A crossroads village clustered around a small university where students live communally in a converted tavern and pursue medicine, engineering, management, and experimental science in a steampunk era of brass and steam.
Where brass meets brilliance at the crossroads of curiosity.
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Student organizer and amateur engineer
A charismatic organizer who mediates disputes and organizes late-night soldering parties.
Patrician investor
A smooth patron who can fund or ruin a young inventor with a signature.
Head of Crossroads Watch
A former engineer turned guard who knows how to jury-rig emergency valves.
Professor of Clinical Mechanics
A demanding instructor who expects precision and rewards brilliance.
Master Clockwright
A genial master craftswoman known for precision watches and clockwork pets.
parts and reagents
A cramped emporium of brass bits, spare gears, and labeled vials for small experiments.
medical supplies
A storefront filled with polished instruments, surgical kits, and apprenticeship manuals.
Mostly students, a few faculty, and visiting patrons.
A sprawling converted tavern where dozens of students live, study, and tinker among hammocks and workbenches.
student collective
A loose student collective that organizes workshops, debates, and mutual aid for newcomers.
merchant consortium
Wealthy families and investors who bankroll student projects in exchange for future patents and access.
craft guild
A guild of master mechanics who produce and maintain clockwork street devices and university apparatus.
local government
The small municipal council that handles ordinances and mediates disputes between students and townsfolk.
A crossroads fountain whose pumps are driven by a small clockwork engine.
A narrow alley where students hang schematics and trade broken gears on a public board.
A shallow creek with tiny turbines students use to test water-driven apparatus.
A rooftop observatory with a brass telescope shared by engineers and astronomers.
The tavern's communal ledger contains encrypted contracts selling student designs to outside powers.
Lord Halton quietly imports experimental aether crystals through front companies to control supply and prices.
Chief Guard Rowan Bale's burned hand results from a suppressed accident involving a prototype weapon years ago.
A retired inventor hides a map to a forgotten aether vein beneath a pub floorboard.
Some students whisper the lantern procession masks conceal a secret society of testers.
Missing Heart-Engine
A prototype heart-engine malfunctions and the inventor vanishes before explaining its fail-safe.
Deadline of the Patron
A patron threatens to seize the Apparatusarium unless a lucrative device is delivered within a fortnight.
Whispering Birds
Clockwork birds begin mimicking private conversations and one carries a coded note from an unknown hand.
Ledger Retrieval
An alum asks for discreet help retrieving ledgers from a shuttered foundry rumored to be haunted by failed machines.
