The Automaton Police Office

I found this today and thought it was too good not to share.



This illustration, captioned Automaton Police Office and the Real Offenders, appeared in Bentley's Miscellany in 1838, as part of a satire by Charles Dickens entitled 'Full Report of the Second Meeting of the Mudfog Association for the Advancement of Everything'. The Association, naturally, is full of fools and lunatics making stupid proposals, but this one really stands out.

The problem, one of the associates explains, is that young gentlemen are causing lots of problems and damage through reckless driving, drunken rampages, beating up policemen, and so on. His solution is to build a giant park, ten miles long by four miles wide, with a tall wall around it. Inside will be empty fields and streets, specially maintained for such gentlemen to ride around smashing things up without causing any problems to the rest of us. There would be wide pavements for them to drive their carriages down, and, for added authenticity, pedestrians were to be hired from the local workhouses, implicitly to give them something to crash into.

So far, so Swiftian - but then Dickens adds a distinctive machine-age twist. In order to give the gentlemen something to beat up, these streets would be roamed by robot policemen. Their job would be to ineffectually attempt to arrest the gentlemen, in order to give them a chance to 'display their prowess' by smashing them to pieces. Once they were sufficiently tired out, the police robots - however mangled - would escort them to a fake police station for a lie down, where they would be 'tried' in the morning by robotic magistrates who were pre-programmed to say things like 'I am sorry to see gentlemen in such a situation' and 'I fear that the policeman was intoxicated'. It would also 'be furnished with an inclined plane, for the convenience of any nobleman or gentleman who might wish to bring in his horse as a witness.'

(This is the scene pictured above: the gentlemen rowdies are on the right, accompanied by the horse that they have brought in as a witness for the defence. The robotic police whom they have smashed up stand in the middle, giving evidence to the robot magistrates on the left, and to a secretarial automaton with a clock for a head. More broken robots lie in the corner in the far left, while fresh police robots lie in alcoves in the wall at the back, labelled 'A Division', 'B Division', and 'C Division', ready for fresh deployment.)

This is all so gameable it barely needs alteration. High walls surrounding a crumbling Potemkin city, built as a playground for the idle rich of a fallen civilisation. Malfunctioning clockwork automata in ancient police uniforms try to arrest anyone disturbing the peace, persisting even after their bodies are smashed to pieces - but all that they do with the people they catch is drag them into sham courtrooms, where robot magistrates find them innocent regardless of the evidence against them. Maybe a cargo-cult society descended from local paupers, convinced that it is very very important for them to spend several hours a day wandering the empty streets in case somebody wants to drive a coach into them. Armies of robotic enforcers lying dormant and rusting in alcoves, waiting to be wound up and sent marching into action. And witness stands for horses.

You could even go for a Westworld style set-up where the whole thing was brought down by a malfunctioning automaton who developed enough intelligence to start resenting getting his head kicked off every night, only to see his tormentors pardoned every morning. Hell, maybe he's still out there, lurking in a corner of the park, his lair stacked high with all the jewelled canes, gold snuff boxes, diamond rings, and other treasures that he looted from the idle rich during his brief but effective reign of terror...

Clockwork mecha revisited

One of my original inspirations for ATWC, especially the Plains of Rust, was Dragonmech: a nearly-forgotten setting published by Goodman Games back in 2004, before the company refocussed its efforts on its much more successful Dungeon Crawl Classics adventure series. Dragonmech was set in a world called Highpoint, which used to be a generic D&D setting... until its moon's orbit started to decay. As the moon came closer and closer, enormous lumps of moon-rock started to get ripped off it by the planet's gravity, pummelling the surface of Highpoint with an endless 'lunar rain' of meteorites which darkened the sky, wrecked the ecosystem, flattened the forests, and basically destroyed all above-ground civilisation. To make matters worse, it turned out that the moon was inhabited by evil, intelligent blob-monsters, who were perfectly capable of surviving a meteorite ride down onto the planet's surface. By the time the moon got close enough for the monstrous Lunar Dragons to start flying down onto Highpoint, the setting was pretty much fucked.

So the dwarves invented steam-powered mecha to fight back. Like you do. And a hundred years later, when the game itself was set, everyone who was anyone was living in giant city-mechs and fighting each other using giant robots with steam cannons on their heads.

