The steam tank is the Ironweld Arsenal's boldest wager: take a fortress bastion, give it a boiler for a heart and wheels for foundations, and drive it at the enemy. Behind its riveted hull a crew stokes, steers, and serves the main cannon while pressure gauges tremble toward their red lines, and the machine wades through massed infantry trailing scalding vapour and the smell of hot iron. Arrows ring off it. Spears skid. Most enemies have no answer to it at all, and the ones that do must stand directly in front of it to try.
Every steam tank is temperamental in its own way, and its engineers speak of them as sailors speak of ships — coaxing, bargaining, occasionally threatening the boiler with a wrench. Overpressure has killed nearly as many crews as the enemy has, which the Ironweld regards less as a flaw than as an engineering frontier. To the Freeguild regiments alongside, none of that matters: when a steam tank rolls forward the line goes forward with it, because it is a rare and wonderful thing in the Mortal Realms to advance behind a wall that shoots back.
Order of battle
