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Big Wheels Keep On Turning
I drew a map for the still-unnamed High-Middle-Ages vaguely Arthurian fantasy world. It's not a world map; it's a map of the vaguely-Celtic-Germanic-kinda culture's continent, which is roughly the size of South America and shaped something like it because I drew it while I was bored proctoring Stanford 10 (the IACP came out of his office and saw his shadow, and now there's going to be six more weeks of testing) and I was in a Spanish I classroom, with maps of the Spanish-speaking world on the walls. The tip's toward the north, though. I should scan it.
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Let me preface this with: I hate steampunk. This is purely a matter of opinion on my part, much like liking or not liking okra, or (more to the point in this case) dark chocolate, but I despise it. It gets under my skin in a way that few subgenres do. Mostly it's because I am utterly revulsed by Victoriana; it makes me want to throw up like little else does. I like the Romantic period, despite some pretty glaring flaws (among others, how can you revere Nature and the "noble savage" and then do what was done to the American West and its inhabitants? And there's that whole slavery thing), but as soon as literature switches from Romantic to Victorian, it all goes to hell. The Victorian era combines much of what I find aesthetically displeasing about the Christian Middle Ages with what I find aesthetically displeasing about the Enlightenment, without the redeeming factors of either period. It's an era full of coal dust and soot, the slow starvation of Ireland and Jack the Ripper. The Georgian era isn't any better, but no one romanticizes it, so it doesn't bother me as much. The Edwardian era has some redeeming factors. But the Victorian era? Yeesh. And the vast majority of the steampunk I've encountered is steeped to the eyeballs in Victoriana. (The one arguably-steampunk story that I can think of that I liked is Back To The Future III, and that entire trilogy is largely about de-romanticizing the times when you aren't.)
I'm ambivalent about some of the offshoots of steampunk. The sort of steampunk-fantasy hybrid that shows up in things like Castle Falkenstein and Girl Genius bugs me, mostly because it still engages in the Victoriana-wallowing I was just complaining about, but less so than straight steampunk. I am much more tolerant of the slightly-later-set stories that I think should properly be called Decopunk - Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow is a slightly comic-book-y example. Still, not really my cup of tea. The FaeriePunk game at Con-Jour was a little odd, partly because I never got a good idea of when-ish the story was supposed to take place. Going by the troupe's costumes, the faerie-realm was still solidly medieval while the human realm was Georgian, if not fully Victorian, but it's not clear how much of the costumes were "what we had on hand" and how much were really tailored to the story. I'm uncomfortable with fae stuff for personal reasons, but I ended up playing one because playing a steampunk-human appealed even less. The steampunkishness of the CoC LARP just adds to the Lovecraftian horror of the piece, for me.
Having said all that, I have found myself over the last couple of days contemplating trying to run a game, either tabletop or LARP, using the idea that the Ghostbusters appeared and developed their equipment in the Naughty Aughties - say, 1909 or so, when spiritualism was still semi-socially-respectable in the US and Britain. While it doesn't feel steampunkish in my head, I have to admit that the period and the appearance of the technology would spell out steampunk to anyone else observing it. I could push it to the '20s and make it Decopunk, but that gives it a streamlined feel that's just wrong for Spenglerian engineering.
The idea will probably never go anywhere. There's already a perfectly good Ghostbusters RPG. But I'm finding it oddly compelling.
--
Let me preface this with: I hate steampunk. This is purely a matter of opinion on my part, much like liking or not liking okra, or (more to the point in this case) dark chocolate, but I despise it. It gets under my skin in a way that few subgenres do. Mostly it's because I am utterly revulsed by Victoriana; it makes me want to throw up like little else does. I like the Romantic period, despite some pretty glaring flaws (among others, how can you revere Nature and the "noble savage" and then do what was done to the American West and its inhabitants? And there's that whole slavery thing), but as soon as literature switches from Romantic to Victorian, it all goes to hell. The Victorian era combines much of what I find aesthetically displeasing about the Christian Middle Ages with what I find aesthetically displeasing about the Enlightenment, without the redeeming factors of either period. It's an era full of coal dust and soot, the slow starvation of Ireland and Jack the Ripper. The Georgian era isn't any better, but no one romanticizes it, so it doesn't bother me as much. The Edwardian era has some redeeming factors. But the Victorian era? Yeesh. And the vast majority of the steampunk I've encountered is steeped to the eyeballs in Victoriana. (The one arguably-steampunk story that I can think of that I liked is Back To The Future III, and that entire trilogy is largely about de-romanticizing the times when you aren't.)
I'm ambivalent about some of the offshoots of steampunk. The sort of steampunk-fantasy hybrid that shows up in things like Castle Falkenstein and Girl Genius bugs me, mostly because it still engages in the Victoriana-wallowing I was just complaining about, but less so than straight steampunk. I am much more tolerant of the slightly-later-set stories that I think should properly be called Decopunk - Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow is a slightly comic-book-y example. Still, not really my cup of tea. The FaeriePunk game at Con-Jour was a little odd, partly because I never got a good idea of when-ish the story was supposed to take place. Going by the troupe's costumes, the faerie-realm was still solidly medieval while the human realm was Georgian, if not fully Victorian, but it's not clear how much of the costumes were "what we had on hand" and how much were really tailored to the story. I'm uncomfortable with fae stuff for personal reasons, but I ended up playing one because playing a steampunk-human appealed even less. The steampunkishness of the CoC LARP just adds to the Lovecraftian horror of the piece, for me.
Having said all that, I have found myself over the last couple of days contemplating trying to run a game, either tabletop or LARP, using the idea that the Ghostbusters appeared and developed their equipment in the Naughty Aughties - say, 1909 or so, when spiritualism was still semi-socially-respectable in the US and Britain. While it doesn't feel steampunkish in my head, I have to admit that the period and the appearance of the technology would spell out steampunk to anyone else observing it. I could push it to the '20s and make it Decopunk, but that gives it a streamlined feel that's just wrong for Spenglerian engineering.
The idea will probably never go anywhere. There's already a perfectly good Ghostbusters RPG. But I'm finding it oddly compelling.
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