Worldcon is nine days out. LAcon V, the 84th World Science Fiction Convention, descends on the Anaheim Convention Center August 27-31, 2026, and the Hugo Awards ceremony hits the stage on Sunday the 30th. The Doctor has opinions about who should win. The Doctor also has opinions about Anaheim in August (hot, crowded, smells faintly of churro and sunscreen), but he goes where the speculative fiction goes.

Quick civic service announcement: Hugo voting closed August 8th, so if you didn’t vote, congratulations, you forfeited your right to complain about the results. The category slate this year includes the second-ever Best Poem award (yes, poetry, keep your monocle in), and finalists in Best Novel include Robert Jackson Bennett’s A Drop of Corruption and Nnedi Okorafor’s Death of the Author, among others. The field is legitimately strong. Whether the ceremony will be equally strong is, as always, a separate question entirely.

If you’re going, find me in the vendor hall. I’ll be the one judging your costume. High-5 to everyone who shows up in something with gears on it. lacon.org for the full schedule, membership info, and streaming details for the ceremony if you’re experiencing Anaheim from a safe distance.

Chrono CCG is a free-to-play digital card game where rival time-traveling syndicates beat each other senseless across unraveling timelines, fighting to rewrite history itself. Your agents Immortalize mid-match, ascending to ultimate forms from across time. The timeline itself shifts on the battlefield as a core mechanic. It is, in short, exactly as unhinged as it sounds, and The Doctor approves.

Built by veterans of Legends of Runeterra and other digital CCGs, it hit Steam Early Access on June 23rd and has been quietly patching ever since. The Steam tags read like someone ran the Omega7Red Formulae on a deck of playing cards: Steampunk, CyberPunk, Alternate History, Time Manipulation, Post-Apocalyptic. That’s not a card game, that’s a whole Punk-iverse in a box. Current Steam reviews sit at 71% positive overall, trending up to 84% in the last 30 days as the patches land. Still rough around the edges (matchmaking needs work, the new-player onboarding was a mess at launch), but the bones are genuinely interesting. I’m giving it a cautious ΩΩΩ for now, with full expectation of upgrading that rating at full release if they stick the landing.

It’s free. You have no excuse not to at least shuffle a deck. Via: Steam

August isn’t done with us yet. The Steampunk Explorer’s North America calendar shows a steampunk festival dropping in Coldwater, Ontario on August 29, and then the whole thing turns into a cavalcade: Hannibal, Missouri (September 4-7), Fergus, Ontario (September 11-12), Colfax, California (September 12-13). The brass horde is mobilizing on multiple fronts simultaneously. The Doctor approves of this level of coordination.

If you’re anywhere near the Great Lakes corridor and you DON’T have Coldwater on your radar, that’s a personal failing I cannot fix for you. Ontario in late August is legitimately gorgeous, and the idea of gears and goggles against the backdrop of cottage country is the kind of thing the Omega7Red Formulae practically writes itself for. Go. Wear the hat. You know which hat.

Meanwhile, two steampunk gatherings also happened TODAY (one in Stamford, CT and one in Los Angeles) on opposite coasts, which means either the movement is growing, or the Formulae is leaking again. Either way: high-5. Via: The Steampunk Explorer

T. Kingfisher drops Daggerbound on August 25, and if you have not yet met the gnole-and-enchanted-sword corner of her “World of the White Rat,” I have only one question: what have you been doing? This is Book 2 of the Swordheart trilogy, following Swordheart (2018) and picking up with Learned Edmund, a disillusioned scholar who grabs an ancient cursed sword in a desperate moment and gets a very angry, very handsome immortal warrior named the Dervish for his trouble. There is also an enslaved gnole, an opinionated donkey, and what the Library Journal is calling “a queer grumpy/sunshine romantasy.” The Doctor approves of all of these things, separately and together.

The broader setting shares continuity with Kingfisher’s Clocktaur War duology, which is about as close to ClockPunk as romantasy gets without someone putting gears on a corset. The combination of mechanical horrors, found-family road comedy, and characters who would apparently rather face cultists and dragons than admit they have feelings is, frankly, the kind of formula the Omega7Red Formulae itself would produce if you fed it a Pratchett novel and a D&D campaign that went completely sideways. Pick up Swordheart now so you’re ready. Nothing can beat old age and betrayal, but this series is at least good company while you wait for both.

Via: Goodreads

Tomorrow, August 15th, the Hornsea Museum in East Yorkshire gets the full Formulae treatment: Victoriana, steam, gears, and presumably at least one person in goggles explaining how their ray gun works to a very patient docent. The museum’s annual Steampunk Day drops cosplayers and makers into a genuine local history collection, which is exactly the kind of collision the Doctor approves of. Real artifacts. Real history. Now add corsets and airship maps. Good job, high-5!

This is the move the genre has always deserved: not a convention center with fluorescent lighting and carpet that hasn’t been replaced since 1987, but an actual museum where the past is already doing the heavy lifting. The Punk just walks in and finishes the job. If you’re anywhere near the East Riding of Yorkshire today, you know what to do. Nothing can beat old age and betrayal, but a steampunk museum day is a solid second place.

Via: The Steampunk Explorer

A two-person team (Team Machiavelli, published by IndieArk) built a steampunk action-RPG tower-defense hybrid and somehow made it Very Positive on Steam with over 600 reviews. You play Bellator: an alchemically enhanced super-soldier reclaiming a castle level by level, setting traps, building towers, crafting randomized weapons, and applying a menu of conditions to the horde (slow, stun, burn, freeze, the full cocktail). The levels run from mine shafts under the castle to engineering forges to eerily silent lecture halls where all the alchemists have apparently evacuated, which: good call, alchemists.

