Dude gears, goggles, airships, and corsets

>dude gears, goggles, airships, and corsets
Is steampunk objectively the ugliest and laziest genre?

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youtube.com/watch?v=TFCuE5rHbPA
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The shit most people call "Steampunk" is.
Actual Steampunk isn't.

youtube.com/watch?v=TFCuE5rHbPA

Bad steampunk is still steampunk

But gluing some gears on something that is not Steampunk does not make it Steampunk.

That's the point of the video I linked.

It doesn't really convince me that there's anything more to steampunk aside from gears, victorian clothes, and steam powered things that work like they aren't steam powered things. There's better and worse ways to do it, but even on the better end of the spectrum I don't have a high opinion of it

Steampunk is only as lazy as the writer. If it's literally Victorian-ish era but with a few terms changed around- "Electrical" to "Steam" being the primary one, that's pretty fucking lazy.

But I think steampunk gets a bad rap because people don't dig further down the possibilities than "It's basically today but with more brass, and everyone dresses like a wanker."

I ran a game a couple years back that I advertised as "steampunk," but it ended up being a cross between Dishonored and Dr. Strangelove. Industrial warfare, the effects of mass production on a society that still values artisan or "exotic" goods, health issues that sprang up from the rapid growth of cities, some HAL 9000 shit later on with the city's "manager" who the party eventually had to make a choice whether or not to kill without fully understanding the impact of either option.

Steampunk is what you make of it.

> corsets
> ugly

You may pick one anw only one

It's as lazy as the players are. Same stuff like all those other punk settings like cyberpunk or biopunk.

Most people aren't into fat chicks

This.

>have slim partner with decent rack (oh Rigevidon, you wonder drug)
>get her into corsets, and victorian-punk cloths

its all about how you play it brah

Dieselpunk tho', that's a mans punk.
>Bioshock, WW2 fashioned technology, fleecy jumpers, das boot in spess.

How boring is OP's life that he has to make weekly "steampunk sucks guise" threads

At least post some hot cosplayers while you regurgitate

Have you ever actually seen a steampunk game where people played punks? Cyberpunk the default is to play as a disenfranchised member of the underclass fightin against corporate overlords. Steampunk could have millworkers or whatever fighting against a hierarchical Victorian society but it seems like SP players area inevitably at the top of the pyramid.

One world in my setting has some steampunk and teslapunk elements, but the general style of warfare, dress, and society is that of the Cavalier Years instead of the Victorian era. Also some advanced technology from space faring merchants has crept in.

Never seen anything else like it.

Steampunk can be done right (see pic related), but it's been infested with shitters who only care about cogs and can't even get the colours right.

I've watched steampunk go from nascent aesthetic with potential to pretty much a joke.

I've never played a cyberpunk where we actually played punks.

We mostly did the corporate overlord's dirty laundry.

Which is why cyberpunk is just as much of a joke.

Yes.
No true scotsman

I feel.like the problem with -punk is that it only works as an aesthetic. For instance, if I see some interesting steampunk art or costume it's interesting to imagine the world this art takes place in, but once you start actually fleshing out the setting it doesn't live up to the expectations you had. Does anyone else feel that way or am I crazy?

What's your pic of/from?

Airships are rad. Steampunk airships are shit.

Yo, that's on you.

Hipsterpunk =/= steampunk

Stop trying to sound smart because you make yourself retarded. That isn't what it means. If a retard calls a cat a dog, that doesn't change the cats species. If you spraypaint a nerf gun brass and add some random shit on it that doesn't make it steampunk.

>this its super gay even at its best and most of it is shit.
i remember in college they had a steampunk club that met in the park and had a picknick like once a month, it was just fat girls in dresses with goggles and dudes in petty coats with top hats with gears glued on. this was in florida so all these people were just sweating balls sitting in the park looking like idiots.

the book diamond age is sort of steampunk and its mc is sort of underclass.

Most foopunk genres are incredibly lazy and just shitty in general.

I mean sure if you flesh something out competently enough you can make any aesthetic work, but 99% of foopunk is "let's take this one minor real-world element and make an entire setting based on only that." It's mildly entertaining as a thought excercise, but really doesn't warrant any attention beyond that.

They're not genres. They're simply not. They're aesthetic choices which you can use to build a setting, but trying to turn it into a genre of its own is without exception lazy and bland.

Man you sound like an asshole. "Look at those losers having fun! Socializing but ending up inconvenienced slightly? Haha lame!" Is something wrong with people having a good time if they're not going out of their way to cause harm or annoy you?

I like female Steampunk cosplayers.

needs more barbershop

Dystopian wars, antarctic faction iirc

That isn't steampunk. If you can list "GEARZ!!!1!1" as a main point and not "STEAM!!!!1!1!(Not the Gaben one)" as a point, you have clockpunk.

