Steampunk
Steampunk is a genre of literature, movies, and RPGs made popular by (among other things) William Gibson's The Difference Engine. It usually features the following:
- Gears
- Brass and iron
- Steam
- Airships
- More gears
Some steampunk runs the more realistic, looking at things which were being developed in the 19th century and expanding on them like steam powered road vehicles and the Babbage's Analytical Engine. Others go for the blatantly fantastic with steam powered mechs, guns that shoot lightning, and colonies on Mars; this is called Gaslamp Fantasy, and mirrors the works of Jules Verne and the high-flying boys' adventure novels published before the turn of the 20th century.
The typical setting has many of the trappings of Victorian England, such as top hats, monocles, and parasols. It may also be reminiscent of the American Old West. Basically, anything between 1840 and 1900 is fair game.
Steampunk works often depict things like a society with a thin facade civility overlying the worship of science, which in turn is just a cover for the cold, ugly, and messy reality; or an aristocracy supported by technology maintained and operated by the poor. Sometimes Steampunk works are post-apocalyptic, incorporating period parody tropes used in settings like Fallout but tuned to Victorian society and ideology, or edging into Industrial Gothic ideals of inevitable ecological disaster brought about by the Industrial Revolution or the horrors of industrial warfare.
Problems
Like many things, Steampunk can be awesome if executed with care, attention to detail and the the nature of the technology and time frame that it is drawing upon. Alas, much of modern Steampunk work gets a lot of well-deserved hate for being only skin-deep, as lamented in the semi-viral music video, "Just Glue Some Gears On It (And Call It Steampunk)". Some fa/tg/uys have declared that we should dub this debris of the steampunk genre "cog fop" and move on to Dieselpunk, though there are risks of the process happening again to dieselpunk as well should it go mainstream.
This likely happened as Steampunk was formed from the top down rather than the bottom up. Science Fiction (in general terms) started in the 19th century as people began to see how science and technology were beginning to reshape the world and asked themselves "what would happen if someone found a way of using electricity to build and reanimate the dead or invented a ship that could sail around the world underwater or could fly to the moon" with their various spins based around their experiences and beliefs. Modern Fantasy has it's origin with people who studied folklore and history and used it to make their own mythologies and histories. Either way, both these ideas started with broad general concepts onto which various ideas were built. Steampunk in contrast emerged from a combination of some of that older sci-fi, but in particular the aesthetics there of. Some people were interested in making use of victorian settings, but far more were interested in the surface details of old fashioned brass machinery with overtly mechanical gears and all that, as well as fashion which looks like someone ran through the costume department for a play company that does a lot of Jane Austin and then fell into a pile of old clock parts.
This sort of stuff in fiction is important, especially in visual fiction, but as a general rule it's supposed to be their to build upon a central theme. Star Trek would still be Star Trek if the Enterprise was an art-deco rocketship but the scripts, actors and direction was all the same (if a bit wonky), but it would not be star trek if you got all the aesthetic details down as they were in the show but it's episodes were about a bunch of Imperialistic assholes who shoot innocent aliens for the Emperor. So much of steampunk was just generic adventures in a setting with some psuedo-victorian backdrops.
Steampunk and /tg/
Some RPG settings that may be considered steampunk include the following:
- Eberron (although it describes itself as "Dungeonpunk" and is based on industrialized magic rather than steam)
- Dragonmech
- Sorcery & Steam
- Inland Empire
- Echelon
- Airship Pirates
- Iron Kingdoms
- Some elements of the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game setting, notably the Mana Wastes
At least three steampunk-inspired tabletop skirmish games exist:
