I'm not too attached to the name, could be mechanic's guild, tinkerer's guild, or machinist's guild.

Primary: Lore
You saw that coming I suppose, and obviously mechanical lore would be the heavily emphasized skill in this guild. If the guild were created in the post-mech lore split, perhaps an appropriate guild specific lore skill could be created, or multiple lores would have hard reqs.

Secondaries: Weapon and Armor
The reason being, I envision this guild as sort of war-engineers. See abilities below.

Tertiaries: Survival and Magic
Machinists prefer the physical tangibility of machines, and consider magic to be unreliable hocus pocus. Also, spending all that time in the design room has left them with lower inclination to the outdoors.

Some ability ideas, in no particular order...

Siege engines! These could get tricky to implement, and I'd imagine would be a fairly high circle thing. But imagine impaling a war mammoth with the ballista that you just made from scratch! You'd of course have to be pretty strong and stout to move around the heavy machines, and they would probably be limited on where you could take them. That is, until you create a pully system to move the machines around. I also think that these abilities should be distributed in blueprint form, requiring you to build your own artillery and also enabling you to replace destroyed artillery. Ammo would also be pretty darned heavy, like catapult ammo for example. I'd imagine blueprints for different types of ammo could be given as guild rewards as well, and the guild shop would sell basic ammo for the beasts. Also in the guild shop would be all the wood and other such supplies for building.

Building your own (temporary) bridges, so a bunch of people can quickly cross a river.

Abilities to aid in mining (if ever released).

Fortifications- Walls and other impediments to keep the enemy at bay during invasions.

Make improvements to ships.

Weapon/armor modifying devices, at very advanced levels of course. This is more along the lines of adding counter-balancing weights to weapons or maybe putting a layer of rubber somewhere inside a suit of armor, to help against electricity.

100th ability- personal gyrocopter blueprint (highly improbable, but would be oh-so-cool)

And a myriad of other things I haven't even dreamed up yet.

Playing an Engineer:
This would be a very slow circling guild, because of hefty lore reqs combined with substantial combat time. The guild itself would have multiple workshops, where engineers could attempt to make their blueprints into real working machinations of destruction (or construction as the case may be). Building stuff would be the best way to train the different mechanical lores, but likely at early levels engineers would have to go work in the mines or do other activities to learn the basics. Primary stats would be strength and mentals, and scholarship I'd imagine would play a big part of making heads or tails of the blueprints.

Comments, criticisms, post it all.

~Caneghem Urathi

I wouldn't mind seeing a lot of these ideas not so much as a guild but as a profession. This would be a great way for the lore primary guilds to flex some of those ranks that quite frankly don't have a lot of uses outside tanning/smithing/forging (which is more about guild/weapon/armor anyway).

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Ranger Hanryu _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _, Sword of House Calibanor
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I would agvree that this sounds like an excellent idea to explore for careers. Being able to make single-use (or a permanent item that requires reloading/refueling/repairing) gadgets for general use in many different siatuations could be quite enjoyable. Here're some ideas that came to mind while reading...

Portable blacksmith's station - permanent big heavy item with a substantial setup/takedown RT that can be used for repair tasks as well as some minor creation work

Grenades - 'nuff said

Wagon enhancements - expendable kit for upgrading a Trader's caravan wagons, raises travel speed

Climbing rig - expendable spike/ladder system that temporarily lowers the climbing requirement on a given movement

Seige weapons and fortifications - constructed from several large independently-carried parts and assembled on-site, allows offensive/defensive use until destroyed (or until they time out, say 24 hours?)

These items would all be fairly sizeable/heavy so as not to be something you make 20 of and toss in a hip pouch. They could, in turn, require smaller parts which would be the starter tasks for new engineers (bolts, screws, connectors). Preferably, have an engineer shop (or integrate it into the pawnshop rewrite) where younger people can sell their parts for purchase by more experience engineers. (Keep cost low to promote use of the system.)

Just my additional thoughts.

Arcelebor

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"Back off, man. I'm a scientist."
PSA - Sakhara's definition of RP (among other things) is erroneous
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