Steampunk Rant

So I decided to check out some of the Steampunk RPGs out there and much to no one's surprise I came away thinking "Wow these are really shit,"

It wasn't the stupid technology that got me it's the toothless settings that seems to plague the genre, half of them are either fantasy or horror settings with a Steampunk reskin. It doesn't even have the balls to go through with it's own speculative fiction.

Honestly I think that the only really good Steampunk setting needs to be somewhere pretty close to the beginning of the WWI and have the main mechanics of the game revolve around pulp action and political intrigue.

The vast majority of steampunk settings are terrible because the vast majority of genre fiction writers are terrible. And most of the ones who aren't terrible don't put effort into making published RPG settings because they don't care/never thought about it.

I'll tell you a little secret, OP: Steampunk is a bad genre.

Don't forget the wave of SJW rhetoric that's riding on Steampunk because muh Victorian society.

Steapunk isn't a genre, it's an aesthetic.
In most people's appreciation, at least.
You never see non-victorian turn of the century stories, you never see stories with era-specific plots.

>muh evil Es Jay Dubyas ruining stuff for us real nerds

I find the socjus crowd obnoxious as well, but I can't believe how much energy people on Veeky Forums devote to complaining about people they don't like.

I'll tell you a little secret, OP: Steampunk is a bad genre/aesthetic/setting/gender/lifestyle.

Arcanum is literally the ONLY steampunk setting ever done well

First post best post.

Unfortunately.

The solution is remarkably simple: a person dissatisfied with licensed RPG settings can just make up their own. That way you can have the steampunk setting you want free of the influences of cogshit, normies, and feminists.

But I guess people would rather just bitch on Veeky Forums than actually take the steps they need to get what they want.

Ultimately the problem is that even if you make your own, you're going to be dissatisfied with it because it's not professional quality and, as you said, the majority of people aren't good writers anyway.

Also I'm writing other things at the moment so I don't exactly have a lot of free time anyway.

Then stop being a lazy fuck and make your own setting.

Will do as soon as I finish the Greek Sword and Sorcery game I'm writing.

>you're going to be dissatisfied with it because it's not professional quality

Then make it "professional quality" if that's what you want so bad.

Steampunk is cancer. There's no way to make it "really good"

Found the uncreative.

Found the redditor

Ok, user, tell us about your ideal "good" steampunk setting. What would it feature? What would make it different?

There's Windward coming out soon that looks like it could be decent, even if it's not strictly steampunk.

Steampunk is usually wasted. There's enormous opportunity in examining the plight of the common people, the effects of abusive imperialism, the ecological devastation caused by the ever growing hunger for production, and the steadily increasing political instability. Unfortunately no one takes this route. It's all gears and cogs and Downton Abbey.

It's probably because I can count the number of steampunk related series I've followed on two hands (mainly the Mortal Engine books and Steamboy) But I think the problem I have with the aesthetic is that the current understanding of it boils down to "put on a tophat and cover it in cogs". It apparently got so bad there were panels at the cons I attended deriding current steampunk aesthetics.

Don't know if this same problem translated over into the media side of steampunk derived content.

>the vast majority of genre fiction writers are terrible. And most of the ones who aren't terrible don't put effort into making published RPG settings

by that logic all rpg settings are terrible

STEAM PUNK:its where fags pretend current tech is analog and in the 1600s
GOTHIC:the 1600s

both genres are garbage because they write themselves into a corner with there silly obsession over silly ass "art" style

>>The solution is remarkably simple: a person dissatisfied with licensed RPG settings can just make up their own
That's literally how the shittiest of them came into existence. Plus that's a recipe for being a heart-breaker, which is another big no-no

>Then make it professional quality
Yes, and to resolve problem of unemployment we must decrease unemployment.
People like you should be shot on sight

>and Downton Abbey
I wish steampunk was even half as good as DA

This.

I mean Gibson himself wrote The Difference Engine as pure experiment - to check if you can translate cyberpunk themes and elements into completely different time period and setting.
His conclusion?
You can't.

So he dropped the aesthetics completely, not seeing any future for it, but a lot of people already went apeshit about it and in less than 5 years between book publication the "genre" was reduced to cogfop bullshit, vastly influenced by tail end of goth culture

I think what's the real problem is treatment of steampunk as a genre, which it clearly isn't.
It's just aesthetics within retro-futurism genre. And because people keep treating the aesthetics as what's most defining element of this non-existing genre, it makes it even more shallow than it really is, reducing everything to visuals and style, completely skipping the content.

Recall Jasper Morello. A GREAT animation, but if you remove steampunk aesthetics from it, it could still work perfectly fine, without any issues whatsoever

Found the buzzworder

>implying they're not

New to the gaming world are we?

I'd rather play a straight up adaption of Pride and Prejudice (no cogfops!) than play anything Steampunk. Watching a bunch of white dudes playing upper middle class Georgian maidens would be good for a laugh if nothing else.

Princess Pillowfighter is a thing, you know?

But the P&P game would be even better

you're getting /v/ and Veeky Forums confused m8, /v/ is where people pretend to hate everything