Many of you who follow Nevermet Press know that we are working on a quasi fantasy steampunk setting called “Loaerth & Feywyrd” (although we prefer to think of it as coalpunk) that will be using Savage Worlds rules. It’s a slow process, but finding the right sources of inspiration can sometimes be half the fun. So, since I’m fascinated by the steampunk genre in general, as I believe are many of the content developers here at NMP, this post is going to be exactly that: where do you go for inspiration for developing a Steampunk game? How do you balance a gritty, 19th century feel with the pulpy, glasssteel of pulp fantasy “dieselpunk“?
Well, I may not have a clear answer – but I’ll explore the topics here – and I should also add that the door is open too, just leave a comment below.
It’s the Inside that Matters
Steampunk can be a tricky fish. It’s been around for at least 20 or 30 years, but I still don’t think anyone has it nailed it down yet. As soon as you ask anyone who is into it, “What’s steampunk to you?“, you’ll get a dozen different answers. For some, I think it’s a cultural thing: the period art, the language, the mood, political intrigue, the plot lines, etc. For most though, its an aesthetics thing: Take steel, steam, gears, big hats, goggles (a must) and brass and then make 20th or even 21st century technologies out of it. Simple right? Not really.
Personally, for me its somewhere in the middle. A purely aesthetic approach to Loaerth & Feywyrd would leave us with a wonderful outer shell, something to gaze at, but its insides would be empty. This is a game, right? So we need to make sure we pay attention to its mechanics as much as we do it’s exterior flavor and imagery. This makes finding inspiration challenging because you can’t just use Google Image Search and expect to find yourself with an armful of compelling stories (although you may end up with some great Halloween ideas with that approach). Finding inspiration for a new campaign setting, in any genre, requires work. That’s lots of reading, watching, and digging (read: research).
The Artist Not The Art
Now, before I go off on some tangent about the inner beauty of steampunk culture, the visual aspects of the genre should be given some respect. I mean, personally, the whole genre is evocative of change, revolution, rebellion. It’s like the GenX answer to high-brow ArtPunk. And yes, you can get some great imagery just by hitting up Google Image Search to see what I mean. But with a good list – you can skip the crap and go straight to the good stuff.
"Requiem for Industry" by Kazuhiko Nakamur
Take Alamcan’s online gallery for example. This amazing Japanese illustrator has been using 19th century mechanical design as a subject of study for a long time. His artwork is simply gorgeous – and the visuals stick to the same steampunk theme of the juxtaposition of three elements: humanity, machines, and Victorian complexity. His images are scattered all over the net, and for good reason — they’re awesome.
The point here is to spend to some time looking for artists – not artwork. Google only spews out the chewed up bits that go into its serchmorgaficonotron, but from those bits you can home in on artwork from good – no AMAZING – artists that may never otherwise show up in your latest PFRPG or D&D rulebook. Like Sam Van Olffan, Myke Amend, or Marcin Jakubowski (wow!).
A Couple Movies To Check Out
Aside from trolling the web for artists – there’s also a minor number of films and animated movies that you could check out. For Loaerth & Feywyrd – given the strong fantasy component being injected into the steampunk setting – there isn’t much to draw from directly, but a few films have stood out and been an influence.
The Monowheel Bike featured in Steamboy
First, there’s Katsuhiro Ôtomo’s Steamboy . I won’t go into the details of the plot here (it’s quite good, and there’s an excellent write up over on Wikipedia, but what I will say is that this is not just a movie showcasing steampunk visuals. Sure, there are cool rotobikes, and jetpacks and all kinds of 19th Century Industrial Style gadgets; but the story’s the thing here. The story breathes steampunk flavor and 19th century culture – the fear of the common people towards the new technology, the madness of the scientists who work closely with it, and the battle between different forces to control it. You can get Steamboy on NetFlix too – so, if you’re thinking about running a steampunk campaign, or looking for inspiration for a campaign setting you’re developing, you owe it to yourself to get it. You won’t be disappointed.
The City of Lost Childre
Google of course can help you find a couple movies to get your steampunk blood flowing, but I’ll offer up at at least one more “must see” flic that tops my list: The City of Lost Children (1995). It’s a French (English subtitles) film that has exquisite sets reminding me of an even darker, Victorian Brazil. The basic plot involves a mad scientist who is stealing the dreams of children – the main protagonist being one of them of course. It’s a truly wonderful film, and steampunk aside, well worth watching.
Fortunately for us – there’s a bunch of great blogs out there dedicated to steampunk, and a few of them have put up there own lists of top movies for the genre. While I don’t agree with all of the choices (i.e. Helboy is not steampunk IMHO), there’s a growing list of great movies over on the BrassGoggles forums here: Steampunk Movie List.
READ A BOOK!
Now of course this brief overview wouldn’t be complete without a couple of book suggestions. Not everyone is into trolling online art galleries or spending hours on the couch watching movies. Some of us would rather find the inspiration the old fashioned way: reading it in a book. As far as books are concerned, my #1 top source for inspiration for Loaerth & Feywyrd has come from reading the short stories found in The VanderMeers’ Steampunk, an anthology of about a dozen or so short stories that covers the entire genre. The opening story, in particular, is amazing. The other books, Boneshaker is one I’ve heard is good – but have yet to read it. Perhaps I’ll stop over at my local library and pick it up.
