Glassgear

Glassgear
State	Fleaspark Union
Population	132,000
Landmarks	Logic Yards; Gearlace Spire; Mirror-Loom Exchange; Cascade Courts; Clockspider Dispatch Hall
Coordinates

Glassgear

Overview

Glassgear is a stacked machine-city built in spirals and scaffolds, its districts welded together into a humming, ever-changing labyrinth. Steam-windows, mirrored gantries, and gear-choked walkways crowd the skyline, while every rooftop serves as a field-test platform for prototypes that may change the Union—or explode trying.

Here, invention is civic ritual. Logic Cascades race through the city’s planning grid, warping alleys and doors, and citizens treat shifting geometry the way others treat weather: expected, inconvenient, and occasionally awe-inspiring.

Geography & Layout

Glassgear’s districts evolve almost seasonally, but a few enduring structures remain:

• Logic Yards – A plaza of indexed calculation towers where Clanks perform data-chains and calibrate civic algorithms.
• Gearlace Spire – A spiraled hub of interlocking clockworks whose top floors house adjudicators for engineering disputes.
• Mirror-Loom Exchange – A marketplace of prototype devices displayed behind resonance-calibrated mirrors.
• Cascade Courts – Legal arenas tailored for logic-malfunction cases, surrounded by collapsible walls for safety.
• Clockspider Dispatch Hall – A cavernous hall where mechanical courier arachnids skitter across brass grids to deliver contracts.

Switchback lifts, spiraled catwalks, and resonance bridges connect each level, often reconfiguring after a major Cascade.

Society & Culture

Glassgear prizes cleverness, nerve, and fast adaptation.

• Children practice with toy gears and fold-puzzles before they ever read a book.
• Public debates are often conducted through competitive invention: whoever builds the better tool wins the argument.
• Citizens carry “fail-chits,” markers exchanged when an experiment catastrophically misbehaves; accumulating too many is a point of pride, not shame.
• Street performers combine engineering and acrobatics, juggling sparking components and minor clockwork beasts.

Ancestries mix fluidly:

• Goblins – Chaotic mathematicians and prototype daredevils.
• Clanks – Algorithmic planners, archivists, and stabilizers.
• Halflings – Speed-couriers navigating volatile street geometry.
• Humans – Brokers, mediators, and multi-guild tutors.
• Ribbets – Vent divers and emergency responders in flood-cooled workshops.

Government & Law

Glassgear governs through engineered precedent.

• The Design Tribunal – Judges hear disputes regarding invention theft, prototype damage, and cascade liability.
• City Logic Charter – A living schema regularly updated via consensus calculations.
• Cascade Inquiry Board – Investigates major geometric failures and assigns corrective guild-tasks.

Laws often include engineering diagrams; clarity of design counts as clarity of argument.

Notable Landmarks

• Logic Yards
• Gearlace Spire
• Mirror-Loom Exchange
• Cascade Courts
• Clockspider Dispatch Hall

Trade & Economy

Glassgear exports:

• Prototype mechanisms
• Precision lenses
• Modular tool-limbs
• Sonic gear-whistles
• Contract-encoded resonance plates

Imports include barkstone for insulation, stormglass for testing chambers, and griefglass for stable memory-cores.

Hazards & Everyday Risks

• Logic Cascades – City sections shift unpredictably, creating paradox streets.
• Prototype Failure – From small-scale fizzles to district-wide chain reactions.
• Mirror Fractures – When resonance mirrors shatter, they trigger reflected malfunctions.
• Autonomous Runaways – Lost devices that continue executing unintended “missions.”

Adventure Hooks

• A Cascade locks a needed artifact in an unreachable loop-street district.
• Clockspider couriers begin delivering forged documents—someone is manipulating the dispatch grid.
• An inventor hires PCs to rescue their apprentice trapped inside a malfunctioning test chamber.