Engineers
Engineers are the intellectual backbone of society - highly educated individuals responsible for maintaining the city's vital infrastructure and driving technological advancement. They embody reason, innovation, and technical expertise in a world overwhelmed by crisis and cold. Tasked with solving complex problems under extreme pressure, Engineers play a crucial role in developing solutions that ensure the city's survival against overwhelming odds.
ACTIONS
Engineer Teams can pick from any of five actions to perform at the end of a given Act:
Upgrade Resource Gathering: An Engineer team construct a sawmill, coal mine, or steelworks to improve resource gathering. Select from Coal, Wood or Steel. From the start of the next Act onwards, any team that takes a Gather action for this resource type will gain one additional unit of that resource. This upgrade can stack multiple times per resource. There is no Steel, Wood, or Coal cost associated with this action.
Improve Generator Efficiency: An Engineer team will focus on designing, manufacturing, and implementing improvements to the Generator to increase the amount of heat generated from the fuel provided. Each Improvement of the Generator Greatly Increases the efficiency value for the city’s Heat Budget. The first upgrade costs 5 steel, the second upgrade costs 11 steel, the third and final upgrade costs 18 steel.
Upgrade Medical Equipment: An Engineer team will manufacture additional medical equipment to boost the efficacy of the city’s Medics teams. From the start of the next Act onwards, any team that uses the Healing action may apply its effect to one additional team. Furthermore, any team that uses the Triage action may apply its effect to one additional team. This upgrade can stack multiple times. The first upgrade costs 5 steel, the second upgrade costs 11 steel, the third and final upgrade costs 18 steel.
Construct Automaton: An Engineer team will manufacture an Automaton to assist in the city’s resource production. Once the action is successfully completed, a new Automaton Team will be created under the direct control of the Engineer team. Automatons have all the same actions as a Labour team except Strike. Automatons do not require food or shelter, and cannot become ill or gravely ill. Manufacturing an Automaton costs 2 Wood and 1 Steel.
Special Rules
As the intellectual core of the city, Engineers are often tasked with repairing devices, maintaining critical machinery, or devising new blueprints. Solving these technical challenges can offer significant advantages to the city—and grant the Engineers a subtle measure of influence. With the right solutions, they could even shape where heat flows, quietly exerting control just beneath the Governor’s watchful eye.
Costuming Advice
If the people of the city are the blood in it’s veins, the generator is it’s beating heart. If it dies, so do you. The Engineers are left with the perhaps unenviable responsibility of maintaining the generator, building automatons, and improving city infrastructure. As this can cover fields both academic and practical, a healthy variety of walks of life can be represented by engineers. An engineer is just as likely to be a bespectacled scholar as they are to be a coal-stained mechanic.
Key features:
- Engineers are the city’s hands-on fixers and inventors. They balance practical workwear with victorian teslapunk flair, blending grit with technical savvy. Engineer clothing will have a level of practicality with lots of functional pockets and tools. Heavy wool coats will be ideally knee-length or shorter, and may have reinforced elbows. The amount or soot-marking on your leather aprons, and the choice of sturdy trousers or work pants, can demonstrate whether yours is a practical mechanic or an erudite inventor.
- As with most other citizens of the city the colour palette for your clothing will be earthy and muted tones: browns, dark greys, navy blues and olive greens. However, there is ample opportunity for accents in brass or copper on metal parts.
- Most Engineers in the city will carry some kind of toolbox or tool pouch with wrenches, screwdrivers, and gear (real or crafted). Similarly common are goggles - leather or metal-framed, and often worn on the forehead or around the neck. To exhibit a more academic personality consider keeping books, notebooks and journals on hand.
- Smudges of grease or dirt on the face and hands might demonstrate some more hands-on involvement with the city’s machinery, while a cleaner complexion would be more suitable for those from an academic background. In either scenario hair will usually be tied back or tucked under a cap, or may be outright shaved off. Clean shaven or simple facial hair - like stubble or a trimmed beard - reflect a hardworking lifestyle.
