(no subject)

[1000morefools]

All illustrations, unless otherwise noted, are by Phillip Reeve himself or Jeremy Levett

Please note, before you read any further: You are free to modify anything you see here. One of the reasons I made this dressing room is to test if this would work for a full scale game. In order for that to work, players here should try a variety of different formats and tweak the setting to suit themselves, thus helping me know what would work best if I ever have to 'solidify' this information. So if your post needs steampunk mecha, like in Sakura Wars, go for it. If you wanna make up a mobile city that imitates the setting of your character's canon, we encourage you.

The central concepts of this game are Mobile Cities and Municipal Darwinism.
Predator city pursuing a town
A large mobile city and its tracks
Tunbridge Wheels, a mobile town with large jaws
Very small towns/fortresses

Mobile Cities make up the majority of the world's cities. They are cities that move, using gigantic wheels, tracks, skis, sails, propellors or even occasionally bags of hydrogen or hot air. They range from small mobile villages of a hundred or so people to massive cities of eight million, larger than mountains.

The first cities were made mobile thousands of years ago, in order to escape the tectonic changes that were sweeping the Earth after the 60 Minutes War. That danger has since passed. However most cities remain mobile due to...

Municipal Darwinism, which is the philosophy by which mobile cities engage in constant "cannibalism". Maintaining a mobile city costs resources, such as lumber, bricks and fuel. With the environmental devestation they themselves have caused, it's difficult for mobile cities to harvest the resources they need to stay mobile. The easiest way to do so is to catch other mobile cities and dismantle them. Stone and metal can be used to maintain your city, wood can be burned for fuel, and the population can be enslaved, or cast out if you don't feel like feeding them. Most cities in the world follow this system. Big cities eat small cities, small cities eat towns and everyone eats 'static' (non-mobile) settlements.
Over the millenia, mobility and municipal darwinism have grown into almost religious duties, complete with their own goddess: Thatcher, a vicious goddess with eight arms. Thus most citizens of large mobile cities are loathe to touch the bare earth.
Most cities in the world subscribe to this philosophy. They are also known as predator cities or urbivores. A few follow alternative paths, peacefully trading, fishing, prospecting, etc.
A more in-depth history can be found here.

Anatomy of a Mobile City:

Levels:
Most mobile cities are built like layer cakes, with deck plating seperating each layer from the other. One gets between these layers by stair, public elevator, car ramp or, for the very richest, private airship. The top level of most cities contains parks, government buildings, airship docking and the homes of the city's richest elite. The rich tend to live on the top levels, the middle class on the middle levels, all the way down to the bottom levels, where the city's very poorest live, close to the ground, away from sunlight and next to the noise and fumes of the engines. Shops selling appropriately priced goods can be found on almost every level.

Engines:
These drive the city and are massive affairs, as large as ten stadiums put together in a large city. The city's working class and/or slaves keep them running. Many kinds of fuel sources are used, from simple wood burning, coal and steam engines to diesel fuel, or even old-tech machines that noone can make anymore. In some of the smaller towns, slaves or beasts of burden provide motive power.

Jaws/Gut:
London pursuing a town, jaws visibleby eleth89 on deviantart
Small town devouring a wreck
Gut room of London, with Thaddeus Valentine and a young apprenticeby eleth89 on deviantart

This is where the actual business of devouring happens. The jaws are massive structures, with huge "teeth" that pull in material from the city that's being devoured. The gut is the equally massive bay inside the city where the materials and people thus devoured are processed and sorted, then sent to the appropriate parts of the city. Guts usually have teams of scavengers whose job it is to find anything valuable in the incoming material. Only non-Municipal Darwinist cities and some small towns lack jaws and guts.

Waste Chute:
On large cities, this is the chute that runs through every level, where useless waste is tossed. It usually terminates near the gut, for ease of access. Waste tossed down the chute simply slides out of the city and onto the earth.

