The people behind the Great Dickens Christmas Fair spent two months building 46 period structures in a pair of Cow Palace warehouses, loaded the whole town onto eight semi-trucks, drove it to Pier 35, and reassembled a functioning Gold Rush-era San Francisco on the waterfront. Over 100 costumed performers (miners, sailors, revue dancers, a juggler, a magician), a docked brigantine you can actually board, saloons, a general store, the Alta California newspaper office, and a pan-for-gold station. Today and tomorrow only. If that logistical audacity doesn’t read as Punk, I don’t know what does.

The San Francisco Historium Spotlight runs August 22-23, 2026 at Pier 35 (10am-6pm). Tickets are $40 adults, $20 kids 5-12, free under 5. Red Barn Productions has been doing this flavor of immersive living-history theater since 1961, and it shows: this isn’t a theme park, it’s an argument that the past was more interesting than the present, made entirely out of hand-painted set pieces and sheer theatrical nerve. The Doctor approves. High-5 to the scenic carpenters who built a ship facade out of lumber, because during the actual Gold Rush, abandoned ships were cannibalized to build San Francisco anyway. History, recursing into itself. Beautiful.

Via: SFist

Five kingdoms. Airborne dreadnoughts. Steam-powered weapons. Eldritch leviathans. A cosmology built from North, South, East, West, and Central African mythology. That is the world of Zairoo, and Molombo Thillia Thillot III has been building it in his head since he was 13. The Formulae approves of a man who commits to the bit for that long.

The pitch is exactly as good as it sounds: an alternate 17th-18th century where African myths come alive, science and ancient mysticism share a workbench, and the stat system runs on attributes called Grit, Vision, Soul, Vibe, and Flow. (Harmony and Discord track how close your heart is to full chaos. We’ve all been there.) The Kickstarter blew past $100,000, a fully playable Alpha PDF is already out, and the trailer crossed 80,000 views before Critical Role took notice. Not bad for a world that started as a 13-year-old’s notebook.

If you’ve ever felt like fantasy worldbuilding forgot that most of the planet exists, here is your corrective. Zairoo is exactly what the Omega7Red Formulae does when it gets applied to an entire mythological tradition: something you did not know you needed, now rendered in brass and smoke and ancient fire. Nothing can beat old age and betrayal, but a Pan-African steampunk TTRPG with eldritch leviathans comes close. Via: GlobeNewswire

Nine days. That is how long you have before Weekend at the Asylum 16 kicks off in the Historic Quarter of Lincoln, U.K. (August 28-31), and if you are not already on a plane, a dirigible, or at minimum a very fast velocipede, the Doctor is deeply concerned about your life choices. This is Asylum 16, the sixteenth edition of the world’s largest steampunk festival, run by the Ministry of Steampunk out of a city that has been occupied by someone or other since the Romans showed up two thousand years ago. They know how to host a crowd.

This year’s theme is the Year of the Dragon, which means the usual brass gears and Victorian splendor get some scaly, fire-breathing additions woven in. Daytime programming lives inside Lincoln Castle, the Castle Ward, the County Assembly Rooms, and Westgate School: workshops, talks, exhibitions, games, cosplay at a level that will make you feel underdressed in full kit. Evening events feature performers including Mr. B, Victor and the Bully, Alice Strange, and Madam Misfit. Thursday the 27th has the traditional Advanced Guard kick-off for those who arrive early; Monday the 31st closes with the Dead Dog Party, because of course it does. The street festival itself is free to the public, because the Ministry of Steampunk is operated by volunteers who have somehow kept this thing alive since 2009 without a single corporate sponsor. Respect.

Wristbands and evening tickets are still available at the link above. Go. The Omega7Red Formulae was forged for exactly this kind of situation: apply it to an entire medieval city, add ten thousand costumed lunatics, and the output is pure Punk. Nothing can beat old age and betrayal, but a long weekend in Lincoln comes close. High-5.

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