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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 9740659" data-attributes="member: 6790260">My problem with the question is a single word."Default".The default game is not steampunk, for a variety of reasons. It's not even Victoriana, which would be (in a sense) "steampunk" with less steam and no punk.But I do think that D&D is, shall we say, sprawling out from where it started. It's always been in this incredibly weird schizotech bubble, where plate mail (which is about 50 years newer than handheld guns, and at least a century newer than cannons) coexists alongside courtly love (a 12th century thing, meaning, about 300 years before plate armor) and the Divine Right of Kings (which did not take the form it takes in D&D-land until the late 1500s/early 1600s at the earliest) and just...all sorts of silly things.The result of this sprawling out is that D&D is embracing both the older parts of its timeline and the younger. We are not seeing steampunk D&D, but rather what one might call "sailpunk" D&D, just...without the sails, which I know sounds silly but bear with me.The late Renaissance and Early Modern Period blend together, and the Age of Discovery aka the Age of Sail is pretty much the period of European history (with things just about to transition to true world history, where developments around the globe start affecting one another) which correspond to the latest late part of the Renaissance and the earliest early part of the Early Modern Period. Discovering "new" lands (often to conquer them...), but still having kings in palaces and castles. The divine right of kings. Plate armor. Some, limited, attention to gunpowder. Far-flung outposts. Dredging up ancient secrets (Egypt's tombs were becoming a Big Deal, and would become an even bigger deal a century later). The very, very first flowerings of what we might call true "science", with advanced, relatively systematized mathematics. Telescopes and clocks and all sorts of things like that.Steam power doesn't really seem to be anywhere in the picture. Warforged aren't steampunk, as much as I'd like them to be--they're golems, animated through wooden connecting tissue, not boilers and gearboxes. They can only really be called "magicpunk", because it's...the magical equivalent of the industrial revolution.But these things are much closer to "steampunk" than default D&D has ever been.Further, D&D is also, at least IMO, reaching even further back. Considering times when Rome was not a distant, glorious memory, but something that still seemed like it might be alive, whether as the Rhomaioi (what we call the Byzantines), or as generals hoping to retake Roma itself and re-prolcaim the Western (or even complete!) Roman Empire. Times when technology was truly much lower even than it is in D&D as it is typically played, where the most advanced machines are waterwheels and bellows.D&D's core is finally expanding outward in both directions from its bizarre "somehow both medieval and renaissance" schizotech nook, and filling in spaces just adjacent to them. As a result, steampunk is no longer far away. Steampunk is now truly D&D-adjacent.But it isn't "default". I don't really expect it to ever become default.</blockquote>

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