Landfall!; the Katang

[kopout]

Discus the Katang and related concepts here.
Landfall!

[jagadaishio]

I'll start by listing everything that we currently have decided about the gnomes, the dwarves, and the katangs. If I miss anything, please point it out.

Back in the day the dwarves lived in stony mountain caves while the gnomes lived in shallow earthen tunnels. When the first rise of the oceans came, the gnomes were quickly left homeless vagrants, moving ever for the higher ground after losing their homes. The dwarves, despite being fully aware that they would someday eventually suffer the same fate, remained stubborn, refusing initially to accept any help from others to be saved from their fate.

When the situation became dire, however, they finally relented, offering shelter and resources to the gnomes in exchange for a mutually vital service: the gnomes would build something, anything, to save their races. And do the gnomes built grand, watertight, armored cities armed with massive, steam-powered mechanical legs able to stride across the shallows and swim to the sea. And thus the five Katang; the five walking crab-cities; the five Striders were born.

Unbeknownst to their builders, however, all five cities had a set of stowaways: a population of kobolds, following their traditional adversaries, the gnomes, now secretly hidden away deep within the machinery of the Striders.

[jagadaishio]

Only three of the original five katangs still survive to this day. Of the two lost ones, one was destroyed by a massive horde of waterborne orcs. Though the battle was fierce, they eventually boarded the city and looted, marauded, and killed wholesale. By the time they were done the city was a useless heap of scrap, everything of value destroyed or stolen away.

The other lost city met a somewhat different fate. The kobolds within this city resented the gnomes and the dwarves and still worshipped the dragons as they had in the old days. One day their leaders came into contact with the dragons again; it is uncertain of who came into contact with whom. They reached an agreement that they would sabotage the inner workings of the city leading up to a raid by dragons and giants. In return, they would be given freedom and power like likes of which no kobold had held for centuries.

When the day came, the katang's legs siezed up, and hatches would not close. The dragons flew in, dragons on back and in talons, and raided the settlement, killing the dwarves and gnomes and freeing the kobolds. The kobolds, with help of dragon mages and giant smiths, then constructed a massive city-ship out of the remains of the katang.

The ship is metal, and heavily armored. Its bow is shaped like a roaring dragon's head, an experimental massive, long-ranged artillery cannon within its mouth. The bow then descends into a bladed, ramming edge. The sides of the ship have murals etched into the sides of kobolds and dragons, a smaller cannon in every draconic being's mouth. The ship itself is powered by a magic consuming generator, making magic difficult or impossible within a certain radius of the ship.

The ship houses fish and fungus farms in the damp, cool belly, a garden and barrels for water collection on the top deck. It is considered a heinous crime to waste, and those who allow items to fall overboard are usually sent after those items. The ship doesn't slow down and wait for them to return.

The ship is slow but hostile. It is a bad idea to ever approach it. It is manned principally by tinkers, dragonfire adepts, and various craftsmen. It is over a mile long, and is the only known independent kobold settlement in the world.

[jagadaishio]

The surviving two-mile-wide striders currently walk and swim all around the world. In the shallows they walk and dig for ore with their massive legs. In the deeper waters, they swim, using their legs as paddles. They fish in the deeper waters, stockpiling food for when it is not so plentiful. All of the cities trade heavily as well. As the principle urban centers in the entire world, trade is never a scarce thing.

Katangs are powered by massive portals to the abyss, where they use abyssal fires to fuel their massive steam turbines. Occasionally, fiends or fire elementals will cross through.

[jagadaishio]

Of the surviving Striders, the first is Kuko. In Kuko, the gnomes and the dwarves stayed largely separate, forming a society in which the dwarven culture ended up dominant. Gnomes typically serve as tinkers in the workforce among dwarven smiths; few raise above that station into any sort of ruling or managerial position. Dwarves, on the other hand, formed a strict, dwarven hierarchy with a cast system and familiar clans.

In this city, the kabouter, half-dwarf half-gnomes, are rare. Those that do exist are usually outcasts, unwanted by the system. They usually end up leaving or being exile.

Kuko is a purist, arrogant, and strict city. Its streets are clean. It's in very good condition, almost identical to the day it was built. It doesn't like outsiders.

All katang have a dock district, usually on the edges and underside of the body. On Kuko, non-citizens, especially non-dwarves and non-gnomes, are not allowed any further into the city than the dock district. Any that are found within the city proper are jailed overnight, escorted to the docks at dawn, and coldly asked to leave.

Kuko has an extensive and rigidly trained military force. The force is made up of gnome-piloted submarines and dwarves armed with axes in heavily-armored diving suits. Kuko's armed forces are so feared, in fact, they they have had less actual battle time than the armed forces of any other katang. So, the most deadly, best trained of military forces are also the ones least used.

