#clanks

my clarence x hank 5 fanchild, cassandra coco couture! or otherwise just known as hank 0. she's a padded hanger.

To codify my thoughts from the post on the Colossus in the Drylands campaign frame and how much it rings all my bells. Heh.

So the base concept here is a clank that’s powered by essentia, the form of crystalised magic that is the focus of the area’s recent mining and industrialisation boom. Because it turns out that essentia is essentially the blood of a buried god, and said god is waking up and throwing titanic monsters around the place, because it is quite reasonably pissed as hell. And clanks in this campaign frame are powered by essentia, which means that this poor clank, through no real fault of their own, is required to keep bleeding said god in order to keep living. And I wanted a clank that has extremely mixed feelings about this once they realise it.

I wanted a character to embody, extremely literally and physically, the tension of exploitation that the mining plotline of this campaign frame draws on. This land is being mined out by foreign powers, with all the impact for the local peoples and environment that entails, and that was before the elder god buried beneath started waking up and filling the area with titanic colossi and other aberrant monstrosities. Everyone’s been left scrambling now that it turns out there was a reason this land was made so inhospitable (to guard the buried god) and that it might not have been the best idea in the world to suddenly tear up half of it trying to get to the mineral goodies beneath.

So. A clank. A constructed being. A mining clank, brought (or actually built) here to do the exploiting. Powered by the ore they’re so recklessly digging out, and perhaps not very efficiently powered, because if they’re directly mining the stuff they’re powered by, why not make it so they can do a down-and-dirty self-refuel on the spot? We’re mining enough of it out here.

But something happens to this mining clank. Or, actually, several somethings.

The first is that they’re starting to … feel things from the essentia. They’re living it, mining it, running on it. It’s part of their very form. They’d started to get … impressions, a sense of something ancient and mad as hell, before ever the first of the colossi tore free of the earth outside Wyllin’s Gulch.

And the second was that they didn’t stay a mining clank. And that wasn’t entirely on purpose either.

What happened was, one of the local communities had had a longstanding grudge against the mining claim the clank worked for, primarily because said mining claim stole and polluted all their water. And things came to a head one night when the clan fully came down and attacked the mining camp, killing several miners and blowing large chunks of it up. Including our clank, who was sideswiped by one of the explosions and left splintered and for dead by the rest of the fleeing miners. For some reason, perhaps fascinating with the artificial lifeform, one of the ridgeborne clan decided to rescue-slash-salvage her. And as she recovered among their community, they taught her their own way of life, of the proud but precarious ways to work with this bleak, inhospitable land to not only survive but thrive here. She became attuned, with their guidance, to something else. The land itself.

She became a druid. And a druid of renewal, of working with the land to help and to heal. But despite her newfound and deeply held beliefs, the fact remains that she must still dig for essentia herself to survive. She is still, at her core, a miner, not a grower. And she’s struggling so hard to come to terms with that, to find a way to reconcile it. And that was before …

Before the colossi came. Before the whole land itself seemed to rise up, against locals and invaders alike, powered by an ancient hate that everyone struggles to understand.

A hate that she, in her bones, felt coming years ago.

Jinny Rawbones, a Drylands druid.

So, quick summary. Her ancestry is Clank, her community is Ridgeborn, her class is Druid, her subclass is Warden of Renewal. Her domains are Arcana and Sage.

Her traits are as follows: +2 to Instinct, +1 to Agility and Finesse, +0 to Knowledge and Strength, -1 to Presence. She’s not a very charismatic sort of gal. Well, being a beat-up, salvaged mining clank with severe self-esteem issues and the occasional pulse of hate from the crystalised blood of an angry god sitting in her chest doesn’t tend to lean towards it?

For her experiences, we’ll give her ‘Mining Clank’ (which will get a bonus from her clank feature ‘Purposeful Design) to give her experience with the extraction and processing of essentia, as well as potentially some facility with mining safety, digging, evaluation of rock, and possibly explosives? And then ‘Wonder of Nature’, for the training and appreciation of the natural world and how to survive within it that her new community have given her. I’m assuming that’ll apply mostly to things like survival and tracking and identification.