I require help defining this idea for a steampunk fantasy setting I am creating.

The Genestone is a concept that functions as a marvellous discovery: it is a medical rosetta stone that has unlocked cures for almost anything (though such cures are of course expensive). I envisage it as being as physical as its name suggests. I'm not sure how it could work. It's discovery (should that be creation) is symbolic of the new technology that steampunk embodies. The Genestone is housed centrally under great protection, away from those who would use it for ill (or distribute that which it provides freely).

So how can this work?

Quote from: Ghost Whistler;415159I require help defining this idea for a steampunk fantasy setting I am creating.

The Genestone is a concept that functions as a marvellous discovery: it is a medical rosetta stone that has unlocked cures for almost anything (though such cures are of course expensive). I envisage it as being as physical as its name suggests. I'm not sure how it could work. It's discovery (should that be creation) is symbolic of the new technology that steampunk embodies. The Genestone is housed centrally under great protection, away from those who would use it for ill (or distribute that which it provides freely).

So how can this work?

Sounds like a "Philosopher's Stone". People actually searched for that thing in actual seriousness as late as the 19th century. And in keeping with the general gist of overly complex simplicity that steam punk thrives on, it temporally regresses tissues to before you had the disease in question. Which means that it will cure cancer and old age, but it won't cure harlequin babies.

-Frank

It is, but as I understand it the Philosophers stone was solely for transmuting base metals into gold. The genestone is for creating cures for diseases and illness.

Quote from: Ghost Whistler;415171It is, but as I understand it the Philosophers stone was solely for transmuting base metals into gold. The genestone is for creating cures for diseases and illness.

From the wikipedia article:

QuoteThe philosophers' stone (Latin: lapis philosophorum) is a legendary alchemical substance, said to be capable of turning base metals, especially lead, into gold (chrysopoeia); it was also sometimes believed to be an elixir of life, useful for rejuvenation and possibly for achieving immortality

-Frank

I think this will work better if the Genestone isn't a single item, but a collection of artifacts - not all of them yet discovered.

This opens up the gameworld a bit, as folk try to find missing pieces, oposing sides wage war and espionage to steal others stuff. Keeping a single artifact under lock and key sort of restricts options in play a bit.

Quote from: One Horse Town;415175I think this will work better if the Genestone isn't a single item, but a collection of artifacts - not all of them yet discovered.

This opens up the gameworld a bit, as folk try to find missing pieces, oposing sides wage war and espionage to steal others stuff. Keeping a single artifact under lock and key sort of restricts options in play a bit.

How could that work? If parts are not fully discovered, ie it remains incomplete, then how could it work? What would those parts be?

Quote from: Ghost Whistler;415207How could that work? If parts are not fully discovered, ie it remains incomplete, then how could it work? What would those parts be?

If it's a simulator, it could all be mechanical.

I mean, here's an orrery - a mechanical simulation of the planetary bodies.



For a steampunk game, a genomic rosetta stone could be an enormous device vaguely like that, which does abstract simulations of biological processes, with savant-readers that report and clarify all the moving ticking crap, with limited running times, and so on.

Again, in steampunk, this could easily be the product of a screwball designer.  And it could be one of many variant designs - though the only one ever actually built.  Later models could have been imagined that included changing into "second gear" and simulating different processes; those other plans could be adapted for used with the main device.

But the other plans need not be under the control of the builders; they could be out in espionage-land, whether whole or incomplete.  The designer himself would likely be dead - or alive and opposed to the builders, but with no space to work in.

Or something like that.

Does the genestone have to be a physical object?

I see more adventure possibilities if it is a mathematical equation that describes and can predict how DNA functions or is the data set that is needed to use the genestone equation.

If it must be a physical object, then have it be the enourmous steam powered Babbage style "difference engine" needed to calculate the genestone equation (the equation itself being hardwired into the gears of the computer).

Although heralded as a modern miracle, it secretly works by distilling its "cures" from diseased individuals.

Sometimes ya gotta break a few eggs:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/22642676@N05/3054878871/sizes/z/in/photostream/

Quote from: jeff37923;415215Does the genestone have to be a physical object?

