The King's Cup

Cardinal Operative Navigation and Robotics of Adaptive Design, or C.O.N.R.A.D (CONRAD) is the name of a factory that resembles a Coliseum that wanders the lands of Magna Grah of its own accord. The purpose of this behemoth is to entice fighters to enter is training grounds and fight its roster of ever-changing robotic warriors so it may learn all the ways to which things fight, and create the perfect warrior.

CONRAD was created by Zagavorian inventor Doctor Harlow Immish 400 years ago. Dr Immish is the father of much of the technology that Zagavor thrives on to this day, but none are more impressive than CONRAD. Dr Immish’s greatest quest was to create a perfect machine, a robot of his design that would perform tasks with impunity and learn from mistakes, just as humans and fae do. However, he was never able to give these machines enough time and data to have them rise above simple complications, and so he needed a solution for self-improvement that would outlast even him.

CONRAD was this solution. It started as a simple factory that could manufacture these machines endlessly, but soon production outpaced improvement, and the Doctor was left with nothing but piles of defective robots. After years and years, he created a system that could function to his liking, but the factory’s location still meant he had to source information for it. The final result was a factory he had built in a field that when turned online, stood up. CONRAD was born, a factory that would seek out its own input, and from that information create obstacles for more input to challenge.

Dr Immish’s idea of the perfect machine was not one of supreme power but measured flaws, and so CONRAD’s processes for production would inject erroneous mistakes into the designs so that the machines it created to learn as organically as possible, and those that perished could improve again. HIs model for this system was as close to biological evolution as he could muster.

When the Ultras took the presidency, they slightly modified the purpose of CONRAD, which now had been operating and wandering the land for millennia. While they could not override all of Dr Immish’s work, they focussed on CONRAD’s objective to be to create fighters over workers or survivors. The 10th centennial King’s Cup is the first time that the wandering factory has been entered as a contestant, and serves as a field test for the Ultra’s sordid experiments.