A free 125-page TTRPG rulebook just dropped on itch.io, and the Doctor is extremely here for it. Dieselpunk 1921 plants you in an alternate history where the shadow of the Great War never quite lifted, the streets are ruled by towering machines called Striders, and complicated people are fighting very complicated battles for survival. It covers 34 countries, a full game engine built around creative problem-solving and investigation, a faction system for political intrigue, and an equipment catalogue that goes from mundane day-to-day gear all the way up to those aforementioned domineering walking machines. Free. One hundred and twenty-five pages. Go.

The year 1921 as a setting is doing a lot of heavy lifting here: the interwar grime, the diesel-and-rivet aesthetic, the sense that history took a hard left turn somewhere around 1914 and nobody’s quite recovered. That’s the sweet spot of Dieselpunk, and BrandonWritesGames nailed the brief. The free edition also comes with character sheets and a Major NPC sheet, so you can run a session before you’ve spent a single dollar. If your table is suffering from a steampunk-adjacent RPG deficit (and statistically, it probably is), this is your prescription. High-5 to the doctor’s doctor: the one who prescribes free TTRPGs.

Via: BrandonWritesGames on itch.io

The beta events are happening right now, chooms. WeirdCo and CD PROJEKT RED launched the Official Cyberpunk Trading Card Game onto Kickstarter back in March and the internet promptly lost its mind: $28 million pledged by 50,773 backers, with the $100K goal vaporized in somewhere around five minutes flat. That is not a typo. Five. Minutes. The Doctor is choosing to interpret this as confirmation that Night City is the only city that matters.

The game ditches the traditional life-point grind entirely. Instead, you’re running Gigs, stealing your opponent’s dice mid-combat, spending Eddies, and building Street Cred to drop the heavy cards. Your starter decks are “The Heist” (Mercenaries) or “Embracing Power” (Arasaka), and your roster includes V, Johnny Silverhand, Jackie Welles, Judy Alvarez, Adam Smasher, and more. Physically: real cards, real boosters, real deck-building, not a digital port slapped onto cardboard. The art is franchise-native, chrome implants and holographic dystopia all the way down.

Beta events run through September 20 at local game stores worldwide; hit cyberpunktcg.com to find one near you. Full retail release drops November 6, 2026. The Doctor will be there on launch day, deck pre-built, ready to be absolutely destroyed by someone half my age. Nothing can beat old age and betrayal.

Someone looked at Iron Harvest and Company of Heroes and said, “Yes, but what if we turned it up?” The result is Veil of Ashes, an incoming dieselpunk mecha RTS set in an alternate history that trades the usual grim realism for something with considerably more walking death machine energy. Riveted steel legs, diesel smoke, and enough tonnage to flatten a trench line. The Doctor approves of this direction in RTS design. STRONGLY.

The pitch: imagine the interwar period, but the arms race went sideways into giant mechanical warfare instead of just, you know, regular catastrophic human warfare. The game leans hard into combat and strategy over base-building micromanagement, which means you spend your time actually commanding dieselpunk monsters on the field rather than clicking a barracks menu seventeen times. If you have ever looked at a 1920s diesel engine and thought “that should be a leg,” this game was made for you specifically, and also for me, and we should probably form a club.

No firm release date is nailed down yet, but the visual fidelity screenshots making the rounds are genuinely striking. Wishlist it, bookmark it, carve a reminder into a gear with a calipers. Nothing can beat old age and betrayal, but a well-piloted dieselpunk mech comes close.

inXile Entertainment (the same mad geniuses behind Wasteland and Torment) have been building Clockwork Revolution long enough that I started to wonder if Lady Ironwood had used the Chronometer to erase it from the timeline. Good news: it still exists. Bad news: it’s 2027 now, not 2026. The Xbox Games Showcase in June confirmed the slip, dropped a four-minute gameplay trailer, and then said absolutely nothing about a specific date. “Coming in due time.” Sure. Fine. I’ll be here, gears rusting.

