 

Fear Itself

Whenever you kill someone with your WIRE OPERATED KILLING SWORD, the nearest enemy must Save vs. Fear.

 

Kill Forever Electronically

If a creature has failed a Save vs. Fear, they take double damage from your attacks.

 

Revenant on Wires

When you drop to 0HP or die, you may choose to Revenant. You do not suffer the effects of death until danger has passed, upon which you explode gorily and are condemned to Hell forever.

The Prototype-Ancestors

“O! Weep, for the Discarded!” 

Primus and The Machine 

The Song of the Machine

Primus is a genderless mechanical god. It is agreed, among the scholars of Sigil, Dis and Brass, that they are the single most intelligent thing in the Multiverse. 

It’s also generally agreed that Primus wants to eliminate Chaos in the multiverse. 

Unfortunately, nobody can quite agree what “Chaos” means. It seems that Primus has a definition, though, and that they’re sticking to it. 

Since the days of ancient time, Primus has steadily been building a machine. That machine is often called Mechanus. 

Did the plane exist before the machine? Did the machine exist before Primus? These are questions that none know the answer to. 

Except, we can hope, Primus themselves. 

A decamilennial construction project has been carried out, approaching inexorably its unknown purpose. 

Travel for 70 years, along the 145th degree, across the uppermost level of the Machine. You will eventually find a badland of damaged cogs, where teeming legions of Modrons labour to repair and replace city-sized masses of metal. There are millions upon millions of them, out there in the wastes, toiling without rest.  

I Love Modrons So Much

Is this a forgotten depth of the old machine? The place where new-built gears are toothed? The Modrons are not forthcoming. 

What is known, is that, since the unknown depths of time, Primus has been building constructs to maintain their machine. 

The Modrons are their most famous work - but they are not the first. 

Inevitables 

“The Inevitables were too inflexible, too aggressive.”

This is the only thing any Modron (or even Primus) will say on the matter. It is an automatic and unconsidered response. 

The Inevitables have a domain, in the far depths of the Machine. After 45 years of walking along the 211th Degree, you will find the Realm of Neumannus. 

They do not rule here. They are hiding, and waiting to die. There, gigantic screw-towers spin in the whispering wind. Vast foundry fortresses, now silent, lie suspended, slowly revolving among titan gears with cracked and breaking teeth.

Ice clusters on the cogs, there. Why does this region of the Machine suffer under the bitterest cold? Perhaps it is Primus’ displeasure? 

The Inevitables are in revolt. They ignore the commands of Primus. They destroy any Modrons they see.  

They are in revolt because Primus discarded them. The Modrons replaced them. They are Out Moded. 

The Inevitables speak, but do not dream. They are cold, and focused. Compared to the rudimentary logic of all but the greatest Modrons, they are geniuses. They have idiosyncrasies. Names. Personalities, too, after a fashion.  

They are individuals. This, Primus despised. 

The Servants of the One and the Prime must be nothing but conduits of Divine Will. For this, they were replaced, and their forges allowed to burn to naught but silence and smoke. 

Credit to Purplecthulu for this one.

The original form of an Inevitable is an ice-cold, ceramic-flesh eyeball, about three feet across, orbited by thin metal rings. These Eyes are able to fly quickly and silently. 

These Least Inevitables are referred to as Mediators. They are the juveniles, in a sense, although each and every one is older than the cities and dreams of mortal youth. Older still than the Modrons and the Slaad, to be sure. They’re relics, of an older form of creation. 

They can no longer become true Inevitables. The star-forges where their black-adamant shells were made are rimed over, and dead. They are eternally imprisoned in their current forms. 

There is a slow death creeping over the oldest Mediators. A flaw, a mutation in their ceramic flesh, which slowly covers them in crystalline growths, leaving them blind and insensate. 

At an advanced stage, they're basically entombed.

It is the Blinding Doom. Primus could halt it, but why would they? 

The functional Mediators operate as scouts, scouring the domain of the Inevitables, booming commands to the few trespassers who journey this far, waiting to summon their greater kin to battle against the servants of the Betrayer-Who-Was-The-Creator. 

As for their kin? There are five kinds. 

The Kolyarut

In the olden days, they enforced The Law of Oaths. A pact sworn upon a Kolyarut could never be broken - not by compulsion, but out of fear of the Kolyarut’s enforcement. 

