Guts and Gear - The Strangelight Mechanik
From the pen of agent, Matt Goetz
Listen up, agents! Quartermaster Bailey will be bringing in some gear for you to get familiar with. Prospective Mechaniks: Bailey could be your best friend or your worst enemy, depending on how you treat his toys.
When he hands you a ghost spike or some mysticuffs, make sure to return them in the same, if not better, condition. Buff out any scratches, keep the nuts and bolts tight, and whatever you do, don’t drop a containment unit in the sewers. He will make you go back for it, and you'll be forced to clean every nook and cranny to his satisfaction. Trust me: he is rarely a satisfied man.
Field teams of the Strangelight Workshop venture into the field equipped with a variety of extraordinary, sometimes untested, pieces of esoteric gear. In the wrong hands, these devices can be as deadly as a fragmentation grenade. Even in the right hands, they can still be just as dangerous. It's the job of the Strangelight Mechanik to keep a team’s equipment in proper working order, despite user errors, equipment failures, and the occasional catastrophic malfunction.
Being a mechanic at the Strangelight Workshop demands a special kind of eccentric genius. Having a piece of equipment explode in your face is among the better outcomes when a prototype fails. Strangelight gear tends to be temperamental and requires constant maintenance in the field, often forcing a mechanic to quickly cobble together a solution with sturdy wire, crossed fingers, and a quick prayer.
Their skill in maintaining the team’s equipment can turn a potentially disastrous malfunction into a much less dangerous one. Their talent for tinkering and bodging items means that, with the right materials, the team never has to worry about lacking the proper tools to complete a task.
As a Mechanik gains experience, they'll specialise in one of several different fields of expertise. Field Engineers are the people their team relies on to keep their equipment running, but they're also the ones who maintain all of the specialised gear required for the team’s ongoing investigations.
Jury-riggers are masters of on-the-fly repairs and improvised enhancements using whatever materials they have on hand. When a Quartermaster goes out into the field with a team, they usually bring the best equipment and even some experimental prototypes to field test.
Strangelight prototypes and specialised equipment are loaned to a team of agents on a case-by-case basis. These items don’t belong to the team, but they can requisition them from the quartermaster of their branch of the Strangelight Workshop, whether that’s the main branch at Blackwell Hall or one of the smaller branch offices elsewhere in the Iron Kingdoms.
Instead of buying these items with gold, a team of agents uses Requisition points, which determine how much of this special equipment they can bring on an investigation. The more work the team does for the Strangelight Workshop, the more specialised gear they can requisition.
Pre-order The Strangelight Workshop now and get your hands on these paranormal prototypes.
The Strangelight Workshop roleplaying game allows you to fully explore every darkened corner of the Iron Kingdoms setting, every complicated aspect of a secret society devoted to explaining the unexplainable, and offers you a 5e compatible RPG experience unlike any other!
Join other agents over in the Steamforged Discord.