Guns:
Many cities carry guns for protection on their exteriors. These range from machine gun emplacements to repel boarders, anti-airship flack guns and artillery pieces, to humungous anti-city "snout" guns.

Plating:
A few cities, most notably the Germanic "panzerstadts", are either permanently encased in metal plating for protection (resulting in a perpetual gloom inside) or have a system where corrugated metal can be deployed over the exterior in times of danger. Some smaller towns are also permanently encased in wood or metal.

Propulsion:
Anchorage, a peaceful mobile city that uses skisby dragonlady4 on deviantart
Airhaven, the city in the skyby eleth89 on deviantart

The thing that makes the city move, usually covering the underside of the bottom tier. These can be tracks, wheels, skis, sails, floats (for aquatic/amphibious cities), even air bags filled with hydrogen or hot air. There's even rumors of a town that can burrow under the ground!


Technology:


The world of Mortal Engines has a technology level best described as between steampunk and dieselpunk, with lost technology ("oldtech") out there that is either modern or near-future science fictiony, though it is poorly understood and very rare. Besides the existence of massive mobile cities and undead dieselpunk cyborgs, the general technology level most people have access to is comparable to that of the 1930s. Electricity is known, though the poor often can't afford it. Long range travel is accomplished by airships, coal burning ships, all terrain motorcycles, horses, donkeys, camels, or even just plain walking, if you don't mind the risk of getting run over, accosted by scavengers, etc. Heavier than air flight has just been rediscovered but currently only consists of fragile monoplanes flown by reckless mercenaries.

Military Technology

Civilian and military airships and one heavier than air fighter dwarfed by all of them

The dominant military vehicle is the airship. Airships have stood the test of time, being reliable and fuel efficient. Lifting gas however, like the hydrogen that came before it is volatile. A hit that penetrates the envelope can send an airship up in a burst of flame. Military airships have armored envelopes and have the lifting gas in widely spaced cells. Gun turrets are tasked with shooting down incoming rockets.
Recently heavier-than-air flight has been [re]discovered. There are a couple mercenary squadrons flying heavier than air craft. These craft are equivalent to early World War One fighters, being generally monoplanes. The interruptor gear has not yet been (re)invented, so most of these aircraft are either of pusher types or have the gun(s) mounted pointing up and down on the fuselage, on the wings, or even in a swiveling mount in the cockpit! They show great promise as military machines, but are still much more fragile and have far less battlefield endurance than fighter airships.
Gun technology is around the level of the 1920s. Most guns are bolt action rifles or hunting shotguns. Carbines and tommy guns are rarer but still used. There are also crossbows and dartguns, used both as weapons and for hunting.

Stalkers:

Old-style Stalker with a glaive

The Stalkers were built by the Nomadic Empires that battled each other across the volcano maze of what was once Europe long before the Traction Era. They are seven feet tall, armoured from head to toe, have glowing green eyes and are also armed with sharp claws. They tend to have steel face plates and some have cords coming out of their heads which look like dredlocs. They built these Stalkers by dragging dead bodies from the battlefields and bringing them back to a sort of life by wiring strange old tech machines into their nervous systems and made deadly warriors by removing unnecessary internal organs, grafting on a metal carapace and implanting weapons, typically finger-glaives. Although most Stalkers are fairly obvious, with the heavy application of cosmetics/artificial skin, some Stalkers can pass for a large human if given a trenchcoat and hat.

A person turned into a stalker usually has no memories of their previous life, but there are certain exceptions. There are rumors of a "remembering machine" in the Arctic that can revive Stalker memories. There have been two examples in the past of massive trauma causing some of a Stalker's memories to come back, but this may have been due to faulty wiring.
New Stalkers are not as well made as old tech ones and must be periodically recharged.
Lately two factions have been creating new Stalkers: London's Guild of Engineers and the Green Storm. The Storm has also been creating experimental Stalker animals such as Stalker bird flocks, Stalker bulls and dogs, even Stalker whales used to bombard floating cities. The Lost Boys also use "message fish", fish with Stalker brains to send communications back to their headquarters of Grimsby.
On the frontier of Stalker research is the application of it to the replacement or even enhancement of damaged/amputated limbs. Stalker limbs are much stronger than regular human limbs and can be fitted with tools and weapons but require recharging and regular maintenance by a surgeon-mechanic. Stalker implants inside the body are rare but not unknown, as the ancients were known to use such technology.

Old Tech:
OldTech scavenger with potential buyersby eleth89 on deviantart
Old Tech refers to technology lost during the Sixty Minute War and the eras immediately after it. It includes all the technology of the 20th century as well as superweapons developed for and after that war. Examples of old tech include jet engines, CDs, computers, Stalkers (see above) and biotech. Old Tech is expensive and inscrutable. You generally buy it from dealers, or if you're qualified, dig it out of the remains of an American or Chinese city. But beware, adventurer. Some Old Tech is extremely dangerous and can blow you up, make you die of plague or riddle you with shrapnel.
If you have Old Tech that you don't know how to use (which your character probably doesn't unless they're historian or have historian friends) best to go to the historians of London or Tienjiang.

Genetics:
The ancients were known to have meddled in the genetic code, and over the millenia a few of these have survived.
Some examples include:
The Scriven- Former rulers of London before it went mobile, these people were possessed of unusually colored eyes, intricate markings on their skin and enhanced brains.
Seagulls of Magda- The seagull population around the Magda crater in what was once Portugal are semi-sentient and able to speak a limited vocabulary, with a curious accent. They mostly use this linguistic ability to beg for food from passersby though.
Mammoths- Used as beasts of burden all around the Arctic Circle, these hardy animals may have been the work of ancient genetic tinkering. Sentient ones are rumored to exist.

There are other unconfirmed rumors floating around: people with the ears or tails of animals, people who can drain their own body's energy to make electricity, people whose sweat is combustible. Such people tend to keep their differences hidden though, for fear of falling into the hands of scummy freak show bosses, unscrupulous scientists and religious fanatics.

The World:

World Mapby lowtuff on deviantart

Europe-

Europe and Western Asia up to the Black Sea and the former location of Moscow is called the Great Hunting Ground. This is the part of the world most densely populated by mobile cities. Their tracks are everywhere and little grows but scrub and weeds. Opportunities for cities to feed are rife here...but then again, so are opportunities to get eaten.
The Black Sea AKA the Sea of Khazak is the domain of pirates. Beware ye any city that stumble into the Sea of Khazak! Yarrgh!

Asia-
Russia is disputed territory. The Green Storm has taken possesion of much of the Russian steppes and they wage war with any mobile city that gets near enough to them.
The 60 minute war rendered most of China uninhabitable. The exception is TienJiang, the headquarters of the Anti-Traction League. TienJiang is an ancient metropolis set somewhere in the Central Asian mountains. It is filled with old-style Chinese architecture and houses the League's military and civilian leadership.
The League has another great city in Asia: Batmunk Ghompa is the gateway to the Indian subcontinent. It is located on the only mountain pass large enough for a mobile city to pass through. Approaching from the west, all you see is the walls of the city, huge, metallic, built from the plating of mobile cities. Littering the ground in front of it are the smashed and abandoned remains of mobile cities, warnings to any that would try to break through the pass. The other side of the wall is a bustling, vertical metropolis. The remains of the League's eastern air fleet are housed in huge warehouses near the top. There are also a number of temples and churches here, from huge complexes dedicated to Hindu gods and goddesses to tiny holes dedicated to the nearly forgotten Christians.

Japan is mostly mobile. Three different "Tokyo"s view for the name: Neo-Tokyo, Crystal Tokyo and Tokyo III. They are perpetually on the verge of a three way city conflict. They are all large, efficient, relatively clean urbivores. Osaka is an amphibious trading city, selling goods it picks up in the Pacific to traction city and static settlement alike. It's known as not only the best marketplace in the region but also a place to see the best comedy this side of Brighton. The mountains are home to Buddhist sects and apocalyptic cults, mostly aligned with the Green Storm.

Africa and the Middle East-

Subsaharan Africa is the Anti-Traction League's strongest territory. Dense jungle and the league's southern air fleet keep it free of city predation. Peaceful farmers and hunters live on the plains as they have since before the 60 minutes war. Zagwa is the largest of these. A walled city, Zagwa is a center of learning for the whole league, housing several universities. The architecture is primarily daub and adobe based.

Northern Africa is the domain of predator cities, hunting each other across the Sahara. New Cairo is the largest of these. Generally they do not grow as large as European cities. Northern Africa is also a good place to hire mercenaries. Quite a few mercenaries/pirates ride the sands in sailed and motored vehicles.

The Middle East is like a watering hole on the African Savvanah: Cities come here to siphon or buy oil out of neccesity, and the locals do a thriving buisiness in it, except when bolder cities decide to simply rob it from them outright.
Big predator cities, however, also come to the region looking for prey. It is a dangerous region but a neccesary one.

The Americas-

North America was hit hard in the 60 minutes war. Most of the former USA is uninhabitable, as is all of Central America. Travellers come to the glassed cities to find lostech artifacts. There are also rumors of peaceful, habitable land around the area of Newfoundland as well as hints in ancient maps.
Most of the former Canada is the domain of mobile cities and Snowmad scavenger tribes (the descendants of refugees from the 60 minutes war who interbred with the local Indigenous People). Arkangel, Anchorage and Wolverinehampton can all be found here and Airhaven is a frequent visitor. A northern city is a good place to buy lostech if you don't want to risk your life in the former USA.
Alaska has lately become more hazardous due to the presence of the Green Storm there. Their headquarters is a former pirate's base called Rogue's Roost in the Aleutian islands. Most of the Storm's air power is housed here.

South America shows all types of human organization. The Amazon jungle has regrown somewhat since its pre-war devestation and is a Green Storm protectorate. The Storm has a number of bases on Tierra Del Fuego. Around half of the static cities that dot the Andes mountains are Storm supporters or have been threatened into being so, while the other half are League loyalists.
The north of the continent has a number of Nuevo-Mayan Ziggurat mobile cities. They are good places to trade but also dangerous. Travellers may find themselves captured there and sold as slaves.

Elsewhere-

Even the seas have not escaped Municipal Darwinism. There are floating and semi-submersible cities aplenty, and most of them prey upon each other. The Lost Boys have their sunken city of Grimsby somewhere here too.

Above the atmosphere, many lost superweapons still orbit the earth, awaiting only some enterprising person down below to find their launch codes...


Some notable traction cities:


Airhaven-

Airhaven escaped Municipal Darwinism by taking to the air. Great bags of hydrogen ring the city and suspend it in the air. Airhaven is a trading center. Anything can be bought here, from Oldtech artifacts to slaves. Airship traders are constantly coming and going, unloading their cargoes. There are a large number of cafes for patrons to while away the hours between flights, as well as a number of duty free shops. Airhaven is built on a circular plan, with the center occupied by the city offices, the next row out by shops and cafes, then the airship docking bays. There are nets underneath the docks, to catch anyone who may fall over the rail. Smoking, or the use of any other kind of fire is strictly prohibited on Airhaven, for obvious reasons.

Anchorage-
A peaceful ice city, Anchorage survives by trading and fishing. Anchorage has a number of beautiful views, from the northern lights, visible from the upper deck, to the Margravine's Winter Palace. Anchorage's people lead simple lives and are welcoming and open.
A lostech plague introduced accidentally by a trader devestated the city ten years ago. Now the city is reduced to a tenth of its old population, barely enough to keep it going. The hereditary ruler is called the Margravine and lives in the Winter Palace. The current Margravine is Freya Rasmussen, a teenage girl catapulted into the position by the death of her parents.
It's rumored that the legendary Tin Book can be found somewhere here. Whoever holds it is said to be able to control a lostech superweapon.