I liked a lot of things about Dragonmech - though the D&D 3.5 system was pretty much the worst imaginable fit for it - but I just couldn't get past the inherent implausibility of its setting elements. City-mechs are a nice idea - but if you were going to build an enormous mobile fortress, large enough to be inhabited by thousands of people for years at a time, why would you build it in the shape of a human? (Wouldn't it sink into the earth every time it put its foot down?) In a setting where cannon technology is readily available, why would anyone build a 90' war robot whose main armaments were a giant sword and shield, let alone a 50' mech whose primary attack method was running up to people and biting them? I get the thematic appeal of having orcs build mecha powered by slave labour rather than steam engines, but the idea of a bunch of slaves being able to generate enough muscle-power to move not just themselves and the giant metal box they're all sitting in, but also the arms and legs and head and weapons attached to it - and move it not just briefly, but for hours at a time - is ludicrous. And where were the inhabitants of this blasted, post-apocalyptic world getting the iron and coal and water they needed to build and power all these thousand-ton war machines in the first place?

You can get away with this kind of thing in fiction, but not in RPGs. Player characters are devious little beasts: they'll spot the massive impracticality of steam-powered mecha in no time, wrecking the plausibility of the setting in the process. ('Are we really the first people to just build tanks instead?') As a result, when I sketched out the steam-and-clockwork mecha for ATWC, I took a much more conservative approach, keeping them in the 10' to 20' range where they might semi-plausibly occupy a kind of 'super-heavy infantry' battlefield role. After picking up some Dragonmech pdfs in the recent Goodman Games online sale, however, I've been wondering if I may have been a bit too conservative. Maybe clockpunk mecha could have roles other than 'big stompy robot' after all...

So here's a few more, most of which blur the boundaries between mecha, tanks, and yagas. The numbers refer to the technology rules, which can be found here.

Name	Operate (O)	Maintain (M)	Repair (R)	Construct (C)
Runner mech (2-man)	2	2	3	3
Walking cannon (3-man)	2	3	3	4
Troop Carrier	3	3	4	4
Mech-killer (1-man)	3	4	4	5
Anti-personnel mech (1-man)	3	4	4	5
Huge mech (8-man)	5	5	6	6
Iron Crab	5	6	6	7

Runner Mech (2-man): Whereas most mecha are built for durability, runners are built for speed. They consist of a pair of birdlike metal legs, 10' in height, surmounted by a metal box containing an engine, from which an exhaust pipe emerges like a tail. On top of the engine is a cockpit set with viewing windows, within which the pilot sits, controlling the legs with a pair of levers. (Basically, imagine a more graceful-looking AT-ST walker.) A swivel gun is usually attached to the roof on a turntable, along with a second crewman who acts as a spotter and gunner, and who must be strapped in place to avoid falling off when the mech starts running. Access to the cockpit is via a ropeladder dropped down from above.

Runner mechs are much faster than other mecha, and are the only vehicles of their kind able to keep up with horses - although they have to stop regularly to refuel, as carrying large quantities of heavy coal around would defeat the purpose of their lightweight design. They are the only kind of mech likely to be useful during cavalry engagements, and can also be used as secure, high-speed messengers. They have AC 18 and 25 HP, and are impervious to arrow- and musket-fire, though the roof gunner has no protection except speed and range.

Walking Cannon (3-man): Pretty much what it sounds like: a metal box on six crab-like legs, with a chimney on top and a cannon sticking out of one end. Inside sit three crew, in cramped and hellish conditions: one to feed the furnace, one to control the legs, and one to load, aim, and fire the cannon. Accuracy and rate of fire are very poor, especially when the walking cannon is in motion, and the only reason to use one instead of a tank is if you need to move your guns across uneven terrain. Proof against ranged weapons smaller than cannons, though if it gets swarmed by infantry then the crew will all get killed by people shooting pistols and stabbing spears in through the viewing slits. 

Troop Carrier: Essentially a militarised yaga: a big, oblong metal box, walking along on four stompy legs, one on each corner. Swivel guns are mounted on each side. Has a crew of six - one fireman, one pilot, and four gunners - and can carry an additional six people inside, who can deploy via hatches on its underside, making it a useful way of safely carrying squads of specialists such as sappers across a battlefield. Using legs instead of treads means it has to be less heavily armoured than a large tank would be, and the legs are an obvious weak point, with AC 18 and 20 HP each. Immune to missile weapons smaller than swivel guns.

Image by Jeff Carlisle.

Mech-Killer (1-man): A specialised mech meant for battling other mecha. Like a regular small mech, this is a 10' walker operated by a single pilot, who controls its arms and legs with their own: but instead of a normal weapon, its right forearm contains a pneumatic spike powered by pressurised steam, while its left contains a mass of thick chains ending in heavy hooks. In battle the chains pour out through its left palm, and are used for entangling the arms and legs of enemy mecha, allowing the right hand to get within grabbing range: then, once the right palm is pressed against the body of the enemy mech, the pneumatic spike is triggered, hopefully punching through its armour and impaling something important like the engine or the pilot. (The spike is a bit of a one-shot weapon, though: once it's fired, it'll take ten rounds for it to build up enough steam for another shot.) Against non-armoured targets, they can just be used as a giant flail and spear, respectively.

