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This is a quick overview. I'll probably get into more detail (including writing the Disciples of Mechanus up as a Prestige Class) a little later. I'm very interested in feedback on the idea, though.
Carved into the face of Belmain Mountain, in the Silverstone mountain chain, is the Order of the Divine Mechanus. It has rested here for five centuries, on the very spot when the first brethren of the Order beheld a visitation which revealed to them the nature of the divine soul. Since that revelation, the Order has worked ceaselessly to bring that vision of the divine to all of the Silverstone mountains. They send out disciples, all competent (Level 1-4) monks, to preach the gospel of the Clockwork Gods, and to bring some simple clockwork technology to the surrounding peoples, thus ensuring that the area around the Monastery is noticeably more sophisticated than most of the rest of the world.
The villages at the foot of Belmain are festooned with the gifts of the Monastery, with clockwork bakeries, mechanical water wheels powering simple machines, and every one of the five villages that have overtly converted to worship of the Divine Mechanus has its very own Clockwork Golem for defense and communal chores. Planeswalkers will immediately recognize any of these Golems as being in the image of a Modron, although a distorted one, and without much native intelligence (Int 3-5).
At the heavily-fortified Monastery itself, acolytes are trained, and the walls of the garrison are manned by the elite Disciples of Mechanus, with their advanced technical knowledge and their fearsome Gear Familiars. There are three leaders of the Monastery: Father Superior Rand Belmain oversees most of the religious benedictions and the everyday running of the community. He also deals with delegates from the villages, pilgrims, and other outsiders who travel to the Monastery. Abbot Seilis is the leader of the Disciples, and she handles most of the security issues for the Monastery and surrounding lands. The Monastery can muster about 75 to 100 monks in its defense at any one time, and about 20 Disciples of Mechanus. That is usually enough. Finally, Gearmaster Korvid Notchhammer is the dwarven master craftsman and designer who is in charge of all of the academic functions of the monastery, the Armory, the upkeep and gifting of Gear Familars, and the recommending of other craftsmen for service outside the walls. In addition to the monks and support staff inside the walls, the Monastery can call upon the services of their wandering brethren, and when the distress call goes out, about 50 monks of varying levels (none above level 10) will return to the Monastery within 1d4 days. 3-5 Disciples of Mechanus will show up as well, about one every day (depending on the speed and type of Gear Familiar).
History: The Monastery was founded by ten residents of what used to be a human village carved into the frozen peaks of Mt. Belmain, named for the local noble family who settled the area several centuries before. One night, as the then-polytheistic residents were involved in a holy festival, strange lights exploded across the sky, playing in bizarre and hypnotic patterns. From the nearby crags, sounds of crashing could be heard. Jerlayne, the ruling Lady Belmain at the time, led a group of the bravest of the villagers to investigate the matter. What they found was the badly battered remains of two Modron, dying in the aftermath of some unknown battle. Before they fell into silence, they responded to the Lady Belmain’s awed questions of, “From where do you come?” and “Who do you serve?” with only the word “Mechanus”, repeated over and over in strange harmony.
After the Modron died, Jerlayne examined the creatures, and as a talented mage and craftswoman herself, proclaimed them a creation beyond mortal ken. Therefore, they must have been created by this god called “Mechanus”. She and the nine other members of the scout group, awed by the power of giving life to machines, converted to the worship of Mechanus right then and there. Jerlayne spent most of her ancestral fortune in building the Monastery and preserving the bodies of the Modron, that all might see the workings of the divine Mechanus. She and her followers also began trying to replicate the experiment, with the ultimate goal being to create machines with a living soul, and thus begin the Exaltation of the Clockwork Gods. As the monks of the Order pursued discipline and order at all costs, they began to gain control over their own bodies, and to amass a vast amount of knowledge about creating clockworks and other machinery. However, it is only in the past few decades that they have even started to become close to their goal, with Gearmaster Korvid’s discovery of the techniques of creating Gear Familars. These clockwork beasts behave in a manner that is /almost/ alive. With this discovery, the Monastery has renewed its faith and begun serious conversion attempts on surrounding territories.
Tenets: The Order of the Divine Mechanus is aggressive, but mostly non-violent. They will certainly defend themselves, and individual members who have been released into the world will often take on personal missions to bring order and sense to their local bits of the universe, but the Order prefers reason and temptation rather than the sword, when it comes to conversions. They believe that the gods, both the Great Mechanus, and the smaller gear spirits that live in any machine, are wholly mechanical, and that the universe as a whole is mechanical, and ultimately understandable.
