The Great Machine

Imagine, if you will, a world of infinite clockwork precision: a never-ending expanse of unbelievable hand-crafted beauty coupled with inexplicable mechanical intricacy. It is a land, or perhaps even an entire universe, wound upon a massive mainspring so cosmically colossal that the mere thought of it boggles the mind.

Envision mighty arc-coils and Jacob’s Ladders that soar far into the sulfur and coal-smoke stained sky — much higher than the highest mountain — with surges of jagged, bright blue and white zigzagging across their surfaces. Visualize pumping pistons that look like they could support and lift the weight of an entire world rising and falling over the horizon like lazy suns. Picture towering cliffs of sheer metal cogs, bizarre copper-wire tangles that stretch on like an endless forest, and rigidly-scored channels filled with dark, slick lubricants that flow slowly across the surface of plain-sized gear wheels.

Now, imagine that this place is alive — yes, alive… but not so much in the manner one might naturally assume.

This is the world of the Great Machine: a titanic, inter-working place of cog and gear, steam and steel, piston and pendulum. It is a world that seems oddly foreign at first glance… yet, on further examination, hints of things long lost and forgotten begin to emerge. There might be an antique brass fitting here, or perhaps a well-worn wooden lever there. The Great Machine is the native home of the Klik, the odd cog-men borne of clock-work and coal-fire. Rollers and Tripods, however, are not the only beings that a visitor to the Great Machine should expect to see. Not by a furlong.

The Great Machine is endless in its production of new Klik models: the Rollers and the Tripods are merely the most numerous… currently. In the midst of the vast and immortal Great Machine one can find countless different shapes, forms, and configurations of its children… and those are just the natives. There are many other residents among the slowly turning drive-shaft dormers and within the deep bowels of the sheet metal cast off pits. Those who delve too deeply into the world's workings might even discover stranger and more unusual creatures, beings either brought here from other worlds investigated by the Klik or birthed out of the primordial ooze sloughed off in centuries of endless mechanical production.

It is this endless beat of creation that leads to both the best and worst of the Great Machine. While on one hand, the sentient clockwork world is a never-ending source of inventions both weird and wonderful… on the other, it also has an eternal and endless hunger for raw materials. Such a continuous craving for resources has to be sated somehow, after all.