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 internet keeps mashing these two together, and the Doctor has had enough. AtomicPunk is the dark side of the atom: duck-and-cover drills, fallout shelters in the backyard, the mushroom cloud looming over every chrome-plated appliance. It is the 1950s screaming at you that progress has a body count. Raypunk is the optimistic lie we told ourselves at the same moment: flying cars, robot butlers, gleaming Googie diners, The Jetsons as sincere prophecy. Same era, opposite emotional register. One says “we’re all going to die beautifully”; the other says “we’re all going to live forever in a push-button paradise.” Both are wrong, which is exactly why both are magnificent.

The Omega7Red Formulae distinguishes them by what the gears do to you. Apply AtomicPunk to a suburban house and you get a fallout shelter with a cocktail bar and a Geiger counter as the centerpiece. Apply Raypunk to that same house and you get a rotating rooftop pad with a personal jetpack rack and an AI butler who still somehow talks like a 1962 dishwasher commercial. Related? Yes. Identical? Absolutely not, and if you keep calling them the same thing the Doctor is going to start mislabeling YOUR aesthetic subgenre. How would you like to be called “GardenPunk?” Think about it.

The confusion is forgivable because both aesthetics are having an enormous moment right now, as even the genre theorists are noting, riding the wake of Fallout and Oppenheimer. But “big moment” is not an excuse for sloppy taxonomy. The Formulae demands precision. Now you know. High-5.

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

The Magnanimous and Beneficent Doctor has been watching inXile Entertainment’s Clockwork Revolution with the patient intensity of a man who has literally survived the end of the world via alchemical formulae. Set in Avalon, a steam-powered metropolis where Lady Ironwood rules by rewriting the past to protect her grip on the future, this first-person RPG hands you the Chronometer: a device that lets you reach back into history, pull a thread, and watch everything downstream change. The Doctor approves of this mechanic on a deeply personal level.

At the Xbox Games Showcase 2026, inXile finally confirmed a 2027 release window on Xbox Series X/S, PC, Steam, cloud, and Game Pass day one. Is that “2027” vague enough to mean December 31st? Yes. Am I going to wishlist it anyway and haunt the Steam page like a brass-goggled poltergeist? Also yes. Brian Fargo says the game already has 750,000 words of dialogue written and will run at least 20 hours on the main story alone. The man does not do things small. This is the same studio that gave us Wasteland 3, and they are putting that chaos energy into a time-bending, class-warfare-soaked, gear-and-soot Victorian city where your choices don’t just matter, they haunt you retroactively. That is either the greatest RPG design philosophy I’ve ever heard, or the Doctor is about to lose three weeks of his life to a save-file spiral. Possibly both.

Nothing can beat old age and betrayal, Lady Ironwood. But the Doctor is coming for your timeline anyway. Wishlist it on Steam. Via: Xbox Wire

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

Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. August 7 through 9. The theme is Worlds of Tomorrow, and the mood board they’re working from is Metropolis, The Rocketeer, and airships. If you just read that sentence and felt nothing, I cannot help you. The Doctor, however, felt several things simultaneously and had to sit down.

Key City is one of the premiere steampunk cons on the East Coast, and they do it right every year: makers, panels, tea dueling, live music, a costume contest, handcrafted goods from vendors who actually know what they’re doing, and a hotel (the Wyndham Gettysburg) that sits minutes from a Civil War battlefield. Which means you can spend Saturday in a brass-goggled aviator coat watching people duel with teacups, and Sunday morning standing on ground where 51,000 people became casualties in three days. The Formulae handles both with equal dignity. Online ticket sales close at midnight on August 6th, so don’t be the person who shows up at the door paying the walk-up rate because you forgot. Nothing can beat old age and betrayal, but forgetting to pre-register comes close.

Get your tickets at keycitysteampunk.com before the clock runs out. High-5 to everyone already packing their goggles.

