RYE - Iron Limbs, Floating Stone

Iron Limbs

It had, for some time, been a known and accepted fact among the slann that any technology acquired from the Uax was at best incomplete without the presence of the creatures. In much the same way that the Geomantic Web buffered and supported the functioning of the lizardmen in an innumerable variety of ways, the Waaagh!!! Field supported the insane contraptions built by its fleshy extrusions, patching over the myriad errors, incompetencies, and physical impossibilities that would otherwise cause all but the simplest orkoid choppas to cease functioning. A basic ork shoota might be missing a trigger, a reload mechanism, or even a barrel connected to where the bullets were stored, and still be able to fire. Trukks and Dakkajets had been examined after being captured in battle and found to be running entirely without fuel, or even engines in some cases. As greenskin technology grew more advanced, the amount of support required by the Waaagh!!! Field grew greater and greater, and the creations more and more likely to simply break when that support was removed. This had made itself most apparent when, after Waaagh!!! Gardakka was broken upon the altar of slann geomancy, all of the sprawling settlements occupied by the greenskins fell to complete ruin in a matter of days. Buildings fell apart, factories spontaneously exploded, walls crumbled without cause, and all evidence of Uax presence had vanished and been replaced by the native Mochantian jungle.

It was this phenomenon that made studying the metal prosthetics that had been looted from the war against the greenskins a difficult prospect. Whatever mechanisms of wire and gear that allowed the synthetic limbs to articulate themselves as they did were more complex by far than most examples of greenskin technology, and the pieces had been crafted quite a few decades ago, making them positively geriatric by the standards of Uax creations. The slann had been able to preserve them only by affixing them within potent stasis fields, which rendered it a complicated, inconvenient process to go into the temple where they were held and conduct a proper examination without fear of breaking them. Any entrant had to be quarantined in a magically sterile temple for a day, subjected to multiple cleansing rituals to remove residual background magic from their bodies, and have an access sigil etched into their scales that would allow the stasis spells to envelop them in their time-lock membranes without also freezing them in eternal captivity. The work had to be done in relatively short shifts of thirty hours, after which the access sigils wore off and would have to be reapplied, and most inconvenient of all, no equipment with overt magical properties could be brought within the enclosed temple, necessitating that all the study be done with the use of the naked eye.

Mere difficulty and inconvenience were not enough to dissuade the researchers of the lizardmen, however, and with the attention of the temple-cities no longer turned solely towards their defense, there was no shortage of available minds to collaborate on the project. The temple holding the prosthetics became host to a steady stream of skinks, kroxigors, and even saurus that entered the stasis field to examine the pieces and record their thoughts by carving on tablets of soft stone with their claws. As more and more observations filtered out to the wider public, the lizardmen were able to produce schematics of the metallic limbs, their forging districts playing host to kroxigors assembling roughshod copies in their spare time. The first such examples produced were near-exact replicas of the orkish products, and thus were as nonfunctional as anything made by the greenskins. The iterative process of observation and alteration carried on over the course of several years, and over that time, the holes in the lizardmen’s knowledge grew smaller and smaller, the connections they could draw to their own methods of devising technology more and more apparent.

The rationale of the ork meks who had created the pieces, if such could even be said to exist, slowly became more visible. The tangled webs of wire and cable that spun within the interior of the arms were meant to simulate the motions of tendon and sinew. The strange spiked apparatuses at the ends were not merely to affix the prosthetics to the flesh of their wearers, but to integrate them with their nervous systems so they could move at the mind’s command. Even the reason why the arms resembled mere metallic versions of a standard ork limb and not something more exotic eventually became apparent - without substantial amounts of training, it was difficult for most sapient beings to learn to properly utilize a limb that was foreign to their ordinary capabilities. With sufficient effort, it was possible to mold one’s self-image enough for the soul to begin to adapt to the new capabilities such an exotic prosthetic would allow, such as the multitudinous dexterity of bifurcating limbs. Given that the length of an average ork boy’s life was oftentimes measured in weeks, if not less, it was perhaps unsurprising that a set of limbs designed for such transient soldiers would instead conform to their regular body plan.