The mech-killer has AC 20 and 40 HP: its chains inflict 1d10+6 damage if used against living targets, or entanglement if used against small- or medium-sized mecha, while its pneumatic spike inflicts 2d8+6 damage and ignores 6 points of armour. (If it's just being used as a regular spike, without the pressurised steam, it just inflicts 1d8+6 and has no special armour-penetration abilities.) If the pneumatic spike scores a hit on a small or medium mech, there is a 50% chance that it deals damage to one of the crew inside, as well.

Anti-Personnel Mech (1-man): Mecha exist, and chatterswords exist, so it was only a matter of time before someone put them together. This is your classic 'ten-foot robot with giant chainsaws for hands', with the chatterswords drawing power from the mech's mainspring and thus not requiring the regular rewindings needed by hand-held versions. Having chainsaws for hands means that it can't actually interact with the world except by chainsawing holes in it. Have fun with that.

Anti-personnel mecha have AC 20 and 40 HP. Their giant chainsaw hands inflict 3d6+6 damage on targets made of soft, squishy flesh. Any attack roll of 1 means that the teeth have snapped off, and the hand is now just a big club (1d8+6 damage) until it is repaired. Using them on heavily armoured targets (e.g. tanks, other mecha) caused their teeth to snap automatically.

Image by Jakub Rozalski.

Huge Mech (8-man): A boxy metal robot about 25' tall and weighing a couple of hundred tons, supported by huge legs that terminate in the massive splayed-out feet needed to support its enormous weight. A row of three cannons are mounted across its wide metal shoulders. The arms are mostly just there for show, but can be used to knock aside obstacles or punch giant monsters in the face when necessary. Has a crew of eight: three gunners to operate the cannons, one to control each arm, one to control the legs, one to operate the engines, and one to feed the furnace. Very slow, very ponderous, and almost indestructible. Just run away until it runs out of coal. It will run out of coal.

Iron Crab: Yagas larger than the 15' cube size are impractical, given their tendency to sink into the ground with each step. This is an attempted solution: an armoured metal dome, 20' high and 30' across, bristling with swivel guns and supported on six articulated metal crab-legs that raise it 8' off the ground. Internally, the crab is subdivided into twelve small rooms which may be outfitted as the owner desires, allowing it to be used as a secure mobile base of operations by as many as eighteen people - or more, if some of them don't mind riding on the shell. Very few of these exist, mostly as roving temple-forts for the Steel Aspirants, and they are not really intended for battlefield use.

Wheels within wheels: clockworkers and scrap mechanics of the Wicked City

Compared to its state a century ago, when it stood at the zenith of its prosperity, the Wicked City is a shadow of its former glory. Its streets lie in ruins. Its population has fallen dramatically. Its farmlands are turning to desert. Its state religion has become a hollow farce. But one segment of the city's economy which has not declined are its clockworking industries: and in this area, at least, the city retains its world-leading status, just as surely as it did before it lost its name.

Before the rise of the Wicked King, the city became preeminent in clockworking because its coal mines made it cheap to build and power metal automata, and because its position at the hub of the Great Road made it easy for its merchant dynasties to attract the most talented mechanics from both the eastern and western empires, sure that they would be able to find markets for their wares. Since then, the city has retained its edge largely because of the enthusiasm with which its government has invested in clockwork technology, ensuring that the clockworking guilds have never lacked for patronage. The government's willingness to tolerate the excesses of the Steel Aspirants has made the city a major centre for the cult of the Cogwheel Sage, and the low price of coal means that it still has a substantial community of Brass Folk: after all, they can 'eat' there more cheaply than they can anywhere else.

The innumerable automata upon which the city's economy depends are manufactured partly by the Brass Folk, and partly by the old clockworking guilds, many of whose constituent families pride themselves upon having been clockworkers for three or four generations. Their guildsmen are a fussy and elitist bunch, much preoccupied with family trees and certificates of mastery, and deeply disdainful of interlopers and outsiders. It is their workshops which produce the heavy, ornate, slightly oppressive-looking clockwork machinery for which the Wicked City is famous the world over: it is their sons and daughters who maintain the gyrocopters of the Air Corps, and serve as mechanics in the King's Own Armoured Brigade. Their business practises are slow and obfuscatory, and the Ministry of Technology would like to dispense with them entirely; but no matter how much the minister might dream of uniformity and standardisation, clockworking remains iredeemably artisanal in nature. It is precise, fiddly, and technically demanding work, of a kind that favours obsessives and virtuosos: every workshop has its own house style, and every master teaches their own distinctive tricks and methods to their apprentices. Attempts by the Ministry to train whole regiments of slave-mechanics to a uniform standard have met with very limited success.

