Chaosium, the house that built Call of Cthulhu, RuneQuest, and Pendragon, has not launched an original IP in thirty years. They just ended that streak. Time Without Tide: Mirth & Misery in the World of Fog is a faux-Victorian, post-apocalyptic steampunk TTRPG where the moon is gone, the cities are rubble, and an evil capital-F Fog covers what’s left. You are a Delver: lantern in hand, venturing beyond the fortified walls into a world that mutates anything it touches. The BackerKit campaign goes live August 11th, but the free 60-page Quickstart is already waiting for you on their pre-launch page right now.

The new system ditches Chaosium’s signature d100 BRP in favor of a d6 dice pool, promising tactical miniatures combat alongside the character-driven weirdness you’d expect from a studio that made a career out of putting investigators in basements with unknowable horrors. Designers David Naylor and James Coquillat describe it as a world where “being weird is the whole point” and your “bonkers build isn’t broken.” The Doctor approves of this philosophy on a deeply personal level. It has robots, mutant powers, a Victorian aesthetic, and a cosmological catastrophe as the inciting incident. The Omega7Red Formulae might as well have written this setting brief.

Grab the Quickstart, follow the BackerKit, and keep your lantern lit. Whatever killed the moon is still out there. Via: TTRPG Fans

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.

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

inXile Entertainment just dropped a new Clockwork Revolution trailer at the Xbox Games Showcase 2026, and the Doctor approves. We’re talking a first-person steampunk RPG set in Avalon, a Victorian metropolis ruled by a tyrant named Lady Ironwood who has been quietly rewriting history via time-travel device to keep her boot on everyone’s neck. You play Morgan Vanette, a street-gang scrapper from the wrong side of the tracks, who gets hold of a Chronometer and starts kicking the legs out from under her carefully curated timeline. BioShock Infinite called, it wants its DNA back, and inXile said: fine, we’ll take it.

The new footage shows off character creation, weapon blueprinting (you carry ONE gun the whole game and build it into a monster), steampunk gadgets as deployables, and the class-war subtext is about as subtle as a wrench to the faceplate. The Formula was applied to “first-person RPG” and the result is grand airships, clockwork automatons, and a city that changes shape depending on which moments you’ve gone back and corrupted. Time travel plus consequences plus gears equals a delivery mechanism for EXACTLY the kind of retrofuturist power fantasy this blog exists to document. It’s currently slated for 2027 on PC and Xbox Series, so yes, patience will be required. Nothing can beat old age and betrayal.

Via: Sortiraparis | Wishlist on Steam