Eventually, the discussion surrounding the orkish limbs drifted up high enough in the stratas of lizardmen society that they reached the ears of Kroq-Gar himself. The resemblance between the iron augmentations and his own Hand of the Gods immediately became apparent to the ancient saurus, and he allowed the ancient artifact to be taken and cross-compared. The number of similarities in overall function and structure were striking, despite the Hand of the Gods being a gauntlet rather than a replacement for the limb itself, and almost by accident, the lizardmen found themselves several steps closer to replicating the formidable device.

Ork Prosthetics researched! The lizardmen have deduced enough of the broad structural framework of prosthetics that integrate into the nervous system that the creation of lizardmen-based variants is now unlocked. Additionally, the Hand of the Gods research project has been reduced in cost by a further 50 points due to remarkable similarities in the way both devices interact with their user’s nervous system.

Stone That Floats

No people could exist for as long as the lizardmen had and not venture into the waves. Even the most dryscaled, landbound ancient had something of Tzunki in their blood, and the first memory that every lizardman had was of opening their eyes within a pool of water, the feel of the currents rippling over their scales the first sensation entering their nerves. Even the slann in their most sessile, hibernative states had regularly exposed themselves to water over their centuries of dormancy, whether by their servants carefully ladling purified water over their skin to prevent excessive dryness or periodic immersions in crystal-clear pools reserved for their use. The ample fat reserves stored in a slann’s body made them naturally buoyant, which compensated adequately for their lack of natural swimming skill compared to the other lizardmen breeds. Whatever the case, from a saurus training to fight halfway submerged in a river to a kroxigor that would hold its breath for hours in order to attend to underwater construction, lizardmen in no way shied away from the waves, and had, when needed, used technology to take them further into the aquatic realms than their bodies alone could.

Rafts of logs lashed together with rope, canoes made from the hollowed-out husks of trees, and occasionally larger examples of either had sufficed for the majority of the lizardmen’s existence in Lustria and elsewhere. Travel along the great rivers of Lustria was conducted in short stints with convoys of lighter rafts that could be linked together or separated via knots and harnesses, all the better to bypass rough waters or pirahnadon infestations by way of simply carrying the watercraft through the jungle instead. This method was mostly relegated to trade or supply missions between temple-cities, where large amounts of goods were being shipped already and the rivers could cut valuable time off the routes. For conveyance of messages or small cargo where speed was truly a priority, Terradons had always sufficed, but the ability of rivers to speed the delivery of food or supply shipments had sustained many a resettlement attempt of a ruined temple-city.

While practiced in river sailing, the lizardmen had rarely, if ever, ventured far offshore, for there was simply no reason to expend effort on voyages to other continents when so much lizardpower was needed to maintain the state of affairs in Lustria. On the rare occasion where a mission to elsewhere in the world was justified, it had almost always been with the assistance of an Azyrite skink priest, who would bend the winds and skies to enable a simple sailboat to make its way across the deep ocean, or on the backs of Dragon Turtles. The aptly-named creatures nested in great shoals on islets off the Lustrian coast, attacking passers-by if they drew too close, but their minds were as malleable as any under the will of a slann. Before the city of Chupayotl had sunk into the sea, it had been known to host a population of the creatures, but after the city went beneath the waves, the practice of taming them had been deemed of marginal use for the mostly-inland temple cities, and so it had come to pass that no Dragon Turtles had been brought over to Mochantia, limiting the lizardmen’s seafaring craft to vessels that were in no way fit to handle the Mochantian oceans and the plethora of leviathan predators that dwelled within them.

