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

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.

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

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

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