Patriot Dakota asks:
Does Monstru have any form of social networking? How are civilized monsters supposed to stay in touch without Facebook and Twitter? LOL!
Well, since Monstru is circa 1918 dieselpunk or so there’s certainly not much in the way of online communication. Heck, only the Authority has dedicated radio lines for communication so far. Phones? No way.
But yes, there are some other ways for beasts to stay in touch.
Message bats.
Yep, pay a fee (or better yet own your own) and a bat will take your message to whomever it has previously smelled. It’s not easy work, and sometimes it takes months for the bat to arrive, but it works.
Reliability: Low. Cost: Low.
Goblin Post.
Letters, letters! Carried by foul goblin slave runners. They tend to drive pedaled message trikes in teams of a dozen. Works pretty well, though you can count on the Authority reading all of it. Also, mail must be picked up at a pre-destined mail station rather than personal delivery to your vehicle. (Though that too is possible for a fee.)
Reliability: Medium. Cost: Low-medium.
Monster Talkers.
Think of your classic Ouiga board, but imagine them in pairs. Basically, a plank of wood, cut into to facing pieces, and enchanted so that one can move the pointer from one letter to another. The Authority has been known to burn these whenever they find them.
Reliability: Good. Cost: High.
The Tube system.
These are used by the Authority to move documents from one place to another, since radios are still new and expensive. Basically, there is a network of pipes below much of Monstru, linking one Celebration Hall and Escape Station to another. And yes, they can be hacked, though they’re not terribly useful for the mobile beast.
Reliability: Good. Cost: Very high, and dangerous.
These are certainly not the only ways… Don’t get me started on the Factory Underground’s methods.
- Daniel
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Just asking my own question: For a lot of Tech in this era, ‘form follows function’ was defintely the rule. Are Mechans usually built with a single purpose in mind? I guess this might be more of an RPG question, but wouldn’t a bot built for streetsweeping have a lot of difficulty in tasks outside that area? Just a thought on the limitations of being a life form with blueprints
I think that you’re pretty much right on there, Scott. There isn’t too much flexibility in the whole Mechan scheme… except for one thing; these machines have intellect.
So, there is some adjustments that they can make over time.
Kip is a Halloween Golem. They were made to clear land, lift heavy loads, plow, and probably repair things like fences, barns, and stuff like that. After they weren’t needed any longer, most of the Halloween Golems were recommissioned as Vend-o-mats, going door-to-door selling junk.
Doesn’t use many of their skills, but then selling isn’t too hard either. (Not that they were that great at it anyway.)
I think the tube delivery system is awesome, right up until some clever bot downloads a steaming river of transmisison fluid into the tube. It kind of resembles a drain system, so a confused bot might just pull out a stopper and do a fluid change right on the spot. Ewwww.
Exactly!
These things were huge though. The Russian one covered many, many miles.
I recall reading that the US postal service experimented with using tubes to send mail between post offices in dense places like New York city.
Are there any lost civilizations? Humans have Atlantis, what do monsters have?
What about Telegraphy? Are there overland telegraph lines, or have they been damaged in the Great Recession?
I like that idea, though they’re probably not so perfect in each Province. But yeah, I like Telegraph stations as a possibility. Privacy level: zero.
If I might borrow the combination formula from Homestuck:
Typewriter && Monster Talker = Majik Telegraph
Pretty much, take the joined pairs idea from the Talker and apply it to a (relatively) cheaper mechanical code wheel, which is installed into regular non-majik clockwork.
- Add more wheels for more penpals!
- Add a ticker tape output for that retro-Twitter action!
- Requires constant fiddly maintenance!
- Requires constant ink & paper refills!
- Jammed keys ahoy!
I’ve always been rather enamoured with the ye-olden days of computing, back when a Terminal was literally a mechanical machine that printed onto paper instead of a screen. There’s still some legacy code hanging around to handle those types of ancient “displays”