I’ll help you with the name of the clockworck dominion people: Maqinos or majinos (the J is not like the English one, but instead like the Spanish strong gutural sound from “José”). I find the q an acceptable repleacement of the ExTreme Kool LetterZ, as it sounds a little foreigner to the English and a bit like greek (-os suffix), latin or spanish (Q and J) without falling into a commonplace. Mechanites sounds a little clichéd.
Sorry for my English

@ Max:

Good point. I guess some kind of cog-wheel driven RAM is a given with these guys. Otherwise it would be rather difficult for them to function. That and they would have some decent, predictive look-ahead type fetching strategy. I’d imagine they would only lock up when they were surprised with an unexpected change of topic, or something random.

That and stat wise I’d typically give them very low initiative to represent their general slowness to react, which would be offset by fiendishly high hit points (because they are basically walking suits of armor designed to take a beating).

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Luke Maciak wrote:

That’s a cool idea, but I kinda like them being completely non-organic and possibly not even descendants from organic life. Plus, they’d be scumbag GM’s dream come true. Players cast “detect life” – nothing. They cast “detect magic” – none. Detect traps? All clear. Decide to enter the room: suddenly 20 windups stage left – roll for initiative. :D Not that I would ever do such a thing, but…

Well, then your players would start to quibble about the definition of a trap. I mean, there’s a bunch of mechanical devices that guard something…sounds like a trap to me. Who says traps can’t be sentient?

I imagine them freezing up a bit in the middle of a sentence sometimes while rewinding their spools and “thinking” rather slowly making people uncomfortable and then just continue on as if nothing happened.

But they need some form of short-term memory. Otherwise, I don’t think they could effectively fight back when savage dwarves try to forge new weapons out of them. Maybe they could be really fast thinkers as long as they don’t need to access long-term memory. “Hey, Mecha-buddy, remember when we got attacked by savage dwarves…Oh crap, there we go again.” Maybe they could also use punch-card cheat sheets for some situations. I imagine they could prepare very well to discuss some specific topic, for example.

Somewhat unrelated: Will there be computer science wizards in that setting, too? The Deep Elves already seem somewhat like the Enchanters.

Shrutarshi Basu wrote:

: the scout should probably be wearing more clothes, to fit in with the environment and all that (unless they have some sort of natural camouflage), though I’ll chalk that up to lack of images.

Heh, very true. The scout could use a Repair Her Armor treatment. Granted, I believe the original image had some palms in the distance that I cropped out suggesting a tropical climate, which could potentially excuse the skimpy clothing. But yeah.

Shrutarshi Basu wrote:

For the Mechanites, maybe their externally visible bodies are just shells for some kind of host organism? I could hypothesize that there was some kind of sentient, soft-bodied, native lifeform on the island that learned to adapt left-over dwarf technology

That’s a cool idea, but I kinda like them being completely non-organic and possibly not even descendants from organic life. Plus, they’d be scumbag GM’s dream come true. Players cast “detect life” – nothing. They cast “detect magic” – none. Detect traps? All clear. Decide to enter the room: suddenly 20 windups stage left – roll for initiative. :D Not that I would ever do such a thing, but…

Dr. Azrael Tod wrote:

For your windups there could be some kind of “alive” Archive that contains spools of dead Mechanos.

Neat. Kinda like the Infinity Circuits used by the Eldar in Warhammer 40k. :)

Dr. Azrael Tod wrote:

Talking of slow… paper spools will probably make those people seeming pretty slow thinking too. There might be some kind of cache, but when they think deeply about some huge problem and ponder old memories, the probably will take a lot of time for that, what would give them a reputation to be slow amongst other people.

Oh, I actually love this. I imagine them freezing up a bit in the middle of a sentence sometimes while rewinding their spools and “thinking” rather slowly making people uncomfortable and then just continue on as if nothing happened. And you don’t know if they just broke, run out of spring-power or what because there is no progress bar or anything. They don’t have glowing eyes that indicate they are in a working state, and you can’t really hear the spool sounds through the hermetically sealed armor. They’d be awkward as fuck to talk to and a lot of fun to role-play as well. :D

For your windups there could be some kind of “alive” Archive that contains spools of dead Mechanos.
Beeing assembled from thousands of (maybe damaged, maybe incomplete) Spools of different Windups, this could be some kind of meta/elder-Guy who takes part by keeping the history of those people and can be asked for advice.

But since it has to query that many spools he will probably be extremely slow. Further it is obviously fixed to a place.

Talking of slow… paper spools will probably make those people seeming pretty slow thinking too. There might be some kind of cache, but when they think deeply about some huge problem and ponder old memories, the probably will take a lot of time for that, what would give them a reputation to be slow amongst other people.

I really like all of this, especially the Deep Elves. Recasting the dwarves is also interesting. Just a few suggestions: the scout should probably be wearing more clothes, to fit in with the environment and all that (unless they have some sort of natural camouflage), though I’ll chalk that up to lack of images. For the Mechanites, maybe their externally visible bodies are just shells for some kind of host organism? I could hypothesize that there was some kind of sentient, soft-bodied, native lifeform on the island that learned to adapt left-over dwarf technology (possibly in answer to the wars and conflicts that you allude to). I’m thinking something like the Trill symbionts in Star Trek, but with mechanical bodies instead of symbionts.

@ Etienne:

Thanks.

Gearforged is kinda nice but but if it’s from a published setting Kobold Press probably has it trademarked. Which is probably not a huge issue seeing how I’m borrowing pictures that were probably scanned in from legit publications too. :P

I like this, I think I might use some of the ideas you present for some Fate or Dungeon World gaming. For your windup-dwarf-bots the name Gearforged seems apt. It is in no way originial though, it comes from Kobold Press’ Midgard setting (some neat ideas there).