As the slann expressed their will unto their servants and efforts began to be made to change this state of affairs, however, a heretofore-hidden source of experience revealed itself within the newly-organized lizardmen population of shipwrights. During the End Times, the sole surviving major temple-city outside of Lustria, ancient Zlatlan, had ferried itself across the treacherous gap between Lustria and the Southlands by means of the architect Awanabil’tat’s meticulous work, conducted over centuries. While the feat managed by the ancient builder was - if not entirely out of reach - impractical for commonplace ocean travel, the venerable skink’s many tutelaries and understudies had needed to acquire a considerable amount of on-the-fly knowledge of how to account for ocean currents, winds, and the basic principles of keeping a waterborne craft flowing efficiently through the waves. These same students now rose to answer the slann’s call, passing down the knowledge they had obtained during their desperate evacuation and submitting it to the scrutinizing gaze of collaborative study. Conclaves of engineers, skink priests, logisticians and tacticians conferred in months-long councils assembled in the city of Mekhinyx’kal, pouring their combined knowledge into a massive stack of tablets detailing the ways in which harbors, ships, and weapons would need to be created and adapted for operations on the open sea.

The first obstacle to overcome was the building of proper harbors. The oceans of Mochantia differed quite readily from those of Lustria in that they plunged to their full depth quite quickly, without the relatively shallow expanse of continental shelf that extended from naturally-occuring tectonic activity. This rapid drop-off ensured that the Mochantian shoreline was frequently exposed to massive waves and tempestuous storms that would ordinarily have had some of their power blunted by an expanse of shallower ocean. The shoreline flora and fauna had adapted readily to this cycle of frequent assaults by the sea, with some regions playing host to a number of aquatic species that simply walked onshore during particularly intense or lengthy storms. The difficulty this presented when building a harbor was twofold - the currents that the enclosure would need to withstand and subdue within its bounds were intense enough to warrant attention on their own, and the depth to which the structure would need to extend in order to be properly secured to the ocean floor grew exponentially the further out from shore one went. Rather than having to meticulously imbue kilometer-long granite pillars with extensive arrays of preservation and stabilization magics, induce temporary pressure-resistant and water-breathing alterations in team after team of workers and guards that would have to go below the waves, clear out the no-doubt territorial wildlife while the bones of the structure were secured, and then have to form a corps of undersea monster-fighting maintenance patrols in order to prevent a hyper-corrosive algae or passing leviathan from damaging any of the vulnerable structures, the slann opted for a more straightforward, if labor-upfront, solution - if the seafloor was not where the lizardmen needed it to be, they would simply build it out until it was.

In the past, such an endeavor would have taken concerted effort, required the careful coordination of the workforce of multiple cities in order to ensure that there was sufficient lizardpower being rotated on and off-duty in order to complete the construction on time. Now, however, the lizardmen were by no means short on labor, and the efficiency-enhancing effects of the Geomantic Web multiplied the productivity of each individual worker so much that only minor reallocations of work cohorts had to be arranged in order to see it done. A portion of each coastal city’s obsinite pits were dedicated towards the production of interlocking pieces, which were then carried into the surf and embedded into the underwater ground at the depth the lizardmen’s architects desired the harbors to be. Octarine Cabals oversaw the assembly of the harbor ‘floors’ to ensure that the inbuilt channels for stability enchantments were correctly designed, and that the connecting pieces that would anchor the harbors into the ground were correctly aligned with the geomantic nexus of each city. After the foundations were laid, expanding outwards was as smooth a process as the building of any pyramid, the only difference being that the work crews were fitted with talismans of Tzunki that allowed them to breathe water.

