How Much Do You Care About Novelty?

[Campbell]

How was Apocalypse Keys? I'm thinking of running it but I'm also concerned with PC power-levels. In your experience, were the PCs "forces of nature" or more like the Avengers?

It's a lot closer to forces of nature, especially once Ruin moves come into play. The Omens are often as much of a threat to themselves and each other as the threats they are facing. It feels pretty close to Golden Army Hellboy in power level and theme.

My group adored it. They loved how the social mechanics in the game were a lot more stick than carrot and really got into the temptation that Ruin moves present. It's my favorite game to run personally. I'm really looking forward to running it again. The scenarios are some of my favorite tabletop scenarios because they define just enough to get things going and build in some nice stakes to things.

 

[Autumnal]

In the 1800s Walter Scott was huge. From writing novels that massively romanticised the past.

Mark Twain thought that Scott played a significant part in preparing the South for secession and civil war by making utterly groundless romantic fantasies of the past so popular. He was not no obviously wrong about that. And whether he was wrong or not, it’s certainly true that Americans have been avid players at the global game of building false pasts all along.

 

[Theory of Games]

It's a lot closer to forces of nature, especially once Ruin moves come into play. The Omens are often as much of a threat to themselves and each other as the threats they are facing. It feels pretty close to Golden Army Hellboy in power level and theme.

My group adored it. They loved how the social mechanics in the game were a lot more stick than carrot and really got into the temptation that Ruin moves present. It's my favorite game to run personally. I'm really looking forward to running it again. The scenarios are some of my favorite tabletop scenarios because they define just enough to get things going and build in some nice stakes to things.

I've seen something in the concept that felt fairly unique as a play experience. Thank you for your insights

 

[Ruin Explorer]

I think you are making a false link between people saying “we hate sex”, whist at it like rabbits, and being ridiculed for it; and different people saying “we like wearing wing collars and top hats”, and being ridiculed for it.

I just don't think it's false, because we've seen what happens when people romanticize something creepy for decades. At first they're joking, and they maybe acknowledge that time was messed up. Then they start equivocating and picking out individual things which they think were better. Then the move on to actually asserting things were better. It's by no means remotely inevitable, but if you engage the kind of romanticization that refuses to acknowledge the horrors of previous eras, it's drastically more likely.

Especially in the era of TikTok and tradwives and so on. All I'm suggesting is that anything that's going to do Victoriana stuff in whitewashy kind of way, which includes steampunk and Wellsian retrofutures, should have some kind of acknowledgement that, actually, thinks were pretty messed up (to put it mildly). And I'd personally really prefer it if they stuck to fantasy versions if they're going to whitewash.

These days there are people romanticising the 1940s for goodness sake!

It's pretty goddamn wild. My grandparents would have slapped them for this sort of nonsense!

 

[aramis erak]

With respect. Wells was commenting on his present, using allegory set in the future.

For steampunk, it's nigh-dystopian aspects are similarly commentary on the present in which they are written, not predictions of the future.

Steampunk and cyberpunk seem only slightly off the mark about societal ills.

But the Steampunk aesthetic was part of sci fi well before being labled such.

The point where steampunk really seems to come forward as a public genre is when Space: 1889 took off. that was about 1987. But the aesthetic elements of steam powered sci-fi never leave sci-fi entirely until the 90's. Goggles, oversized wrenches, pipes everywhere... it even infiltrates Star Wars prop design. (Adam Savage has noted this.)

Wild Wild West (TV) was clearly fantastical alt-history, and in retrospect, is pretty much the leading edge of Steampunk as a retro-alt-history movement, before the name was coined.

Wild Wild West (Movie) was doubling down on the steampunk elements. Making Captain West black was, well... a nifty subversion vs history. Few black men made law enforcement in the era of SteamPunk (1870-1920, really). Fewer still survived it. Wil Smith nailed the attitude...

