Do you think there are any worthy Steampunk (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steampunk) role-playing games and settings out there?
Which ones?
What does make a Steampunk RPG worth it, in your opinion? What should it be about? What feel should it convey? Is it all a matter of aesthetics of the game, or is there something more to it? What?
Let's talk about Steampunk in RPGs.
I love steam. Punk, not so much.
My very most favoritest alternative Victoriana (that's what I like to call it) is Space:1889. I like to play it pretty straight out of the box. It's a sci-fi exaggeration of the colonial period, adding space as a frontier for colonies. I love to extrapolate what might be different about that world, but I also like to be conservative and imagine what would be the same.
I love the machinery--the trains and vessels and whatnot. I love steam travel, and I love to imagine living within the stricter social mores of the time.
My next favorite is Castle Falkenstein. It's a little loopier, adding faeries and magic in with the other stuff. That's OK. I play it with the same conservative extrapolation and go perhaps even tighter on the Victorian worldview to balance out the strangeness.
I like Wooden Suits and Iron Men for the same reason I like Space:1889. I love the machines. There's no space travel here, but there are giant steam-powered wooden robots, and they're pretty sweet. I had to jack around with the rules to make them playable, but I've hit on some rules that make steambot combat fun for everyone in the rpg, rather than switching to BattleTech boardgame mode when it's fight time. It's been worth it. It's closest to actual Victorian times and the most conservative in my view.
I like Terra Incognita, Age of Empire, Victoriana, Faerie, Queen and Country, Cthulhu Gaslight--all for about the same reasons I like the games above.
I don't like Etherscope. It's a perfectly good game, but it's really mostly cyberpunk, involving the internet and other punky things I don't like. I really don't like Unhallowed Metropolis. It's full punk, with just a token nod to steam. Again--I don't think it's an awful game--it's just way over on the end of the spectrum that doesn't grab me. I hate zombies.They creep me out.
The larping and cosplay are cool for their imagination and ingenuity, but no way would anyone in any Wooden Suits and Iron Men game would ever dress like that. That stuff tends to be pretty punk, too. In fact, I think the fashion movement inspired Unhallowed Metropolis more than the anachronism or what have you.
It does sound like you are indeed a lot more fan of Victoriana than Steampunk, but that's alright. It's all part of the topic, since classifications are not as clearly cut as one would believe.
Quote from: stu2000;325902I don't like Etherscope. It's a perfectly good game, but it's really mostly cyberpunk, involving the internet and other punky things I don't like. I really don't like Unhallowed Metropolis. It's full punk, with just a token nod to steam. Again--I don't think it's an awful game--it's just way over on the end of the spectrum that doesn't grab me. I hate zombies.They creep me out.
I really like Etherscope, but I totally see where you're coming from, here. It sure takes the "punk" in Steampunk to the next level, with a blend of Cyberpunk and SF approaches (with eugenics , for instance) blended to Victorian alternate history. I find it original, playable, brilliant overall, but it's not for everyone, for sure.
Castle Falkenstein is one of my favourite games, although I tend to run it a lot more like a cross between A Midsummer Night's Dream and and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen than the default setting.
I am also a big fan of Cthulu by Gaslight, although that is a lot less Steampunk and more pure Victoriana.
One thing I may try out is Rippers, although I think I would have to modify quite a lot. At the moment it comes across as a far to close the fucking awful Van Helsing film for my liking.
My favorite steampunk isn't steam punk at all, it's just anachronistic fantasy technology. I love the dwarf/gnome/goblin tech in WoW, it's big and clunky and bulky and makes all manner of awful noise and everything breaks or blows up or catches fire. It's awesome.
I really enjoyed Iron Kingdoms - easily my favorite setting from the 3e years with Midnight as second. IK / Warmachine is an interesting setting and the Warjacks (steam bots) and the combo of guns/magic were cool. If I ran it, I'd do it in Savage Worlds and use a bunch of Mage Knight minis.
Iron Kingdoms is pretty swell.
Though I'll admit that I have to plug my own work in this thread: I wrote a book (http://www.rpgnow.com/product_info.php?products_id=55315) for the d20 System for technology, with the intended feel being steampunk-ish.
I'm a big fan of Castle Falkenstein, although I'm not quite as big a fan of the system as I am of the setting.
I like Etherscope, but I agree with Stu2000 about it's approach.
I never cared much for Victoriana.
Anyone have a link for Wooden Suits and Iron Men?
Seanchai
The OGL Steampunk book is quite good. I recommend giving it a look.
I like UnMet, if that can be considered steampunk.
Quote from: Seanchai;326074Anyone have a link for Wooden Suits and Iron Men?