I see more adventure possibilities if it is a mathematical equation that describes and can predict how DNA functions or is the data set that is needed to use the genestone equation.

If it must be a physical object, then have it be the enourmous steam powered Babbage style "difference engine" needed to calculate the genestone equation (the equation itself being hardwired into the gears of the computer).

I feel it should be. That's my first instinct, even though it's not the easiest choice.

EDIT: my initial vibe was a literal stone. Something kept under lock and key, probably stored in some kind of (tech level permitting) environmental container. This stone is then used, somehow, to unlock cures. It's not something that's portable.

Perhaps it is a stone that requires some additional framework to direct and enable its function...
The sick/troubled person enters a chamber and puts their hand through a hole where they touch the stone... the stone sends out impulses that are translated through a more mundane/man-made set of cogs/pipes/relays... to supply a result in another location.
It's been decided that the stone functions to solve medical quandries but is that its true nature? or only part of the story? How accurate/reliable is it?

The machine elements might only be 'geared' to one bit of the stone's potential. Like if some primitives had a television set but only used/enabled it for the sound coming from one station that only broadcast on odd hours...
What if a woman who has some psychosomatic ailment resulting from an unhappy home life sought treatment from the stone and it gave her a resulting 'cure' telling her to go home and kill her domineering/abusive husband?
What if human interaction eventually 'awakens' the stone to other potentials?

In the 18th century or so, if I recall correctly, pseudoscientific medicine found magnetism and magnetism-based cures very popular..if you wanted to keep a Steampunk motif, that sort of thing could be the basis for the Genestone. It could generate a curative magnetic field, perhaps with magnetic monopoles in it or something similar. (if you have one magnetic monopole, it would be theoretically possible to use that to make more). Actual IRL therapy value of this approaches (if not actually being) nil, but it might fit the genre.

How would that work if the Genestone isn't portable?

Quote from: Ghost Whistler;415171It is, but as I understand it the Philosophers stone was solely for transmuting base metals into gold. The genestone is for creating cures for diseases and illness.

In the alchemical worldview everything is metal. An alchemist who knew how to turn 'dead' lead into 'incorruptable' gold was only a few steps from transforming his mortal body into an incorruptable body, and from there it was just a few short steps to killing god and resurecting the corpse of a cosmos we call home. The making gold angle is a convinient falsehood. Convinient to con men because it was an easy way to make a quick buck, convineint to moralizers becuse it fits the greed narrative.
 
I like your original idea of a rosetta stone. A big old rock with the answer to life the universe and everything. Unlocking the power of the genestone is simply a matter of translating the message.
 
Hypotetical quotes from a campaign I might run someday:
 
"Alas! Sweet Alissa has contracted steampunk vaccum cancer and there's no known cure!"
 
"To the Genestone!"
 
"I have constructed a swarm of mechanical spiders that painstakingly record every possible measurment. They are then deconstructed by the mega steam spider and the information is written on punchcodes and fed to a series of brains in jars that cross tabulate and regress every iota of datum. Soon we will have the answer"
 
"This gentlemen, is the cure to steampunk vaccum cancer"
 
"But what does it mean? I see the capacitance for electrosteam and fluxwingjets but this term here, I've never seen anything like it before. It simply reads 'E=mc^2.'"
 
"It's hopeless! The answer is useless without the secret of 'E=mc^2' Dash it all!"
 
"Wait this brain jar's drive axle dislocated from the stylus geartrain. Now that It's been reintegrated we've found a clue on the flip side of the stone! The secret of E=mc^2 is also part of these instructions of what can only be...
 
All:  "...a doomsday device!"
 
"We shall build the doomsday device and thereby learn the dread secret of E=mc^2. We must, for Alissa's life hangs in the balance."

The word "gene" is from 1911. So the genestone needs to contain information about what it does so that someone can discover genes much earlier.

I favour an Antikythera-style computer made from lodestone during prehistory. It's barely portable, because it's a giant stone computer, but it's also incomplete. Certain functions are inoperative, including the "amarantos" operation, because parts are missing which the PCs have to go and discover.