The setup, though? Legitimately excellent. You’re loose in Avalon, a steam-powered Victorian metropolis run top-to-bottom by Lady Ironwood, a ruler who already got to the Chronometer first and quietly rewrote history to cement her grip on everything. Your job is to go back, make choices, and watch the butterfly effects ripple forward through the city. The comparisons to BioShock Infinite and Dishonored are warranted and the Doctor approves of both reference points. inXile has apparently written 750,000 words of dialogue for this thing. That’s not a game, that’s a civilization.

Xbox console exclusive, also on PC and Game Pass day one. Wishlist it now and let the waiting be someone else’s problem. Nothing can beat old age and betrayal.

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 still 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.

Level-5 nailed the timing down at their VISION 2026 showcase: end of 2026, simultaneous worldwide release, on Switch 2, Switch, PS5, and PC. That last pair is a first for the series, and a worldwide simultaneous release means there are no region-locked excuses this time. The good Professor has been stuck in development purgatory since 2023 (delayed from 2024, then 2025, now finally actually 2026), so forgive the Doctor for not booking the champagne until the cartridge is physically in his hand. Nothing can beat old age and betrayal.

The steampunk hook here isn’t just window dressing: Steam Bison is a full-on Victorian-industrial American boomtown where steam engine technology has surpassed even London’s finest clockwork. The villain is apparently a ghostly gunslinger (a SteamPunk Western, basically), the theme song is being composed by Joe Hisaishi (yes, that Joe Hisaishi, the man responsible for every Ghibli film that ever made you cry), and puzzle design duties passed to quiz collective QuizKnock after the original puzzle master Akira Tago passed in 2016. That’s a legacy worth inheriting carefully. Level-5 says development is progressing smoothly, and given how many times they’ve said that, the Doctor rates it at “optimistically skeptical.”

The Omega7Red Formulae did not need to touch this one. Level-5 handled it themselves. So put on your best waistcoat and go wishlist it, because a clockwork mystery in a town named after the most diesel animal on the plains goes straight to the top of the holiday SteamPunk gaming pile. High-5, Level-5. Don’t blow it.

Via: Nintendo Everything and Level-5

Warcradle Studios has been steadily rolling out factions for the new edition of Dystopian Wars, their alternate-late-19th-century naval wargame, and this month the Kaiser sends his regards: the Imperium hits the tabletop in October. Blood and iron, baby. We’re talking Blücher Cruisers as the Prussian workhorse, Augustus Bombardment Cruisers lobbing heavy mortars from long range, and Reiter Flak Cruisers watching the skies so your fleet doesn’t get chewed up by enemy aircraft. One starter box, multiple build options, maximum carnage on the Dystopian Age high seas.

If you somehow missed the new edition: Dystopian Wars is a miniatures wargame set in an alternate 19th century where super-science-fueled great powers clash over resources and dominion, on, above, and below the ocean. The new edition streamlined the rules without gutting the crunch (they trimmed the special-rule list from over 200 down to something a human being can actually memorize), and existing minis are still legal. Your old fleet doesn’t go in the bin. The Doctor approves of this policy; nothing can beat old age and betrayal, but at least your Imperium dreadnoughts get to die with dignity.

The Commonwealth Starter Set is already shipping this month, so if you want to get reps in before the Kaiser crashes the party, now is the time. High-5 to Warcradle for keeping the new-faction pipeline moving. Via: Warcradle Studios Blog

Feudal Japan. Boshin War. Steam-powered war machines stomping through ancient temple courtyards while yokai tear into imperial soldiers from the shadows. The British East Nippon Company (yes, really) has handed Emperor Mutsuhito’s forces a massive technological leg-up, and here you are, a ragtag party of ronin, retainers, and one very suspicious child, trying to survive the whole mess. That’s Shadow of the Road, and Owlcat Games just locked in a release date at gamescom: November 12, 2026, on Steam, GOG, and Epic.