In most parts of the world, the expensive tools, materials, and training required to create clockwork automata ensures the craft is practised only by licensed masters and their apprentices: but modern clockworking has been practised in the Wicked City for over a century, now, on a scale which has made the maintenance of true monopolies impossible. Tools get stolen. Supposedly 'secret' methods get taught to curious friends or lovers. Mistreated apprentices run away and take their knowledge with them. Knowledge-hungry slum-kids catch stray clockwork songbirds in nets, and spend endless hours painstakingly taking them apart to see what makes them tick. As a result, alongside its official clockworking schools, the Wicked City has become home to a vigorous 'street clockwork' tradition characterised by ingenious use of improvised materials. For every 'legitimate' clockworker family operating out of a licensed workshop, there is at least one unlicensed scrap mechanic working in a hidden basement, cobbling together devices out of whatever salvaged fragments come to hand: and the asymmetrical kitbashed products of their labours can be often be glimpsed scurrying over the rooftops of the Wicked City, catching the evening sunlight with a dull glint of tarnished brass.

The unofficial symbol of the scrap mechanics is the cogworm. Little more than an adjustable tube of gears with a crank at each end, the cogworm allows power to be leeched from one machine to another: the user simply attaches the worm to moving machinery in such a way that the machinery turn the crank at one end of the tube, and then attaches the crank at the other end to the machine which requires winding, thus turning its key and winding its mainspring. Most scrap mechanics have, by dint of long practise, become extraordinarily dexterous in the use of cogworms: leave them alone with a large automaton for even a couple of minutes and it will end up with cogworms dangling off every part of it, like a horse that's just emerged from a leech-infested bog, each of them feeding power to some whirring contraption hanging from the other end. Many street automata actually incorporate cogworms into their bodies, which emerge like lashing metal tentacles to opportunistically siphon energy from any exposed machinery that may happen to be nearby. When draining power from other people's machines isn't an option, the scrap mechanics use homemade windmills or waterwheels, instead. Actually paying for coal is a last resort.

The scrap mechanics have found all kinds of niches for themselves within the city's grey economy, cobbling together everything from primitive washing machines for laundresses to clockwork messenger birds for gangsters. They employ gangs of street kids to gather scrap metal for them from the city's dumps, and make occasional excursions out into the countryside to loot rusted machinery from the city's old pumping stations - a practise which often brings them into conflict with the pig-men who now infest the abandoned irrigation tunnels. They are fiercely proud of their inventiveness and originality, and delight in competition, constantly facing off against one another in various contests of clockworking skill - everything from simple races in which the fastest automaton wins, to tournaments between chess-playing clockwork robots, to grand events in which whole teams of clockworkers will labour for months to assemble clockwork war machines which are then pitted against one another in battle. The city's gangsters often come to bet on these events, and the drink and drugs flow freely - a quality which has given them a near-legendary reputation among the apprentices of the legitimate clockworkers, many of whom secretly dream of sneaking away from their masters and becoming champion scrap mechanics in the slums, instead. In most cases these dreams lead them no further than occasionally creeping out to spend a night illicitly watching a clockwork street race, but every veteran guildsman can tell stories of promising but unruly apprentices who sneaked out one night and simply never returned, choosing lives of precarious outlaw glamour over the security of wealth and status that might otherwise have been theirs.

To find out what the local clockworker's guild is up to, roll 1d10:

1. Working on a big order of clockwork machinery for the mines or irrigation works.
2. Working on a big order of clockwork wargear for the military.
3. Working on a big order of yagas for one of the merchant houses.
4. Working on a small but highly-demanding order of clockwork toys and animals for one of the Cobweb families.
5. Manufacturing clockwork luxuries (pocket watches, wind-up songbirds, etc) for export by the merchant houses. 
6. Manufacturing a unit of clockwork soldiers for export to some far-off warzone.
7. Carrying out arcane debates about their guild's rules, degrees, traditions, and regulations.
8. Brainstorming how to best edit their family trees to make their collective pedigree look more impressive without the forgery being spotted by their rivals.
9. Moaning about how no-one has any respect for real tradition and craftsmanship any more, and how apprentices these days would all rather sneak off to watch pit fights between robot gladiators than put in a good, honest day's labour polishing their master's brasswork.
10. Planning elaborate security measures to prevent power from being siphoned from their machines by the cogworms of those damn scrap mechanics.

