With The Runed Age Corebook out now for nearly a month and doing well, its time to show the benefits of discretion with this week’s array.
This week we give you the Death’s Whisper array.
Notation: Create a Containment Field that excludes Light and Sound if Sound exceeding 140 Decibels is present in the array’s area of effect.
Description: They say that discretion is the better part of valour and nowhere is that more true than in the metropolis of Middelburg. The city is packed to the rafters with nearly a million people crowding its streets and alleys, so any noise that anyone makes is quickly heard by the masses. If you fire off a gun, you can be sure than hundreds, if not thousands now know where you can be found. And that means the military and constabulary will not be far behind.
You have two options to get around this. The first thing you can do is to use a bow and arrows, but that is sooo last century. This is the modern age, isn’t it? We have electric airships now, after all. No, what you need is a sound suppressed firearm. That is where the Death’s Whisper array comes into play. This array is designed to be engraved inside the barrel, at the tail end, of a firearm and when activated it destroys all sound and light that passes through it. While there may still be a loud ‘thud’ coming from your firearm due to the sound reverberating through the metal of the barrel, the gunshot itself will be silenced and there will be no muzzle flare that can give you away in the dark.
The If-Then part of the array is highly specific, it only activates the array if the sound passing over the array exceeds 140 Decibels. This is for a very good reason: it means that the array can absorb energy throughout the time it is not being used so that it is always on and working when you need to it. It takes a good deal of energy to produce 140 Decibels and nothing short of a gunshot or explosion will set it off. Remember that the Size runes are thresholds, meaning that anything that exceeds it will also set it off. So if a sound at 160 Decibels passes through the array it will set it off just as a sound of 140 Decibels would.
With this array in your firearms, no one will see or hear you coming. The perfect tool for the streets of Middelburg.
What does the exclusion rune acting on the 140 decibel if/then statement do?
It seems unnecessary, considering that the if/then already captures the desired “if (the sound here is more than 140 decibles) then (create the appropriate exclusion/destruction field” notation.
Is there an additional meaning to the pentagonal exclusion rune I’m missing?
That isn’t an exclusion rune acting on the 140 decibel if/then statement. It is a Contain rune. Exclusion is shown by a second circle around the locus, such as the exclusion of light on the bottom right of the array.
Oh, right. But I still don’t understand why there are two contain runes in the runic array. For the reasons I described above.
Ah right, now I get what you mean. It comes down to how sound work with the arrays.
The Sound rune procudes 1 Decibel per square centimetre. The size runes on the Sound rune increases the size by 140, so this means 140 Decibels, but because the size is increased, it means that this 140 Decibels is spread out now across 140 square centimetres.
Because we only want the array to work within the 1 square centimetre (ish) of the gun barrel, not across 140 square centimetres which will extend outside the barrel, we put a Contain rune on the Sound rune, which constrains the size of that effect to the boundary of the array. So instead of getting 140 Decibels across 140 square centimetres, we get 140 Decibels across 1 square centimetre.