All I could find is the P&P RPG entry.
http://www.pen-paper.net/rpgdb.php?op=showbook&bookid=1398
Here's an ebay auction going on:
http://cgi.ebay.com/Wooden-Suits-Iron-Men-First-WorldBook-for-DUEL-Syste_W0QQitemZ400066112268QQcmdZViewItemQQptZLH_DefaultDomain_0?hash=item5d25cc6b0c&_trksid=p3286.c0.m14
I'm not sure if I recommend it as a product, as is. I loved Duel when it came out. It seemed like a $7 paper-pamphlet generic rpg idea, kind of what I wanted GURPS lite to be. It's flawed, but I liked it. The way it was designed seemed very intuitive to me, so I could fairly effortlessly fill in the holes for logical rulings on the fly. My friends liked the low-cost, undergroundish feel of it. It suited our needs with multiple jobs, wives, tiny little children. It was our just pick it up and play game.
I picked up WS/IM because it was alternate Victoriana--in 1993 there was less glut of that genre than there is now--and because it was a sourcebook for these Duel rules I liked so much. However, immediately upon reading it and trying to build a steambot, it was apparent that this had been originally designed as a fun little rules lite Victorian BattleTech. It didn't mesh well with Duel. I felt like it had been a separate game, welded sloppily onto Duel.
It was a great idea, though, so I bolted on spare parts from BattleTech and filed down the seam. I was happy with that for a while. When I got a regular little group together, they had the predictable problem of the non-pilot characters being bored while the pilots played BattleTech in the middle of the game. I didn't like that either, in that context, so I redid my bolt-on rules using ideas from one of the versions of Star Trek (I don't know which one, I'm a Prime Directive guy) where all the crew of the steambot have unique responsibilities during mech combat. It makes it even more of a boardgame during combat, but everyone is involved and it has seemed fun every time we've played it.
Crunchy Frog made Duel in the 90s, but changed it to Paradigm Shift. All they really did was double the die values so d10s became d20s and d5s became d10s. They said people didn't like d5s. I like them just fine. My Zocchi d5s will outlive us all. So I never switched. So I think Duel is gone. Which really shouldn't be that much of a hardship if you wanted WS/IM, because it wasn't that great a fit anyway.
But WS/IM was simply a $7 pamphlet, as was Duel. It has rules--lets call them ideas--for building Steambots, and some sketchy background of their alternate Victorian time. But that's about the whole book. I wonder if you wouldn't be better off using mech or gadget rules from your favorite system. WS/IM works for me because I like the original rules and I've tinkered with it for 16 years. Really, though, if you just think to yourself "Victorian Mechwarrior" you have about everything there in terms of game concept.
The new Wild Talents supplement, The Kerberos Club, is actually tickling my steampunk fancy more than anything else has so far. It's Victoriana really, but the superheroes lift it into the weird science realm and it's darker than much of the sanitized steampunk that's out there.
Quote from: Tetsubo;326089The OGL Steampunk book is quite good. I recommend giving it a look.
You are talking about this OGL Steampunk product (http://rpg.drivethrustuff.com/product_info.php?products_id=2177&it=1), correct?
Do you need d20 Past to make this book work, or is it a stand-alone product?
I don't know anything about it.
Quote from: J Arcane;325918My favorite steampunk isn't steam punk at all, it's just anachronistic fantasy technology. I love the dwarf/gnome/goblin tech in WoW, it's big and clunky and bulky and makes all manner of awful noise and everything breaks or blows up or catches fire. It's awesome.
I like the gnomes of 3rd ed Forgotten Realms that way. Like the isles of Lantan, the Cult of Gond, and all these sorts of things. Wasn't it Faiths & Pantheons that had a Gear Priest prestige class, or something to that extent?
Quote from: Benoist;326196You are talking about this OGL Steampunk product (http://rpg.drivethrustuff.com/product_info.php?products_id=2177&it=1), correct?
Do you need d20 Past to make this book work, or is it a stand-alone product?
I don't know anything about it.
You don't need d20 Past. At all, really. That was about a useless product. But you surely don't need it for ogl Steampunk. I like it well enough. I've used it as the basis for a sword and planet game using Adamant's Mars. I can't comment too much, because I'm not a huge d20 fan, and I don't know how well the book fits in with others or how it rates in the cornucopia of d20 products. But you don't need other books to play it. It's standalone.
Quote from: Benoist;326196You are talking about this OGL Steampunk product (http://rpg.drivethrustuff.com/product_info.php?products_id=2177&it=1), correct?
Do you need d20 Past to make this book work, or is it a stand-alone product?
I don't know anything about it.
It's a stand alone product. I really liked the races and how they captured a 19th century 'imperial' feel with the classes. You can play 'animal men', constructs (flesh, wood or metal), ghosts, vampires, dwarves or humans. The classes are sort of generic adventurers with different life path options. They also have a neat 'spiritualist' feel to psionics and magic. The flavor fiction is also quite good. I really enjoyed just reading the book.
Cool. Thanks, Stu2000, Tetsubo. :)
We did mention Space 1889 on this thread, but didn't mention that it is going to resurface on LGS shelves with a Savage Worlds iteration pretty soon. Anybody knows anything about it?