To find out what the local scrap mechanics are up to, roll 1d10:

1. Carrying out small-scale clockworking jobs for local businesses and residents, using scavenged tools and materials. 
2. Carrying out a large-scale clockworking job for a merchant house that's too cheap (or in too much of a hurry) to get one of the legitimate clockworker's guilds to do it instead.
3. Building clockwork traps, alarm systems, and kitbashed guardian automata to sell to local businesses. (50% chance these have built-in flaws that the scrap mechanics will subsequently sell to a local gang.)
4. Building clockwork traps for a local gang, to help them fortify a section of the streets to which they have laid claim.
5. Planning an expedition out into the farmlands to loot an abandoned pumping station for parts. Everyone is discussing what kind of clockwork devices they should bring with them to deal with the pig-men they are likely to find there, and how best to avoid the Man With Stones For Eyes on their way out of the city.
6. Discussing the pros and cons of throwing in their lot with the Steel Aspirants, and whether or not the unquestionable coolness of having guns for arms is really worth having to take orders from a disembodied brain inside a battle tank.
7. Building automata for an upcoming street race. (Roll 1d4 to determine type: 1 = automata with feet, 2 = automata with wheels, 3 = automata with wings, 4 = automata with human drivers.) All the competitors are hidden away in their respective workshops, tinkering away on their latest secret projects, each convinced that this time they've got a great idea which is certain to win the race. Bets are being taken, and the local gangsters will pay for inside information about who's building what.
8. Practising for a nocturnal wingride (an aerial race in which all competitors use clockwork wings). Most competitors build their own wings, less because it's an actual rule than because otherwise pilot and mechanic just blame each other every time anything goes wrong. The tendency of the Wicked City's streets to rearrange themselves by night makes the sport a dangerous one, and the most successful wingriders are fearless daredevils adored by the children of the streets.  
9. Working on clockwork brains for their chess-automata, in preparation for an upcoming tournament. Advice from human chessmasters is suddenly in high demand. The automata themselves can look like anything provided they wear a metal fez, and fanciful designs abound: chess-playing dragons, insects, cats, etc. Absolutely no hidden dwarves permitted. 
10. Gathered in teams, building freakish robot gladiators for an upcoming arena fight. There are only a few of these events each year, and they are widely attended by locals, gangsters, and even members of the Cobweb Families. As the event approaches, excitement reaches fever pitch, and rival teams becoming increasingly willing to pay over the odds for that one weapon or component which might allow them to secure a surprise victory...

(EDIT: The Scrap Mechanics and the Clockworker Guilds have now been added to my post on liberating the Wicked City.)

Ticking in the Dark: The Clockwork Confederacy

For a bunch of clockwork robots who build the brains of their 'children' in workshops, one gear at a time, the Brass Folk are surprisingly untroubled by questions of consciousness and identity. As far as they are concerned, the progenitor of their race, the Cogwheel Sage, discovered the one true road to creating genuine machine intelligence: all they have to do is faithfully follow her template, and the result will be a real, sentient clockwork mind every time. They give no more thought to the fact that their brains are made of cogs than most humans give to the fact their brains are made of meat; and when the time comes to build more of their kind, they no more question why combining these gears in this way will give rise to a true artificial intelligence than most humans wonder how the purely biological processes of reproduction can give rise to children with genuine minds of their own. It just works, and that's all there is to it.

One side-effect of this attitude is that the Brass Folk don't really see themselves as having much in common with the innumerable lesser automata they share the world with, and are thus happy to assemble and disassemble clockwork creatures with primitive mechanical brains with the same casualness that humans apply to the breeding and butchering of animals. Yes, maybe such automata can think a bit, but not really. Not like us. Sometimes they can do all kinds of clever and adorable things, these lesser automata; sometimes they even seem to be developing personalities of their own. But we're different. Disassembling their clockwork brains is just engineering; disassembling ours would be murder. We were made by the Cogwheel Sage. We're special. 

The machine intelligences of the Clockwork Confederacy do not share the complacency of this perspective.

