It is July 16. The sun is a diesel-powered furnace welded directly above your skull by a malevolent engineer who clearly never had to work outdoors. Heat indexes are lying to you in real-time. Somewhere, a politician is promising relief that will never come. The ice in your drink surrendered eleven seconds ago. This is Summer, raw and unprocessed.

Now watch what happens when I apply the Formulae.

Apply the Omega7Red Formulae and Summer becomes: brass valves bleeding off overpressure steam on a copper boiler the size of a cathedral, zeppelins trailing condensation over a crowd in full kit (goggles down, corsets tight, nobody sweating because the aesthetic demands it), the smell of machine oil and gunpowder and something that is definitely not legal at a county fair. It is SteamPunk Summer: oppressive, gorgeous, completely worth it. Whitby XX just wrapped. Papplewick Pumping Station turned ten. The Brass Screw Consortium has already convened and dispersed. TeslaCon is heading to Oz. The Formula is running hot this year, and for once, that is not a complaint. High-5. Stay hydrated. Nothing can beat old age and betrayal.

The Clockpunk genre has a problem, and that problem is that most Clockpunk games look like someone put a gear decal on a generic fantasy RPG and called it a day. Duskfade, however, is not that. Indie studio Weird Beluga (yes, that is their actual name, and the Doctor approves) has built a full clockpunk world out of suspended architecture, intricate mechanisms, and painterly landscapes that shift from ethereal forests to underwater ruins to cloud-piercing heights. The whole land has been plunged into eternal night by a mysterious Clock Tower and its enigmatic Master Clockmakers, which is exactly the kind of villain backstory that makes sense when you think about it for two seconds and then makes you furious that you didn’t invent it first.

You play Zirian, a workshop apprentice accompanied by his mechanical bird sidekick Cuckoo, who must shatter the shackles of time (their words, and they earned them) to rescue his sister and restore the world. The traversal looks genuinely fluid: jumps, dashes, grapples, glides, swinging from floating chains, running suspended rails. GameSpot called it “the spiritual successor to Jak and Daxter that we’ve been waiting years for,” which is either massive hype or the truest thing anyone has said about a game in a decade. The demo is live right now on Steam and PS5, so you have zero excuse not to find out which one it is. Launches August 13 on PS5, Xbox Series X/S, PC, and Nintendo Switch 2.

Nothing can beat old age and betrayal, but a clockpunk kid with a mechanical bird and a vendetta against the concept of time might come close. High-5, Weird Beluga. Wishlist it. Play the demo. You’re welcome.

Via: Chalgyr’s Game Room

The people behind the Great Dickens Christmas Fair have gone and done it again: they’re turning Pier 35 on the Embarcadero into an 1849 Gold Rush settlement for two days only, August 22 and 23. We’re talking immersive Victorian-era San Francisco, sea shanties pouring out of saloon doors, high-kicking can-can dancers, artisan wares, oysters, sourdough, and hopeful prospectors who will absolutely try to sell you a shovel. In partnership with the San Francisco Historical Society, no less. Red Barn Productions calls it “theatrical living history.” The Doctor calls it GoldPunk, and he will not be taking questions.

Think about what’s actually being proposed here: a fully immersive port city circa 1850, crammed with period clothing shops, sketch comedians, sea captains, gold panners, and enough local ale to float one of those great sailing vessels. This is the Omega7Red Formulae applied to Manifest Destiny, and the result is completely canonical. The Formula doesn’t care about your eras; it just asks what the most interesting version of a moment in history looks like. Turns out it looks like San Francisco before the earthquake got to it, staffed by 150 actors and built on Pier 35. Tickets are $40 for adults. Get in there.

Via: The Steampunk Explorer

Britain has a Victorian waterworks in Nottingham that fires up its original 1880s James Watt beam engines, opens the underground reservoir, and once a year lets the Steampunk community take over the whole magnificent, gear-laden, boiler-heated cathedral of a building. This weekend was that weekend. The 10th Annual Steampunk Steam Event at Papplewick Pumping Station ran July 11-12, and if you weren’t there, you were somewhere objectively worse.