So while the term is clearly from the 80's, it was labelling an existing pattern.

 

[aramis erak]

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:

It's how the terms are used in the US. Yet another case where US and UK English are in fact different understandings of the same words.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

It's how the terms are used in the US. Yet another case where US and UK English are in fact different understandings of the same words.

All those terms are US terms, and I'm talking about the usage in the US in the 1980s and early 1990s.

Nowadays they're absolutely used in the -gate sense described.

 

[Umbran]

But the Steampunk aesthetic was part of sci fi well before being labled such.

It existed, sure. But it wasn't terribly common. That's generally how naming works: when a thing starts being common enough that you want to refer to it collectively, someone will name it and that name will stick. Before that, it isn't common enough to need a name.

The point where steampunk really seems to come forward as a public genre is when Space: 1889 took off. that was about 1987.

Space: 1889 was initially published in 1989, and it didn't "take off". It was cancelled by GDW in 1990 because it was a commercial failure. Sorry.

Steampunk "came forward as a public genre" with The Difference Engine, which was published in 1990. And how that happened is easy to see:

William Gibson had written Neuromancer in 1984, Burning Chrome and Count Zero in 1986, and Mona Lisa Overdrive in 1988, cementing himself in the cyberpunk genre across the decade.

Bruce Sterling meanwhile had edited Mirrorshades in 1986, and published Islands in the Net in 1988.

And the next thing these guys do, at the height of popularity? The Difference Engine. These guys took all the cachet of cyberpunk of the 1980s, and use it turn everyone's eyes onto the age of steam with a really awesome book. No wonder it took off.

 

[aramis erak]

Nah the Alternity version, which was apparently the 5th edition of Gamma World.

It existed, sure. But it wasn't terribly common. That's generally how naming works: when a thing starts being common enough that you want to refer to it collectively, someone will name it and that name will stick. Before that, it isn't common enough to need a name.



Space: 1889 was initially published in 1989, and it didn't "take off". It was cancelled by GDW in 1990 because it was a commercial failure. Sorry.

Canceled after a dozen additional items, and made a profit, per Marc and Frank.
The guys who sold it. And it's seen 3 different reprints since. Plus ports to 3 other game systems released commercially.

THATS No failure.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

I just don't think it's false, because we've seen what happens when people romanticize something creepy for decades. At first they're joking, and they maybe acknowledge that time was messed up. Then they start equivocating and picking out individual things which they think were better. Then the move on to actually asserting things were better. It's by no means remotely inevitable, but if you engage the kind of romanticization that refuses to acknowledge the horrors of previous eras, it's drastically more likely.

Especially in the era of TikTok and tradwives and so on. All I'm suggesting is that anything that's going to do Victoriana stuff in whitewashy kind of way, which includes steampunk and Wellsian retrofutures, should have some kind of acknowledgement that, actually, thinks were pretty messed up (to put it mildly). And I'd personally really prefer it if they stuck to fantasy versions if they're going to whitewash.

I don't find "slippery slope" arguments entirely convincing: "One minute you are wearing a top hat, the next you are sending children down the mines". Especially not in the pre-social media days of the 1990s. Maybe some people? But then, should the steampunk genre be avoided, because it might potentially lead some people to romanticise the past? Or would the romanticisation happen anyway, just hung from a different peg? And what about D&D? The pseudo-medievalism of early D&D is straight out of Scott's Ivanhoe, but is still fetishized by some players. Was the satanic panic right all along (but for the wrong reason)?

It's pretty goddamn wild. My grandparents would have slapped them for this sort of nonsense!

My mother told me about soldiers evacuated from Dunkirk where billeted in her mother's boarding house. How defeated and demoralised they seemed. She also recalled looking out over the water at Liverpool burning during the blitz. My dad was a couple of years younger and was in Liverpool during the blitz. He never spoke of it. Your grandparents in London would have had it much worse. But these people are gone now. It falls to us to remind people.