Someone applied the Formulae to a WWII shipyard employee manual, and the result is exactly as beautiful and deranged as that sounds. South Carolina artist Tony Snipes is Kickstarting Employee Handbook: Portsmouth Aeroshipbuilding Co., a ~100-page dieselpunk art book dressed up as the onboarding packet for a fictional 1940s shipyard where the battleships don’t just float, they fly. Alt-history WWII. Sky dreadnoughts. Authentic mid-century workplace culture. Original dieselpunk illustrations. A signed copy for thirty bucks.

The campaign launched today and already blew past its funding goal, so your fellow degenerates clearly have taste. It runs through October 4. The Doctor hereby designates this “Essential Reading” for anyone who has ever sat through a mandatory safety orientation and thought: this would be better with aerial warships. High-5, Mr. Snipes. High-5.

Via: The Steampunk Explorer | Back it on Kickstarter

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

Five kingdoms. Airborne dreadnoughts. Steam-powered weapons. Eldritch leviathans. A cosmology built from North, South, East, West, and Central African mythology. That is the world of Zairoo, and Molombo Thillia Thillot III has been building it in his head since he was 13. The Formulae approves of a man who commits to the bit for that long.

The pitch is exactly as good as it sounds: an alternate 17th-18th century where African myths come alive, science and ancient mysticism share a workbench, and the stat system runs on attributes called Grit, Vision, Soul, Vibe, and Flow. (Harmony and Discord track how close your heart is to full chaos. We’ve all been there.) The Kickstarter blew past $100,000, a fully playable Alpha PDF is already out, and the trailer crossed 80,000 views before Critical Role took notice. Not bad for a world that started as a 13-year-old’s notebook.

If you’ve ever felt like fantasy worldbuilding forgot that most of the planet exists, here is your corrective. Zairoo is exactly what the Omega7Red Formulae does when it gets applied to an entire mythological tradition: something you did not know you needed, now rendered in brass and smoke and ancient fire. Nothing can beat old age and betrayal, but a Pan-African steampunk TTRPG with eldritch leviathans comes close. Via: GlobeNewswire

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 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

Felicia Day just did something the internet desperately needed: she brought back The Guild. Not a reboot, not a remake, not a soulless streaming-service cash-grab. A fan-funded reunion movie, titled The Guild: Ren Faire’d, crowdfunded on Kickstarter, and it hit $2.7 million in pledges before anyone had time to dust off their old WoW subscription. The full original cast is back: Codex, Zaboo, Vork, Tink, Clara, Bladezz (the Knights of Good, for those of you who were living under a rock between 2007 and 2013), and the adventure this time drops them directly into a Renaissance Faire. A RENAISSANCE FAIRE. As if those people needed an excuse to wear more elaborate cosplay and argue about historically accurate mead.

The campaign closes August 21, and the reward tiers include a TTRPG supplement for D&D 5.5E (the Dragonor Campaign Setting, written by cast member Vince Caso and published by Hit Point Press, featuring monsters, subclasses, carnivorous outhouses, and a pirate named Cheesybeard). The Omega7Red Formulae has been waiting years for someone to apply it to a Ren Faire and actually get the budget to do it right. Felicia Day figured it out first. High-5, Codex. The campaign is live now at the link below, and the movie is set to debut in 2027, right on the 20th anniversary. Nothing can beat old age and betrayal, but apparently crowdfunding comes close.

Via: The Guild: Ren Faire’d on Kickstarter

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 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

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