How Much Do You Care About Novelty?

[Paul Farquhar]

They’re not oversaturated like medieval fantasy is.

It’s players who are stuck in medieval fantasy mode, not the games. D&D hasn’t been that for decades.

 

[VelvetViolet]

It’s players who are stuck in medieval fantasy mode, not the games. D&D hasn’t been that for decades.

Yes it has. In the 90s TSR was happy to throw money at more novel settings like Dark Sun, Spelljammer and Planescape. Then WotC canceled everything except Forgotten Realms.

I prefer TSR’s Alternity. Unfortunately WotC canceled it and took the PDFs off drivethrurpg.

I hate the hobby because of stunts like this. Creator makes fun novel setting, then it gets canceled and locked in copyright jail. It happens all the time and I am sick of it.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

Then WotC canceled everything except Forgotten Realms.

A) Forgotten Realms isn’t remotely medieval.

B) It’s not remotely true. There is another Eberron book this year for a start.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

While there is certainly dystopian steampunk fiction, I don’t thinks dystopian tropes are a defining characteristic of the genre.

They literally are, though.

That's why it's called steamPUNK.

That's the core of the old conflict about what should be called "steampunk". If there's no dystopia and no resistance to that dystopia, and there's no punk element, and you haven't got steampunk. You've just got some kind of romanticized Victoriana alt-history. But the aesthetic became more dominant than the actual meaning of the trope - that happened by the end of the 1990s, so "steampunk" is still usually used to describe romanticized Victoriana and HG Wells-esque retrofutures that as @Umbran says would be better described as "gaslamp fantasy" or just as Victoriana.

And while the Victorian era certainly had its share of misery to go around, categorizing it as dystopian may stretch the definition of a tad.

I'm sorry but absolutely not.

It's not at all a stretch to suggest that or categorize it that way in the UK, which is where the majority of this stuff was set. Maybe in some newly-built city in the US or Canada or on the frontier or whatever you can easily dismiss dystopia (particularly as the US also had a shiny new political system, not the decrepit and failing one the UK had - the US also had a lot lower "oligarch count"). But in, say, London in the UK? Absolutely much of the Victorian era was easily dystopian, truly horrifying, in every way that mattered. And, to be clear - worse than the immediately preceding period in many places.

There’s nothing inherent in a Victorian setting that requires the hero to struggle against the worst excesses of the era.

Maybe not but it seems utterly horrific to me to set a game in Victorian England (or similar) and expect the players to just ignore the extreme horrors of that setting and enjoy being jolly gentlemen (and anachronistic jolly ladies) in top hats as their society basically throws starving children into machinery for profit. As living standards for much of the population absolutely nosedive solely for the sake of the mighty pound. Only because in reality, people did resist, did push back, did things improve.

Personally I just refuse to play in games that are set horrifying societies but where the GM wants us to be advantaged members of that society yet to not actually do anything about what's wrong with that society.

 

[VelvetViolet]

That's the core of the old conflict about what should be called "steampunk". If there's no dystopia and no resistance to that dystopia, and there's no punk element, and you haven't got steampunk. You've just got some kind of romanticized Victoriana alt-history. But the aesthetic became more dominant than the actual meaning of the trope - that happened by the end of the 1990s, so "steampunk" is still usually used to describe romanticized Victoriana and HG Wells-esque retrofutures that as @Umbran says would be better described as "gaslamp fantasy" or just as Victoriana.

My suggestion is to use the suffix -tech instead of -punk. Cybertech, steamtech, etc. whenever you’re talking about an aesthetic genre that isn’t about punks fighting The Man™ in a dystopia.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

That's why it's called steamPUNK.

It’s called “punk” because cyberpunk. Cyberpunk was called that because it was dystopian, but the things that follow the same naming convention, such as Hopepunk and Solarpunk are decidedly not.

It’s like calling all scandals something-gate. The meaning of “gate” is completely lost.

I had a friend who was a Steampunk. It just meant they liked to dress up in a top hat with a clock attachment, it had nothing to do with dystopianism.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

Wells and Verne are not steampunk in the same reason Parthenon is not neoclassicism.

No. "Retrofuturism" is "what the past thought the future would be".

Steampunk would be more appropriately classified as alt-history, except for how it rarely cares about the historical aspect except for the aesthetics and Jack the Ripper.

Scifi is about futuristic technologies, regardless of whether nominal era it is set would be the present or the future. Steampunk is about the reimagined past, inspired by vision of the future by people of that past era.

Wikipedia seems to agree with me:

"Steampunk is a subgenre of science fiction that incorporates retrofuturistic technology and aesthetics inspired by, but not limited to, 19th-century industrial steam-powered machinery."

Wells and Verne are not steampunk in the same reason Parthenon is not neoclassicism.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

It’s called “punk” because cyberpunk. Cyberpunk was called that because it was dystopian, but the things that follow the same naming convention, such as Hopepunk and Solarpunk are decidedly not.

Sorry but no.

That's just flatly incorrect. It was absolutely a dystopian genre in the 1980s and very early 1990s. Then it started being used in two other ways:

1) To describe Victorian or early 20th century retrofutures, like HG Wells.

2) To describe straight up Victorian alt-history, which was often psychotically romanticized, and which was mostly interested in aesthetics.

It’s like calling all scandals something-gate. The meaning of “gate” is completely lost.

That's revisionist linguistic history of the most unhelpful kind, that's usually only seen from confused teens and twenty-somethings (like the guy who I saw insisting "CRPG" meant "classic RPG" and always had), specifically, that's rewriting the past because of usage in the future.

Hopepunk and solarpunk I agree it's largely the same as -gate (though there is an element of rebellion, it's mostly against present-day society, not a dystopian future society though note the very first usage of "solarpunk" was absolutely about a dystopian society and a scary far future, and it's since been appropriated for more hopeful stuff), but that absolutely was not the case with steampunk and claiming it is, is easily disproven if you just go back and read discussions of the term in that era (if you can dig them up). It had similar elements of dystopia and rebellious antagonists and so on to cyberpunk, and when people started using it to just mean "Victoriana" or "retrofuture", people were annoyed. Particularly a problem was the romanticization of the era, which was, in many places, a deeply horrifying era, and frequent lionization of figures from that era, many of whom were awful people, which ran directly against the -punk element. Didn't help that the aesthetics tended to focus tightly on how elites dressed, not Victorians in general.

 

[Reynard]

As an aside: I think "Arcane" (the animated series) is a really great example of Aetherpunk (and leans into the punk part). Are there any good aetherpunk RPGs/settings that also hold onto the true meaning of -punk?

 

[Paul Farquhar]

It had similar elements of dystopia and rebellious antagonists and so on to cyberpunk, and when people started using it to just mean "Victoriana" or "retrofuture", people were annoyed.

Sure, you always get purist fanbois with their gatekeeping and one-true-wayism. But the fact is most people just liked mixing up Victorian costumes with cogs and gears.

Which was true for the original punks too. There were some anti-establishment types, but some just liked the fashion and thought they looked cool with spiky green hair.