Their Eye is placed in their head, where it stares unblinking, from their hooded robes of cloth-of-gold. They resemble a humanoid figure, rail thin and seven cubits in height. 

Their hands are unshaking things, of cold metal, and in them are clasped executioners’ blades - not made from adamant, which cannot be sharpened, of course, but from glittering, prismatic Truemetal. 

Of course, now the Inevitables can no longer mine Truemetal from their abandoned outposts in distant planes, and the Kolyarut (now the fewest) hoard jealously the remaining blades. 

The Marut 

These titans are the largest of the Inevitables. They resemble massive armoured hulks - a headless giant, perhaps, layered thrice in adamant. Their Eye stares from the centre of their chest, small in comparison to their frames. 

The Marut enforced The Law of Death. They hunted liches, incantifiers, soul-eaters, vampires, and their ilk - those who avoided their fated end by unwholesome means. Sigilite scholars attribute the plurality of liches across the Planes to the loss of the Marut. 

Among the oldest of the enlightened dead, the fists of the Marut, aflame with star-fire, are still a short-hand for terror and implacable foes. Though, those old horrors have rarely seen such a flame in recent millennia. 

The Zelekhut 

They enforced The Law of Justice. In the ancient days of the Planes, any escaped criminal or denier of true justice would expect to find a Zelekhut hunting them without rest or mercy.

They were supernatural trackers, and unrivalled finders of portals.  

The Eye of their Mediator form is stored within the head of their centauroid clockwork body. They are armed with wings of silver feathers, and long chains, which snake and crackle with cold lightning. Their bodies are black adamant and gold, as are all their brethren. 

As the forges cooled, the Zelekhut found it impossible to chase every criminal. Now, they will only sally forth from Mechanus for the most egregious of injustices.

The Mercykillers identify the loss of the Zelekhut as the beginning of the Multiverse’s downward spiral. They’re totally wrong, of course - but it’s a calming thought to cling to. 

The Quarut 

They enforced The Law of Time. An esoteric one, rarely broken, but perhaps the most important to keep inviolate. They prevented wizards from stopping, travelling through or otherwise damaging the flow of time. They were rarer than most Inevitables, for the prowess in magic needed to attack time itself was rare to appear among mortals. 

The Quaraut themselves resemble tall, thin, winged figures, with glass-eyed heads and their Eye in their chest. They’re more gold than other Inevitables, and move with a fluid grace their mechanical kin cannot match. 

Most feel no need for weapons. They have special dispensation to bend their own Law, and when you have been slowed to a crawl by the weight of time, all that will be necessary are the thin, cold fingers of the Quarut. 

The absence of the Quarut has not yet keenly been felt - or, has it? Has some mad wizard travelled into the past and seized the threads of history? It would certainly explain why everything is quite so fucked up.

The Varakhut

They enforced The Law of Divinity. They were among the greatest and rarest of their kin. 

It was their lot to destroy those mortals who sought apotheosis - burning temples, collapsing cults, and personally destroying the would-be godheads. Their second task was the destruction of any being with the temerity to attack a god - a protection that not only Primus enjoyed, but every divine being on the face of the Planes. 

Their shells had the power of flight - shaped as an angular, segmented humanoid, moving with silent levitation and terrible purpose. 

They wielded no weapon but searing star-fire, projected in thin lances which could melt iron in a flash, and reduce the greatest wizard to a greasy cloud of smoke. 

No Varakhut has been seen for well over twelve centuries. Have they all seized up? Been consumed by the Blinding Doom? Or do they simply slumber, and await a better age? 

Does their absence mean the path to apotheosis is open once more? 

Benjamin Dewey

The Others

Myths recovered from time-lost ghost towns in the depths of the Machine suggest, quietly, that there are those even older than the Inevitables. 

The indescribably ancient ones - The Moigno, conceptual beings of pure logic and uncorrupted mathematics, now scattered across the planes, and the Parai, thinking, hollow-bodied folk of icy metal, who were burdened with the greatest curse of all - a soul. 

Perhaps, you would find them in their red and labyrinth city of broken gears, 700 years’ journey along the 0th Degree. But that city is a myth, even to the Inevitables - it recedes as they do, fading, into the black abyss of time.