The lineup: Alice Strange on Saturday, Professor Elemental on Sunday (with a noon Rap School, because of course), Tea Dueling with Steampunk Shenanigans, over 30 trade stalls, and the engines in full steam the entire time. A Victorian pumping station that is a Scheduled Ancient Monument running its 1883 Lancashire boilers while costumed gogglers duel with teacups. The Omega7Red Formulae did not need to be applied here. The universe already did the work.

Year ten. High-5, Papplewick. Nothing can beat old age and betrayal, but ten years of keeping this alive on volunteer power comes close.

Flying pirate ship. Steampunk floating islands. Ancient Gods who want you very, very dead. Turn-based tactical combat where one bad move ends the whole run. Oh, and Lovecraftian atmosphere baked straight into the pixel art. The Doctor approves, and The Doctor does not approve of just anything. Dead Weight drops on Steam July 16 for the extremely reasonable sum of $12.99, and it has already racked up over 120,000 wishlists, which means you people have taste.

Here is what you are signing up for: captain a steam-powered airship across a procedurally generated world, recruit a crew of four distinct characters through branching skill trees, and then get absolutely worked over by compact tactical battlefields where every single hex counts. The dev cites Into the Breach and Final Fantasy Tactics as combat inspirations, which is a sentence that should make any self-respecting tactician sit up straighter. Throw in random events, fatigue, madness mechanics, and late-game crisis events that can blow the whole run sideways, and you have a roguelite that will eat your weekend like an Ancient God eats a poorly-positioned barbarian.

There is a free Prologue available on the Steam page right now, so you have zero excuses not to wishlist it and give it a spin before launch. Nothing can beat old age and betrayal, but a well-placed broadside from a flying steampunk pirate ship comes close. High-5, Klukva Games.

Via: Steam (Dead Weight)

Today is Nikola Tesla’s birthday, which means the Punk calendar is already winning. But if you’re anywhere near Jacksonville, Florida tonight, you’ve got exactly zero excuses not to be at Nemo’s Steampunk Gala. Hall of Heroes is throwing the first-ever Jules Verne-themed blowout at Goozlepipe & Guttyworks (yes, that is the actual name of the venue, and yes, it was already perfect before any steampunks got their hands on it), running 9pm to 2am. The upstairs is the Nautilus Engine Room: DJs, live performances, full food and drink menu. The downstairs is called The Abyss, described as a journey “20,000 leagues under King Street” into the Kraken’s Lounge. If that sentence doesn’t make you want to put on a frock coat and a diving helmet, the Omega7Red Formulae cannot help you.

There’s also a Steampunk Market with independent creators on the floor, so you can spend money on things you absolutely do not need but will treasure forever. The Doctor approves of any event where the aesthetic is “Victorian submarine nightmare” and the cover charge is cheaper than therapy. Get your tickets before they’re gone, or spend tomorrow reading about it on the internet like a surface-dweller. Nothing can beat old age and betrayal.

Via: Hall of Heroes Events

Iron Crown Enterprises just dropped HARP Steampunk, a new sourcebook by veteran designer Phil Masters (yes, the same Phil Masters who wrote GURPS Steampunk and GURPS Castle Falkenstein, so the man clearly has a type). It hit DriveThruRPG in PDF form simultaneously with a physical premiere at Gen Con, and it’s already the top-selling Phil Masters title on the platform. The Doctor approves of this velocity.

The book bolts the HARP system onto Victorian melodrama, weird science, and Jules Verne retro-sci-fi, delivering 12 new Steampunk professions: Detective, Doctor, Engineer, Pilot, and more. You also get mechanical rules for clockwork automata, steam-driven contraptions, ornithopters, steam-powered power armour, and something called Akashic Reading, which sounds exactly as gloriously unhinged as it should. Settings are modular, scaling from grounded Victorian realism all the way up to “electrical miracles,” so your table can calibrate from Sherlock Holmes to The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen depending on how much absinthe the GM has had. Note that this is a sourcebook, not a standalone: you’ll need either the HARP Fantasy or HARP SF core rules to run it. PDF is $20.00. High-5, Iron Crown.

