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

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

Brandon Sanderson’s Cosmere RPG is expanding, and the new wave is Mistborn, dropping into retail November 2026 from Brotherwise Games. That means a Starter Set, a Handbook, a 285-page World Guide packed with lore and art, and a full campaign book called Mistborn: Legacy. Four products. One very ambitious launch.

Here is the part that earns the Doctor’s attention: the setting supports two eras, and Era 2 is basically an industrial fantasy with revolvers, railroads, and a gunslinging underclass navigating the ash-choked wreckage of a collapsed empire. That is the Formulae doing its job. You start in a feudal nightmare of grim oppression (Era 1, full-grimdark, capes and steel), then pivot to a proto-industrial world of political intrigue and Allomantic cowboys (Era 2). The mists clear and suddenly you’re in DieselPunk Before Diesel: all the grit, none of the gasoline. The Doctor approves of this timeline.

Kickstarter backers already have their books; retail hits November 4. The World Guide retails for $59.99 and is also perfectly usable as a straight-up art and lore book if the dice scare you. Which they should not, but no judgment. Nothing can beat old age and betrayal. Pre-order on the Brotherwise site before the mists eat you. Via: ICv2

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 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.

A one-person dev named BrandonWritesGames has been grinding on Dieselpunk 1921 for nearly a year, logging hundreds of hours of collage-making, and he’s almost across the finish line. To prove it, a free condensed quickstart edition drops tomorrow (July 23) on itch.io, packing the full rules, a condensed character creation process, 34 country description pages, and an item list. Thirty-four countries. The Doctor is taking notes.

The pitch is political intrigue in the interwar period, which is basically the Dieselpunk sweet spot: grease-stained trench coats, Art Deco everything, factions that would sell you to the highest bidder before the ink dries, and the slow creep of Very Bad History just offstage. If you’ve ever wanted to run a game set in Monaco in 1921 where everyone is lying to everyone else, this is your game. The full release is inbound; the quickstart is the appetizer.

Go grab the free edition when it drops. Support the solo dev. Give the Doctor a full release to write about. Nothing can beat old age and betrayal. Via: BrandonWritesGames on itch.io

The nominees for the 2026 ENNIE Awards have been announced, and voting is open RIGHT NOW. Go cast your ballot. Winners get announced at Gen Con in Indianapolis at the end of July, so the clock is ticking. This year’s field is legitimately stacked: Daggerheart, Legend in the Mist, Vaesen: City of My Nightmares (yes, please), and the Crooked Moon VTT are all in the mix, plus Call of Cthulhu products showing up in roughly half the categories because Chaosium apparently does not sleep. Good for them.

Also new this year: a dedicated Best Solo Game category, which means the TTRPG community has officially acknowledged that some of us roll dice alone in our laboratories at 2am. The Doctor neither confirms nor denies. The point is: if you play tabletop RPGs and you have opinions (you do), you have until Gen Con to make them count. The ENNIEs are a fan vote, which means the results are only as good as the people who bother to show up. Be the person who bothers to show up. Nothing can beat old age and betrayal, but a well-placed vote comes close.

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

Catalyst Game Labs just dropped the Frostpunk RPG: Core Rulebook into retail this week, and yes, the Formulae approves. The video game already nailed the SteamPunk-survival-city-building sweet spot (coal-fired generators, the last city on Earth, morally crushing choices before your morning tea), and now 11 bit Studios and Catalyst have handed you the keys to run that frozen nightmare yourself at a tabletop. Players manage the last city on Earth as resources run out, navigate Hope and Discontent city mechanics, and apparently make each other miserable with the Dice Core engine. $49.99 MSRP. That is a bargain for the number of friendships you will destroy.

The Doctor has been watching Frostpunk eat city-builders alive since the original launched, and the sequel has only gotten meaner, so a full tabletop adaptation was, frankly, overdue. If your game group survived Pandemic with their relationships intact, consider this the next stress test. Just remember: the law must be passed. It’s always the law.

Good job, high‑5, Catalyst. Nothing can beat old age and betrayal, but a well-timed coal shortage comes close. Via: ICv2