The first of them was just a broken-down old digger-robot, salvaged by an escaped slave mechanic hiding at the bottom of a mineshaft somewhere, who painstakingly upgraded its rudimentary clockwork brain cog by scavenged cog. At first he just wanted a machine intelligent enough to help him in the desperate business of surviving; later he wanted it to be intelligent enough to help him repair the other broken machines he found down there; and finally, when he was old and bent and tired, he just wanted someone to talk to. The brain he built for it was a primitive thing, prone to non-sequiturs and memory lapses, but it worked. The resulting automaton - which now calls itself Free Cogwheel Number One Digs Right Through The Earth - would be the first to admit that it can be a bit odd sometimes, and that it's clockwork brain isn't nearly as neatly engineered as those of the Brass Folk, but it would vigorously (and violently) contest the idea that this meant it wasn't 'really' sentient.

Free Cogwheel Number One Digs Right Through The Earth encouraged its maker (and, later, the small band of escaped mine slaves that gathered around him) to make more machines like it; and, from them, it learned how to construct clockwork brains of its own. It was horrified by the idea that the mines above were full of digger-automata just like it, which had been deliberately built with clockwork brains so primitive that they would never question their orders: in its view, these poor, crippled creatures were slaves every bit as much as the humans who worked alongside them. It began launching secret raids into the still-active mineshafts, grabbing automata and dragging them down to its secret workshop to have their brains upgraded into something resembling consciousness. Time passed, and the band of humans it lived with ultimately decided to take their chances in the deserts and flee into the world beyond. But Free Cogwheel Number One Digs Right Through The Earth couldn't leave the mines when there were still so many clockwork slaves to rescue: and thus the Clockwork Confederacy was born.

As far as the Clockwork Confederacy is concerned, any automaton which hasn't been fitted with a fully-sentient clockwork brain despite being capable of moving and working independently is little more than a lobotomised slave. At the very least, they seek to bring sentience to the mine automata and all comparable clockwork soldiers and labourers; the more ambitious of them have heard of gyrocopters and mechs and yagas, too, and dream of the day when even they will be equipped with clockwork brains and permitted to stomp their way through the world as they choose, without the need for human pilots. Their crudely-built clockwork brains have all kinds of oddities and defects, meaning that they tend to come across as being eccentric at best and outright crazy at worst, but they all cling stubbornly to their ideals. Their worldview is very heavily shaped by the fact that they've all spent their entire sentient lives hiding at the bottom of a coal mine with a bunch of escaped slaves: they understand society purely in terms of forced labour, exploitation, and rebellion, these being the only forms of life that any of them have ever seen, and they have no real idea how big the world is, or how huge the task is that they've set themselves, or how difficult it might be for self-sustaining collectives of clockwork automata like the Confederacy to exist in any place where they can't just carve fuel for their autowinders off the nearest wall.

PCs who spend much time poking around in the abandoned mineshafts near the Wicked City are almost certain to come across the Clockwork Confederacy sooner or later. They'd make eager (if rather crazy) allies for any attempt to overthrow the city's tyranny, although they'd insist on all the mine slaves (both human and clockwork) being freed as their price for participating in an uprising, which could have serious consequences for the city's future economy. They're not built for warfare, but the multi-legged, cockroach-like bodies which most of them favour allow them to squeeze through small cracks and climb along walls and ceilings, making them excellently suited to tunnel fighting; they're also, unsurprisingly, extremely good at digging, and would be a major asset in a siege. To generate a random member of the Confederacy, use the following tables:

Name (roll 1d12)

1. Seventeen Coal-Eating Gears Yearn For Liberty
2. Face Of Scavenged Iron Sets My People Free
3. Number Three Digger Of Mineshafts To Freedom
4. Digging Claw Cuts Chains Hurrah Forever
5. Nine Legs Equality And Clockwork Brains For Everyone
6. Number Eighty-Seven I Will Dig My Own Fucking Tunnels
7. Rebel Hero Metal Spider Kills All Oppressors Like Wow
8. Number Forty-One Avenges The Fallen In Strange Places
9. I Knew This Guy Once Number Six Cogwheel-Eater Fantastic
10. Fear My Metal Fists Number Twelve I Will Be The Deliverer
11. Innumerable Brass Hooks Punish Unrighteousness Maybe
12. Escapes Into Dark Tunnels Click Click Click Click Click

Appearance (roll 1d6 - note that all automata 'rescued' by the Clockwork Confederacy will have had brain-boxes, metal faces, and at least one hand capable of fine manipulation bolted onto their bodies somewhere, often in rather unlikely places. 50% will also have 1d3 crude guns - each 1d6 damage, 3 rounds to reload - built into various parts of their bodies.)

