Small Settings Vol 1: Wooden Battle Stages in Cypris

Small Settings Vol 1: Wooden Battle Stages in Cypris

In the lush, forested, furry adventurer fantasy setting of Cypris, a pink mist known as 'Torpor', dense and heavy, flows over the underbrush, causing lethargy in furries with higher intellectual functions.

As a result, civilization takes place in treetop towns, wooden huts, sheds and boardwalks providing a safe haven from the Torpor. These towns are scattered amongst the vast, untamed wilderness, full of monsters, minerals and mystery.

Adventurers take up the call of braving the wilderness, helping establish and secure trade and travel routes, mapping the world, locating and helping pioneer frontier outposts and sharing skills and information with each other at guilds and taverns.

But no one wants to trudge through the Torpor! This is where 'Battle Stages' come in.

Battle Stages are 100ft tall, inanimate/no computer technology, crudely-shoddily constructed wooden platforms. They're manufactured from wood, cloth, paint and rope. They always resemble some mascot creature and its chibi proportions (Ivalician Moogles from FFTA, Emolga/Pachirisu from Pokemon, Carbuncles from FF14 are great examples). They have cheerful, unchanging expressions.
By being constructed of the same 'Ironwood' as the forest, they can use their 'Lightfoot' to maneuver even through dense foilage seemingly untouched (thought if needed, they can brute force smash their way through).

Their construction begins with a wheeled base that gets lowered to and raised up from the forest floor. A cylinderical pillar forms the core of the structural support. Surrounding it are a number of personal rooms for expeditions that might take days, weeks or even months, connected by spiral staircase and exterior catwalks, ladders and hatches.

At the top of the Battle Stage's head is the Control Crown, where the adventurer sits during travel. It has a joystick to control the wheels, a voxhorn, spyglass and sextant. The Battle Stage also has weapons - typically a schema of three, two mounted on the arms, one mounted inside of the trapdoor-opening maw. They have to be manually aimed, armed, fired and reloaded by the adventurer.
Adventurers have enough agility/stamina to run around and operate everything themselves and move fast compared to the slow scale of combat, able to multi-task multiple actions simultaneously while they slowly take place. (Though it's not unheard of for adventurers to hire stagehands or band together as a party.)
Battle Stages contain wood and rope machinery, big, complex and noisy, allowing for mechanical transmission, basic memory/states in the form of flywheels, switches, knots and looms allowing for basic programming and automation to be set up and executed.
And as for what those weapons are? Medieval fantasy tech? Magical tech? Early great war/world war tech? Modern military/mecha anime tech but approximated by this particular tech base and set of resources? Perhaps it even differs on a per-faction basis to differentiate them, still balancing out to reasonably equivalent power levels!

The Battle Stage has a backpack, containing ammo, spare parts and supplies. It also contains a crane that can unfold and extend, swiveling in any direction to raise and lower supplies anywhere from the forest floor to any limb or any adjacent Battle Stage/building, controlled by the adventurer. During downtime, adventurers spend time maintaining, repairing and caring for their Battle Supplies, using supplies, salvage, scrap and newly harvested resources alike.


Battle Stages are impermanent things. An adventurer expects their Battle Stage to take damage on routine missions and not always make it back in the same one piece it started as on long, more challenging expeditions. Battle Stations are often rescued/retrieved from the wilderness, decommissioned, recommissioned, consigned to storage, scrapped and recycled, or newly commissioned. It's even quite often that you have to drive a Battle Stage you're unfamiliar with just because it was what was available in town. After all, Cypris is flush with resources, so there's no reason to worry about exhausting them any time soon - every hardship is a new opportunity to make a cherished memory!

Adventurers are curious folks, a personality type fitting for the unpredictable challenges of the wilderness. When they cross paths by chance, they tend to admire and ask each other questions about their history, capabilities and Battle Stages. They may also be down for a friendly spar or may decide to tag along and team up for their respective missions before returning back to civilization, the seed of a new friendship planted.

Despite their clunky, cheap nature, Battle Stages are cherished and lovingly cared for - used as canvases to peacock with, to demonstrate their abilities. capabilities, history and affiliations through markings in barding, banners and painted wood, though their condition may be uneven depending on what trials and refurbishing they've been through recently.

Typical markings to see are:

* An identifying serial, in the format manufacturer-model designation-unit id-revision id. It is written out in long form in text somewhere too.
* Additional bynames and titles, if any have been earned.
* The adventurer's personal emblem, pinup and information.
* The emblem and title of the faction and/or guild, if the adventurer is affiliated with one.
* A stylized, anime style mural of the Battle Stage and adventurer mid dramatic scene - either something it has done in the past, or an aspiration by its adventurer for its future. Particularly historied units may have multiple murals.
* Part identifiers and indicators on weapons and other modules.
* A stat sheet and blurb outlining all of the physical specs, capabilities and information of this Battle Stage in one place.

Adventurers themselves are also fancily decorated. They have weapons, armour, equipment, gambessons and cloth barding in their personal or faction colours, with stylized metalwork and patterns, personal identifiers, markings, emblems and logos, and proudly show themselves off on and off of missions in how they dress.

Adventurers may find the clunkiness, sluggishness and stiffness of their Battle Stages flustering and embarrassing from time to time, but ultimately find it charming, exciting and thrilling to put them to use, show thgem off and excitedly see how well they handle the Wilderness this time.