Steampunk is weird.
See, I think the genre's name was a variation on Cyberpunk, the genre that became popular in the 1980s, imagining a future in which democracy and freedom collapses in the face of powerful high-tech corporations... sigh. I won't say that the genre's dead, or anything - there's a very popular video game that is literally just named after the genre (I believe, though I could be wrong, based on the TTRPG) but I do think that, with the exception of people using tons of cybernetics, many of its central tropes have kind of become just normal. I mean, the degree to which people build identities around their online presence was something only for a small minority when I was a kid in the 1990s, before social media was really a thing.
The point is, while Cyberpunk borrowed a lot of its aesthetic from punk culture of the 1970s and 80s, somehow, "punk" became a suffix describing genre fiction with a sort of high- or at least modern-tech feel despite being set in older eras.
Steampunk is, actually, probably the most well-known of these -punk variants, though bizarrely, it doesn't actually share much with Cyberpunk except that it tends to focus on how the development of new technologies impacts a society.
Steampunk largely takes inspiration from pulp adventure stories from the early 20th century, as well as classic science fiction, like the works of H. G. Wells and Jules Verne.
But in a bizarre twist, because this early sci-fi was imagining technology that didn't exist at the time, a lot of the classics of sci-fi from the turn of the 20th century and thereabouts could be sort of retroactively steampunk.
One of the things I find very bizarre about steampunk as a genre is that we all more or less know what the "look" of steampunk is, but whereas I could cite Neuromancer, Snow Crash, Akira, or even The Matrix (not quite in the first wave like the others, as it came out in 1999) as the core classics of Cyberpunk, I really don't know that I could name a "quintessential" work of Steampunk fiction. So, in a bizarre, way, those classics of sci-fi (not really the earliest works, because that belongs to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, which was several decades before stories like The Time Machine or Ten Thousand Leagues Under the Sea) have retroactively become Steampunk despite simply being contemporary science fiction of the time.
The reason I bring this all up is that Dimension 20 is also doing something a bit unusual: this Intrepid Hero season (the Intrepid Heroes being D20's core six players) is doing a Steampunk season without really much more of a hook than that.
Mind you: this is not a criticism: I've watched the first two episodes (which are what is out so far - this is my first time watching a D20 season when the whole season isn't already out) and I'm really enjoying it.
One of the things I find really interesting about the season is that they're doing a lot of homebrew and customizing classes, including some work apparently by some former WotC D&D developers, such as Dan Dillon.
As far as I can tell, only one or two of the PCs is using fully WotC-published classes and subclasses. Emily Axford appears to be playing a Battle Smith Artificer, and Ally Beardsely is playing a Rogue (only 2nd level, as this is a campaign where some of the characters are much more experienced than others). Though, Beardsley's character might have a bit of twist, as they've also got a mech suit that apparently is statted out as its own thing.
The other characters include two fighters, one using what appears to be Matt Mercer's Gunslinger subclass, as well as another that is actually a re-skinning of a 3rd party subclass (I want to say "Shield Warden? Though this character fights unarmed). Brian Murphy plays a "Pugilist," which is apparently a full separate class, rather than being a re-skinned Monk (apparently using Strength for attacks). And finally, there's a Ranger, but a Ranger that has been redesigned to not use spells.
I believe that Starstruck Odyssey largely just used the existing "SW5E" system, which is a free hack of 5th Edition designed to be played in the Star Wars universe, though of course they did some re-skinning of that to fit it in the Starstruck setting. But this appears to be a more elaborate and involved kitbashing of several systems and some brand-new stuff to put together characters fit for a Steampunk adventure.
I'm eager to keep an eye on all of this to see how it looks and feels.
As I've said many times before, I really like to do some genre-bending when it comes to - well, anything I write, but also D&D. Still, as flexible as it is, D&D does gravitate toward that medieval fantasy aesthetic.
My general solution for this tends to be to simply make allowances: just as Cloud fights with a big sword in Final Fantasy VII despite living in a world with machine guns and robots, perhaps it's not too hard for us to just handwave the idea that our characters fight with such things in whatever bent genre we find ourselves in.
But it is kind of exciting to see some of the most public D&D players in the world experimenting with things.
Paizo, the publishers of Pathfinder, made their sci-fi (or science-fantasy) game Starfinder built largely on the same rules system (itself built on the bones of 3.5th Edition D&D). Interestingly, Starfinder 2nd Edition actually fundamentally uses the Pathfinder 2nd Edition system, such that it's not actually an independent game system anymore.
I've thought for a long time that it would be cool if WotC did something similar with 5th Edition D&D.
Anyway, I'm still bummed that I only got to play my artificer briefly before that campaign fell apart. While my current excitement is to play classes from the 2024 PHB, I'm also eager to see what the finalized version of the Forge of the Artificer revision for the Artificer is (I did see an image of some of the Artillerist features, and I can happily report that their Arcane Firearm can now also be a martial ranged weapon, which is what, you know, Firearms are. Remains to be seen if the class retains its firearm proficiency, because it seems so obvious that an Artillerist should be using a Repeating Shot Musket with True Strike.
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