Gaming with Steampunk
Deadlands Reloaded Kicks Ass
And of course, there’s already several great roleplaying games out there that are set in steampunk worlds, to varying degrees. If you play D&D, you can jump into the “film-noir” setting of Eberron. This game first came out in 3E D&D, and has since been updated for 4th Edition. Great setting with a very rich and detailed backstory – L&F can only hope to be one day as deeply developed.
My own personal steampunk gaming experience has been mostly with Savage Worlds’ Deadlands Reloaded, a “weird west” style game with strong steampunk and horror elements. I can’t recommend DLR enough – it rocks! Although L&F doesn’t have any wild-west flavor, DLR has still been no less of an inspiration for development and translation of steampunk, mad science “fluff” into usable and fun game mechanics. To prep for my DLR game, I also watched Will Smith in Wild Wild West again – the similarities are just too much to ignore, even if the movie was terrible.
Another setting which I’m rather enamored with – but can’t seem to find a group to play – is Wolfgang Baur’s Tales of Zobeck. This setting, much like Eberron, mixes steampunk (although it’s spun as “clockwork“) and fantasy elements together extremely well. An example of this mixing of genre’s can be seen often on Kobold Quarterly’s blog. One of the things I really enjoy about Zobeck is that it Mr. Baur has for years maintained a laser-like focus on the city-state of Zobeck. What lies beyond the borders of Zobeck was open to development – meaning that DM’s could start with what was presented and build out from there without “breaking” any of the internal consistencies of the world. This is one thing I’ve hated for a long time about Forgotten Realms – it’s so detailed that it’s almost a given that your campaign is not going to fit perfectly in. With Zobeck, I expect that would not be the case.
Iron Kingdo
And finally there’s the out-of-print Iron Kingdoms game, which I didn’t even know about until after I first discussed Loaerth & Feywyrd with artist Rob Torno . He referred me to it – and since then I’ve been watching ebay for months for a version of the book that is not over $100. Apparently this game was so amazing, and the production values so high, it’s worth more now than it was when it was in print. I’m dying to get it to play. Have you played it? Let me know your experiences – my interest is peaked!
Summary
Well that’s about it – I don’t know what I was trying to accomplish in this post. If anything it was to go through all the various sources I’m going back to for inspiration regarding Loaerth & Feywyrd. I would be remiss not to mention that, although steampunk plays a big part of the setting, there’s also a very strong fantasy element that comes out of Arthurian and Celtic mythos. Perhaps that’s a topic for another post.
If I’ve missed something, or there’s some other source for Steampunk that I _must_ see – please drop a comment below and let us know! In the meantime, thanks for reading and stay tuned for more L&F as it develops.
Game On!
I have all of the Iron Kingdom books, and have successfully run it using Savage Worlds.
You can get PDF copies of all the books from Paizo, and other online places. They are creating their own rules system for the setting, and will re-release the RPG using their own system sometime in the future. This is probably a ways off yet.
I own all the Privateer Press books for the IK and have run games in the setting. They always turn out well. You should know that even though the books are out of print, the pdf’s are for sale on RPGNow.com from Privateer Press. That includes the awesome world book. The player’s guide is great, but their fluff only world book is one of the pride’s of my gaming library. Overall I love the setting and the feel of the world, and it is one of the few published settings that I run that has a working religious structure that I actually feel works.
Good Article. I’m looking forward to working up some art in this coalpunk setting and contributing to the look and feel of L&F. Another growing resource for steampunk-style visuals is the video game industry. In particular Bioshock’s undersea city of Rapture comes to mind. While it pushes things into the early 20th century, it definitely has that steampunk quality. The forthcoming game, Bioshock: Infinite, takes that genre above ground http://www.gametrailers.com/video/debut-trailer-bioshock-infinite/702794.
Sweet! I’ll definately have to check out the Bioshock game (if only I could find the time to play it…) – and Rob you know I’ll be hitting you up for some art once we get closer to that project’s runway.
@Steve / Alex — WELCOME to NMP! I may be wrong, but this is your first comment here. I knew that IK was available via PDF (forgot to mention that in the article; I’ll do a post edit in a minute) – but whenever I’m “new” to a game I always prefer to have the deadtree version (at least until I get an ipad maybe). In anycase, there happens to be a couple IK pieces on ebay right now I’m bidding on, so maybe I’ll get lucky this time and get them for under a $100 each. LOL!
– btw — I started a thread over at our new NMP forums about Steam Punk resources online, if you guys can think anything that should be included in that list, please post them over there. Here’s the link.
