You probably saw the trailer to mortal engines, and, frankly, the trailer was the best part. The idea of giant cities that wheel around and hunt each other is a neat idea, but it was maybe 20 minutes of the actual movie. And yet, that’s going to be what I focus on for the rest of this reflection.
I’m not really sure what else I wanted out of such a premise. But I don’t feel it delivered. I’m glad I finally watched it, though. But it didn’t hold my attention and I probably will forget most of it soon enough.
But, the idea of mobile cities, well, that idea has some thematic merit. How would I run an RPG on that concept?
My first, immediate thought is that the game needs to take place on three levels of scale. There would be some encounters that would be Pilot level, some that would be Ship level, and some that would be City level. And we’d need to move between them. There’s not much that a Pilot could do to a City, not without special locations like the helm of the city. But a ship should be able to do something to a City, just like a Pilot could do something to a Ship. Planet Mercenary had 3 tiers of weapon damage. Maybe I could lean into that.
I’d probably want there to be some distinct correlation between City improvements and the abilities and attributes of the Pilot Characters. Install idk, a Gym or something, and all Pilots get +1 Strength. Base building and city improvements should directly improve the PCs. Tie them to the success of the city mechanically. When their city gets destroyed, they lose some bonuses that came from it.
The city should probably be rather abstracted. A single stat block, where it is like a living organism that repairs itself, has food consumptions needs, things like that. I think a good system would let players who wanted to get into the nitty gritty of trying to optimize and play sim city, but if you didn’t want to do that, you wouldn’t have to. Mostly, the city should have a list of things that would help it grow that the part could help retrieve, as well as problems they could help deal with.
I personally would want to run it as my standard hexcrawl/Simulation game. Which means asking some questions about the world. The movie is very vague on a lot of things that I am very interested in. Why are these mortal engines the best way forward? It’s acknowledged that the lifestyle isn’t sustainable. What would a sustainable mortal engines world look like? It wouldn’t need to be truely sensical, but enough of a nod towards logical that you could theorize the world improving.
Now, there’s no reason to claim this as a utopia. There’s enough human nature to say that there will always be warmongers and pirates, so there will always be conflict. But why do we need ot be on mobile cities?
I’m partial to giant monsters. City eating spiders, more traditional kaiju. If being stationary is asking to be eaten, then the world begins to be nomads. And gradually with a wave of the hand, we have city engines.
I’d need to do some pencil math, figure out things like size, weight, energy consumption and the like. I’m prepared to make this a magitech system if needed, to have this really work. I think there needs to be a lot more engines in this world. I think the movie had maybe ten, tops. And a lot of those were dinky, train sized engines. We really only saw the one city engine. (As if the writers didn’t have answers to some of the questions that I’m running into here…)
The Web novel Thresholder had a world where the surviving population were in a slow moving mech city that was powered by ancient fusion reactors. That is more believable to me. I’d want to come up with some sort of number for how much energy a city sized engine would require, and how much it could generate from a few different means. I don’t really have the engineering background to do that math, however. Not without a lot of time spent. I could probably make up some numbers, but in my mind getting a full city to move fast would be improbable.
This isn’t the first time I’ve thought about this sort of system. The animorph book Ellimist had migratory cities. There’s been a few anime I’ve seen that have danced around the topic. And having Kaiju rules would be awesome.
It’s important to state that the mechanics of City Engines would be the backdrop. You need world mechanics to identify the struggles of the people who are making decisions, and then you can see their policy decisions with that light, and only then can you have characters who have wants and desires based on that. We didn’t really have that in the film, imo. It seemed too focused on “Ancient future-tech weapons are bad news” and not really on how to live in this world and why we’re still doing this.
Maybe the books have more? I’ll see if I can find them and develop these thoughts further. Apparently, there’s at least 4 titles in the series, maybe 7? I guess 3 of them are prequels.
I’m pretty sure I read a book sort of like this in my dad’s library when I was growing up. Vague memories of a grayish cover. What I see on google could be the novel I read. I’ve put in the request for book one, we’ll see if its the thing I read before. It certainly could match the time frame.
What does it say about the world that I found the dialogue super predictable, the characters very tropey? Why was I more concerned with the setting than the characters? And what can I learn from it? I don’t really know. But it feels nice to warm up the Culture Quest with something that’s been in my Youtube recommendations for a while that I didn’t really need to impress anyone with.
Final thought: Municipal Darwinism is a great phrase.