That'd totally work: I'm playing very loose with the actual chronology of the setting, I have a lot of problems with some of the things in the book and thus am encouraging players to be creative and make what they like. The spiritual successor to San Francisco would be brilliant, I'm all for it.
It is more useful to appeal against a thunderstorm as against the terrible hardships of war. War is cruelty, its glory is all moonshine. It is only those who have neither fired a shot nor heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded who cry aloud for blood, vengeance and desolation. War is hell. -Engraving beneath a statue of ‘Cump’, God of the Traction City of Cleave-Land
A thousand years after the Sixty Minute War, this quote hs proven deficient. The unimaginable exchange of firepower that marked the end of the world as it was not just hell. It created hell. In the aftermath of the titanic struggle between the American Empire and Greater China, the world is a wasteland. The very Earth buckles beneath the scars of the war, and has left only desolation and danger for those humans who still have the gall to carve out lives for themselves. Mountains explode with volcanic fury, the sea-bed, bared of its water, shakes and festers. Great ice-sheets encroach from the north, and the swirling deserts morph like foul organisms far to the south. Humanity, in its infinite capacity for adaptation, has been forced to innovate or die, and so they have created the great cradles which maintain them in the ashes of their homeworld.
TRACTION CITIES
The world is too volatile and fickle for permanent settlement, or so the ancient wisdom says. On the Great Hunting Ground, the land which the ancients called 'Europe', the Traction Cities, from the great metropolises of millions to the scavenger-towns of a few hundred, scurry with the power of ancient engines, sustained by great works of artificial agriculture, engaged in the great sport of Municipal Darwinism.
The weak are eaten by the strong. The great cities area always looking to expand, to scavenge ancient technology and bolster the population of either their citizenry or, in the cases of some cities, their slave stock. Other cities are the most prized catch of them all, and so a great food chain of municipalities war on the Hunting Grounds, each day a struggle to survive knowing there is always someone bigger than you, some threat to take you from your position of power and wealth.
Meanwhile, rumors fly on the Hunting Grounds, borne by airships and traders, of dangers encroaching on the status quo. Massive cities from the West, having crossed the Radiation Ocean, greater than any seen before, and an Anti-Traction League in the East, determined to tear down the last hope of civilization. The cities of the Great Hunting Grounds, whether they know it or not, face a dangerous chapter in their history, and only wise leadership and sound guidance will see these final bastions of humanity crawl into a new golden age.
OOC
Hello there, and welcome to an unorthodox Nation RP! In this RP, players will take command of a sovereign Traction City (a colossal moving city, by one means or another, not necessarily treads) and guide it to great and terrible things, among the ruins of knowledge and civilization in a steampunk-esque new world. Nations will face trials and tribulations as new forces enter the ecosystem of Municipal Darwinism, and will always have to be watching for enemies seeking to consume them and strip them down to the chassis.
The world is based, mostly, on the Mortal Engines quartet by Philip Reeve. Reading these books are by no means necessary, or ever recommended, but there is a wiki with information that will be cleaved to during the game. For those not familiar, there is a briefing on the world here:
The world of the RP is one of ignorance and danger. The per-war world was one of incredible technology: of space travel, of incredible medicine, and most enduringly of weaponry beyond the imagining of mortal minds. The Sixty Minute War reduced the world to rubble, and now the area of greatest population is in the Great Hunting Grounds, an area which encompasses Europe, the drained North Sea, the Black Salt Flats and the Middle East. It is bordered by the Arctic glaciers to the north, the irradiated Atlantic Ocean to the west, the ever-growing Sahara to the south and mountains to the east.
Traction cities are self-sustaining arcologies that can range from cities in the orders of millions of inhabitants to scavenger or trader towns which house little more than a few hundred residents. Traction Cities hunt other cities, always searching for more people, more power, and most importantly more relics of the Ancient World to give them the edge on their competition. Secrets like heavier-than-air flight, antibiotics, computers, artificial intelligence, cybernetics and nuclear energy have all been lost, and information on the old world is difficult to find indeed.
Lighter-than-air airships ply the skies, floating raft cities trawl the ocean dodging irradiated sea monsters, and traction behemoths fight with cannon, rifle and cutlass over old maps and diagrams. Meanwhile, the wasteland that the cities scrape over is a barren desert of mutated animals, nomadic scavengers and scant sustenance.
Cities are mostly based on Pre-War cities, though the history is so garbled that most of the lineage has been forgotten. The great Traction City of London still rolls across the northern Hunting Grounds, but has satraps like Tunbridge Wheels and Wolverinehampton and to aid it in its fight against Panzerstadt-Breslau.
