The Chicago Steampunk Exposition has dropped its 2027 theme and, look, I just want to say: someone in Schaumburg, Illinois is doing the Lord’s work. The 2027 Expo is going full Victorian space travel, drawing its inspiration from H.G. Wells, Georges Méliès, Edgar Rice Burroughs, and anyone else who ever looked at a steam-powered boiler and thought, “yes, but what if we aimed it at Mars.” The convention channels the spirit of the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair with a retro-futuristic twist, and this year the twist is: the Moon, Mars, and boldly going where no chap (or lady) has gone before. Mark your calendar: June 11–13, 2027, Schaumburg, IL.

This is the Omega7Red Formulae operating at peak efficiency, people. You take Victorian ambition (the kind that built the Ferris Wheel and called it a modest achievement), you point it at the void of space, and you get something that makes NASA look like it’s still loading on dial-up. Méliès shot a rocket into the Moon’s eye in 1902 as a film trick. The Victorians would have called that a proof of concept and started laying track. Three days of panels, costumes, vendors, entertainment, and presumably at least one argument about whether aetheric propulsion counts as hard science. Free parking. Fully air conditioned. The Doctor approves.

Get your goggles calibrated, fire up the brass orrery, and start planning your kit now. Twelve months is barely enough time to properly weather an authentic Lunar Expedition ensemble. chicagosteampunkexpo.com — wait, no. chicagosteampunkexpo.com for all the details. Nothing can beat old age and betrayal, but a steam-powered rocket to the Moon is a solid second place. High-5.

Your wallet is about to get jacked in and left bleeding in a neon-soaked alley, and you are going to thank them for it. Steam Cyberpunk Fest 2026 runs August 3 through 10, and it is exactly what the label says: a week of discounts on high-tech, low-life games featuring neon megacities, corporate dystopias, chrome implants, and the general understanding that the future is a bad neighborhood you choose to live in anyway. Cyberpunk 2077, Ghostrunner, Deus Ex, and a few hundred of their degenerate friends are all expected to be on the block.

Look, the Doctor has a complicated relationship with CyberPunk. It is the rebellious younger cousin of SteamPunk, the one who swapped the top hat for a neural interface and traded brass gears for black-market wetware. Different aesthetic, same energy: the Omega7Red Formulae recognizes it as kin. If you have been sitting on a wishlist full of neon-drenched future-noir titles, this is your week. Load up the list, clear some hard drive space, and try not to spend your rent money. (No promises on that last part.) The Train Fest just pulled out of the station, so the timing is perfect: go directly from locomotives to cyberneticly-enhanced assassins with no stops in between.

High-5, your future dystopia awaits. Via: GameGrin

The Magnanimous and Beneficent Dr. Warthan hereby raises a brass monocle to Level-5, because Professor Layton and the New World of Steam is still happening, and it is set in a steampunk town called Steam Bison. They named the town Steam Bison. That is either the best or the most gloriously unhinged thing in game development this year, and frankly the Doctor does not care which. It’s canon. It counts.

The game is the eighth main entry in the Layton series, and it’s coming in 2026 to Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 5, and Windows simultaneously: the first time a Layton game has ever landed on either of those last two platforms. Level-5 confirmed in April that it’s still on track for a worldwide simultaneous release, which means there are no region-locked excuses this time. You will play a puzzle game set in a steampunk frontier town called Steam Bison. The Omega7Red Formulae did not need to touch this one. Level-5 handled it themselves.

Good job, high-5. Now put on your best waistcoat and go wishlist it. Nothing can beat old age and betrayal, but a clockwork mystery in a town named after the most diesel animal on the plains comes remarkably close.

Via: Wikipedia

San Diego Comic-Con 2026 wrapped up today, and while the normies were busy losing their minds over Marvel casting news and Blade Runner 2099 (CyberPunk, yes, I see you, it counts), the real action was happening at the back stairs of the Convention Center on Saturday morning. Drake & McTrowell called the faithful: full steampunk cosplay, back stairs, 10am, be there or be boring. And they showed up. Of course they showed up. Nothing can beat old age and betrayal.

Meanwhile, The Steampunk Explorer did what it does best and compiled the steampunk highlights from the whole con floor, because someone has to be the archivist of the aesthetically correct. Between the Enola Holmes 3 news (neo-Victorian, close enough, the Formula approves) and whatever gothic-gear cosplay wandered into frame, SDCC 2026 was apparently a better steampunk con than it had any right to be. The Doctor is grudgingly pleased. High-5, San Diego.

Via: The Steampunk Explorer / SDCC Unofficial Blog

Brandon Sanderson’s Cosmere RPG is expanding, and the new wave is Mistborn, dropping into retail November 2026 from Brotherwise Games. That means a Starter Set, a Handbook, a 285-page World Guide packed with lore and art, and a full campaign book called Mistborn: Legacy. Four products. One very ambitious launch.

Here is the part that earns the Doctor’s attention: the setting supports two eras, and Era 2 is basically an industrial fantasy with revolvers, railroads, and a gunslinging underclass navigating the ash-choked wreckage of a collapsed empire. That is the Formulae doing its job. You start in a feudal nightmare of grim oppression (Era 1, full-grimdark, capes and steel), then pivot to a proto-industrial world of political intrigue and Allomantic cowboys (Era 2). The mists clear and suddenly you’re in DieselPunk Before Diesel: all the grit, none of the gasoline. The Doctor approves of this timeline.