As I say in any steampunk thread I see, if the focus is on gear-filled Victorian shit, it is clockpunk.

Mixing clockpunk and steampunk just makes ugly shit.

The -punk suffix does not actually denote punks being there. It was just a meaningless part of the term Steampunk so that the genre had a name.

I just wanna play as a big dude in greasy overalls that wields a comically oversized wrench.

You're crazy.
But I actually agree with you.

Diamond Age is post-cyberpunk. Stephenson even kills off the rad cyberpunk protagonist at the beginning to drive the point home.

To be fair, a lot of steampunk looks like a mere cyberpunk reskin. I mean, look at Wolsung and tell me that this isnt Shadowrun.

>Dude elves, dwarves, magic and orcs
Fantasy is objectively the laziest genre

"Steampunk" isn't a genre, it's an aesthetic. Perdido Street Station and Wild Wild West have nothing in common other than a general look of parts of the world, yet both are "Steampunk". The closest you can get to a steampunk genre is bioshock and bas-lag, weird fiction set in vaguely late 1800s-early 1900s, where the themes focus around progress, both socially and technologically, and explore the ramifications of modern technologies and ideas being introduced into fantastical worlds. There is nothing inherently wrong with this, and it can make for very interesting and introspective fiction, but the majority of "steampunk" is wild wild west: gears slapped onto technology in ways that make no sense, in a story that really doesn't need gears.

That is exactly what steampunk is. For better or worse, cyberpunk actually came from a set of concepts and themes that described a certain society, and laid out conflicts within it. Steampunk, and all the other punkpunks, are just names applied to visual styles, with no intrinsic narrative themes of their own.

That's why pretty much anything with a gear in it gets labeled "steampunk." The only thing vaguely unifying steampunk is its set of visual cues.

>Cyberpunk the default is to play as a disenfranchised member of the underclass fightin against corporate overlords

You mean getting payed corporate overlords to steal shit from rival corporate overlords? And then buying extra gadget shit so you can do more corporate espionage and sabotage.

>Steampunk, and all the other punkpunks, are just names applied to visual styles, with no intrinsic narrative themes of their own.

Steampunk is basically just industrialization conflict from 19th cent.

Rate my steampunk plot
>Industrial societies build machines that think and act as God
>Require a shit ton of coal
>Almost all the coal in the world mined up and burned to power the God Machines
>Almost all the trees and alterative fuel sources also go into the furnaces
>Nations begin burning their poor to keep the furnaces burning
>Nations begin going to war with each other to capture cities to kidnap hundreds of thousands of people to throw into the furnaces
>Women are taken and locked into baby factories where they are raped to produce more cattle for the furnaces
>Deep in the Carpathian mountains, a peaceful monastery which still follows Orthodox Christianity vows to stop the God Machines and the madness
>They go on a five man sneaking mission into the industrial world to shut down the God Machines

Pretty boring, but this is the first thread I've ever made on the matter.

ahahahahahaha faggot

>Women are taken and locked into baby factories where they are raped to produce more cattle for the furnace

Seems kinda roundabout. It would be more efficient to feed the furnace what you would feed the women. Going from food to woman to baby wastes a lot of energy.

their existence is annoying or at least shameful

They took what it was and made it a "style".

NO. Optimistic engineering and inventing of fantasy materials is not a style.


But play it with smart enough dudes and they construct you a working turbine and then it'S dieselpunk.

Why? Because dieselpunk is more metal, gritty and awesome than steampunk.

But then how would he fulfil his rape factory fantasy?

And the architecture is called "Jugendstiel".

That is, no visible cogs or chains unless that is necessary or at least practical.

And I have no idea how it is called when used for steam engines or machines, because guess why it's a fictional genre...

But generally RREEEEEEEEEE

However.The anti-heroes and dashing dudes in Steampunk settings should be hunted by the law or similar, so they barely survive through haphazard engineering, that is when cartoon logic and fun enters the more or less grim settings.

Basically, Orkz in a Steampunk setting = Overpowered

But try to motivate players to just play as Orkz and have chaotic fun with explosions and ridiculous salvaged vehicles and they want to be "classy" or "the good ones" or have "character development".

I know what is going on your brains don't try to wiggle out of it!

>And that is how we combine it with rape fantasies.

Yes... Punk is dead.

Necropunk. But they will then roleplay pseudo clerics or "The skeleton overlord in their dungeon" do we want to bet or what?!

I want to see a generic fantasy (orcs, elves, wizards) in the late 1800s.

Subjectively? No. Objectively? Yes.

>Necropunk

Jesus, that makes me think of this detective story I've been reading set in a zombie apocalypse of a sort, it was pretty damn rad.