The RP will be somewhat unique, in that the scope is simultaneously smaller (with nations being at most a few million people in a single city), and much larger (since nations can move and interact at will across a wide swathe of territory). War, politics, romance, rivalry and adventure are all being promised, and I think this can be an excellent vehicle for good storytelling.
Please, if you're at all interested, apply! A nation sheet is all that is required, and the template is right here. Note, the questions asked are simply there to prompt writing, and are not in any way to be seen as prescriptive. Feel free to write whatever seems best for communicating your idea.
City Name: Most Traction Cities are named for the cities that they started as, such as London or Panzerstadt-Munich, but the Old World is a distant place. Many cities have become perversions of Old World names, like Wolverinehampton or Petrolgrad. Others have taken on entirely new identities as new powers come to the fore
Population: For easy reference and sense of scope. The largest Traction Cities have perhaps a few million people, most have far less than that.
Method of Locomotion: The vast majority of Traction Cities use, as their name suggests, giant treads, but humanity is resourceful and innovative: some cities ride the waves, others skate across the ice, some even crawl along the ground on drills or walk on legs. (A note: while sky-cities do technically exist, they are little more than ever-shifting collections of rafts and bridges between airships: they do not qualify as Traction Cities or are even of the same genre)
Physical Description: Both from without and within, here. What is the city like from the inside, what is its structure, its streets, the layout of its buildings. Does it have tiers? Is there a hanging city beneath the baseplate? What are the methods of moving, how tall is it? Things like these should be included alongside how it looks from the outside, its general shape, the style of architecture, any distinguishing features like massive guns, airship docks or great monuments of the Old or New world.
Culture and People: Add here the nature of the people of your city. How do they identify, what do they value, how do they see the world? What are their general physical characteristics, are there any? Traditions, religion, society, their beliefs and way of life should be put here. The physical and economic welfare might also be touched on, the general state of inhabitants and their quality of life, and disparity therein.
Leadership and Power Groups: Who rules your city, and are they monolithic? Is it a dictatorship, a monarchy, a sovereign priesthood, a democratic system, base anarchy? What are the powerful groups? Is there a great Guild of Engine-seers who keep the Old World engines running? Does the military hoard the archaeotech to build new weapons of war that keep them in a position of the highest prestige? Who is fighting over control of the city, who is pulling the strings, and how are they doing it?
Foreign and Internal Policy: Include here how the city views the outside, and how it generally is known to deal with other cities. This is the place for discussion of military, production, industy, craft, trade, violence, espionage, any of these that are important to your city can be included here.
Miscellaneous Information: Do not shy away from this category, feel free to put whatever you want here.
So I'd like a few more than four to start, but no matter what I'll get the OOC up soon so we can keep the momentum going: I'm sick of NRPs fizzling out after too much dilly-dallying.
Yes! Once again, I won't be touching canon (mostly because on a second read of the books, it turns out my tastes have changed from when I was eight years old), but I always find that some sort of threat makes Nation RPs more likely to continue. So many times it is just player nations and nothing much happens until they peter out. You'll have the Anti-Traction factions moving in from the east, while great American behemoths arrive from the west. Fun!
We're not keeping to canon, I figure if you want to rationalize it we're a few hundred years before the series picks up, when the Great Hunting Grounds are a little more populated. As such, there's no canonical archaeotech working, but that does not mean that you can't find some spicy Old World technology and go bananas with it. As for things like heavier than air flight, computers and all sorts of other technological advancements, they have not been re-invented, but once again that is the sort of thing that very well might happen in the RP if things go well.
I'm afraid I'm not much of a cartographer, but I'll do my best to get a map up soon. As for an OOC, well, it'll be up in a day or two. I've got some real-life work to get done, but it seems like there's sufficient interest. As for how traction cities came about: there needs to be a little suspension of disbelief for the things, they're not exactly logically water-tight, but they're very useful for narrative purposes. The actual explanation is that London was the first city, and it was formed only a few decades after the Sixty Minute War, having dodged enough of the munitions to still exist. It had to dodge volcanoes and earthquakes, and so it used some now-forgotten technology to get itself on treads. Other cities followed, and now the mechanisms of turning static settlements to traction cities is lost, but people can still make new traction cities with enough scavenged technology and elbow grease.
