Carnifex
First Post
Conaill said:
Would be fairly easy. Same malfunction rules, except some of the possible results would not be posssible, so you'd ignore for instance the 'Smouldering Embers' malfunction where the firebox goes out, since there's no firebox in a clockwork engine. Fuelling requries winding up and this is where its really up to DM's disgression as to how much a clockwork device would need - ie a small pocketwatch might require a minutes winding per day, whereas trying to wind up the clockwork engine on something like a behemoth woud require dozens of men working for horus - or even other constructs doing the winding!
Main advantages would be cheap fuelling (just phsyical effort, no actual fuel needed) and limited malfunctions (unlike some other engine types it's not going to blow up in a blast of steam or magical energy), but I imagine it would be very expensive compared to a normal fuelburner engine, probably half-way between the costs of a coal-burner (extremely cheap engine) and arcane source engine (quite expensive engine) in cost.
Furthermore, when a steam engine runs out of fuel, it pretty damn quickly reaches the point where it just stops working. You don't have hours of it working at lower efficiency, it just stops. But as a clockwork engine loses torque it'll probably spend the last quarter/half of its 'fuel time' in a situation of having elss power, slowly slowing down before finally stopping. You could say taht as a result such thinsg suffer penalties after half of their fuelled duration expiring, meaning they need to be rewound for best efficiency.
These are just ideas off the top of my head. I know Maldur has been working on some clockwork rules which, when I had a look, seemed pretty good, though they were of fairly limited diversity (primarily focusing on music boxes, clocks etc).
