Beyond the Wall: The Land of Grum, A New World of Adventure?

[Moon_Dew]

Will we be able to travel to Grum some day?

[Blitz]

Not for a while to come, I don't think. "Some Day" perhaps, but nowhere in the foreseeable future last I checked.

[Moon_Dew]

I wonder what kind of enemies we'll find there, maybe rouge clockwork war machines?

[Lysse]

From what I understand, the current plans for gameplay just include the quarantine area. I think (could be mistaken) that the current map is only about 25% of what the GMs intend for the Quarantine Zone to include.

[Rias]

PCs are unlikely to ever travel outside the Quarantine, with the possible exception of very rare temporary events (don't make this an expectation). A big reason the Quarantine exists is to limit the playable area to the Lost Lands. Most of the other areas of Arad are (relatively) chock full of cities and such, which would be an impossible burden on the GM team to create and maintain. Additionally, they're all pretty well-developed and relatively tamed. The Lost Lands are where you'll find adventure and danger in spades with the ancient and mysterious ruins, lost treasure, strange and dangerous creatures, rampant nether-taint and nethrim, large-scale resen infestation, widespread canim outbreaks, unchecked and dangerous experiments gone awry, and so on. The rest of the world is boringly domesticated by comparison.

[Moon_Dew]

...we'll still be able to fight Grummish clockwork war machines in future updates, right?

[Rias]

What kind of war machines are you thinking? Don't overstimate Grum's technology level. They're into clockwork and steam, and of course we've got gunpowder already. They can make accurate clocks, fancy orreries, elaborate operated machinery, and pre-programmed automata, as examples. They are not Guild Wars Asura, or Warcraft goblins/gnomes, however. Automata could only do the functions they're pre-programmed to do (such as a "robot" that plays a specific violin tune, or draws a specific picture with a pen); they have no way to "sense" or respond to things. Grummers have no way of giving their machines any sort of artificial intelligence, or a way to respond to spoken or visual cues, or anything like that.

Now Tol Rhun, they've done a few impressive things combining clockwork machinery and willful nether (providing the "AI"), but they're still fairly basic and quite inferior to human-operated equivalents. Nether can obviously animate matter (see the scarecrows, flesh golems, animated suits of armor, bog wights and various "undead" that are animated dead bodies) but it has a much harder and less-efficient time physically influencing the world around it than a human would. The clockwork designs of a clockwork robotic frame help reduce the amount of effort required on nether's part, but it's still quite inefficient. The primary benefit would be using them to perform dangerous work over short periods (or be frequently "recharged" by a sorcerer) in order to reduce human casualties. aThey could make a good initial wave of shock troops in a battle, but they wouldn't last terribly long, and it would be horribly inefficient to have sorcerers constantly recharging them rather than just having the sorcerers use their power directly for other tasks.

[Moon_Dew]

What kind of war machines are you thinking? Don't overstimate Grum's technology level. They're into clockwork and steam, and of course we've got gunpowder already. They can make accurate clocks, fancy orreries, elaborate operated machinery, and pre-programmed automata, as examples. They are not Guild Wars Asura, or Warcraft goblins/gnomes, however. Automata could only do the functions they're pre-programmed to do (such as a "robot" that plays a specific violin tune, or draws a specific picture with a pen); they have no way to "sense" or respond to things. Grummers have no way of giving their machines any sort of artificial intelligence, or a way to respond to spoken or visual cues, or anything like that.

Now Tol Rhun, they've done a few impressive things combining clockwork machinery and willful nether (providing the "AI"), but they're still fairly basic and quite inferior to human-operated equivalents. Nether can obviously animate matter (see the scarecrows, flesh golems, animated suits of armor, bog wights and various "undead" that are animated dead bodies) but it has a much harder and less-efficient time physically influencing the world around it than a human would. The clockwork designs of a clockwork robotic frame help reduce the amount of effort required on nether's part, but it's still quite inefficient. The primary benefit would be using them to perform dangerous work over short periods (or be frequently "recharged" by a sorcerer) in order to reduce human casualties. aThey could make a good initial wave of shock troops in a battle, but they wouldn't last terribly long, and it would be horribly inefficient to have sorcerers constantly recharging them rather than just having the sorcerers use their power directly for other tasks.

Maybe, but it could be part of, as you said in a previous post, a dangerous experiment gone awry. Perhaps some ambitious inventor tried to create something that could replace convential soldiers and it wound up going rogue. Of course it could just as easily be some new form of farm equipment (something like some sort of clockwork combine harvester) that went haywire. If they can't be regular enemies then at least make some event-based ones.

[Makkah]

I think the real question here is... "What does my contraption do?!"

[Kiyaani]

You mean where is Wynthor so I can ask him where can I get a replacement part for my contraption.