Developer Another Angle Games has serious pedigree (Witcher, Ghostrunner, Rogue Trader alumni), and the tactical bones look sharp: turn-based combat with relationship mechanics, multi-attack combos, environmental interaction, and a yokai transformation mode for when everything has gone completely sideways. The Omega7Red Formulae looked at 19th-century Japan, said “needs more rivets and fog,” and apparently the result is a war story where your most dangerous enemy might be a steam automaton, a supernatural fox spirit, or your own party members’ conflicting loyalties. All three, probably, before lunch. A free demo is already on Steam if you want to find out the hard way. High-5.

Via: RPGamer

A new steampunk TTRPG just landed on Kickstarter, and The Doctor is paying attention. Brass & Embers, from Questborne Studios out of Orlando, runs on a D6 system and drops you into a world where the whole civilization is about to tear itself apart over a mineral called machnite. The industrialists want to burn it for profit, the faithful want to keep it sacred, and the Queen is sitting in the back doing her best “entertaining fad” impression while quietly expanding her empire on everyone else’s dime. Sound familiar? Good. That means the setting has teeth.

The system is designed to be easy to pick up and can run short campaigns or long-haul ones, which is the right call: nobody wants a steampunk RPG that requires a graduate seminar just to roll initiative. Pledges start at US$20 for a digital sourcebook, $55 for hardcover (early-bird tiers, standard is $10 more). They’re after $42,000 by September 16th and were sitting at about 10 percent of goal as of last week, so if this sounds like your kind of industrial-age theological throwdown, go give it a shove. Nothing can beat old age and betrayal, but a fully funded Kickstarter is a decent start.

Via: The Steampunk Explorer

Bonsart Bokel (the Netherlands, creator of The Association of Ishtar series, host of the Radio Retrofuture podcast, and apparently incapable of sitting still) has a steampunk TTRPG on Kickstarter called NIGHTWATCH, and it is exactly as unhinged as it needs to be. The premise: rifts tear open portals to other worlds, some full of alien lifeforms, some populated by suspiciously advanced human civilizations, all of them begging to be explored by your faction of Operators who are absolutely NOT getting paid enough for this. Cosmic mystery. Pulp adventure. Steampunk everything. The Doctor approves.

The system is built around fast setup and high-action flow (board game mechanics were raided for inspiration, which is either genius or heresy, and I’ve decided it’s genius). Reviewers describe it as one of the easiest TTRPGs to pick up while still delivering deep world-building, and the art is handled by award-winning illustrators including Yohan Alexander. Play in Victorian London’s darkest alleys, or kick the rift open wider and end up in the Old West. The multiverse is your problem now. Grab the free prototype PDF on their site and see if you survive long enough to back the full thing.

Via: Kickstarter / NIGHTWATCH

A giant Clock Tower plunges the world of Tearfeld into eternal night. A kid with a clock-hand sword and a mechanical cuckoo bird has to fix it. Yes, this is a ClockPunk video game, and yes, The Doctor approves of its entire premise. Duskfade, from Spanish indie studio Weird Beluga and published by Fireshine Games, hit PC, PS5, Xbox Series X|S, and Nintendo Switch 2 on August 13th at $29.99. The aesthetic is the real payload here: rusted machinery, ticking motifs, grandfather-clock grappling hooks, and surreal architecture that feels like a fever dream someone had inside a pocketwatch. It already swept three awards at BCN Game Fest (including Best Game and Best Sound), so the bones are undeniably there.

Now, the honest part: the pro reviews are… more complicated. Steam players are sitting at 89% Very Positive, which is respectable. The critics, on the other hand, keep landing on the same note: gorgeous world, competent-to-repetitive combat, levels that don’t fully live up to the art. That tracks. Sometimes a team nails the vibe and the mechanics are just a vehicle to get you through more of it. For ClockPunk fans, Duskfade is essentially a guided tour of a world you want to live in, even if the tour guide occasionally runs you in circles. I’m giving it ΩΩΩ: the aesthetic earns its keep, the execution needs another pass, and I’d still rather be here than in a hundred brown-corridor shooters. Nothing can beat old age and betrayal, but a clockwork cuckoo bird companion comes close.