The harbor floors, set roughly 30 meters underwater, extended several hundred meters out into the sea, encompassing a width more or less as wide as its city. They were fitted with walls as sturdy and rigorous as any that protected the outer gates of a lizardmen metropolis, walls that soared up and out of the surf, high enough to shelter the space within them from storms. A calming teal mix of Azyr and Ghyran pulsed through their blocks, slowing and smoothing the tempestuous waves within their perimeter, and spiked obelisks thrumming with Ghur and Ulgu jutted from the bricks at the harbor mouth, casting a net of fear and obfuscation to prevent the Mochantian wildlife from moving into this newfound sanctuary. Once the spells had done their work and the water within the harbor was calm enough to work in, the skink priests of Chamon went to work with kroxigor masons, growing and shaping the natural granite and limestone of the shore into broad docks and pathways that stretched out into the harbors, and the flow of materials and engineers that had built up in the meantime promptly surged out onto these stone branches to cultivate the fruit of their labor.

The lizardmen decided, after much debate, to design two distinct types of vessel to sail the waters of Mochantia, with plans for a third momentarily set aside to allow for more refinement - anything worthy of even carrying a slann, much less allowing the mage-lord to effectively utilize their arcane capacities to their fullest in any naval endeavor, would require far more effort than any basic schematic. The first of these was as simple and utilitarian as anything crafted for a singular purpose could be - it was effectively an outgrowth of the river barges of old, a simple block of hollowed-out stone that had been fitted with a prow carved with Tzunki’s name. There was housing for the crew, adjustable mounts upon which everything from bolt throwers to Monument Cannons could be placed, and above all, massive amounts of storage space, with adjustable bulkheads that could house everything from troops to supplies to unruly dinosaurs. It was a transport vessel, as large as any barracks and suited to moving through the waves like an implacable glacier. To enable the lumbering thing to effectively sail, it was fitted not only with great sheets of magically-treated cloth, but also the permanent placement of two skink priests - one of Azyr, to guide the winds around it, and the other of Ghyran, to part the waves and coax the water to let the vessel through.

The second design contrasted the first in almost every respect. Where the first was large and blocky, the second was small and sleek, a splinter of sharp black that cut through the waves like a knife with the assistance of twin banks of oars. Where the hull of the first was thick and riddled with spells of stability, resilience, and preservation, the second was specialized towards speed, with a layer of hardened obsinite providing most of the armor, protecting an internal chassis of worked bronze and gold that hummed with enchantments to lighten the hull, amplify momentum, and enable turns that would otherwise be impossibly sharp. The craft resembled nothing more than the blade of a spear, and it was outfitted appropriately. No extensive arrays of armaments adorned its outer surface, which was by and large nothing but sloped angles and smooth portholes shaped to deflect ranged fire and prevent hostiles from being able to board. There was room for a singular cannon on its frontal prow, one that did not fire shells but instead launched a massive harpoon attached to a thin, Chamon-reinforced metal cable. The intent of the design was brutal in its simplicity - upon sighting an enemy, the craft would close alongside a hunting pack of its kind, utilizing the Arcane Engine buried in its guts to create a temporary burst of speed that rivalled ork-made craft. It would affix itself to the enemy with its harpoon, reeling either itself or the foe in. Once the vessel was close enough, the saurus contingent inside would leap out, dash across to the enemy ship or creature, and kill everything in sight until either hostilities ceased or circumstances warranted a return to ship. It would be the darting gnat buzzing protectively in great swarms around the bulk of its larger kin, bringing its prey down like Cold Ones hunting a Bastilodon.

Upon seeing what their underlings had made of their designs, the slann pronounced it good, and gifted each class of ship a name by which it would be known in the Great Plan forevermore.

[] [Transport Ship] Write-in name

[] [Boarding Ship] Write-in name

Ships and harbors appropriate for the Mochantian sea have been designed! Each coastal city currently has enough ships produced to supply 1 AP for naval ventures or voyages between the continents. This will passively increase with no action input, but may be accelerated with further actions. The opportunity to create more ship designs will pop up in response to further research.

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If y’all comment names for the ship designs you think would be cool, I’ll stick them in the voting options when it comes time to post to the actual thread. Hope you enjoyed this, it’s been a while since I got to write some proper unnecessarily lengthy research babble. January kinda kicked my ass in terms of allowing me time to actually write, so it's a good feeling to get back in the groove at least a bit.