Yes or no and to what degree? Post some examples. Personally I really like doing artifact creatures and constructs.
Machinery was fairly sophisticated in the ancient world. It's not a big stretch to have steam power in alternate historical settings, so I don't think it pushes the envelope much in a generic fantasy setting.
>>93412231I like it in concept, but I've always got the issue of my players wanting to try and invoke the industrial revolution overnight.
I used to like it before I realized that it isn't used for service of the story and setting but instead as a way to insert modern woke politics into something old fashioned
>>93412231There sure are a lot of Heroes Of Might & Magic 4 creature renders running around in here lately. Are you the same anon that made the Beholder thread for example?
>>93412448There's a reason why Wild West and WW2 are also forbidden genres for RPGs. It's contemporary. What might make for good fiction when the author absolutely controls the narrative is not necessarily safe to allow players to affect.You want to trust your players, you want to offload some of the workload onto them, but the truth is they're just animals. And not even toilet trained ones sometimes.Even in strict sword-and-sorcery fantasy you get That Guy trying to bundle alchemist fire together to make a nuclear bomb or training NPCs to cast cantrips to form an industrial assembly line with Mending or Ray Of Frost or some dumb shit. You might say it's a problem of player culture, and you'd be right, but some genres more than others allow them to feel as if there's an implicit tolerance of that kind of behavior.And of course, there's only like two or three players in the entire fucking world who know a goddamn thing about history. Try to do ancient Egypt and the first thing out of their fucking mouth isn't "Which period? Old Kingdom or Ptolemaic or Intermediate or...?" it's "lol if we get a bunch of scribes can we make a printing press?"The best solution is, in fact, to not run games for free. Get paid enough to not give a fuck if they ruin the game for themselves.
>>93412448Well just let them. Sounds like a great campaign.
>>93412549>not run games for freeYou're a slut, you know that right?
Hate it. If you can produce these machines thencyou can produce machines to produce machines. It HAS to be industrial revolition
>>93412836Maybe only the dwarves understand this technology and they simple don't care for technological advancement since they are rather conservatively minded. For them, tinkering with technology might just be a leisure hobby and an end in itself to calm the mind. It could even be considered blasphemous for a dwarf to build a machine that would do his crafting, digging or other physical labor for him. He simply wouldn't be able to grasp the concept. He has all the time in the world to do the same work better with his own hands as the artisan he is so what does he need a machine for?
>>93412836Unless they're ancient unreplicatable tech, and the current civ has only the most limited understanding of it.
>>93412993Do they also spontaneously combust if they ever write that shit down? If it is useful people will try to apply it. Perhaps not all or even most people, but its absurd to think that noone anywhere would eat oranges just because the dwarves were the first to breed an orange tree and they decided they were purely ornamentalEven ignoring that, they dont sell any of their steamtech? Noone has ever reverse engineered a boiler in however many hundreds of years? Its idiotic>>93412995Its the only reasonable way assuming every engineer was killed and every wheel smashed and every book burned
>>93412666All GMs are sluts.I'm just not stupid enough to work for free.
>>93412231No, to the "absolutely not" degree.
>>93412401>I release my swarm of robotic killer flies
>>93413106>Do they also spontaneously combust if they ever write that shit down?Obviously they guard their secret
>>93412231Steampunk? No, the aesthetics are wrong.On the other hand, you can use steam in fantasy better.>Advanced dwarves with steamships including steam-powered cannons and aircraft catapults>steam aircraft>ornate steam or compressed air weaponsNone of this needs to have the hacked together, dystopian air of steampunk.
>>93412231Unless it's one of those post-apocalyptic fantasies I say no.
>>93415027>Steampunk? No, the aesthetics are wrong.How?
>>93412401the problem back then was of total system primitivity. individual inventors in greek cities could come up with ingenious things, but their administration structure was so simple that they were essentially nothing but curiosities. they were more work then they were worth. it wasnt until the medieval feudal, administrative, and guild structures that inventions could legitimately be used at any scale outside of individual eccentrics showing off their shit as novelties.
>>93415079Because it is always done by artfags who thinks that putting cogwheels on a top hat is peak aesthetics.
>>93415617That's not necessarily inherent to steampunk though
>>93415617Thank you for answering better than I could.>>93415885If the game is a synthesis of the DM and player's actions, then anything that leans in a direction like to many widgets, or freakshit, is going to be exploited by players.
>>93415885>>93416551That's retarded. Even LOTR has steampunk elements.
There's already a setting for this. It's called the Iron Kingdoms.
>>93418970If that's what your picture resembles then no offense but it looks like shit.
>>93419037It's a mage walking around in steam armor, steam punk fantasy.
>>93419049Looks like warhammerslop
>>93419072Alright.
>>93415027Steampunk just means fictional steam powered machinery for most people, disconnect it from the aesthetics AtLA had steampunk elements and it wasn't particularly gears on tophats
>>93419140Not really seeing the steampunk in here, what’s going on?
>>93419154>Steampunk just means fictional steam powered machinery for most peopleDoubt dot jpegAlso, Legend of Korra had steam and Art Deco elements but I wouldn't call it steampunk. Note, I'm writing this from the perspective of having many cosplay and Burning Man art types as friends and to all of them, steampunk is random, nonfunctional gears on everything. Show me a steam powered art car and I'll be impressed.
>>93423826It's hard to tell on that one, but see those vents on his back? Those are smokestacks, he's wearing steam powered armor.
>>93412231If it makes internal sense. A whole lot of steampunk seems to forget that even with a perpetual energy source, you still need a ton of water to provide the "steam" that pushes all those actuators and pistons. Most allegedly steampunk tech doesn't appear to contain an actual boiler or water tank to store the main median of energy transfer.