[jagadaishio]

The next of the cities is Bala. Bala is in many ways the polar opposite of Kuko. In its history, the gnomes picked up an element of dwarven stubbornness, and refused to allow themselves to be dominated by the strong dwarven cultures. Instead, they pulled as hard as the dwarves did, causing their society to fall into an open middle-ground.

Bala accepts any who wish as citizens. No district of the city is off-limits to foreigners, though buildings may be barred off at their owner's discretion. The city's population, because of these policies, is double that of the other katangs, and it receives more trade than the other two put together. The kabouter are more common than the gnomes or the dwarves here, though they don't have the population of dwarves and gnomes put together.

The city is governed by a largely democratic council, with all of the inefficiency and bureaucracy that implies. They have the largest military of any of the katang, though it isn't the best equipped. In times of emergency, trading vessels are conscripted to defend the city along with its military.

The kobolds of Bala have recently revealed themselves to the citizenry, and are slowly integrating, taking well to the role of deep-repair and labor.

[jagadaishio]

The city of Mata is the final surviving katang. This city, until the other two, never got hung up on the differences that the dwarves and gnomes had. Instead, they focused on what they had in common to pull together and survive. Mata is the the most advanced of the Striders; the city of mechanists and artificers.

Mata has a largely corporate social structure, with workers overseen by supervisors overseen by managers and so on. No race is more common than the others among any class, and while the kabouter are far more common here than in Kuko, they are much less common than in Bala. The city also has a race not seen in the other cities: the warforged.

In this city, when elementals cross through, they are given an offer which the other cities don't have the same technological ability to meet. They are offered mechanical bodies to protect their fragile inner fires. In exchange, they are required to serve a short mandatory period in the military and labor force to work of the debt that their bodies accumulate in their construction.

After paying off their debt, they are then allowed to go freely. Many decide to remain in the city and forge a military career, but many are compelled to move on by the same adventurous spirit which inspired them to cross the portal into the city's boilers to begin with. The military force is also made up of many animal-shaped constructs, such as metal sharks and crabs patrolling the waters. It's not public knowledge what means are used to animate them.

Mata itself is unlike the other katang. While the others have stayed at the same technological level, Mata has been refitted, magicked, and upgraded to the point that the city itself is a sentient living construct. In many ways, it has a higher rank than even Mata's official governor.

The city is also patrolled by a vast number of servitor and mindless constructs, like golems and dedicated wrights, both for security and maintenance. Unfortunately, every now and then a golem or a construct will go berserk, or a perturbed warforged will go rogue. When that happens, they are re-designated as gremlins: rogue constructs that undermine the security of efficiency of the city.

Mata was aware of the kobold population within hours of being awakened. She also became aware of the sheer number of rogue constructs within her, effectively diseases in her body. Because of this, she harnessed the speakers strung all throughout her body and contacted the kobolds. She asked them to hunt the rogue constructs, acting as her antibodies. In return she would redirect shipments of supplies to them every now and then and provide them a save place to live.

Since then, the kobolds have drastically reduced the gremlin population, bringing it to stable numbers. Furthermore, they have long-since abandoned their dragon-worship, now worshipping Mata herself as a deity. The general populace is still unaware of the kobolds in the machine.

[jagadaishio]

The Striders are now en-route to the only land in the world. Because of their slow speeds, it is literally a race. Each of the katangs still not quite there, in spite of nearly a decade of travel. All of them were on the other side of the globe when they word first reached them.

Kuko wants to re-establish an empire by reclaiming the dwarven mines that must still be there on these mountains. Bala wants to be there at land, in order to draw upon the massive attention that the traders have given it. Mata, though, is mainly going there because she's curious as to what land looks like. The people are similarly curious, and so don't mind.

Am I forgetting anything, people?

[Kellus]

Grat summary. I think it covers all the fluffy bits fantastically. I'll try to do something similar with the deep dwellers later tonight.

[jagadaishio]

I imagine that the great armor plates on the shell of the katangs could be lifted up. This would allow in both natural light and fresh air in the open areas of the Striders. It would never reach any sort of an engineering district, but it would really lighten things up in any residential or commercial districts. I could see Bala having them open most of the time, but it being less common on Kuko and Mata. After all, the people of Kuko tend not to mind the cave-like darkness, and Mata has electric lighting everywhere, while Kuko and Bala only have electric lights in main areas, relying more often on candle and torch.

What do you guys think?

[jagadaishio]

Has Mata developed firearms, or is the only faction with firearms the cannoned-out dragon ship?