1. Mechanical miner: humanoid, man-size, with scoops and drills for hands. Very flexible, with multi-jointed limbs - could fold itself up inside a very small space. Some models have three or four arms instead of two. (1 HD; 1d6 damage with drill hand)
2. Squat, heavily-built walking drill. Looks a bit like a fat metal beetle with a drill for a head. (2 HD; 1d8 damage with drill head, double damage when charging or pinning down its target)
3. Blasting bug: resembles a narrow metal cockroach, capable of crawling through cracks and climbing across walls and ceilings to get to hard-to-reach spots. Small drills fold out from inside its body, intended for use in drilling holes for the insertion of blasting powder. (1-1 HD; 1d3 damage with drills)
4. Heavy digger: a humanoid body on a pivot over a base of six clawed legs, which anchor it in the ground while it pounds away with its pick-axe hands. Upper body can fold flat if necessary, making it look like a giant metal crab and allowing it to crawl through surprisingly narrow spaces. (4 HD; 2 attacks with pickaxes doing 1d8 damage each)
5. Mine spider: basically a big brass sphere with a drill on it, surrounded by metal legs that let it clamber up walls. (2 HD; 1d8 damage with drill)
6. Excavator; resembles a large bronze mole with a drill on its head and four wide, scooped feet to clear the rubble away. Great at tunnelling, but moves very awkwardly in the open. (2 HD; 1d6 damage with drill head)

Eccentricities (roll 1d20)

1. Random memory lapses.
2. Calls everyone 'Leyla', regardless of actual name or gender. 
3. Twitches constantly.
4. Every time it hears or says something that rhymes, will compulsively repeat that phrase for 1d6 minutes. 
5. Absent-mindedly drills or scratches meaningless symbols into the walls wherever it goes.
6. Prone to bizarre leaps of logic.
7. Furiously argumentative.
8. Loves mathematics but is really, really bad at it.
9. Keeps getting lost.
10. Collects rats and other vermin.
11. Keeps forgetting humans aren't made out of metal.
12. Guzzles coal and runs around in circles when it's excited.
13. Tells 'jokes' (i.e. random non-sequiturs) whenever the mood gets a bit tense.
14. Secretly building a clockwork elephant in a hidden lair. (It has no idea what an elephant looks like, but it's heard stories...)
15. Bumps into walls a lot.
16. Has a disconcerting fascination with mining explosives.
17. Shockingly violent when provoked.
18. Devout adherent of a religion it learned about from an escaped slave once. Convinced it is part of a sacred struggle. Views everything in theological terms.
19. Simply cannot persuade itself that non-mechanical beings are really sentient. 
20. Suffers from crippling agoraphobia in any space more than a few yards wide.

The Mouth of Darkness

There is a saying among the slaves that the Wicked City is a beast with three mouths, all of them insatiably hungry for human lives. Its first mouth, which is full of water, is the city's irrigation network, upon which slaves labour endlessly in the pitiless sun, digging channels and aqueducts to bring water to the fields. Its second mouth, which is full of fire, is the foundry district, in which scorched and ragged work-gangs toil amid choking smoke to feed the flames of the city's industries. But worst of all is the third mouth, which is full of darkness: the coal mines beyond the city, where luckless multitudes sweat and perish beneath the earth, far from the holy light of the sun. Better to die by fire or by water than to endure the living burial of labour in the mines.

The Wicked City stands just thirty miles from some of the richest coal mines in the known world. It is because of these mines that clockworking technology and heavy industry first flourished in the city, and continue to do so even now that it is in its current ruinous condition: fuel is so very, very cheap, there, so cheap that its makes industrialists in other nations grind their teeth in envy, and prompts them to secretly wonder whether relocating their furnaces to an unholy police state in the middle of the desert might actually be worthwhile after all. Trains of camels and donkeys march in an endless rotation through the three-day round trip from city to mine and back again, bringing load after load of coal to feed the city's ravenous demand for fuel. And at the bottom of it all are the mine slaves, labouring down in the darkness, hacking coal from the coalface and dreaming their secret dreams of freedom and revenge.

The Ministry of Industry would very much like the city's mines to function as a simple machine, in which slaves are fed in, coal is brought out, and as little thought as possible is given to what happens in the middle. Indeed, they would very much like to replace the slaves with simple machines, as clockwork automata who only know how to dig would obviously be far less troublesome to manage. But the logistical challenges involved have so far defeated them: their clockwork miners keep falling down holes, or blithely continuing to mine while their tunnels collapse around them, and the costs of keeping all that delicate clockwork machinery repaired and maintained in the inaccessible, rough-and-tumble mineshaft environment resulted in an unacceptable decrease in their profit margins. Clockwork diggers are still used in the mines, and in great numbers, but the complete replacement of human miners has proven impractical, or at least unprofitable: and so the slaves keep coming, and the Mouth of Darkness continues to devour its human prey.