The Chicago Steampunk Exposition has dropped its 2027 theme and, look, I just want to say: someone in Schaumburg, Illinois is doing the Lord’s work. The 2027 Expo is going full Victorian space travel, drawing its inspiration from H.G. Wells, Georges Méliès, Edgar Rice Burroughs, and anyone else who ever looked at a steam-powered boiler and thought, “yes, but what if we aimed it at Mars.” The convention channels the spirit of the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair with a retro-futuristic twist, and this year the twist is: the Moon, Mars, and boldly going where no chap (or lady) has gone before. Mark your calendar: June 11–13, 2027, Schaumburg, IL.

This is the Omega7Red Formulae operating at peak efficiency, people. You take Victorian ambition (the kind that built the Ferris Wheel and called it a modest achievement), you point it at the void of space, and you get something that makes NASA look like it’s still loading on dial-up. Méliès shot a rocket into the Moon’s eye in 1902 as a film trick. The Victorians would have called that a proof of concept and started laying track. Three days of panels, costumes, vendors, entertainment, and presumably at least one argument about whether aetheric propulsion counts as hard science. Free parking. Fully air conditioned. The Doctor approves.

Get your goggles calibrated, fire up the brass orrery, and start planning your kit now. Twelve months is barely enough time to properly weather an authentic Lunar Expedition ensemble. chicagosteampunkexpo.com — wait, no. chicagosteampunkexpo.com for all the details. Nothing can beat old age and betrayal, but a steam-powered rocket to the Moon is a solid second place. High-5.

Your wallet is about to get jacked in and left bleeding in a neon-soaked alley, and you are going to thank them for it. Steam Cyberpunk Fest 2026 runs August 3 through 10, and it is exactly what the label says: a week of discounts on high-tech, low-life games featuring neon megacities, corporate dystopias, chrome implants, and the general understanding that the future is a bad neighborhood you choose to live in anyway. Cyberpunk 2077, Ghostrunner, Deus Ex, and a few hundred of their degenerate friends are all expected to be on the block.

Look, the Doctor has a complicated relationship with CyberPunk. It is the rebellious younger cousin of SteamPunk, the one who swapped the top hat for a neural interface and traded brass gears for black-market wetware. Different aesthetic, same energy: the Omega7Red Formulae recognizes it as kin. If you have been sitting on a wishlist full of neon-drenched future-noir titles, this is your week. Load up the list, clear some hard drive space, and try not to spend your rent money. (No promises on that last part.) The Train Fest just pulled out of the station, so the timing is perfect: go directly from locomotives to cyberneticly-enhanced assassins with no stops in between.

High-5, your future dystopia awaits. Via: GameGrin

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 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.

The game is the eighth main entry in the Layton series, and it’s coming in 2026 to Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 5, and Windows simultaneously: the first time a Layton game has ever landed on either of those last two platforms. Level-5 confirmed in April that it’s still on track for a worldwide simultaneous release, which means there are no region-locked excuses this time. You will play a puzzle game set in a steampunk frontier town called Steam Bison. The Omega7Red Formulae did not need to touch this one. Level-5 handled it themselves.

Good job, high-5. Now put on your best waistcoat and go wishlist it. Nothing can beat old age and betrayal, but a clockwork mystery in a town named after the most diesel animal on the plains comes remarkably close.

Via: Wikipedia

San Diego Comic-Con 2026 wrapped up today, and while the normies were busy losing their minds over Marvel casting news and Blade Runner 2099 (CyberPunk, yes, I see you, it counts), the real action was happening at the back stairs of the Convention Center on Saturday morning. Drake & McTrowell called the faithful: full steampunk cosplay, back stairs, 10am, be there or be boring. And they showed up. Of course they showed up. Nothing can beat old age and betrayal.

Meanwhile, The Steampunk Explorer did what it does best and compiled the steampunk highlights from the whole con floor, because someone has to be the archivist of the aesthetically correct. Between the Enola Holmes 3 news (neo-Victorian, close enough, the Formula approves) and whatever gothic-gear cosplay wandered into frame, SDCC 2026 was apparently a better steampunk con than it had any right to be. The Doctor is grudgingly pleased. High-5, San Diego.

Via: The Steampunk Explorer / SDCC Unofficial Blog