steamPUNK?

[Quixotic Qlippoth]

Last night talking to one of my group members about a Retrorocket style game I'm going to run (see other thread...) we got into a bit of a conversation about "steampunk" and we all know what it is- with the alt. tech of the era etc-- but we got into a fun conversation about how it'd be fun to do it backwards: start with, literally, "punk" (and in our meaning that means a 1970's/early 80's punk rock aesthetic) with all the tech & trappings of Steamtech.

We started talking about how that would develop, how you could get to that point, or whether it would require you to literally go backwards. Do you guys think it would be worth it to develop something like this, or would it be just "rule of cool" since it's tacking an aesthetic choice on a technological one?

This isn't for an actual game, just sort of an idle discussion we were having I thought I'd bring here (for the heck of it). You guys all seem really on the ball and I've always, ALWAYS felt that role players have more "genre flexibility" in their DNA than other people.

[Ronin Rabbit]

Hmm... I think for Diesel Punk it would work both in context and aesthetically while if you do it with steamtech you'll more be ignoring the blatant contradiction.

[Dalillama]

The punk ethos would be perfectly adaptable to the pseudo-victorian culture that's common in steampunk settings. A group of working class people who are sick of the economic and social stratification that condemns them to a life as factory drudges, who leverage new technologies to make DIY versions of industrial products. They will probably talk a lot about American Indians (that's where the 'mohawk' style originated) and other tribal peoples as romanticised examples of egalitarian, nonheirarchical societies, wear leather clothes, odd hairstyles, body piercings, and tattoos in imitation of what the believe those cultures to wear, with their own industrial chic touches and materials, etc.

[martin_rook]

If you want steam-tech in the punk era, you're already into an alternate history, right? Either steam-tech is just what develops (the setting is TL 5+2) or something happens to bring that type of technology back to the fore. Either way, you could Use the Coronal Mass Ejections of 1859 or 1971 and some acute misunderstandings of physics to make Earth's magnetosphere inhospitable to electronics and radio.

Alternatively, you could have some sort of secret society from the 18th or 19th century that developed steam-tech devices and kept their technological advantage to themselves, developing it even after mainstream science went other directions (see one of the GURPS Steampunk settings and In The Country of the Blind).

[Phil Masters]

The original steampunk-as-such authors (Jeter, Blaylock and Powers) claim to have been inspired by Mayhew's London Labour and the London Poor, which is about as punk a reference as you could hope for... But the sordidness gets a bit attenuated in most implementations of steampunk. Funnily enough, one book which really evokes Mayhew is GURPS Goblins.

Then there is the second-generation steampunk novel which does manage to combine high steam-tech with twinges of the punk aesthetic; Gibson and Sterling's The Difference Engine. Those two clearly reckoned that punk was the result of runaway information technology colliding with social dislocation.

[Quixotic Qlippoth]

Interesting- I'll have to look into all of that. Like I said, it was an offhand conversational tangent sparked by my groupmate's recalling his disappointment that there was so little "punk" in GURPS Steampunk. I'll have to point him to some of those sources.

I know we tried playing Goblins at one point, but none of us could get into it.

[Peter Knutsen]

Originally Posted by Phil Masters

The original steampunk-as-such authors (Jeter, Blaylock and Powers) claim to have been inspired by Mayhew's London Labour and the London Poor, which is about as punk a reference as you could hope for... But the sordidness gets a bit attenuated in most implementations of steampunk. Funnily enough, one book which really evokes Mayhew is GURPS Goblins.

Then there is the second-generation steampunk novel which does manage to combine high steam-tech with twinges of the punk aesthetic; Gibson and Sterling's The Difference Engine. Those two clearly reckoned that punk was the result of runaway information technology colliding with social dislocation.

There's a lot of cyberpunky thought in "The Difference Engine".

[jacobmuller]

Originally Posted by Phil Masters

one book which really evokes Mayhew is GURPS Goblins.

It'd be extra nice to see it make it into the classic pdf library then.

[jeff_wilson]

There is the Guy Davis radical alt history detective comic BAKER STREET where some Victorian culture has extended into the WWII-less 20th century at least in England complete with mutton chop whiskers and high collars on the authority figures and Cockney punks and goths. The Holmes-Watson stand-ins are a recovering junkie ex-police detective and her American medical student flatmate.

http://www.downeu.net/magazine/87935...guy-davis.html

[jeff_wilson]

Originally Posted by Ronin Rabbit

Hmm... I think for Diesel Punk it would work both in context and aesthetically while if you do it with steamtech you'll more be ignoring the blatant contradiction.

Silly rabbit!

Originally Posted by Sjard

Ronin Rabbit and Quixotic Qlippoth have been permanently banned as sockpuppets.