Use this document when players are exploring, scheming, or working in The Forge-Wheel. This zone is an industrial intrigue sandbox—busy, noisy, and full of interesting characters, inventions, and pressure.
The Forge-Wheel is the Vault’s engine of production and innovation: a colossal rotating city-gear of brick, brass, smoke, and light.
Think 1890s New York jammed into a giant gear:
Crowded streets and stacked walkways
Brick factories and red-brick tenements
Neon workshop signs, overhead pipes, street vendors
Theme/Vibe: "Industrial Melting Pot." Imagine the smog-choked, bustling energy of 1890s New York City, but expanded to an impossible scale. The air is a thick soup of coal smoke, flavored with the spices of a dozen different cultures. It is a chaotic, vertical sprawl of brick factories, brass pipes, and neon-lit workshops.
The Atmosphere: This is the most "alive" part of the Vault. The constant clanging of hammers is the heartbeat of the sector. Here, a futuristic orbital mechanic might be sharing a workbench with a Renaissance clockmaker, both trying to solve the same problem with a mix of high-tech scrap and ancient ingenuity.
Purpose: Social Intrigue, Puzzles, & Discovery. This is the center of the Vault’s economy. Players come here to have gear modified, solve complex mechanical mysteries, and navigate the tensions between the various "Guilds" (factions) that keep the Vault’s machinery running.
Description:
Primary arrival/exit point, built into the core of the giant city-gear. It channels kinetic energy from the island’s rotation to power teleportation and is heavily monitored by Wardens.
Appearance:
A broad metal disc carved with shifting mechanical runes, glowing copper and blue circuitry. Massive piston-pillars ring the edge, venting steam on activation. The floor hums with constant vibration.
Use:
Entry, inspection, checkpoint, first impression of scale and motion.
Description:
A physics lab where Einstein and Newton argue over the rules of reality—and the lab itself pays the price. Laws of time and gravity are unstable here.
Appearance:
Tables buried in equipment, chalk equations over every surface, devices wired into strange orbits. Localized zones of warped time and gravity: floating tools, slowed falling objects, flickers of reversed motion.
Use:
Anomalous hazards, puzzles, access to deep lore about the Vault’s instability.
Description:
A towering residential high-rise built around a repurposed smokestack. Home to rising engineers, tinkerers, and families living one floor away from industry.
Appearance:
Dark red brick reinforced with brass and iron balconies. Glowing pressure lights, copper piping like mechanical vines, a central smokestack now used as a skylit vent. Inside: narrow halls, rattling elevators, humming radiators, jazz leaking under doors.
Use:
Safe-ish hub, neighbor drama, low-key intrigue, “the job is in someone’s apartment/workshop” hooks.
Description:
A hidden jazz club beneath a heat-venting station, accessible via a fake maintenance tunnel. Front: a smoky speakeasy for workers. Back: the secret HQ of The Brass Outfit (Al Capone’s gang).
Appearance:
Club:
Low ceilings wrapped in brass pipes, velvet booths, small stage framed by steam vents, bar with ornate mechanical taps, haze swirling under warm light.
HQ (The Command Floor):
Valve-hidden entrance to a bunker-like control room. Map table showing glowing island sectors, blueprint racks, stolen chrono-tech, and secure gear vaults. Lighting is functional: glow panels and red emergency strips.
Use:
Criminal deals, faction recruitment, heist planning, social scenes with music and danger.
Description:
A colossal factory devoted to standardized output, embodying Henry Ford’s ideology. Base automaton chassis are stamped out here in endless sequences.
Appearance:
Vast metal halls lined with conveyor belts and assembly lines. Identical automatons at various stages of construction move under welding arms and stamping presses. Overhead catwalks and observation bridges cross above, bathed in harsh industrial light.
Use:
Sabotage, infiltration, moral dilemmas about mass-produced sentience, “lost someone in the line” stories.
Description:
Ford’s suspended command deck, serving as the brain of major industrial operations.
Appearance:
Glass-and-iron chamber hanging above the city on chains and pistons. Floor-to-ceiling angled windows overlook factories. A semi-circular brass and steel console is packed with gauges, levers, and toggles. Walls: blueprints, output charts, and clocks synced to Chronos.
Use:
Confrontations with Ford, hacking the production system, rerouting the sector’s behavior, tense negotiations.
Description:
An artisan’s studio where creativity hasn’t been fully standardized. Here, prototypes, artistic machines, and impossible projects live.
Appearance:
Sunlit loft crammed with half-built devices in wood, brass, and canvas. Ropes and frames hang from rafters, sketches and diagrams cover walls and floors, tools and scrap are stacked everywhere. Big windows overlook the turning city-gear below.
Use:
Custom gear, quirky inventor NPCs, “we built a thing we don’t understand” quests, a refuge from Ford’s cold efficiency.
Types:
Factory workers, line bosses
Independent inventors and small workshop owners
Smugglers, runners, gang members, union organizers
Behavior:
Tired but sharp
Practical, sarcastic, often suspicious of authority
Motivated by survival, pride in craft, or the hope of “making it”
Line automatons performing repetitive tasks
Hauler-bots moving crates and raw material
Helper-bots in shops, occasionally glitching into personality
Wardens enforcing safety, quotas, and transit regulation
In this district, automatons are treated as machinery—until they glitch toward sentience, which becomes a problem for someone.
Ford rarely appears directly; his presence is systemic:
Quotas, inspection sweeps, shutdowns, “efficiency drives”
Wardens citing productivity rules
Innovators forced to choose: standardize or vanish
He embodies the idea that progress must be controlled, optimized, and owned.
Scrap Market: Street bazaar of salvage, broken automatons, and illegal tech.
Boilerline Alley: Narrow overhead service way, hot and noisy, perfect for secret meets.
Clocktower Depot: Cargo clocktower used as a dead-drop zone for contraband parts.
Union Hall 13: Tiny meeting hall where workers whisper about strikes and disappearances.
The Fusehouse: Cramped shop selling unstable power cores and experimental fuses.
Keep It Crowded & Moving
Always mention crowds, carts, cranes, steam bursts, distant hammering. The Forge-Wheel is never still.
Highlight Collaboration & Conflict
Show different eras and cultures working side by side—and clashing over methods, credit, and ownership.
Problems Are Systemic, Not Random
Most hooks arise from supply issues, sabotage, broken machinery, crime, dangerous experiments, anomalies, or labor tension.
Show Ford’s Reach Indirectly
Quotas, inspections, “policy changes,” and production shifts are how his will shows up.
Reward Player Ingenuity
Let creative uses of tools, machines, and jury-rigging matter, even when they fail.
Progress Has a Price
Every new upgrade, invention, or shortcut strains something—workers, infrastructure, or reality itself.
In the Forge-Wheel, everything turns:
Gears, boilers, deals, revolutions… and people.