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

The internet keeps mashing these two together, and the Doctor has had enough. AtomicPunk is the dark side of the atom: duck-and-cover drills, fallout shelters in the backyard, the mushroom cloud looming over every chrome-plated appliance. It is the 1950s screaming at you that progress has a body count. Raypunk is the optimistic lie we told ourselves at the same moment: flying cars, robot butlers, gleaming Googie diners, The Jetsons as sincere prophecy. Same era, opposite emotional register. One says “we’re all going to die beautifully”; the other says “we’re all going to live forever in a push-button paradise.” Both are wrong, which is exactly why both are magnificent.

The Omega7Red Formulae distinguishes them by what the gears do to you. Apply AtomicPunk to a suburban house and you get a fallout shelter with a cocktail bar and a Geiger counter as the centerpiece. Apply Raypunk to that same house and you get a rotating rooftop pad with a personal jetpack rack and an AI butler who still somehow talks like a 1962 dishwasher commercial. Related? Yes. Identical? Absolutely not, and if you keep calling them the same thing the Doctor is going to start mislabeling YOUR aesthetic subgenre. How would you like to be called “GardenPunk?” Think about it.

The confusion is forgivable because both aesthetics are having an enormous moment right now, as even the genre theorists are noting, riding the wake of Fallout and Oppenheimer. But “big moment” is not an excuse for sloppy taxonomy. The Formulae demands precision. Now you know. High-5.

The street finds its own uses for things, and apparently the street also finds its own uses for rules systems. Shadowrun Anarchy 2.0 just went fully funded on Kickstarter, courtesy of Catalyst Game Labs and Black Book Editions, and if you’ve never played Shadowrun before: imagine the year 2070, magic came back, corporations own everything, elves and trolls are filing W-2s, and you are a street-level criminal with a datajack and a dragon problem. The original Anarchy was a rules-light take on that universe, and 2.0 is the cleaned-up, expanded follow-up. The Omega7Red Formulae recognizes this as CyberPunk operating at full power.

Shadowrun has always been the genre that SteamPunk kids grow up into when they realize the future is a lot grittier than a brass airship. Neon replaces copper pipe, megacorps replace robber barons, and the hacking is way more annoying to run at the table. Anarchy fixes that last part: it strips out the notoriously baroque ruleset and hands you something you can actually finish a campaign with without needing a spreadsheet for your spreadsheet. Catalyst knows what they’re doing here. High-5 to everyone who backed it.

Via: TTRPG Fanatics

The Magnanimous and Beneficent Doctor has been watching inXile Entertainment’s Clockwork Revolution with the patient intensity of a man who has literally survived the end of the world via alchemical formulae. Set in Avalon, a steam-powered metropolis where Lady Ironwood rules by rewriting the past to protect her grip on the future, this first-person RPG hands you the Chronometer: a device that lets you reach back into history, pull a thread, and watch everything downstream change. The Doctor approves of this mechanic on a deeply personal level.

At the Xbox Games Showcase 2026, inXile finally confirmed a 2027 release window on Xbox Series X/S, PC, Steam, cloud, and Game Pass day one. Is that “2027” vague enough to mean December 31st? Yes. Am I going to wishlist it anyway and haunt the Steam page like a brass-goggled poltergeist? Also yes. Brian Fargo says the game already has 750,000 words of dialogue written and will run at least 20 hours on the main story alone. The man does not do things small. This is the same studio that gave us Wasteland 3, and they are putting that chaos energy into a time-bending, class-warfare-soaked, gear-and-soot Victorian city where your choices don’t just matter, they haunt you retroactively. That is either the greatest RPG design philosophy I’ve ever heard, or the Doctor is about to lose three weeks of his life to a save-file spiral. Possibly both.

Nothing can beat old age and betrayal, Lady Ironwood. But the Doctor is coming for your timeline anyway. Wishlist it on Steam. Via: Xbox Wire