Karneth Frame

Karneth Frames were first wrought generations ago by the Ironward Guild of Crownbridge Gate, a craftsmen's consortium that fused heavy clockwork with crude arcane triggers to protect settlements too proud or too poor to maintain large standing armies. Each Frame was keyed to a city's war-alarms: a pattern of notes, sigils, and ember-markers encoded into an activation lattice. When those signals combine, dormant frames across the city's armories stir and stride to predetermined embrasures. Over time, guildwrights taught the Frames limited battlefield protocols: to crush siege towers, to shore breaches, to avoid trampling civilians if possible. Scholars like Master Halverin of the Cartography House documented these behaviors in treatises known collectively as the Watchwright Papers. Legends tell of a single Frame, nicknamed the Iron Psalm, that once held the Lower Ward for three days against a payroll of bandit mercenaries — but also of Frames that followed corrupted alarms to tear down the wrong district. Today, opportunistic brigands and rival states seek fragments of Karneth lattices for sabotage or imitation, making the Frames both prized trophies and dangerous wildcards.

A Karneth Frame is an oversized, boxy construct roughly the size of a small wagon but taller — about 12 feet from ground to top of its bolt-launching crossbar. Its chassis is plate-planked oak banded with riveted iron, pitted and seamed with repair plates. Four spidery jointed legs articulate from heavy axles, each ending in a broad iron shoe with stamped guild sigils; the legs bear visible piston rods and coil-springs. The 'face' is a slotted lantern grate above the bolt-rack; beneath that a blunt iron ram juts from a sliding collar. Bolts and powder flasks live in side-holds; soot-streaks and scorch marks ring the bolt-muzzle. Chains, spare gears, and canvas tarpaulins flank the sides. Scale notes: a standing human reaches roughly to the top of the bolt-rack mounts; a standard city gate is just taller than the Frame when it arches slightly upward. Textures to emphasize: hammered iron, splintered wood grain, crosshatched soot stains, greasy oil streaks, and dented reinforcement bands.