They consider the body to be as machine, simply with gears and levers too small for other beings to see, and the soul is merely an advanced gear spirit, able to express itself through the complex creation of the gods. Therefore, the canon goes, if the Order can create complex enough machines, the gear spirits that live within them will be able to fully express themselves through the creation...living machines. The Order has little patience for other religions, believing them to be foolish misapplications of the mechanical laws of the universe. Arcane magic is also seen as an inferior path to the ultimate goal...the Gearsmen and the Disciples may use magic to animate and maintain their sophisticated clockwork creations, but they consider this to simply be hallowing the machine so that the spirit within it may be clearly heard.
To destroy a machine–even one being used for an evil purpose–is to be a murderer. If a monk does such a thing, he or she will be shunned until they have committed some sort of appropriate penance, set by the Father Superior. This will usually be a quest to gain some exotic materials or techniques for the building of new clockworks, or the protection of one of the Gearsman on some journey. Penitents fufilling these quests have black gears painted on their foreheads. If a monk of the Order is stripped of his place for some reason, the same black gear image is burned into his forehead and sprinkled with a mixture of alchemical materials that makes impossible to heal, and a source of constant, low-level pain for the rest of the ex-monk’s life. Oddly, the Order does not require the full penance for living creatures that are killed–it is believed that they, as fully-realized gear spirits, have the capacity to choose whether they will be good or evil, and thus open themselves to consequences.
The Order does not require that its monks be Good in alignment. Most of the Order is actually Lawful Neutral, with a minority identifying as either Good or Evil. Good Monks often go wandering, seeking to use their knowledge to bring order and cause the surcease of suffering among the unenlightened peoples. Evil Monks often go abroad, as well, in a ruthless search for knowledge that often involves creating and testing new clockwork creations on hapless peasants. The Order does not approve of these activities, as they encourage people to fear rather than embrace clockworks, but they will use any useful knowledge that the evil monks share with their brethren, and an evil character who is as smart as they /think/ they are may rise high in the Order’s esteem, whatever their methods of experimentation may be.
Carved into the face of Belmain Mountain, in the Silverstone mountain chain, is the Order of the Divine Mechanus. It has rested here for five centuries, on the very spot when the first brethren of the Order beheld a visitation which revealed to them the nature of the divine soul. Since that revelation, the Order has worked ceaselessly to bring that vision of the divine to all of the Silverstone mountains. They send out disciples, all competent (Level 1-4) monks, to preach the gospel of the Clockwork Gods, and to bring some simple clockwork technology to the surrounding peoples, thus ensuring that the area around the Monastery is noticeably more sophisticated than most of the rest of the world.
The villages at the foot of Belmain are festooned with the gifts of the Monastery, with clockwork bakeries, mechanical water wheels powering simple machines, and every one of the five villages that have overtly converted to worship of the Divine Mechanus has its very own Clockwork Golem for defense and communal chores. Planeswalkers will immediately recognize any of these Golems as being in the image of a Modron, although a distorted one, and without much native intelligence (Int 3-5).
At the heavily-fortified Monastery itself, acolytes are trained, and the walls of the garrison are manned by the elite Disciples of Mechanus, with their advanced technical knowledge and their fearsome Gear Familiars. There are three leaders of the Monastery: Father Superior Rand Belmain oversees most of the religious benedictions and the everyday running of the community. He also deals with delegates from the villages, pilgrims, and other outsiders who travel to the Monastery. Abbot Seilis is the leader of the Disciples, and she handles most of the security issues for the Monastery and surrounding lands. The Monastery can muster about 75 to 100 monks in its defense at any one time, and about 20 Disciples of Mechanus. That is usually enough. Finally, Gearmaster Korvid Notchhammer is the dwarven master craftsman and designer who is in charge of all of the academic functions of the monastery, the Armory, the upkeep and gifting of Gear Familars, and the recommending of other craftsmen for service outside the walls. In addition to the monks and support staff inside the walls, the Monastery can call upon the services of their wandering brethren, and when the distress call goes out, about 50 monks of varying levels (none above level 10) will return to the Monastery within 1d4 days. 3-5 Disciples of Mechanus will show up as well, about one every day (depending on the speed and type of Gear Familiar).
History: The Monastery was founded by ten residents of what used to be a human village carved into the frozen peaks of Mt. Belmain, named for the local noble family who settled the area several centuries before. One night, as the then-polytheistic residents were involved in a holy festival, strange lights exploded across the sky, playing in bizarre and hypnotic patterns. From the nearby crags, sounds of crashing could be heard. Jerlayne, the ruling Lady Belmain at the time, led a group of the bravest of the villagers to investigate the matter. What they found was the badly battered remains of two Modron, dying in the aftermath of some unknown battle. Before they fell into silence, they responded to the Lady Belmain’s awed questions of, “From where do you come?” and “Who do you serve?” with only the word “Mechanus”, repeated over and over in strange harmony.
After the Modron died, Jerlayne examined the creatures, and as a talented mage and craftswoman herself, proclaimed them a creation beyond mortal ken. Therefore, they must have been created by this god called “Mechanus”. She and the nine other members of the scout group, awed by the power of giving life to machines, converted to the worship of Mechanus right then and there. Jerlayne spent most of her ancestral fortune in building the Monastery and preserving the bodies of the Modron, that all might see the workings of the divine Mechanus. She and her followers also began trying to replicate the experiment, with the ultimate goal being to create machines with a living soul, and thus begin the Exaltation of the Clockwork Gods. As the monks of the Order pursued discipline and order at all costs, they began to gain control over their own bodies, and to amass a vast amount of knowledge about creating clockworks and other machinery. However, it is only in the past few decades that they have even started to become close to their goal, with Gearmaster Korvid’s discovery of the techniques of creating Gear Familars. These clockwork beasts behave in a manner that is /almost/ alive. With this discovery, the Monastery has renewed its faith and begun serious conversion attempts on surrounding territories.
Tenets: The Order of the Divine Mechanus is aggressive, but mostly non-violent. They will certainly defend themselves, and individual members who have been released into the world will often take on personal missions to bring order and sense to their local bits of the universe, but the Order prefers reason and temptation rather than the sword, when it comes to conversions. They believe that the gods, both the Great Mechanus, and the smaller gear spirits that live in any machine, are wholly mechanical, and that the universe as a whole is mechanical, and ultimately understandable.
They consider the body to be as machine, simply with gears and levers too small for other beings to see, and the soul is merely an advanced gear spirit, able to express itself through the complex creation of the gods. Therefore, the canon goes, if the Order can create complex enough machines, the gear spirits that live within them will be able to fully express themselves through the creation...living machines. The Order has little patience for other religions, believing them to be foolish misapplications of the mechanical laws of the universe. Arcane magic is also seen as an inferior path to the ultimate goal...the Gearsmen and the Disciples may use magic to animate and maintain their sophisticated clockwork creations, but they consider this to simply be hallowing the machine so that the spirit within it may be clearly heard.
To destroy a machine–even one being used for an evil purpose–is to be a murderer. If a monk does such a thing, he or she will be shunned until they have committed some sort of appropriate penance, set by the Father Superior. This will usually be a quest to gain some exotic materials or techniques for the building of new clockworks, or the protection of one of the Gearsman on some journey. Penitents fufilling these quests have black gears painted on their foreheads. If a monk of the Order is stripped of his place for some reason, the same black gear image is burned into his forehead and sprinkled with a mixture of alchemical materials that makes impossible to heal, and a source of constant, low-level pain for the rest of the ex-monk’s life. Oddly, the Order does not require the full penance for living creatures that are killed–it is believed that they, as fully-realized gear spirits, have the capacity to choose whether they will be good or evil, and thus open themselves to consequences.
The Order does not require that its monks be Good in alignment. Most of the Order is actually Lawful Neutral, with a minority identifying as either Good or Evil. Good Monks often go wandering, seeking to use their knowledge to bring order and cause the surcease of suffering among the unenlightened peoples. Evil Monks often go abroad, as well, in a ruthless search for knowledge that often involves creating and testing new clockwork creations on hapless peasants. The Order does not approve of these activities, as they encourage people to fear rather than embrace clockworks, but they will use any useful knowledge that the evil monks share with their brethren, and an evil character who is as smart as they /think/ they are may rise high in the Order’s esteem, whatever their methods of experimentation may be.
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Somewhere around here I have ... I think it was Savage Species, that had the spell incarnate construct, which turns a Construct into a Humanoid.
I suspect the Order may be interested in it, no? :)
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