¶ The Barking GNU
Free Magic. Free Machines. Free People. (Donations Welcome, but Optional)
Slogan: "Magic is for everyone. Even Steve."
Unofficial Slogan: "Making magic, machines, and mayhem mildly more manageable."
Motive: To repair, teach, and leave things better than they found them — preferably with fewer exploding toasters.
Unofficial Mascot: A glowing wrench with wings and a tiny angry face, often painted on walls near broken light crystals.
¶ Overview
The Barking GNU is a loosely organised and highly passionate conglomerate of renegade inventors, rogue artificers, magical tinkerers, and at least one talking kettle. Founded by former Eberron Inc. employees who grew tired of soul-numbing performance reviews and the constant buzz of weaponised bureaucracy, the GNU now operates as Calad Bar's underground tech collective.
Their name is both a pun, a programming joke no one really understands anymore, and a veiled insult aimed squarely at Eberron Inc., who reportedly once tried to sue the name for being "disruptively whimsical".
¶ Activities
Unlike the Arcane Collective, who mostly care about theoretical advancement and accidental lightning, the Barking GNU is fiercely practical. They exist to help people, not impress tenure boards. Their engineers design, distribute, and maintain free magical and technological tools that:
- Heal wounds (when the spell doesn't backfire),
- Warm homes (without turning them into saunas),
- Protect them from Space Clowns (without causing earthquakes).
They believe technology should serve people — not the other way round. They're equally committed to giving communities access to tools and helping them break their dependence on automation when it's become... pathological. If a village can no longer cook soup because their AI-controlled ladle went on strike, the GNU will either fix it or teach someone to hold a spoon again.
They also provide spare parts, repairs, and emotional support circuits for the robotic members of the Calad Bar Dragonchess Club — many of whom consider the GNU their extended family and emergency reassembly team.
¶ Culture
Barking GNU engineers are often scruffy, overworked, sleep-deprived, and gloriously kind. Their headquarters is always moving (for legal reasons), often disguised as a tea shop, a laundrette, or an abstract art gallery called "This Is Definitely Not A Workshop".
They don't wear uniforms. They wear tool belts, patched robes, enchanted safety goggles, and sometimes bathrobes (if you wake them up early enough). Their official motto is:
- "Fix first. Explain later."
They maintain a strict non-profit ethos, though donations of food, hugs, and recycled spell components are always welcome.
¶ Enemies and Frenemies
- Eberron Inc. considers them an existential threat, a hotbed of intellectual theft, and a public relations nightmare wrapped in solder.
- The Arcane Collective mostly finds them quaint — annoyingly competent, but lacking academic footnotes.
- Khelda Braenna Wyrdsdottir is, officially, required to oppose them. She cannot be seen supporting anarchist tech-smugglers without drawing the ire of Eberron Inc., who might label her a "sympathetic radical" (which, in corporate language, is only slightly better than "witch").
And so, the Khelda condemns them officially, issuing statements like:
- "It is deeply regrettable that certain unsanctioned citizens continue to provide healing wands and heating charms to the poor without undergoing proper brand alignment procedures. We, of course, do not condone such charitable horrors."
Behind the scenes, she continues to look the other way, sends the occasional fruit basket, and has been known to drop anonymous legal warnings whenever Eberron Inc. gets too close to finding their mobile workshop.
¶ Not the Leader
Milo "The Good Boy" Gearwhistle is a golden retriever-shaped whirlwind of optimism, gadgetry, and fried food, serving as the Barking GNU's most beloved chaos engineer and harbourfront fry cook, where he runs "Milo's Gadget Repair and Fish 'n' Chips".
Once a promising arcano-technologist for Eberron Inc., he fled corporate rigidity in favour of Calad Bar's greasy freedom, where he now fixes robots, feeds revolutionaries, and occasionally invents things that explode less than intended.
Milo lives by the principle that every problem can be solved with love, compressed air, and duct tape, while his mortal nemesis — a bureaucratic modron — suffers from glitter-based sabotage and self-issued arrest warrants. Endlessly helpful and pathologically enthusiastic, Milo has become the city's go-to fixer for misbehaving furniture, rogue toasters, and souls in need of a snack and a soldering lesson.
