Engine Heart.pdf

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Viral would like to thank:
Earthflame (10/10 would malware again)
Kalad "CaesarSalad" Hovatter, for
getting this out of the basement
and onto the street
Seth Morrigan, for taking on
the task of being Project Manager and
putting up with all my dumb requests
99E9F0 Edition
2013 Viral Games Publishing
Debugging and tech support:
Anonymous, Banter & friends, Bee-Bot
and Co., Brisk, Captain Rambling,
Dirk, Druin
*
, Freeheart, Tom Hasbury,
Indonesian Gentleman, Ishallcallu,
Issyl, John Fitzgerald, Evan Louscher,
Nap, nono, Rectifier, Ru, Saihenjin,
saint johnson, cheeky bastard,
Sauber, tallstaff, /tg/, Zach
...and lots more humans whose names
I either lost or never knew
in the first place!
Thank you all for
contributions. Without
Programmers, fans
none of this
your amazing
the players,
and critics,
would exist.
Art Department:
James Abbott, cThor,
nono, Viral, and Brian Zmek
Fiction Section:
Written by Kalad Hovatter and Viral
'There Will Come Soft Rains'
1920 Sara Teasdale
Power and Light:
Anonymous
(The airport, clothing boutique,
EverPet store,
Pro-Piary)
Brisk !!kVnL2R3f6Oa
(FW3)
Earthflame
(Art museum, hidden courtyard,
train station, UFO crash site,
the sewers)
Kalad Hovatter
(The Farm, Luck E. Dog's,
Putt-Putt Village)
nono
(The supermarket)
Servant of the Emperor
(The rustyard)
Zach !!m1zNwNhpIw+
(Ziz, Behemoth, Leviathan)
Questions or suggestions?
ViralGames@programmer.net
Updates and Patches at
ViralGamesPublishing.com
ISBN: 978-0-9896378-0-0
Contents
!
Part 1:
Engine Heart
0: The World.............. page
1: Make and Model.........
Universal rules.......
Creating a robot......
Character sheet.......
Attributes............
Repairing a robot.....
Reprogramming a robot.
page
page
page
page
page
page
page
3
9
10
11
12
13
17
18
Part 2:
Power and Light
How to Use............... 60
The Farm................. 61
Enclave.................. 71
Waste Not, Want Not...... 79
Interlude................ 86
Oasis.................... 87
Optional Rule: Inflammable Fuel
... 91
Interlude................ 94
On the Road Again........ 95
The City................. 99
The Menagerie........... 111
Luck E. Dog's........... 119
The Border.............. 127
Optional Rule: Firearms
....... 131
KS-EXCLUSIVE MINIMOD
Once Upon a Time........ 137
2: Features and Defects... page 19
Features.............. page 20
Defects............... page 33
3: Playing the Game....... page
Example of play....... page
Improving a robot..... page
Constructing traps.... page
Microgravity.......... page
Environmental hazards..page
Useful pools.......... page
Common checks......... page
Random locales........ page
39
40
44
44
44
45
46
46
48
4: Engines................ page 51
Creating an AI........ page 55
Other characters...... page 56
Getting into character.... page 57
Inspirational sources..... page 58
There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground,
And swallows circling with their shimmering sound;
And frogs in the pool singing at night,
And wild plum trees in tremulous white;
Robins will wear their feathery fire,
Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire;
And not one will know of the war, not one
Will care at last when it is done.
Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree,
If mankind perished utterly;
And Spring herself when she woke at dawn
Would scarcely know that we were gone.
It turned the scrap of paper over and quickly scanned the back side.
None of the information was directed at it, so the robot dropped
the paper and let the wind carry it across the lot, where it flapped
against the side of the single remaining Roadboy. The boxy triwheeler
squonked in surprise and paused for a moment, before it slid forward
in its continued attempt to remelt old asphalt in the section of the
parking lot deemed most important to maintain.
The lot helper hadn’t always been capable of littering. A long time
ago the ManageMaster system had decided there were better things for
it to use its daily draw from the remaining solar panels on than
recharging the escort every time it brought in a load of trash (and
for the first thirty or forty years after the emergency rewrite, there
had been so much trash).
The lot helper now spent its day-cycles simply patrolling the cratered
remains of the parking lot, accosting the deer that sometimes passed
through in the hope that they needed help entering the SavR-Mart.
3
The library was on fire.
It was, perhaps, inevitable. Countless seasons had passed, and since
the environmental controls had given out years before, the polished
wooden shelves of yellowed, brittle pages were a tinderbox. An errant
spark or a faulty wire could have transformed the venerable collection
into a roaring conflagration; what chance did they have against a
bolt of lightning out of the roiling summer sky? The brief storm
did nothing to quench the flames. In its wake was left a fire rapidly
growing out of control.
The lone PageMaster unit that serviced the library didn’t dwell on the
causes. Its sole function was to maintain the neat and ordered rows.
Dewey Decimal, alphabetical. Subject, author. Fiction, non. There
was perfection in organization. A kind of terror suddenly filled the
PageMaster’s normally businesslike processors. If the books burned,
what would it put into order on the shelves? If the shelves were
destroyed, where would it place the books? If the library ceased to
be, what of its purpose?
So the boxy robot, no more than two feet tall, raced back and forth in
the midst of the blaze, gathering what it could onto a single cart. The
heat rolled over it in waves, too hot now for its sensors to estimate.
Its oiled, plastic wheels melted and it squalled along on bare metal.
The books must be saved. Its extending limbs failed, dooming the top
four shelves in every row, but it pushed on, its single optical lens
covered in ash and soot. One manipulator snapped clean off as it
forced the top-heavy cart of books into the damp, evening air. It had
saved what it could.
Only then did it realize that its optics had failed as well.
Alone, in the parking lot, with
back, the PageMaster lifted its
grasping digits were fused from
spines of the books, scattering
the heat of the burning library at its
sole remaining limb. Once-dexterous
the fire. Blind, it groped across the
them helplessly onto the asphalt.
4

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