Ballista Blueprints

Ballista Blueprints lie open on the timber table, parchment edges curled like leaves dried in a pocket of hot sun. The sheet is a map of lines: thick, arcing bars that suggest a weapon’s backbone, fine gears inked with a patient hand, and the stubby silhouette of a frame that would anchor bolts into the wind. The ink has run a little where the sheet brushed against a bottle of resin, giving the diagrams a damp, breathing look—as if the ballista might rise and lean toward you if you tilted your head just right. A pale wax seal dessicated to a dull sunburst rests in a corner, a reminder of a courier’s seal and a time when promises were pressed into the very wood of a contract. Holding the blueprint, you feel the texture shift under your finger: the parchment is stiff at first, then suddenly pliant where the oils of a traveler’s hands have loosened it. The fibers carry a faint salt tang—sea air pressed inland by traders and caravans—and across the margins are careful marginal notes, smudged equations and a shorthand that reads like a diary of experiments. The whole thing has the scent of a long conversation—between draftsmen who rarely spoke aloud and the iron that waited, patient and hungry, in the workshop. Lore threads through the paper as surely as the ink threads through the lines. These blueprints are said to descend from frontier engineers who rode between ruined watchposts, trying to outpace raiders with a machine that could hurl a bolt with the weight of a man’s courage. The diagrams borrow geometry from siege days long enough to fade in memory, pairing practical restraint with a whisper of ritual—the creases where a master builder would press metal joints and the tiny rune-like marks that supposedly coax the levers to sing when the wind is right. It’s easy to imagine a guild hall at dusk, lanterns swaying, the master pointing to a line and saying, “If you bend here, the bolt will fly true,” and the room listening as if to a quiet oath. In the world of play, these blueprints are a gateway, not a trophy. They unlock the ability to craft a ballista for one’s outpost, a tool of defense as much as a symbol of persistence. They demand craft—metal, leather, and careful fit—because the machine is as much about discipline as it is about force. When you mount a ballista by gate or rampart, you become part of a larger arc: the engineers who designed the thing, the guards who boy-scout the battlements, the traders who barter for resin and steel, and the caravan leaders who know a siege can turn on a single misstep. The blueprint is the hinge between intention and action, between the whisper of plans and the roar of a first bolt. Saddlebag Exchange does weighty business with such items, too. In its ledger-tented markets, the blueprints drift from stall to stall with the weather of the day. I watch a broker thumb a page, then lean in to whisper: the price moves with the tide of skirmishes, with the hush of a whispered rumor of a campfall, with the steady pull of supply chasing demand. Sometimes a buyer will trade a few coins for a book of notes, sometimes for a hard-won component snatched from a wreck. The exchange keeps the pulse of the world in its ledgers, and this parchment is a living part of that current. So the Ballista Blueprints endure—not merely as paper, but as a quiet agreement between ingenuity and necessity, between inked intention and the steel that answers. It's a story etched in fibers and wind, waiting for hands ready to transform plan into result, and for a world that still believes a siege is won as much by the right diagram as by the right bolt.