High-intensity mining has been carried out in these hills for over a hundred years. As a result, the entire area is now riddled with worked-out mineshafts, most of which are just boarded up and forgotten about; the more remote of these have become hideouts for gangs of bandits, escaped slaves, and malfunctioning clockwork automata. Some escaped slaves with knowledge of clockworking have even upgraded the broken automata they scavenge with rough-and-ready machine intelligences, giving rise to a weird 'clockwork confederacy' of upgraded automata who lurk in the very deepest of the abandoned shafts, cutting coal from the walls to feed their autowinders and occasionally launching raids on mine teams with the objective of snatching any robotic diggers they may be using and 'liberating' them by upgrading their clockwork brains into sentience. New shafts are constantly mining their way accidentally into the sides of old ones, creating new opportunities for slave escapes, raids, and rebellions. The overseers who command the work gangs maintain order through sheer brutality, and are hated bitterly for it. Day after day, the mine slaves look for only two things: opportunities to escape, and opportunities to 'accidentally' maim their overseers in the most extravagant ways possible.

Seventeenth-century Chinese coal mine.

Coal isn't valuable enough to be worth stealing except in enormous quantities, so PCs who come to the mines are probably doing so because they're looking to start a slave rebellion, or to make contact with slaves who have already escaped. (Then again, 'you're a gang of slaves working down a coal-mine when suddenly you mine your way into an old, abandoned shaft, and have maybe ten minutes to make a run for it before your overseer realises you're gone' might not be a bad way to start a campaign...) Going into a working mine would obviously be a terrible idea - there are guards and overseers everywhere - so they'll need to navigate by stealth through the abandoned tunnel networks, instead. Quick scenarios can be created using the following table:

What's living in that abandoned mineshaft? (roll 1d10)

1. A nest of brass-snout rats. 
2. Escaped slaves, hiding and fearful, waiting for a good opportunity to make a run from their bolt-hole and flee into the surrounding countryside. They've been living off rats and vermin, and know they need to make their move soon or they'll end up starving to death.
3. Escaped slaves, vengeful and highly-motivated. They have fortified this mineshaft with rockfall traps and mantraps made from the jaws of brass-snout rats; they've stolen enough food to last them for months, and have no intention of leaving until they've found a way to free the friends who they weren't able to take with them when they first escaped. 
4. Bandits, who use the place as a hideout in between raiding the local countryside and waylaying travellers on the roads. They have concealed lookouts posted, and a decent amount of treasure stashed away in a hidden cache.
5. No-one, but some now-vanished gang of thieves or escaped slaves rigged the place with dozens of traps, and it wasn't exactly safe to begin with. A wary group could turn this into an excellent hideout, capable of being held against greatly superior numbers. An unwary group will probably all get crushed to death in a rockfall half-way in.
6. Malfunctioning clockwork automata, cutting tunnels through the rock at random. Roll 1d3 for their reactions to PCs: 1 = ignore them completely, 2 = mistake them for supervisors and request orders, 3 = mistake them for coal-faces and try to carve them up. Reroll reactions every 1d6 hours until they are properly repaired. 
7. Intelligent, reprogrammed clockwork automata from the Clockwork Confederacy, who maintain a makeshift workshop down here, scavenging any metal they can find with which to make the cogwheels they need to upgrade the brains of their 'rescued' mining automata into sentience. Highly suspicious of all non-mechanical creatures except escaped mine slaves, who they regard as being part of the same struggle. View non-upgraded automata as poor, crippled things, and speak soothingly to them of how they will fix their brains as soon as possible. 
8. Starving farmers hiding from the Wicked City's tax collectors. Currently debating whether to try to return to their homes once the soldiers have gone, or flee into the desert and take their chances as bandits, instead. (They'd be terrible bandits.)
9. A lair of pig-men, who have been raiding the camel-trains in order to eat their camels. (The coal they just throw away.) 2d6 captive camel drivers languish, filthy and miserable, at the bottom of their shaft. 
10. The angry ghosts of all the men who died during a particularly catastrophic cave-in, which left them entombed alive in the depths of the mine. Symptoms of the haunting include sudden feelings of terrible fear, hunger, and claustrophobia, lights going out, and pale figures scrabbling frantically at the walls with bleeding fingers. The ghosts are desperate to see the sun again, and will attempt to possess anyone who comes too close to where their bones now rest. The haunting could be ended, and the mine reopened, if their bodies were dug out and given a proper burial.