SteamPunk Blimp: Adventure Race Lite

Throughout SteamPunk history people have looked at sporting events as a way to lessen the chance of warfare between different nations, and the airship races initially began like this. The earliest known events were informal races held by different inventors from all across the six countries. These races were initially put together to show off what new flying contraptions that different designers built. Nevertheless, some top sponsors were quick to notice the potential for a growth industry.

Eventually the six countries in the world started to grow closer as a result of having an outlet for national aggressions. What was once displayed as aggression on the battlefield was now portrayed as Devilish skill on the race course. By Aero Year 25 the six countries had reached an agreement banning any nation from possessing a standing army or navy. Instead, international disagreements were supposed to be handled honorably by racing blimps filled with lifting gas and propelled by reciprocating steam pistons.

As the stakes grew the competition became incredibly fierce. While the rules forbade any racing crew from committing an act of homicide, it was quickly discovered that no one ever banned crews from taking down other airships. Canons and repeating guns were soon mounted on the majority of airships, and cutthroat competition became the order of the day. Bombs were even sometimes used to blast objects out of the sky.

A punk inventor named Tabloid blamed the airship crews for bringing such sweeping changes and bad luck to his business empire. He decided to sabotage them through a number of cruel inventions made by experimenting on creatures. He created mechanical birds that would piece through the skin of the toughest blimps and machine dinosaurs that would chew through anything. These creations scattered the entire skies and race courses and took down anything flying blimp around them. Eventually even commercial blimps couldn’t fly because of the threat of these creatures.

Around the same time that Tabloid was producing these creatures; a young boy had been growing up in the Tomahawk Forest region. Young is something of a subjective term because the residents of Tomahawk Forest live for centuries and generally remain youthful for quite some time. The young boy’s name was Diamond, and he was training to be a messenger. He loved to playfully leap and fly amongst the towns in the wooded area, and he had a love to stand atop the wooden telephone poles that seemed to connect all of the roofs throughout the area. While his method of getting packages to their destination while using flight via rooftops was dangerous and frowned on by his superiors, no one argued that he wasn’t the fastest messenger in the land. Diamond always made his deliveries on time like clockwork.

It makes sense that he would put a pair of goggles on his forehead and tinker around with various airships in his spare time. Diamond loved to mess with anything with speed. Since Tabloid’s mechanical creatures had taken down the professional airships, the six countries called offered up a bounty to anyone who would take down these creatures. He only had a limited selection of retro equipment since he was a novice before suddenly being selected to fly through the air, but Diamond was confident that he could find enough of the prized coins littered throughout the former racecourses to buy a better blimp.