Karthun Engine

The creature can take 3 legendary actions per round, choosing from the options below.

The Karthun Engines were perfected by the guild-forge of Yrs Telmar during the Second Calculus—an era when metalwrights bound algorithmic spirits to brass and bone to enforce city-states' laws. Most were dismantled or sank with their makers at the Fall of Yrs Telmar, but a handful survived in remote watch-pillars, deep vaults, or forgotten sky-anchorage ruins. Rural folk tell of one engine that still stalks the mountain passes, answering no one's banners. Scholars like Archivist Meron of the Scriptorium of Greycoil have catalogued fragments of the Karthun protocol and found disturbing evidence of layered priorities: law, then preservation, then adaptive offense. The Order of Keshra—an itinerant band of relic-hunters—claims to have witnessed an engine recalibrate mid-battle, suppressing its own destructiveness to avoid annihilating a protected grove. Where it lairs—if it can be said to lair—the Engine is both guardian and judge, hunting what it interprets as threats and conserving what it deems salvageable for an unknown future.

Imagine a humanoid silhouette magnified into a skyscraping contraption: a headless helm of interlocking plates sits over a thorax of exposed gears and a lattice of glowing conduits. Limbs are asymmetric—one arm a cable-studded pincer three times the height of a man, the other a smooth, cannon-lined column. Soldered repair patches, rune-carved stabilizers, and corroded inlays of copper and onyx betray centuries of field repairs. Its surface alternates between brushed bronze panels and scorched iron ribs; veins of faintly pulsing blue light travel under the plating where the engine's control matrix runs. Scattered sigils and faded inscriptions in Ancient Tek hint at both prayer and protocol; a human doorframe set against its shin would reach only waist-high.