Von Richtenbach's Engine
My first attempt at making some sort of old-fashioned diagram, intended for a roleplaying campaign I'm currently running. Shaky lines and poor angles everywhere, but hey, gotta start somewhere.
It depicts the components of a weapon which attempts to concentrate sunlight into a devastating beam that can desintegrate solid matter upon contact, built into the structure of Castle Argat, an old deprecated fortress overlooking an otherwise nondescript swamp that once was the staging groun for a crusade.
Hans von Richtenbach built it under request of Cardinal Dagoberto de Montebravo for a very specific purpose: To maintain custody over another invention created by the famous engineer Giacomo Stefaneschi, who had intervened a centuries-old site once believed to the be Fountain of Youth and accidentally created a rift in the fabric of reality. Put under quarantine 300 years ago by the Order of Saint Basil, monster hunters extraordinaire and practicioners of the art of keeping well-groomed beards and moustaches, the Church had several reasons to believe the wards were failing, and as with many of Stefaneschi's ill-fated mechanical wonders, Von Richtebach had been summoned to figure out a way to deal with them.
The party stumbled by accident on the machine, which had remained abandoned for the past 80 years without anyone knowing it was even there, when they were trying to rescue the castle's garrison after a band of marauding orcs, fleeing from something in the swamps, had overtaken it. After fiddling with it for a while, the party's resident wizard fired it by accident and obliterated the entire frontal section of the fortress, taking out half the orcish tribe in the process. He had to deal with some rather severe alignment issues after that, though.
El Ingenio de Von Richtenbach.jpg
Since the text in the picture is in Castillian, here's how the machine works
-The weapon itself, which is folded within the castle's main tower. The roof opens as the machine arms itself, and eventually extends a flexible arm on which both the comman seat and the cannon itsel are located, allowing it to move freely.
-Cisterns connected to a natural cave system empower the machines by causing the swamp's water to flow through them when opened, using a series of turbines to provide the mechanical force that empowers the millwork, which runs in tunnels underneath the surface.
-Further into the swamp, the sunlight collector remains folded into a cylindrical apparatus which in turn hides under a brass dome (all covered up in plants and growths when the players found it). When activated from inside (after the whole system has been put in motion), the thing opens up into the sky as some sort of mirror-covered mechanical flower, which transmits the concentrated light back to the tower through a lens system underground.
-All the components in the swamp have to be set up by using a mobile command unit (the cube in the middle), which runs on rails set up all over the area and has some rather hellishly complicated controls that took a while for them to figure out. The cube itself is empowered by a pair of crystals that trade light and move in response to it, spinning fast and thus generating mechanical energy. As the cube gets to the different control stations, it has to fix itself to it to allow the levels and wheels inside to activate stuff (so it's sort of a moving key).
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