Steampunk Character Creation

Last week at StarFest, I moderated a panel on Steampunk character creation. Joining me were Chaz Kemp, Sam Knight and Tonya DeMarco. With the audience’s help we came up with a very unique character and setting. We asked some fairly standard character background questions, with only one limitation -no gender. I wanted us to create a person, and let the audience decide what sex, if any, the character would be in their own stories. I’m not sure if what follows below happened because of that one limitation or not, but I have to say, this was the most unique character we’ve come up with in the times we’ve done this panel. But then again, there was the South American character who used steampunk llamas on zip-lines, and the Atlantean cyborg centaur…

Feel free to take what we came up with and run with it. If you write a story with this and want to share it here, please email me at ckauthor at gmail dot com. I’d love to see what you come up with.

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Picture yourself in an elaborate system of caverns underneath the desert vistas of Australia. Something has happened in the world above which drove our human inhabitants underground. Not willing to live in drab tunnels, our civilization has carved fanciful and beautiful designs into the cavern walls. Wood and metal trusses supporting the ceilings are also elaborately carved. Steam and alchemy are the primary sources of power here.

Our character is discovered by workers digging a new tunnel.  It’s in pieces, deliberately buried that way by an ancient race of reptile-like Skyrians. Why this race would bury a sentient janitorial machine in pieces is a matter of mystery.

It takes several clever engineers quite some time to reassemble our machine, but once they do, they’re not sure what it does. It’s boxy, with multiple arms and a bevy of attachments that look rather sinister.

When our machine finally wakes, it’s groggy, and can’t access its data stores. It looks around, finding itself in a strange world. It’s missing something but doesn’t quite know what. (It used to be part of a team of machines that maintained the Skyrian city.)

Much to the engineers’ dismay, the machine takes off, exploring the caverns, but not seeming to have any harmful intent. So they let it roam.  Our little machine is observant by nature, always scanning the environment for something out of place. People begin to notice that the caverns the machine has been through are cleaner, and little things have been fixed.

After some time, the machine begins to communicate with the inhabitant’s pets. It watches as the humans pick up after the animals, feeds them, and cater to their every whim. Logically, the pets must then be the superior life form.   The humans in our world don’t understand this, and begin to become wary of our machine.

This wouldn’t be a steampunk world without a bit of social hierarchy. In the colony, the richer you are, the more elaborately one can dress their pet. The wealthiest often dress their pets up to look like Skyrians, further enforcing our machine’s belief that the pets are the superior race.

In one potential plot, our little machine befriends a lowborn mutt without an owner and endeavors to find ways to elevate the dog’s station. Not content with a minor rise, the machine wants to see its friend become the leader of the pets. Maybe then, the mutt can help it find its family – its fellow machines.