[Owrtho]

I'd think cannons would be fairly common place. However, I can see Mata could have firearms as well as more advanced cannons.

Owrtho

[Limos]

I think Kuko is too traditional, too set in it's ways to adopt new technologies. Everything is maintained as it was when it was first built, adding cannons would be a perversion of the cities design.

Bala is more open, but also more peaceful and bogged down by bureaucracy and governmental interference. I don't think they would have the drive to perfect firearms.

Mata probably has the tech and might have more efficient and advanced cannons than the city ship. But they aren't as warlike and probably will just have basic defenses and prototypes.

The Kobold city ship on the other hand... The cannons are symbols and holy relics all rolled into one. They are the agent by which the Kobolds have freed themselves. They are the fire from the mouths of their dragons. I would think that the Kobolds would be almost fanatically devoted to the building and maintenance of their cannons. Once trapmaking was the Kobold way, but you can't lay traps when your city is always moving, so instead they transfer that same devotion to weapons.

Their weapons would be heavy and brutish. Crude cannons that take a full team of kobolds to load and fire. Nowhere near the sleek and elegant weaponry in Mata workshops. But what they lack in finesse they make up for in savagery. The cannons fire any number of horrific ammunition, from the basic cast iron shot to clumps of spiked chains dripping with antimagic pollutants that leak from the ship's reactor.

Crafting more and more vicious weaponry is an art form among the Kobolds. Even if you escape the kobolds who knows what manner of poisons or oozes they launched on to your vessel. Hollow flasks filled with black pudding make for a nasty surprise once they start to multiply in the lower decks of your vessel.

[jagadaishio]

Limos, that is brilliant. It also really emphasizes the fact that you should never get within range of the cannons of the dragon ship. Ever. It also seems like Mata would be the only place in the world to go for any sort of handheld firearm. With how resource-limited the world is currently looking, do you think that a person would be able to get gunpowder anywhere other than a successful alchemist's shop in a large city? Considering that fact, might Mata have researched a method of replacing the volatile of gunpowder with elemental fire bound from their portal into inert powders or multi-shot crystals?

Basically, where we developed firearms technologically, might Mata have started with a mechanical concept and started enhancing it with both technology and magic, creating true magitech weapons instead of firearms as we know them? If they did, how expensive would they be? Would they have actually bothered developing them beyond single shot pistols, or would they instead have just researched more advanced crossbows?

[Limos]

They would almost have to find new sources of weapon power with how material starved the world is. I could totally see fire sprites bound into cartridges in place of gunpowder for use in firearms.

The Kobolds would probably just run all the cannons off of the main reactor using steam pipes and pressurized cannons. The pollution from the reactor and the anti-magic effect would probably be felt for miles in every direction, an ominous black cloud that heralds the oncoming battlecruiser.

This also makes for a nice technology contrast. On one side you have Magitek city of Mata, and on the other you have the squalid Steampunk Dragon Ship. Mata weaponry relies on bound elementals and enchantments whiles Kobold weaponry is mostly technological with maybe a dash of divine casting handed down from their dragon gods.

[jagadaishio]

The large mass of kobolds worshipping Mata instead of dragons infuriates the dragons, already balanced on a razor's edge when it comes to their minions. Because of that, Mata is next on the draconic agenda of conquest. With any luck, the dragons think, they'll be able to liberate their worshippers and release them from the worship of a false god in one fell swoop. The kobolds of the dragon ship have a similar agenda.

Because of this animosity, Mata is the place to go for dragon parts. Every few months, a naive young dragon with everything to prove goes sweeping on on Mata for a bit of plunder and conquest. The lucky ones escape with a few scars and an interesting story to tell. The unlucky ones are massacred by the warforged, their parts distributed amongst the participating battalion as pay bonus. Those warforged still in debt instead have their debt reduced by an appropriate amount, often negating it entirely. A few warforged take levels in classes where they can specialize in the slaying of dragons for this very reason.

[Limos]

The routine Dragon Slaying only manages to reinforce the rogue Kobolds faith in Mata and her Warforged children over the brutish Dragons who die like animals before their very eyes.

What kind of God falls before you only to be chopped up for trophies?

This in turn only infuriates the Dragon's further and increases the ferocity of their attacks.

[jagadaishio]

The routine Dragon Slaying only manages to reinforce the rogue Kobolds faith in Mata and her Warforged children over the brutish Dragons who die like animals before their very eyes.

What kind of God falls before you only to be chopped up for trophies?

This in turn only infuriates the Dragon's further and increases the ferocity of their attacks.