The Formulae approves. Alchemy is proto-SteamPunk chemistry: you’re just running the experiment at scale, with a blunderbuss. Two people built this. TWO. The Doctor has shipped code with a team of twelve and produced something considerably less impressive. High-5, Team Machiavelli. Nothing can beat old age and betrayal, but apparently a two-person shop with pixel art and randomized loot comes close.

Via: Steam

You heard correctly. TeslaCon, North America’s largest immersion SteamPunk convention, is dragging us all to the Wonderful Land of Oz this November. November 12-15, 2026, Madison Marriott West in Middleton, Wisconsin. The con is set in 1896, which means Tik-Tok the clockwork man is technically on the schedule, and the Wizard is presumably running some kind of con inside the con. The Doctor approves of this arrangement.

It gets better: the International Wizard of Oz Club’s national convention has parked itself inside TeslaCon for 2026, so you’ve got a genuine crossover event with professional actors performing a full Oz drama across the whole weekend. Vendors from 15-plus states, 100-plus breakout sessions, art workshops, panels. Tik-Tok is a brass automaton who runs on clockwork and never needs to sleep. That is just the Omega7Red Formulae applied to a children’s book character, and it happened in 1900, and nobody gave L. Frank Baum nearly enough credit for that.

Tickets are $80 in advance. That is less than you spent on the last three mediocre games you rage-quit. Priorities, people. Go get a brass gear glued to a top hat and meet me in Oz. Nothing can beat old age and betrayal, but a SteamPunk Scarecrow comes close.

Via: TeslaCon

The Doctor does not play puzzle-adventure games because they are “relaxing.” The Doctor plays them because there is something deeply satisfying about a clockpunk automaton named Oscar following you across half of Europe on a train powered by sheer mechanical stubbornness. Syberia, Benoît Sokal’s masterwork of wind-up melancholy, has been given the full remaster treatment, and the updated version is sitting right there on Steam judging you for every FPS-bro game you bought instead.

If you somehow missed the original: you play as Kate Walker, a Manhattan lawyer who arrives in a tiny Alpine village to finalize a factory acquisition, only to discover the inventor she’s looking for has wandered off on a quixotic mission involving woolly mammoths and a place called Syberia. The world Sokal built is ClockPunk in its bones: brass automatons, hand-wound mechanisms, a whole civilization built on springs and ingenuity instead of steam or diesel. It is gorgeous and a little heartbreaking and it has absolutely zero exploding helicopters, which is the correct amount. Oscar, the automaton companion, remains one of the better written non-human characters in gaming, and I will not be taking questions on this point.

The Omega7Red Formulae declares this one ΩΩΩΩ½. If you have never played it, the remaster is the version to start with. If you have played it, you already know. Nothing can beat old age and betrayal, but a good clockwork train comes close.

Via: Steam

Chaosium, the house that built Call of Cthulhu, RuneQuest, and Pendragon, has not launched an original IP in thirty years. They just ended that streak. Time Without Tide: Mirth & Misery in the World of Fog is a faux-Victorian, post-apocalyptic steampunk TTRPG where the moon is gone, the cities are rubble, and an evil capital-F Fog covers what’s left. You are a Delver: lantern in hand, venturing beyond the fortified walls into a world that mutates anything it touches. The BackerKit campaign goes live August 11th, but the free 60-page Quickstart is already waiting for you on their pre-launch page right now.

The new system ditches Chaosium’s signature d100 BRP in favor of a d6 dice pool, promising tactical miniatures combat alongside the character-driven weirdness you’d expect from a studio that made a career out of putting investigators in basements with unknowable horrors. Designers David Naylor and James Coquillat describe it as a world where “being weird is the whole point” and your “bonkers build isn’t broken.” The Doctor approves of this philosophy on a deeply personal level. It has robots, mutant powers, a Victorian aesthetic, and a cosmological catastrophe as the inciting incident. The Omega7Red Formulae might as well have written this setting brief.

Grab the Quickstart, follow the BackerKit, and keep your lantern lit. Whatever killed the moon is still out there. Via: TTRPG Fans

Napoleon III’s aetherships dueling the British Empire over Venus. Germans colonizing Mars. The moons of Jupiter, unclaimed and up for grabs. That’s not a geopolitical fever dream — that’s the premise of Castle in the Stars: The Universe in 1875, the gloriously over-the-top artbook from illustrator Alex Alice and French publisher Caurette. The Kickstarter hit its €8,000 goal in eight minutes. EIGHT. MINUTES. It eventually blew past €200,000 and unlocked enough stretch goals to fill an aethership cargo hold, including an official “Invitation to the Interplanetary Exposition.” The Doctor approves of this level of ambition.

The book itself is an in-world artifact: a lavishly illustrated guidebook designed as if it were printed for actual travelers in the Castle in the Stars universe, complete with over 200 watercolor illustrations, travel tips, maps, and enough Jules Verne energy to power a steam-driven orbital cannon. Alex Alice also dropped a companion sketchbook called Prototypes that cracks open his design process from first sketch to finished world. It’s the kind of behind-the-scenes material that makes you want to quit your job and move to 1875 Paris and build a rocket. The full Kickstarter run is a 2022 artifact, but copies are still findable through Caurette’s store (last items in stock, so move your gears). High-5, Monsieur Alice. High-5.

Via: Caurette Editions