The Best Steampunk Games and RPGs

This is why steampunk roleplaying games and video games matter so much. They do not merely display airships, clockwork automatons, steam-powered cities and inventors with the safety instincts of drunken ferrets. They let you climb inside the contraption. You can pilot the ether flyer, burgle the occult refinery, build the mechanical arm, argue with the faerie ambassador, decide whether to save the city or heat it with suspiciously expendable principles, and, in the finest traditions of tabletop gaming, spend forty minutes debating whether a steam-powered elephant can fit through a service door.

The first great tabletop landmark is Space: 1889, designed by Frank Chadwick and originally published by Game Designers’ Workshop. If steampunk has a playable foundation stone, this is one of the brassier candidates. Its great conceit is that Victorian science was right in all the best wrong ways. Ether travel works. Mars and Venus are reachable. The Great Powers have carried their flags, assumptions, uniforms and colonial headaches into the inner solar system. It is Jules Verne, H.G. Wells, imperial adventure and planetary romance poured into a roleplaying engine with a smoking funnel on top.

What makes Space: 1889 important is not just that it has Victorian space travel. It shows how quickly steampunk became playable. The genre had barely been named before gaming tables were heading to Mars with rifles, pith helmets and entirely too much confidence. It is also a useful reminder that steampunk cannot honestly enjoy empire-flavoured adventure without acknowledging empire-flavoured consequences. The best modern handling of Space: 1889 would keep the romance of ether flyers while making sure the colonial machinery is not treated as harmless wallpaper.