D&D General D&D is now Steampunk (poll)

Is default D&D steampunk?

  • Yes

    Votes: 10 12.7%
  • No

    Votes: 64 81.0%
  • Aren't Warforged a default species?

    Votes: 5 6.3%

D&D have never been really medieval to my mind anyway. It has been this weird mix of what I consider a mid-century Hollywood visual medieval aesthetic and sword and sorcery which is really its own thing and does not map onto any period of history outside the mythical Wild West.
It ranges from about 1350 to 1600, without any cannon and a Hollywood interpretation of the society with a strong layer of the Wild West and the Sword and Sorcery look bolted on.
Adding gunpowder pistols and muskets pushes it out to about 1700 so you can add in the Three Musketeers.

Ebberon is magitech with a post WW1 vibe, Indianna Jones meets Tales of the Gold Monkey with a dash of Agatha Christie.
 

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There's barely any punk in the default D&D assumption. The presence of steam does not make punk. Most large organizations like nations or knightly orders are considered to be good and the players are not expected to be from the underclass; we've got "high tech", but not the corresponding "low life."
 

3) Clarke's Law is cute but not applicable
The technology hasn't become so advanced as to be indistinguishable from magic in D&D settings, magic just happens to exist AS magic.
A bit of a tangent here, but I would argue there’s a reverse-Clarke’s Law going on with D&D’s magic. It is sufficiently understood so as to be indistinguishable from technology. Eberron is the only setting that really delves into the implications of how systematic, reliable, and reproducible magic is in D&D. But it is broadly true of D&D’s magic, despite other settings’ relative disinterest in exploring that aspect of it.
 


There's barely any punk in the default D&D assumption. The presence of steam does not make punk. Most large organizations like nations or knightly orders are considered to be good and the players are not expected to be from the underclass; we've got "high tech", but not the corresponding "low life."
Of the settings, Eberron has the most potential to be punk. I run it a lot like a cyberpunk game, actually. It has emergent tech disrupting society, megacorporations monopolizing that tech, and the protagonists are usually a motley crew of ne'er do wells getting on the wrong side of those megacorps and governments, which unearthing dangerous knowledge.
 

It seems that "medieval fantasy" no longer applies to D&D. It's more of a steampunk game,
Others have discussed the appropriateness of the term steampunk. Others have discussed medieval. I am going to address the 'no longer' part.

D&D, AD&D, playtest-era-proto-D&D, Chainmail, and the supporting literature (be that Tolkien, Howard, Vance, or whomever) have all been quasi-medieval at best. Tolkien's hobbits famously had umbrellas, camping kettles, matches, clocks, pocket handkerchiefs and (in an early draft) barometers. They also had new world crops like potatoes and 'pipeweed' (although that one might be a deliberate tobacco alternative, explaining the otherwise-anachronism rather than highlighting it). Most impressively, the dragon firework is described as going overhead "like an express train." Other appendix N fiction varied all over the map, some of them being explicitly sci fi, or having a central protagonist being drawn from the modern era.

Chainmail and original D&D had plate armor (a renaissance technology) from their inceptions. Chainmail had firearms as well (although this makes sense regardless, as the fantasy element was an optional supplemental component). oD&D and AD&D didn't have firearms initially, but firearm rules were introduced in Dragon #60 and Dragon #70, as well as in the AD&D 2nd edition Player's Handbook in 1989. AD&D did, however, have explicit rules for running crossover games with the other TSR properties Boot Hill and Gamma World, both of which included firearms (realistic or sci-fi/futuristic). More strikingly, sci fi elements (including robots, rayguns, and spaceships) showed up in Expedition to the Barrier Peaks, first introduced in the Origins II convention of 1976.

After that, we've had Dragonlance tinker gnomes, Spelljammer trips to the stars, cthulian monsters from other galaxies (or beyond time and space), and any and every sci fi trope recycled and repackaged into fantasy elements any number of times, with no specific weight given to here-and-now. With the instigating moments being (as mentioned) right from the very beginning and every major introduction I can think of being older than many gamers. The last major new sci-fi or post-medieval addition to the game or breakthrough I can think of is the introduction of warforged as a default character race (in a specific singular game setting) -- which came out 20 years and 2.0 editions (I don't care how you count .5 editions, but they don't make it fewer number of iterations) ago. That also was the era where I think the art deviated from at least the attempt at medieval aesthetic -- although whether the Liefeld-like buckles of 3.0 are more anachronistic than the Frazetta cover aesthetic of oD&D/AD&D is really a subjective position, I will allow.

So, no, I don't see any specific reason to think that medieval fantasy "no longer" applies to D&D, and certainly not specifically now or with the current version. It started out as fantasy with a medieval facade, peaked in its non-medieval-ness some time not now, and has arrived in the here and now not specifically more or less un-medieval at this point as any other.
 
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Early Modern Clockpunk more 16th - 18th Century than Steampunks 19th Century

Pirate Games have always been there and DnD has never really been Medieval, it was also at least Rennaissance. Having it develop a little isnt at all bad imho

That said it would be nice to have a proper Medieval Chivalric setting for DnD
 


i consider muskets and pistols a little early for steampunk. i usually consider steampunk arms to be more late victorian - repeating rifles, shotguns, revolvers, and weird steam-powered contraptions.
 

How many words are we going to add to the suffix -punk to before the concept loses all meaning? Are we already there?
I think it's already shifted from the original notion of juxtaposing the preceding word with societal collapse and dystopia, to a more general term meaning 'aesthetically evocative of' the preceding term. That said, from there on out the term has been pretty stable. Steampunk evokes the age-of-steam aesthetic, solarpunk evokes a sustainable future society, etc.
 

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