Armada-

Unlike Brighton, Armada is not a peaceful city. It is in fact the most feared city plying the waves currently. Unlike other mobile cities, it was not made whole. Rather, Armada is composed of hundreds of lashed together ships, collected since time immemorial. Noone knows how old it is (it may predate Municipal Darwinism itself). On the underside of the city, there is a thriving community if genetically altered merpeople, one of the last places they can be seen outside of a pen in a freak show. Also under the city are massive chains the size of buildings. Noone knows their purpose.

Armada's governing is divided into eight 'ridings', or areas of the city. Each is governed under a different political system, from anarchy to tyranny. It is a cosmopolitan city, where the detritus of every continent can be found.

Armada survives on piracy. Its pirates fan out from the city, boarding ships and forcing them to turn towards Armada. Those ships are then added to Armada, if they are deemed still seaworthy. The crew and passengers are given the option to join Armada or be marooned on the nearest shore. A surprising number choose to stay, preferring the relative freedom and equality of Armadan society.

Arkangel-

Arkangel is the most ruthless urbivore of the north. Its culture is best described as neo-Viking. The elite of Arkangel's military are the "Huntsmen", airship troopers led by the king's son, Piotr Masgard. The Huntsmen use their fast airships to land on prey cities. They then force the city's navigators to turn right into the path of Arkangel's jaws at swordpoint.
Unlike most other cities, Arkangel's elite do not live on the top tier, but closer to the center of the city, where it's warmer. The lower classes live farther out, more exposed to the winds.

Brighton-

Brighton on the moveIllustration by Kathryn Rosa Miller

Brighton is a raft city entirely dedicated to leisure. Every conceivable form of entertainment can be found here, from high class balls to peep shows, museums to opium dens. Brighton's social structure resembles other cities, except that the stratification is based on how high or low brow the entertainment is considered. Prostitution is on the lowest tier, and the social functions of the city's elite are at the top. In between there are tourist trap museums, subcultures of bohemian artists, live music, anything money and an afternoon can buy. Most of the entrances are on walkways that overlook the ocean.
The interior of the city houses the slaves and temporary workers that do most of the labor in Brighton and serve the city's upper classes.
The current mayor of Brighton is Nimrod Pennyroyal, the blustery, exxagerating writer of mostly made up "adventures". His wife is a dimwitted cow named Booboo who is a patron of the romantic opera.
Brighton is currently protected from piracy by Orla Twombley's Flying Ferrets, a heavier than air flying squadron.
Brighton generally can be found floating in the Medditeranean.

Harrowbarrow-

An experimental suburb of Traktionstadt Weimar, Harrowbarrow is the world's first burrowing city. Capable of burrowing for days at a time with the massive jaws mounted on its front, it measures in at three levels and about two thirds of a mile long. It is under the command of Wolf Kobold, son of the Weimar Kaiser, who believes the era of great Traction Cities is at its end and the future will be dominated by small, swift predator towns.

High Cromlech-

The name of this city is a dark rumor that persists across generations. The Necropolis, they call it, for its ruling class are all Stalkers. When a person is judged of enough importance, they are allowed to be ceremonially slain, then resurrected as a Stalker. Unknown oldtech allows them to recover many of their memories, though they are still much changed, less human than before. It is a grim and eerily silent city, moving around on oldtech legs.