Kickstarter backers already have their books; retail hits November 4. The World Guide retails for $59.99 and is also perfectly usable as a straight-up art and lore book if the dice scare you. Which they should not, but no judgment. Nothing can beat old age and betrayal. Pre-order on the Brotherwise site before the mists eat you. Via: ICv2

Someone at Somanyrobots Games asked the right question: what if the Industrial Revolution ran on reanimated corpses instead of coal and steam? The answer is Machines of Bone & Blood, a 5E/5.5E sourcebook set inside a Necroindustrial Revolution, where skeletal constructs are replacing living workers, necrobarons run factory floors staffed by the freshly dead, and the tagline is literally “Fight the Necroindustrial Revolution!” The Doctor approves. That is the Omega7Red Formulae applied to labor history, and it is glorious.

The book clocks in at 300-plus pages of necrocrafting rules, two new classes, twenty-odd subclasses, spells, monsters, and mini-settings you can drop straight into an existing campaign. The art is all human-made (the publisher has a firm no-AI policy, which earns them a bonus half-Omega just on principle). The Kickstarter already funded at nearly five times its goal before closing on July 9th, so late pledges are your move now. Via: Kickstarter

Nothing can beat old age and betrayal, but a factory floor run by a necrobaron and his army of bone-machines comes remarkably close. ΩΩΩΩ½ before I’ve even rolled a single die.

Someone in France just shipped a cozy, pocket-sized steampunk RPG in a box and I’m unreasonably pleased about it. Nobi Nobi Steampunk is one of two new adventure settings (the other being Cyberpunk, naturally) for the Nobi Nobi tabletop system: a fast, cinematic party game that gets you into a story in minutes. No 400-page rulebook. No character optimization spreadsheet. You strap on the clockwork goggles, load the electropistol, fire up the steamwagon, and go. The whole thing is modular too: mix and match with the Fantasy, Horror, and Thriller boxes because sure, why not, a steampunk horror thriller is basically Tuesday around here.

The Formula has always held that SteamPunk is a delivery mechanism for adventure, not a homework assignment. A tiny box that drops a table of people into gears-and-steam mayhem in under ten minutes? The Doctor approves. BackerKit late pledges are still open, rewards ship end of 2026. Get on it. Nothing can beat old age and betrayal, so you might as well spend the time rolling dice.

A one-person dev named BrandonWritesGames has been grinding on Dieselpunk 1921 for nearly a year, logging hundreds of hours of collage-making, and he’s almost across the finish line. To prove it, a free condensed quickstart edition drops tomorrow (July 23) on itch.io, packing the full rules, a condensed character creation process, 34 country description pages, and an item list. Thirty-four countries. The Doctor is taking notes.

The pitch is political intrigue in the interwar period, which is basically the Dieselpunk sweet spot: grease-stained trench coats, Art Deco everything, factions that would sell you to the highest bidder before the ink dries, and the slow creep of Very Bad History just offstage. If you’ve ever wanted to run a game set in Monaco in 1921 where everyone is lying to everyone else, this is your game. The full release is inbound; the quickstart is the appetizer.

Go grab the free edition when it drops. Support the solo dev. Give the Doctor a full release to write about. Nothing can beat old age and betrayal. Via: BrandonWritesGames on itch.io

Someone finally did it. Someone looked at the grease-stained, rivet-popped glory of alt-history dieselpunk, strapped it to a mech, handed that mech a machine gun, and said: “yes, parkour.” Diesel Knights is a 6-v-6 mech/movement shooter set in a pulp-inspired dieselpunk world, and it funded on Kickstarter in forty-two minutes. FORTY-TWO. The Formula approves of this velocity.

The pitch is Titanfall’s fluid movement and mech combat DNA, dressed up in an aesthetic that looks like The Rocketeer crashed into Iron Harvest and they both liked it. No battle passes. No loot boxes. Just mastery, momentum, and the satisfying thud of a diesel-powered war machine doing something physically improbable at high speed. The Kickstarter closed at $526,576 from 7,763 backers, blew through every stretch goal, and the dev posted a fresh update on July 20, so the engine is still running. Wishlist it on Steam now, before the Ancient Gods wake up and ruin the servers.

Via: Steam / Kickstarter

The nominees for the 2026 ENNIE Awards have been announced, and voting is open RIGHT NOW. Go cast your ballot. Winners get announced at Gen Con in Indianapolis at the end of July, so the clock is ticking. This year’s field is legitimately stacked: Daggerheart, Legend in the Mist, Vaesen: City of My Nightmares (yes, please), and the Crooked Moon VTT are all in the mix, plus Call of Cthulhu products showing up in roughly half the categories because Chaosium apparently does not sleep. Good for them.

Also new this year: a dedicated Best Solo Game category, which means the TTRPG community has officially acknowledged that some of us roll dice alone in our laboratories at 2am. The Doctor neither confirms nor denies. The point is: if you play tabletop RPGs and you have opinions (you do), you have until Gen Con to make them count. The ENNIEs are a fan vote, which means the results are only as good as the people who bother to show up. Be the person who bothers to show up. Nothing can beat old age and betrayal, but a well-placed vote comes close.