I’ve seen most of the books on Amazon for well under $100. $54 for a used copy of the Character Guild and $75 for the World Guild. I haven’t got a copy of the W.G. yet and it is starting to look pretty tempting even at starving artists wage. If you enjoy Monster Manuals you should check out both volumes of their Monsternomican. They are the best monster manuals out there for any roleplaying game IMO. Well put together, tons of information and fluff, great b&w illustrations and so many story hooks for each entry. I can’t recomend them enough and they are much cheaper then the Guildbooks. If your alright with the 3.0 version of the first you can get it for $10 right now. You won’t regret it.
I think there’s a tendency to ignore the darker side of steampunk – while there’s a lot of dashing idealism, there’s a bleak side to the genre.
Charles Stross has recently written an awesome rant on the state of steampunk and the comments in that post are made of win.
thanks Satyre! stumbled that post you linked. good stuff; still reading through the comments (jeez!).
I think there’s something at the following LOC pages.
Lewis Hine was a key imagists from that period. He made the documents that helped bring about the Child Labor Law Act.
THe coal mines, et al. Maybe I ought to send you a photo of my still functioning, coal boiler that was converted to oil in the 50′s.
http://www.loc.gov/pictures/search/?q=lewis%20hine%20mine
And ALL things coal in their digitized library:
http://www.loc.gov/pictures/search/?q=coal+&fa=displayed%3Aanywhere&sp=1
And steam:
http://www.loc.gov/pictures/search/?q=steam+engine+&fa=displayed%3Aanywhere&sp=1
I love the term coalpunk. I will so want to write something using that implicit setting.
I had found an online article about the coal cities in India. Here is a link to the WSJ article.
http://blogs.wsj.com/photojournal/2010/04/01/living-amid-the-fires/
I find these images to be powerful and they are great inspiration for the gritty feel of steampunk, which might translate over into the coal punk.
Awesome! Thanks for the link and welcome to NMP! Well — considering the contest we are having this month for Loaerth & Feywyrd, we’d love to have your input!
I look forward to read more about Loaerth & Feywyrd. I am interested in new steampunk offerings.
I was recently at the Pure Speculation Festival in Edmonton and was able to meet Mike Perschon. He is currently working on his thesis on steampunk. I’ve followed (stalked?) Mike online for a while now and I highly recommend his site Steam Scholar (http://steampunkscholar.blogspot.com/) as a great resource.
There are several things I am looking forward to reading about. Like how the Loaerth & Feywyrd lore will interweave the neovictorian with the fantasy races. How mixing technology and magic will work – or won’t work.
I think I am most excited about how you will use steampunk to reinforce certain fantasy tropes while using it to break others.
I look forward to reading more about Loaerth & Feywyrd!
Inspiration is always where you find it. It never has a 1:1 ratio. It follows it’s own damn patterns. It’s a spiral, with you and your work in the centre.
As far as the sources go, the one thing you can count on is a common vocabulary. With all that you have mentioned above, the readers of your setting can get a glimmer of where you are coming from. Then it’s just a simple case of compare/contrast.
Something Punk? Man, this is getting more and more hairy as the days pass. Clockpunk, coalpunk, dieselpunk? How about the Technocarchanic Revoloution?
I describe my novel-in-progress as Elfpunk Planetary Romance to a few strangers recently, and got dropped jaws in response. They couldn’t wait to find out what that meant.
Neither can I. And I look forward to your effort.
I am a fan of Steampunk settings. I happen to have the Iron Kingdoms Player’s Guide in print (not to mention much of the system in PDF). Of course, you seem to have missed in your references both D20 Steampunk and the old Space 1889 game (no magic in that, but Steampunk definitely).
@Alan – excellent point – I did over look them. My exposure to steampunk is best described as “accidental”. Having only recently discovered the genre a few years ago – I’m constantly reminded by steampunk aficionados about this or that. D20 – do you mean Mongoose’s book from ’04? I haven’t seen it (it’s $300 on Amazon…)
L&F is definitely going to go for more of a gritty, wierd, far out fantasy angle than stock Sherlock Holmes’esque Steampunk. Hopefully people will find it worth playing. =D
Yes, “OGL Steampunk” from Mongoose Press, I have that too. If you can find a copy in PDF or whatever form, you should read it. Also the Amazing Engine System’s “For Faerie, Queen, and Country”, and “Castle Falkenstein” from R. Talsorian Games. All good Streampunk settings with magic.
There was also, if I recall, a setting called Etherscope, which was steampunk occult.
My main question is how the magic and technology of the setting interact. In OGL Steampunk, Magic and technology are pretty much at odds (BTW, ever tried the Arcanum computer game?). In Iron Kingdoms, magic and technology are intigrated. In Etherscope and Eberron, much of technology is based on magic.
It’s going to be a bit of both… lol. Magic came first – then it and all the Fey were banished from the Known World, magic blinks out essentially, then coalcraft developed in its absence, then the Veil which separates the two worlds is pierced and magic begins flowing back into the world from the Feywyrd again – along with a huge influx of the Fey. We’re going to post a “Timeline of Loaerth & Feywyrd” here on the blog later this week to put all this in context — but that’s basically the gist of it.
Well, I do have the Savage Worlds rules in my collection, I will have to think it over and decide how I would do things in the system. It was not really my favorite system, but it does have its points.