Welcome to the 13th post in a series of Design Diaries for Rangers of a Broken World by the creator Leon Richardson:
…
If you’ve read the first Design Diary in the whole series, then you’ll know that Amylte, the world of Rangers of a Broken World, was inspired by efforts to reclaim the old WWI and WWII battlefields, where buried munitions make the now-overgrown areas incredibly dangerous despite how peaceful they look on the surface. So of course I had to bury some weapons of my own, didn’t I?
(This was where my inspiration from Final Fantasy X came in, believe it or not. In other words, I started with “buried tech from an ancient war” and got to “FFX” from there, not the other way around!)
The secret of building Automata has been long since lost, and that may well be a good thing. They were built to kill, after all. Their entire purpose is destruction and domination, and Amylte no longer has any use for them. But, they’re still here, sleeping under the grass of the ancient battlefields, waiting to be reactivated.
Quake Engine trudges along on huge legs, then hammers the ground, shaking the earth to annihilate fortifications, or any other human building unfortunate enough to stand in its way.
The Buried Turret sticks out of a remote hill, always watching for trespassers to pass within its radius so it can do what it was built to do – shoot to kill.
Automata are mindless, but self-operating, meaning Rangers who try to reason with every opponent will find themselves up against a cold, calculating wall. There is no soul in an Automaton, not even a will, just a set of instructions left by some long-dead warlike engineer that the machine will follow until its breakdown.
The problem is, it was built to last. It survived war, it survived the Cataclysm, and it survived the intervening years to make it to an age where it is no longer needed, where its very purpose is a legend of a bygone era.
What kind of weapons will Amylte remember in your game? The game’s encounter creation chapter features everything you could need to design Automata of your very own so your players can wrestle with humanity’s murderous ingenuity.