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

Hand-built sculptural vehicles versus flying monkeys, killer robots, and zombies. On a closed course. Judged by how well the contraption handles the chaos. This is the Obtainium Cup Contraptor’s Rally, produced by Obtainium Works out of Vallejo, California, and the 10th Annual edition just went down on July 28 at Mare Island Art Studios. Ten years of this glorious nonsense. The Doctor approves wholeheartedly.

If you need a scorecard: participants build people-powered (and occasionally motorized) sculptural vehicles out of found objects, hence "obtainium," which is the most SteamPunk word that has ever existed. They then pilot those contraptions around an obstacle course while being assailed by stuffed flying monkeys, confronted by mad robots, and generally menaced by the entire cast of a fever dream. Trophies are awarded for creativity, tenacity, and participation. There is no trophy for dignity, because dignity didn’t show up. Good.

Ten years in, the Obtainium Cup is proof that the maker spirit is alive, greasy, and completely off its rails, in the best possible way. High-5 to every contraption that survived. And a moment of respect for every one that didn’t. Via: The Steampunk Explorer

A giant Clock Tower plunges the world of Tearfeld into eternal night. A kid with a clock-hand sword and a mechanical cuckoo bird has to fix it. Yes, this is a ClockPunk video game, and yes, The Doctor approves of its entire premise. Duskfade, from Spanish indie studio Weird Beluga and published by Fireshine Games, hit PC, PS5, Xbox Series X|S, and Nintendo Switch 2 on August 13th at $29.99. The aesthetic is the real payload here: rusted machinery, ticking motifs, grandfather-clock grappling hooks, and surreal architecture that feels like a fever dream someone had inside a pocketwatch. It already swept three awards at BCN Game Fest (including Best Game and Best Sound), so the bones are undeniably there.

Now, the honest part: the pro reviews are… more complicated. Steam players are sitting at 89% Very Positive, which is respectable. The critics, on the other hand, keep landing on the same note: gorgeous world, competent-to-repetitive combat, levels that don’t fully live up to the art. That tracks. Sometimes a team nails the vibe and the mechanics are just a vehicle to get you through more of it. For ClockPunk fans, Duskfade is essentially a guided tour of a world you want to live in, even if the tour guide occasionally runs you in circles. I’m giving it ΩΩΩ: the aesthetic earns its keep, the execution needs another pass, and I’d still rather be here than in a hundred brown-corridor shooters. Nothing can beat old age and betrayal, but a clockwork cuckoo bird companion comes close.

The people behind the Great Dickens Christmas Fair spent two months building 46 period structures in a pair of Cow Palace warehouses, loaded the whole town onto eight semi-trucks, drove it to Pier 35, and reassembled a functioning Gold Rush-era San Francisco on the waterfront. Over 100 costumed performers (miners, sailors, revue dancers, a juggler, a magician), a docked brigantine you can actually board, saloons, a general store, the Alta California newspaper office, and a pan-for-gold station. Today and tomorrow only. If that logistical audacity doesn’t read as Punk, I don’t know what does.

The San Francisco Historium Spotlight runs August 22-23, 2026 at Pier 35 (10am-6pm). Tickets are $40 adults, $20 kids 5-12, free under 5. Red Barn Productions has been doing this flavor of immersive living-history theater since 1961, and it shows: this isn’t a theme park, it’s an argument that the past was more interesting than the present, made entirely out of hand-painted set pieces and sheer theatrical nerve. The Doctor approves. High-5 to the scenic carpenters who built a ship facade out of lumber, because during the actual Gold Rush, abandoned ships were cannibalized to build San Francisco anyway. History, recursing into itself. Beautiful.

Via: SFist

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

Nine days. That is how long you have before Weekend at the Asylum 16 kicks off in the Historic Quarter of Lincoln, U.K. (August 28-31), and if you are not already on a plane, a dirigible, or at minimum a very fast velocipede, the Doctor is deeply concerned about your life choices. This is Asylum 16, the sixteenth edition of the world’s largest steampunk festival, run by the Ministry of Steampunk out of a city that has been occupied by someone or other since the Romans showed up two thousand years ago. They know how to host a crowd.

