Rattlehand

Hull-iron rusts. Sawteeth blunt. Engines cough and struggle. In a world of salvage and barter, nothing lasts forever… unless you have a good rattlehand on your side.

A rattlehand is somewhere between an engineer, a blacksmith and an artist, able to use the scrap of the seas to repair, reinforce and create. Many rattlehands excel in crafting new and unique gear for their crewmates, perfectly suited to the troubles they face.

A Second-Hand World

The first thing almost every rattlehand learns is how to make the best of a bad situation; relying on imprecise tools, twisted salvage and broken machinery to ply their trade. The lack of wide-scale mining and ore processing makes metal shortage an unfortunate reality, so those that balk at the idea of repurposing the same wreckage for the twentieth time often turn to wood or bone as a stand-in.

Salvage or Specimens?

Salvage is by far the easiest material for a rattlehand to work with, tried and true pieces of wood or metal that stood the test of time (at least for a while). As most materials on the wildsea are second-hand, using fragments of old machines and discarded pieces of ship-stuff is a natural part of the job.

But some rattlehands like a challenge, particularly those that spend a lot of time around the unusual creatures of the wider waves. These engineers combine the coldly artificial with the unpalatably organic, using plant and animal specimens alongside more traditional materials to create effective (but occassionally unsettling) products.

Questions to Consider

When you incorporate elements of the rattlehand into your character, consider the following questions…

• Most rattlehands have a favoured material to work with - what’s yours?
• Whaich experiment or repair job of yours failed spectacularly at just the wrong moment?
• What was your crowning glory, technologically speaking? The development of a new technique, the completion of a grand machine or the unlocking of a pre-verdant industrial secret?

Alternate Presentations

Alternate rattlehand presentations are as diverse as rattlehands themselves; you might want to aim for a dockside engineer or ship-builder called to the waves, a blacksmith struggling in a world without forges, a technology-focused scientist or even an artist or sculptor that works in salvage.