Second Dawn:Tinkers
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This is a reference document for the LARP The Second Dawn.
[edit] The Tinkers
The lore of the Tinkers goes back to the time of the Cataclysm, preserved in ancient papers and records built with sciences of uncertain whiteness. When the war raged in the skies and great weapons smashed armies and capitals, the three great governments of the old world fell. In rushed the armies of the disaffected, the angry margins and the small petty states that had long suffered beneath the technological power of the old nations. But here in the territory that would someday become the Eastern Union, the leaders of these anarchist and anti-technological masses showed rare wisdom. Many died who had once been privileged, but a core of the old scientists were saved, kept alive by those who knew the flame of their knowledge could not be allowed to die out.
Those people have become the Tinkers. The true descendants of the Ancients whose technologies spanned earth and space, the keepers of their knowledge. You have remained apart from the descendants of the barbarians, over time growing ethnically distinct as well; intermarriage is not unheard-of, but rare and frowned upon.
You understand the writings of the Ancients better than anyone else in the known world; while the Maple Kingdom may have at least as much of the old technology, they scarcely understand what they hold. Yet even you know but a fraction of the old ways, with the vast majority of records destroyed by the atomic weapons in the Cataclysm. In the Union, all Ancient ruins belong to the Tinkers, though few are prosecuted for the crime of ruin-delving. You have what few survive of the Ancients’ tiny building machines, nanotechnology, though you could never make any anew.
Chief among the nanotechnologies you hold, are those that build the seerstones. All you need do is cookbook work and the occasional simple coding, a secret which you jealously guard from outsiders. But those tiny machines assemble silicon and trace rare metals into crystals capable of carrying out computations and storing information better than any of the electronic devices they once replaced. Still other nanotechnologies build the interfaces between the mechanical “babbages” and the seerstones, chemical and optical interfaces entirely circumventing the dangers of the path of power.
Tinker communities are divided over Black Science. Some consider it a foolish superstition perpetuated by the outsiders, but others recognize the risk those sciences represent, the very real dangers that led to the Cataclysm. Regardless, the temptation to use sciences now called Black -especially the convenient path of power- constantly simmers among the Tinker community, balancing the need to learn and use the Ancients’ ways against stirring the wrath of the outsiders and bringing back old dangers. You have lived among them for generations, after all; peacefully, if not always easily, each side harboring suspicion or disdain for the other.
Tinkers do not use surnames, so outsiders often simply append the surname “Tinker,” a mild annoyance most Tinkers have learned to ignore.