London-

The second largest english speaking traction city and one of the largest in the world, London is also the oldest, having first been animated by the engineer Quirke thousands of years ago. London is cultured, bustling, and home to a sophisticated but highly stratified society. London's society is divided into four major and a number of minor Guilds. The Engineers are responsible for maintaining the machines necessary for the survival of London. The Historians are in charge of collecting and preserving highly prized, often dangerous, but decorative and sometimes even useful ancient artifacts which are sought after and traded. The Navigators are responsible for steering and plotting the course of London. The Merchants are in charge of running London's economy. London is officially ruled by an elected Mayor. The Lord Mayor is Magnus Crome, who is also the head of the Guild of Engineers.

Like most Traction Cities, London is shaped like a wedding cake, built on a series of tiers. This encourages the system of social classes, with the wealthier nobles living at the top of the city and the lower classes living further down, closer to the noise and pollution of the city's massive engines. Atop the whole of London, however, sits St Paul's Cathedral, the only building in London known to have survived from pre-traction times. The top level also contains a number of parks, the headquarters of the Guild of Engineers and London's parliament.

Panzerstadts-

The German "Tank Cities", these are grim places to live even if you're part of the upper class. Formerly the most ruthless urbivores in history, the Panzerstadts were united by Panzerstadt Weimar as an opposition to the emerging Green Storm.

The Panzerstadts are heavily armored cities with little light due to the massive armor plates protecting the city. When the plates close in preparation for battle or feeding, sunlight is completely blocked off and the streetlights switch on.

The Panzerstadts as a rule tend to have large militaries and aristocratic rulers drawn from the ranks of the generals.

Truthiness And Consequences-

A relatively small city that provides two valuable services. The first is maintenance of the amateur radio network that is the first form of globalized communication in ten thousand years. The second is the broadcasting of news. There are two main newscasters, one a strict Municipal Darwinist who sees Mossie conspiracies everywhere, the other more level headed, with a dry wit, and although not anti-tractionist himself, is somewhat sympathetic to their cause. There is frequent on-air sparring between them.

T&C is assisted by a network of small "booster" cities, stationed around the world, which amplify the central signal. It is defended by hired mercenaries.

Factions:


Anti-Traction League-

Anti-Traction League capital at Batmunkh Gompaby eleth89 on deviantart
Batmunkh Gompa seen from the wall on the other side

The Anti-Traction League is the unifying body of most of the remaining static (unmoving) cities. Founded by Lamma Batmunkh in the Black Centuries following the rise of the Traction Cities. Its massive military has so far prevented most traction city incursions into the Indian Subcontinent, continental east Asia and subsaharan Africa.

However in recent years the League has been weakened. Thaddeus Valentine, an agent for London, set explosives which destroyed almost all of their Eastern Air Fleet in Batmunkh Gompa. The massive Spitzbergen Static was devoured by Arkangel. And the rise of the Green Storm has caused many of its best soldiers to defect. Teetering on the brink of collapse, the League will scarcely survive another decade at this rate.

The League's symbol is a broken wheel.

Green Storm-

Following the disasters of Batmunkh Gompa and Spitzbergen and the death of the hero Anna Fang, many of the Anti-Traction League's brightest young officers became fed up with the ancient, bureacratic leadership. They took their units and left, converging on the pirate's base in the Aleutian Islands known as Rogue's Roost. Slaughtering the pirates, the Green Storm set up their headquarters in the nigh-impenatrable fortress. In ten years the Storm has cut a swath of destruction through Alaska and Siberia, leaving destroyed cities in their wake. In their place they set up nothing but simple, agrarian villages dotted with military bases.
Storm ideology is of a radical return-to-nature type. They despise all cities, mobile and static. However the opposite side of this belief means they have been the greatest force for environmental protection in thirteen thousand years, preserving threatened sites in ways the old League would never have bothered to do.
The Storm has in its arsenal some of the most advanced military technology in the world, including Murasaki Fox Spirit airships capable of laying down devestating rocket barrages and massive floating air destroyers.
Their ressurection corps is responsible for the recycling of corpses into Stalkers. They are also in charge of experimental Stalker animals, including flocks of vicious Stalker birds capable of picking an enemy to shreds, controlled by radio transmitters, vicious stalker wolves and crocodiles and massive stalker whales which launch rockets from their mouths at floating cities.