It is more useful to appeal against a thunderstorm as against the terrible hardships of war. War is cruelty, its glory is all moonshine. It is only those who have neither fired a shot nor heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded who cry aloud for blood, vengeance and desolation. War is hell. -Engraving beneath a statue of ‘Cump’, God of the Traction City of Cleave-Land
A thousand years after the Sixty Minute War, this quote hs proven deficient. The unimaginable exchange of firepower that marked the end of the world as it was not just hell. It created hell. In the aftermath of the titanic struggle between the American Empire and Greater China, the world is a wasteland. The very Earth buckles beneath the scars of the war, and has left only desolation and danger for those humans who still have the gall to carve out lives for themselves. Mountains explode with volcanic fury, the sea-bed, bared of its water, shakes and festers. Great ice-sheets encroach from the north, and the swirling deserts morph like foul organisms far to the south. Humanity, in its infinite capacity for adaptation, has been forced to innovate or die, and so they have created the great cradles which maintain them in the ashes of their homeworld.
TRACTION CITIES
The world is too volatile and fickle for permanent settlement, or so the ancient wisdom says. On the Great Hunting Ground, the land which the ancients called 'Europe', the Traction Cities, from the great metropolises of millions to the scavenger-towns of a few hundred, scurry with the power of ancient engines, sustained by great works of artificial agriculture, engaged in the great sport of Municipal Darwinism.
The weak are eaten by the strong. The great cities area always looking to expand, to scavenge ancient technology and bolster the population of either their citizenry or, in the cases of some cities, their slave stock. Other cities are the most prized catch of them all, and so a great food chain of municipalities war on the Hunting Grounds, each day a struggle to survive knowing there is always someone bigger than you, some threat to take you from your position of power and wealth.
Meanwhile, rumors fly on the Hunting Grounds, borne by airships and traders, of dangers encroaching on the status quo. Massive cities from the West, having crossed the Radiation Ocean, greater than any seen before, and an Anti-Traction League in the East, determined to tear down the last hope of civilization. The cities of the Great Hunting Grounds, whether they know it or not, face a dangerous chapter in their history, and only wise leadership and sound guidance will see these final bastions of humanity crawl into a new golden age.
OOC
Hello there, and welcome to an unorthodox Nation RP! In this RP, players will take command of a sovereign Traction City and guide it to great and terrible things, among the ruins of knowledge and civilization in a steampunk-esque new world. Nations will face trials and tribulations as new forces enter the ecosystem of Municipal Darwinism, and will always have to be watching for enemies seeking to consume them and strip them down to the chassis.
The world is based, mostly, on the Mortal Engines quartet by Philip Reeve. Reading these books are by no means necessary, or ever recommended, but there is a wiki with information that will be cleaved to during the game. For those not familiar, there is a briefing on the world here:
The world of the RP is one of ignorance and danger. The per-war world was one of incredible technology: of space travel, of incredible medicine, and most enduringly of weaponry beyond the imagining of mortal minds. The Sixty Minute War reduced the world to rubble, and now the area of greatest population is in the Great Hunting Grounds, an area which encompasses Europe, the drained North Sea, the Black Salt Flats and the Middle East. It is bordered by the Arctic glaciers to the north, the irradiated Atlantic Ocean to the west, the ever-growing Sahara to the south and mountains to the east.
Traction cities are self-sustaining arcologies that can range from cities in the orders of millions of inhabitants to scavenger or trader towns which house little more than a few hundred residents. Traction Cities hunt other cities, always searching for more people, more power, and most importantly more relics of the Ancient World to give them the edge on their competition. Secrets like heavier-than-air flight, antibiotics, computers, artificial intelligence, cybernetics and nuclear energy have all been lost, and information on the old world is difficult to find indeed.
Lighter-than-air airships ply the skies, floating raft cities trawl the ocean dodging irradiated sea monsters, and traction behemoths fight with cannon, rifle and cutlass over old maps and diagrams. Meanwhile, the wasteland that the cities scrape over is a barren desert of mutated animals, nomadic scavengers and scant sustenance.
Cities are mostly based on Pre-War cities, though the history is so garbled that most of the lineage has been forgotten. The great Traction City of London still rolls across the northern Hunting Grounds, but has satraps like Tunbridge Wheels and Wolverinehampton and to aid it in its fight against Panzerstadt-Breslau.
The RP will be somewhat unique, in that the scope is simultaneously smaller (with nations being at most a few million people in a single city), and much larger (since nations can move and interact at will across a wide swathe of territory). War, politics, romance, rivalry and adventure are all being promised, and I think this can be an excellent vehicle for good storytelling. Please, let me know if this sounds at all interesting to you!
