Second Dawn:Seerstones

From EryriWiki

This is a reference document for the LARP The Second Dawn.

In their days, the Ancients planned their great works with calculators run by electricity, devices in every home and workplace. But these machines used black science, and when they were destroyed in the Cataclysm, mankind has never sought to replace them. Yet neither has it needed to, for in the modern world, we have purer and better machines to do their work.

Nomally, seerstones appear as clear crystals, no larger than an egg. When in use, light often flashes within their depths, clear shapes and figures sometimes appearing within. In order to put numbers into those spheres, we use boxes called “babbages,” covered in levers and gears. Some rarer, faster babbages are seen only in Tinker hands, with individual keys for each letter of the alphabet.

Any man can learn the skill of putting numbers into a babbage, and interpreting the results on the levers and gears and the stone’s lights, and even the tricks that multiple stones and babbages can accomplish. Few, however, know how the two communicate, the stones setting into featureless sockets on the babbages’ surface.

Some seerstones can perform other functions as well; they take in as well as emit light, and can both record and portray scenes in the right hands.

The Tinkers of the Eastern Union produce new seerstones, as well as babbages and other objects that read or write information into seerstones. However, historians say that the Ancients produced the first seerstones in time immemorial.