Via: DriveThruRPG / Iron Crown Enterprises

Twenty editions. Twenty. The Romans would approve of the numerals, and so does the Doctor. Whitby Steampunk Weekend XX descends on Whitby, North Yorkshire, July 24-26, 2026, turning the seaside town Bram Stoker used as his personal horror-writing backdrop into something Stoker himself would have found delightfully unhinged: thousands of costumed steampunks doing costumed promenades along the clifftops, a 70-plus-stall Retail Emporium packed with handcrafted curiosities, live music, workshops, and educational presentations, all inside the Whitby Pavilion. Free daytime entry. Family friendly. The past is always in the future, apparently, and in Whitby it is also apparently wearing a very elaborate hat.

Seriously though: free, accessible, and set in a town with a ruined abbey looming over the harbor and a Dracula connection baked into the postcode? That is either the best-scouted convention venue in the genre or the most [expletive deleted] obvious one, and either way the Doctor gives full credit. If you are anywhere near North Yorkshire in late July and you are not already packing your goggles and your best brass-fitted waistcoat, I genuinely do not know what you are doing with your life. Nothing can beat old age and betrayal, but Whitby Steampunk Weekend at least gives you something worth staying alive for.

Via: Whitby Pavilion

Samurai. Yōkai. And a British trade conglomerate rolling in with steam-powered war machines to “help” everyone modernize. Shadow of the Road is a turn-based tactical RPG from Another Angle Games (published by Owlcat, the fine people behind Pathfinder and Warhammer 40K: Rogue Trader) set in a reimagined 1868 Bakumatsu-era Japan, where the Tokugawa Shogunate and Emperor Mutsuhito’s loyalists are already at each other’s throats, and the British East Nippon Company has decided this is a great time to show up with steampunk constructs and advanced firepower. Progress and prosperity, they promise. Sure. Sure they do.

Your fight roster isn’t just human factions either: yōkai share the battlefield with armored steampunk contraptions, so your party loadout has to cover supernatural threats AND industrial machinery in the same engagement. The campaign follows a Tokugawa spymaster who recruits ronin Satoru and Akira to escort a boy with unstable, catastrophic power, and every relationship in that party matters mechanically. Choices reshape bonds, break them, or push characters down completely different paths. The Doctor approves of consequences that actually stick. The demo is live on Steam right now, the full release is still 2026, and the store pages are already up on Steam, GOG, and Epic. Go play the demo. Nothing can beat old age and betrayal, but a well-timed tactical yōkai ambush is a solid second place.

Via: RPG Site

Somewhere in an alternate 1940s, Abraham Lincoln survives, the Reconstruction goes differently, and battleships take to the skies on the back of bold leaps in electricity, magnetism, and gravity. That is the premise baked into every rivet of Steel Seas & Sky Machines, the Portsmouth, Virginia exhibition showcasing the dieselpunk world of artist Tony Snipes and his fictional Portsmouth Aeroshipbuilding Co. Detailed sketches, 3-D models, and digital works, all locked in to an alt-history where the home front didn’t build Liberty Ships, it built Aerocycles and aeroships. The Doctor approves of this timeline.

If you missed the exhibition, Snipes has a live Kickstarter running right now for the Aerocycle Art Book & Model Kit, a product launch straight out of The Yard itself. An art book AND a model kit. In a dieselpunk universe. For actual money you can spend. This is the Omega7Red Formulae applied to “what if WWII-era industrial propaganda was awesome on purpose” and the result is exactly what you’d hope. Go back this thing. Nothing can beat old age and betrayal, but a tabletop Aerocycle might come close.

Via: The Steampunk Explorer