Finli's mechanical armour

Finli's mechanical armour is the suit worn by the gnome engineer Finli in the campaign Yeni Dünya ("New World"). It is made of metal, with glowing runes and mechanisms, and its moving parts lend him a strength that he himself says belongs to the armour, not to him. In the Empire it is commonly held that gears and moving mechanisms are the work of gnomes.¹²³

Origins

Some six years before the campaign, Finli and a younger gnome partner kept an engineering workshop underground, repairing mining equipment by day and working by night on special armour. Finli had lost a leg when a ruin fell on him at an archaeological dig, and was looking for armour that would let him go back to adventuring. Their prototypes of strength-giving limbs worked, but only where they could be charged by runes on the spot: the partners had not found a portable source of power.⁴⁵⁶⁷

A store of mithril found in a rune tablet seemed to promise an answer, though the workshop had no mithril tools to work it with and the work would be very slow. Finli kept a small amount of it, worked on every gram of it in the years that followed, and in time managed to give himself something that worked in place of his lost leg.⁸⁹¹⁰¹¹

Forms

After the fight on the way back from Fauna's tribe, Finli reworked the armour into a form suited to movement and stealth: the mechanical plates drawn inside and the outside covered in black leather, with his prosthetic leg also wrapped in leather.¹²

When he was invited to a secret meeting at which all weapons and tools of spellcasting had to be left behind, he packed the rune pieces from which he forms the armour into his bag; an officer later said that the governor allowed the party to keep their weapons and belongings.¹³¹⁴¹⁵

The new plate

For a new suit Finli rented a smith's forge, prepared materials and recorded his first full day of work and its cost. Later, working through a night with the smith's help instead of resting, he finished a suit of plate made to his own measure, borrowing details of the joints from dwarven designs and using up all the remaining material. It was ready to wear, though its decoration and any further refinements were left for later.¹⁶¹⁷¹⁸

Spoiler: Later eventsRevealSpoils: Yeni Dünya #27 · Say what you have read

In a shared dream that Finli later lived through with his companions, he walked about in light everyday armour, and in the cupboard of a toymaker's workshop there hung a heavy suit marked by burns and dents, which he set right and put on.¹⁹²⁰