Steampunk

As anyone who's paid even a remote degree of attention to my campaign setting knows, I incorporate a fair bit of "advanced" technology, at least from a fantasy norm standpoint, and much of that is steam-powered. In addition, I do have a rather dark, dystopian view of society in this setting. This raises the question amongst many that my setting is a "steampunk" setting.

What is steampunk, exactly? I ask this, because I just got in an argument with some guy who claims that Eberron is steampunk. When I asked him to tell me even one element of the setting that was steampunk, he couldn't do it, and instead just did a quick Google search to show that he wasn't the only one who thought so, and that he was in fact just parroting back what he had heard somewhere. So while I came to the conclusion that he either simply didn't know what he was talking about, or is using a definition for steampunk that is completely meaningless to me, he did raise the question in my mind: what exactly is steampunk, and what are some examples of it?

I think that's more problematic than it sounds, on the face of it. Coming up with a definition isn't difficult; it's clearly an outgrowth of cyberpunk, and like cyberpunk, it has to deal with a certain theme of rebellion against impersonal dystopian societies. That's the -punk equation in steampunk; the first part of the word is of course that it uses steam-based technology.

However, I think the word has accreted additional usage to the point where few people even recognize this confined definition anymore. Basically, the -punk addage is forgotten. If it has steam-powered technology, particularly bizarre steam-powered technology a la the scientific romances of Jules Vernes or H. G. Wells, then it's steampunk.

In the case of Eberron it has neither steam nor punk, and the elements that some folks use mark Eberron has "having some steampunk flavor" whatever that means, could just as easily be used to claim that Peter Pan or Pinocchio are steampunk stories. I remain thoroughly unconvinced. However, true, "pure" steampunk remains an elusive entity. A few works, such as The Difference Engine or Steamboy are obviously clear, but others like Perdido Street Station or Iron Kingdoms use some trappings of steampunk but incorporate other elements just as much.

My own setting uses "steampunk" elements, but no more so than it uses Sergio Leone elements, Edgar Rice Burroughs elements, H. P. Lovecraft elements or Robert Ludlum elements. And I think that's what steampunk has become; a patina or template that can be applied to any other work and give it a "steampunk aesthetic" without actually fundamentally altering the work from whatever subgenre it already belongs to.

Not that I worry too much about subgenres--for my setting, I'm perfectly happy to reclaim the old umbrella term "Weird Tale" and have done with it.

In any case, not that I've been a faithful blogger, but I will be at GenCon most of the rest of this week, so I won't be making posts. But hopefully I'll have quite a bit to report on when I'm back. I've got at least seven games fairly well confirmed, including three planetary romance games, two Dark•Matter games (that I'm rumming), a Dino-Pirates of Ninja Island game, and another swashbuckling D&D game too. I'm hoping to also work some Blood Bowl into the week somewhere, and maybe one or two other pick-up impromptu games here and there.