>>93419154AtLA arguably 'is' Steampunk because the nation with steam power is using said tech to oppress all the nations that don't, and the protagonists are working to topple that system.
>>93423826corposlop
>>93425381Another picture, just for you.
>>93425426Looks like shit. Happy now?
*tips fedora*
>>93412231Only very barebones stuff like picrel
>>93412836>if you can produce these machineYes..>then you can produce machines to produce machinesNo. This is a non-sequitur. The rune carver is a fundamental part of mechanical engineering, and a machine cannot carve runes. Q.E.D.
>>93429081So a conventional steam engine just wouldn't work in your setting?
>>93429081Honestly, making the machines isn't even the big part of what makes an Industrial Revolution such a big deal. Nobody was assembling cotton gins with other cotton gins - most machines were still made by people since the degree of craftsmanship required for industrial equipment has been well beyond the capabilities of automation for most of human history (and even now a lot of the high end stuff is hand made by experts).The fundamental societal change brought about by the industrial revolution is that productivity is limited by available fuel for the machines, not by human (or elf, dwarf etc if we're talking fantasy) manpower. You can replace entire towns worth of people, and the huge areas of farmland required to sustain them, with a relatively small number of machines and their operators...*if* you can keep those machines supplied with a good steady source of fuel.But without a readily available local fuel source that doesn't deplete quickly (like coal from coal mines IRL), industrial machines cannot be sustained and thus the industrial revolution cannot happen. All the mechanical knowledge in the world doesn't help you much if you still need people doing hard manual labor on those machines to operate them.
>>93425435I'm just happy I get to be on topic while posting some artwork of a setting I enjoy.
>>93430094Enjoy a better setting then
>>93430094Just kidding enjoy what you like
>>93412231>make a fantasy world with industrial age technology, with guns, trains, airships, steampowered mechs etc.>political structure is still that of a feudal monarchy>No emerging capitalist class>No factories and mass urbanization changing the landscape of old cities>No nationalist movements >No proletarianization of the countryside >No racial and class tension >No exploration of any 19th century theme that isn’t surface levelIf you’re going to do steampunk, commit to it like Arcanum.
>>93430162Why would there be nationalist movements?
>>93430590Because a huge number of nationalists movements popped up during the industrial age. When do you think German nationalism/unification come about?
>>93431074Industrialization is great enabler of independence, suddenly you don't need to outnumber the would-be oppressors and still can outgun them.
>>93430590Because as people are becoming more educated and literate, ideas are spreads faster via the masses reading print media like newspapers. In Europe this manifested in pan-cultural unification movements across the continent that succeeded in Germany and Italy and to a less successful extent Yugoslavia. It’s easy to see this happening in a fantasy setting where the Dwarves or Halflings want to carve out their own independent self governing homeland rather than remaining a divided people.
>>93429092Only to about the same degree of success as an aeolipile. Fire + Water is a woefully inefficient method of generating Steam. Sourcing it directly from runes would be far more effective, but then you might as well just use propulsion magic.
>>93412231Make it limited if you're doing Sword and Sorcery game. Dwarves are good at creating technology, but they treat it as a hobby and largely do not give a fuck because advancing it means the machine doing work for you, and that sucks.Alternatively, go down the route of Arcanum and start the industrial age in a world of magic and beasts. How would your setting change when mages are beginning to meet their rivals in the form of technocrats who educate the peasants and cause massive political turmoil? You don't need to do pure steampunk either, add coal to it too. Hell, be creative and say that these motherfuckers found massive stores of oil underneath the earth and now your setting is extremely primitive diselpunk.
Recommending Arcanum is the new recommending GURPS at this point
>>93412401Is that a good book? Some of those “intro to myth” books are written so dumbed down (for normies) that it’s doesn’t really capture the myth at all.
>>93432870Okay, so what would YOU recommend then?
>>93415176Hellenism fixed that, until the multiple versions of Romans collectively un-fixed Hellenism and tanked our progress in engineering and sciences to the point where we had to spend a millenium just to get back to the level of mathematical theory we enjoyed around AD 0.
>>93435112Arcanum of course
>>93433413I've mistakenly picked up some mythology and folklore books that looked interesting only to find the contents on par with a collection of paraphrased Wikipedia articles. I listened to a long-form interview with the author on a podcast when it was new. She seemed to be well versed on the topic, so I was convinced it was more substantial than that. It's currently collecting dust in the queue, so I can't confirm.
I'm just gonna leave this here
>>93412401>It's not a big stretch to have steam power in alternate historical settingsYes it is you fucking mongoloids. Making spinning toys did not put the Greeks on the verge of an industrial revolution because the science of metallurgy was still millennia behind. You can't make a fucking steam engine with the shit metal they had. They needed the technology to make furnaces capable of much higher temperatures before they could do that.
>>93412231Personally, I dig it. But there's always one guy "I wanna take it apart and....". As a DM, I can shut that shit down. But as a player, hate it. I immediately try to see if I can call shots and break anything that looks like an obvious weapon/blaster/gadget. I don't wanna hear the rules lawyering horseshit of someone building lasers.
>>93440742Another proof that DMs tend to be terrible players
>>93439889Kind of an incredibly stupid point to make in a setting where people can light superhot fires with chanting.
>>93444404Another proof autists have no social skills.
>>93447415Autism is in fact beneficial. It just has a bad reputation
>>93448801This did not address anything. Thanks for proving him right, lololololol.>M-muh bad reputation!On account of the no social skills, among MANY other things.
>>93448838You type like an infant.
>>93448843Ya seethe, lonely boi?
>>93448881Nice projection
>>93448886Oh she's boiling.
>>93448888Cringe