This year’s theme is the Year of the Dragon, which means the usual brass gears and Victorian splendor get some scaly, fire-breathing additions woven in. Daytime programming lives inside Lincoln Castle, the Castle Ward, the County Assembly Rooms, and Westgate School: workshops, talks, exhibitions, games, cosplay at a level that will make you feel underdressed in full kit. Evening events feature performers including Mr. B, Victor and the Bully, Alice Strange, and Madam Misfit. Thursday the 27th has the traditional Advanced Guard kick-off for those who arrive early; Monday the 31st closes with the Dead Dog Party, because of course it does. The street festival itself is free to the public, because the Ministry of Steampunk is operated by volunteers who have somehow kept this thing alive since 2009 without a single corporate sponsor. Respect.

Wristbands and evening tickets are still available at the link above. Go. The Omega7Red Formulae was forged for exactly this kind of situation: apply it to an entire medieval city, add ten thousand costumed lunatics, and the output is pure Punk. Nothing can beat old age and betrayal, but a long weekend in Lincoln comes close. High-5.

Worldcon is nine days out. LAcon V, the 84th World Science Fiction Convention, descends on the Anaheim Convention Center August 27-31, 2026, and the Hugo Awards ceremony hits the stage on Sunday the 30th. The Doctor has opinions about who should win. The Doctor also has opinions about Anaheim in August (hot, crowded, smells faintly of churro and sunscreen), but he goes where the speculative fiction goes.

Quick civic service announcement: Hugo voting closed August 8th, so if you didn’t vote, congratulations, you forfeited your right to complain about the results. The category slate this year includes the second-ever Best Poem award (yes, poetry, keep your monocle in), and finalists in Best Novel include Robert Jackson Bennett’s A Drop of Corruption and Nnedi Okorafor’s Death of the Author, among others. The field is legitimately strong. Whether the ceremony will be equally strong is, as always, a separate question entirely.

If you’re going, find me in the vendor hall. I’ll be the one judging your costume. High-5 to everyone who shows up in something with gears on it. lacon.org for the full schedule, membership info, and streaming details for the ceremony if you’re experiencing Anaheim from a safe distance.

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

August isn’t done with us yet. The Steampunk Explorer’s North America calendar shows a steampunk festival dropping in Coldwater, Ontario on August 29, and then the whole thing turns into a cavalcade: Hannibal, Missouri (September 4-7), Fergus, Ontario (September 11-12), Colfax, California (September 12-13). The brass horde is mobilizing on multiple fronts simultaneously. The Doctor approves of this level of coordination.

If you’re anywhere near the Great Lakes corridor and you DON’T have Coldwater on your radar, that’s a personal failing I cannot fix for you. Ontario in late August is legitimately gorgeous, and the idea of gears and goggles against the backdrop of cottage country is the kind of thing the Omega7Red Formulae practically writes itself for. Go. Wear the hat. You know which hat.

Meanwhile, two steampunk gatherings also happened TODAY (one in Stamford, CT and one in Los Angeles) on opposite coasts, which means either the movement is growing, or the Formulae is leaking again. Either way: high-5. Via: The Steampunk Explorer

T. Kingfisher drops Daggerbound on August 25, and if you have not yet met the gnole-and-enchanted-sword corner of her “World of the White Rat,” I have only one question: what have you been doing? This is Book 2 of the Swordheart trilogy, following Swordheart (2018) and picking up with Learned Edmund, a disillusioned scholar who grabs an ancient cursed sword in a desperate moment and gets a very angry, very handsome immortal warrior named the Dervish for his trouble. There is also an enslaved gnole, an opinionated donkey, and what the Library Journal is calling “a queer grumpy/sunshine romantasy.” The Doctor approves of all of these things, separately and together.

The broader setting shares continuity with Kingfisher’s Clocktaur War duology, which is about as close to ClockPunk as romantasy gets without someone putting gears on a corset. The combination of mechanical horrors, found-family road comedy, and characters who would apparently rather face cultists and dragons than admit they have feelings is, frankly, the kind of formula the Omega7Red Formulae itself would produce if you fed it a Pratchett novel and a D&D campaign that went completely sideways. Pick up Swordheart now so you’re ready. Nothing can beat old age and betrayal, but this series is at least good company while you wait for both.

Via: Goodreads