>Nothing dies anymore
>Not even hot dogs stay still
>If your brain is intact when you die, or at least intact enough, you still function
>Rotting is a bit gross, even if you can't feel it, so preservatives and shit for corpses are like fashion products or whatever I'm trying to say
>People go to the police to report their own murders.
>Police fucking useless if crime isn't in progress or you don't know the name of your killer.
>Detectives far more reliable in finding your killer.

>The masses of flesh and bone without enough brain are held back with massive walls and pits
>They don't care if you are living or undead, om nom nom

Just set it up from the outset as a game where players are playing the 19th century "Bomb-throwing Anarchist" stereotype.
They want the old order to burn so that something new (and hopefully better) will arise from the ashes

>Is steampunk objectively the ugliest and laziest genre?
That honor goes to anything zombie.

It's become such, but in a way no more than how 'cyberpunk' to some people seems to be 'add glowy bits'.

Truthfully, my small rant is that I feel like good steampunk, along with using the social unrest of caste disparity of the Victorian/Edwardian Eras, should use the actual "Steampunk" technologies and such sparingly. as genuine wonders even the rich and elite don't always see everyday.

Plus, many technolofies of the 1870 to 1910's were perfectly serviceable as is.

If you want a "steampunk" computer, that's fine, but don't add junk onto a perfectly good revolver unless there's a perfectly good reason for it. (Magnetic accelerators, for example). Sad part is, many people into steampunk won't even say that.

At it's core, I feel "steampunk" in terms of technology and aesthetics should be bizarre and wondrous but still functional.

If you like 3.5 derivatives look through this.
If nothing else it has much better equipment upgrading than rules the others from what I have seen.

shockingly, user will discover that "steampunk is ass" is a common opinion among anyone who goes on here, and not everyone's on every day to notice the last week's "steampunk is ass" thread

You seem to have made a mistake by thinking it is steampunk instead of cogfop. This is similar to people mistaking black people for niggers, because there are so few of the former they get mistaken for the later.

So is yours.

OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOoooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooohhhhhhhhhhhhhh.

Burnt.

cogfop is a more accurate term

>that modded corset
What a waist of time.

As another response stated, that's on your group and GM. That's more about lazy prep than setting problem. In contrast to your experience, my last campaign was focused on securing enough food, water and medicine for our gang to survive and fortifying an abandonned building complex enough to consider it as a base of operation. Cybertech? Ammo? Advanced weaponry? HAH! We were gathering scrap and making heavy use of our techies. Our 'assault vehicle' is basically an over-sized thrash container with an engine and murder-holes. Fuel? We had to steal it Lord Humungus style. And it was a fucking awesome session.

Our agenda? Unite enough people in this warzone to take what we need from corporations and people. Likely it will end just like any peasantry rebellion, but we did not get the education to know that ;P.

Seriously, the best way to avoid this 'corporate soldier with attitude' type of games is to cut the amount of starting funds by two or three. When the players need to actually stop and think about the pros and cons of having a MachineÜberGun that can blast through a monetary equivalent of two weeks worth of food and having a living space seems like a distant dream… you get cyber punk. Otherwise you get a party of corporate lackeys.

Do you feel the same way about Bronies congregating in public and playing with toys intended for 7 year old girls?

As an aesthetic it has lots of potential, as an ahistorical creative concept it has lots of potential, but the steampunk fandom is just so fucking awful that I can't bring myself to care about it much.

I've got this setting I'm developing, based largely around the mid-to-late 1800s, and I wanted to steal some art to represent the setting's equivalent of japan. I was thinking samurai with rifles, some nice architecture, plus better reference pics for life in the era than I'd gotten so far. So, like an idiot, I googled "steampunk japan" and was inundated with the absolute worst bullshit I've ever seen in my life.

All that said, you gotta take the good with the bad. I've found some great architecture reference, you learn about interesting technologies of the era, and you make sure that the only people who wear goggles are people who might need goggles, and make sure gears are always hooked up to something.

I'm just gonna post everything in my D&D folder with "steam" in the filename.

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Holy shit! You were right about the search results. For two or three actually cool designs I got out of it there is so much shit it's not even funny.

Pic related.

Honestly yeah if they aren't causing harm who the fuck cares. You'd have to be petty and childish as fuck to.

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There's this third-party 3.5 supplement called Dragonmech that I've really liked as a great way to frame steampunk.

Tl;DR-moon is falling, as it disintegrates and falls to earth it brings awful lunar monsters, only structures strong and mobile enough to withstand the lunar rain and the monster attacks are walking cities.

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Dieselpunk will always be the superior aesthetic. Especially in post-apocalypse settings. Bonus points if you couple it with Art Nouveau, or more boringly, Art Deco design sensibilities.

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So what happens if you burn a body in this setting? Do they finally actually die or does it result in a sentient cloud scenario?