It's an endless cycle of disenfranchisement and revenge. What sort of a greeting would a half-dragon or any other kind of dragonblooded humanoid have at the docks of Mata? How much hassle would they have from the largely warforged dock authority or the dwarf and gnome merchants?

[Limos]

I think that would depend on just what the other half is. If it's a smaller race then they might think they are nearly Kobold and give them at least a lukewarm welcome. They probably wouldn't kill them outright.

If it's anything medium sized or larger then they will probably start wondering which bits would make the best trophies. A very poor welcome indeed.

So a Half-dragon Gnome would probably be welcome as an oddity while a Half-dragon Orc would be killed on sight.

[jagadaishio]

Remember, though, that the citizenry of Mata is ignorant of the kobolds within. If the kobolds were ever brought out into the public eye, they would likely face heavy discrimination. So, I don't think that the side would play into it really. If Mata dislikes the dragonblooded, Mata dislikes the kobolds too.

[Limos]

Oh I forgot about that. So yeah, I guess anything scaly and chromatic would probably be chopped up on sight. Years of fending off dragon attack can give you a deep distrust of colorful reptiles.

[DracoDei]

Are all the cities self-aware or just the one?

A self aware city does beg for a FEW stats...
HD, hitpoints and physical ability scores are so huge as to have no meaning. But mental ability scores, skills, and perhaps even class levels could apply.

[Limos]

I was actually planning to stat up all three Katangs as some manner of Colossal Animate Construct, though even Colossal isn't quite big enough. Can I just make a new size category above Colossal? Titanic?

I think we've already established it is more than two miles on a side, and has quite a few giant smashing limbs. Mata would also have any number of cannons.

I was thinking to do the same for the Dragon ship as when you have things fighting on that scale the crew is basically part of the ship itself and you can just treat it as a construct rather than a vehicle.

Of course I would probably stat out a leg and cannon emplacement so that you can actually take them out singularly rather than having to deal with it at full strength right up until the city keels over.

The Katang's would have to be powerful enough that two good hits from a limb would enough to take down an adult dragon. Cannons should be capable of one shotting younger dragons.

But I don't think Mata is self aware in the sentient sense, but in a more placid way. Like a particularly intelligent animal. I mean sure it is worshiped as a God, but it still started out as a giant lump of metal.

[jagadaishio]

Actually, the way I originally intended it, Mata had full sentience. After all, it was able to coherently contact the kobolds and contract them. If anything, I think that in order for Mata to be aware of the goings on of the internal city in more than just a generalized macro sense would necessitate her having a phenomenal intelligence and wisdom. I dunno, did everyone else see Mata as having sentient-level intelligence, or was it just me?

[DracoDei]

I have only read this thread, but full sentience was definitely the impression I got. I don't think it necessary has a huge wisdom just because it can multi-task a lot.

[Vadin]

Actually, the way I originally intended it, Mata had full sentience. After all, it was able to coherently contact the kobolds and contract them. If anything, I think that in order for Mata to be aware of the goings on of the internal city in more than just a generalized macro sense would necessitate her having a phenomenal intelligence and wisdom. I dunno, did everyone else see Mata as having sentient-level intelligence, or was it just me?

I am definitely of the opinion that Mata should be self-aware and very smart. Sentient, sapient, whatever word one wants to use for 'thinks like a person'.

[Limos]

Apparently I am outvoted and everyone else was feeling the sentience vibe. Still though I find the thought of Mata having class levels very odd.

I wouldn't think it would have the same kind of thought processes it's passengers do. It views the Gremlins as an infection. The Kobolds are it's immune system. Mata doesn't have to know them on a personal level to make use of them.

I just can't imagine Mata acting like a normal person and speaking to them in anything but an authoritative "Go kill this thing for me" kind of way. I would think it would be difficult to relate to Mata due to such wildly different viewpoints.

Have you ever tried having a conversation with one of your white blood cells?

[jagadaishio]

I could totally see Mata having lots and lots of levels in artificer. Maybe some levels in rogue. MAAAAAYBE wizard. Nothing else, though.

[DracoDei]

The class level thing was just a wild idea on my part.

How would rogue fit?

[Limos]

Really, Rogue?? How in the world would a two mile long mechanical crab pull off anything rogueish? It's not like it could ever sneak up on anyone of sufficient size to be worth attacking. And what would be capable of flanking with it?

I could see Mata having some divine casting as spell like abilities, being a living god and all, and Artificer definately fits thematically. What kind of CR do you think Mata would have?

Probably somewhere deep into Epic tier for any normal party. It's basically a walking dungeon which is alive.

EDIT: You probably can't go too crazy with class levels simply because the base Katang is going to have a crazy high CR, and each class level will quickly push Mata into ridiculous Epic tier levels.