The Green Storm's symbol is a green lightning bolt.


Lost Boys-

The Lost Boys are an organization of thieves that secretly infiltrate traction cities and steal whatever their leader, called Uncle (really Stilton Keel, Anna Fang's former slavemaster) finds useful or interesting.

The Lost Boys are young boys between the ages of 8 and about 20, kidnapped from various Traction Cities. They are then taken to the secret sunken city of Grimsby, their headquarters. There they are trained in a place called the Burglarium, until they are considered skillful enough to go their first mission. The boys are sent in groups depending on the size of the mission, usually in twos or threes when robbing ordinary cities. They use limpets, a kind of submarine, to travel to their host city where they clamp, hidden underneath it. The Boys then board the city stealthily and begin to take peoples' possessions, stowing them in their limpets' hold. Once the hold is full or after a set period of time, the Boys detach the limpet from the city and sail back to Grimsby. The Lost boys are built on a hierarchical system, with the oldest and most experienced Boys at the top, getting the best rooms, limpets etc. while the trainees or the Boys who have broken the rules at the bottom.

The most used piece of technology by the Lost Boys is the Crab-Cam, which is basically a remote controlled camera on legs. They are used by the Boys to spy on cities in order to know when it is safe to start burgling. The limpets used by the Boys to travel in are like giant submarines used as control rooms by the Boys when on a mission. The limpets also contain Message-Fish, mechanical fishes installed with Stalker brains, which are used to take messages and reports between a limpet and Grimsby over long distances

Mercenaries:

The second oldest profession, mercenary companies sell their services to every faction and city, though the League and Storm despise them. One of the most famous in recent years is Orla Twombley and her Flying Ferrets. Piloting recently rediscovered monoplanes, they're known for fighting hard and partying harder. Their planes are painted outrageous colors and have names like Teeny Weeny Polka Dot Bikini and You May Not Be The Coolest Person Here. The Flying Ferrets are currently contracted to Brighton.

Traktionstadtsgesellschaft (Traktionstadt for short)-

The Traktionstadt is an organization of mostly German cities that have banded together to present a united front against the Green Storm and Anti-Traction League. Their lines extend down Eastern Europe, from the former Ukraine to the Black Sea. Within that territory, Municipal Darwinism is temporarily suspended (cities do not prey on each other). Many cities send tribute to the Traktionstadt and others profit by selling them weapons and supplies.

The Traktionstadt's symbol is a stylized red tooth and claw on a shield.

Known members of the Traktionstadt:

Murnau
Bremen
Panzerstadt Koblenz
Wagenhafn
Panzerstadt Winterthur
Traktionstadt Braunschweig
Traktionstadt Weimar (founder member)
Manchester
Neo-Edo

Glossary:

Bird Roads: The tradewind-routes which airship merchants tend to congregate on

Great Hunting Ground: The area of all of Europe, western Asia and North
Africa which contains the greatest concentration of predator cities

Mobile City or Traction City: Any city which moves

Mossie: Derogatory term for a resident of a static (non-moving) settlement

Municipal Darwinism: System by which cities 'devour' each other for resources

OldFangled: Anything which uses a lot of OldTech. Has a connotation of being fancy/showy.

OldTech: Any ancient technology which is no longer understood. Can range from the seemingly magical to the useless to the kill-you-dead.

Predator City: A mobile city which participates in Municipal Darwinism

Stalker: OldTech which is used to revive dead humans and animals into dieselpunk cyborgs. Usually used in warfare. Recently, prosthetics from Stalker-tech have come into use.

Static: Any city, town or village which does not move. Can be a noun or an adjective.

Townie: A resident of a mobile city

Urbivore: A particularly large predator city

Comments

[urbanplanners]