(Also posted on the Brassangeles group...)

I like to begin with an overview of the world setting for any game, and steampunk feeds nicely into my longstanding interest in the Regency, Victorian and Edwardian eras (as well as the Wild West). I've begun the design here with a generic (but nevertheless fairly original) alternate 19th century, into which players may plug their characters as the inventors, explorers, pioneers, villains, heroes and other adventurers. The original material's (c) 2008 Richard A. Becker, but it's here for general perusal, while the historical notes are tossed together quickly on the fly. So let's take a first look at my steampunk LARP background...

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We begin with the world as it actually was in 1889.

Political and military situation

The United States is governed by newly sworn-in President Benjamin Harrison, a Republican from Indiana. His election is credited partially to highly fraudulent ballot-counting in two states, and he is the earliest American president to have had his voice recorded for posterity. In the first weeks of his term, he has been forced to face off the American Navy against the German Navy in Samoa. The Ghost Dance uprising will soon take place in what remains of the Wild West.

U.S. neighbors Canada and Mexico are very much satellites of the Americans. Mexico is ruled by a vicious, thuggish dictator named Porfirio Diaz, who has continued the nation’s degeneration as it was begun under Santa Anna. Reduced from its glorious status as the center of civilization in the Western Hemisphere, Mexico City is the base of Diaz’ regime, which is famous for the motto, “Pan – o palo” (“bread or the stick” – take what you are given, or take a beating). Canada is very busy consolidating its territories, suppressing its native population, and making sure to call itself a Dominion in order to placate its dangerous neighbors in the United States.

The British Empire is at its zenith, ruled in title by Queen Victoria (aka “the Empress of India”) and in fact by Prime Minister Sir Robert Arthur Talbot Gascoyne-Cecil, the Third Marquess of Salisbury. His aristocratic and conservative leadership seized the reins of power when popular M.P. William Gladstone split the Liberal party with the Irish Home Rule bill (Gladstone wished for Ireland to be given self-rule rather than having them wrest it from Britain by force – he was reviled for this position). The Empire rules a large span of the globe, and is arguably the most powerful nation on Earth.

France is governed by moderates (dubbed “Opportunists” by their foes) in the Third Republic, in this period known as “La Belle Epoque” (the Beautiful Age). The French president is M.F. Sadi Carnot, one of the most honest and respected men in all of Europe – or the world. The nation is a hotbed of political strife in the wake of Communist insurrection, rising militarism and anti-Semitism, and German warfare and annexation. It is also a center of intellectualism, art, cynicism, decadence and modernism. The Eiffel Tower has just opened at La Exposition Universelle (a world’s fair in 1889), and is considered by most critics to be among the ugliest structures in the world.

Germany is only recently forged into one nation by Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, and is ruled by Kaiser Wilhelm II, cousin to Queen Victoria herself. They are a burgeoning European power, with growing military might and intellectual prowess, but von Bismarck’s calls for caution and strategy are overshadowed by belligerent military men and an impatient Wilhelm.

Russia is increasingly isolated by the xenophobic Tsar Aleksandr III, who seeks to avoid sharing China’s fate as a puppet of Western powers – while taking advantage of China’s weakness at the same time. Imperial Russia is only slowly awakening to the Industrial Revolution, though its serfs were finally emancipated a generation or so ago. As with Imperial Japan, the Russians are being courted and counseled by French advisors, in this case to help contain German power.

The Ottoman Empire is “the sick man of Europe,” and its Sultan – Abdulhamid the Second, known as “the Red Sultan” for his genocidal slaughters of Armenians – has traveled to many other nations and has courted German support for his doddering regime. He has allowed Egypt to fall into the hands of the British and is very unpopular with his own military officers. Europe generally detests the social structures of the Ottoman Empire, such as slavery, which they regard as barbaric. But Turkey’s strategic importance to the Middle East and India is such that the dying Empire cannot be ignored.

Japan is in a period of great upheaval, as a movement toward a German model of government – with a monarch and an elected parliament, or diet – is begun. In this Meiji Era (for the Emperor Meiji), there is rapid Westernization in the Japanese Empire and French military advisors are involved in helping the Japanese bring their army and navy up to modern European standards.

China is essentially ruled by invading foreigners with the cooperation of the Dowager Empress Cixi, though there is an Emperor – Guangxu – who commands in name only, despite his reforming ideas and modern ways. The Qing Dynasty is a shadow of its former self, though there are many in China who detest foreign domination and government corruption.

Much of the world is a crazy-quilt of imperialism and international exploitation, whether by crowns or by captains of industry and adventurers of various sorts.


Science, technology and medicine

There’s only room for a rough sketch here:

Thomas Edison developed electric light systems – already invented decades before his time – into a practical working invention about nine years ago. Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone 23 years ago, and Edison’s engineers developed the phonograph 21 years ago. The Eastman Kodak camera appeared a year ago, to initiate amateur photography. Certain universities have already begun to admit women on an equal basis with men. Marx has already published _Das Kapital_.

Among the known scientific and medical principles (up to and including the year 1890) are:

• The speed of light and approximate distance between Earth and Sun
• Vaccination against disease
• Natural selection
• Sterilizing against bacteria and viruses, wearing rubber gloves during surgery
• The periodic table of elements
• Electromagnetism
• The cause of “the bends” (nitrogen in the bloodstream)
• Carbon dating
• The existence of dinosaurs
• Radio wave (but not voice/music/etc.) transmission
• Doppler shift, rotation and revolution of the Earth and other bodies
• Law of Conservation of Energy
• Cellular basis of life

Early motion pictures exist alongside better-established magic lantern shows. There is some rudimentary refrigeration, and even the first steps toward refrigerated air (air conditioning). Although modern methods of construction are known (such as reinforced concrete and asphalt pavement), skyscrapers are relatively new (the first 10-story skyscraper was built in Chicago in 1885). Rubber, vulcanized rubber and celluloid are all in use, but no one has yet invented Bakelite or later plastics. Aluminum is in wide use, but metallurgists have not yet discovered the alloy stainless steel. Electricity is understood to a limited degree, while gaslight, dynamite and gunpowder are better known. The internal combustion engine is not yet viable—the steam engine and clockwork are king.

Social and religious elements

Most societies are conservative, with late Victorian sexual and moral values. However, there is also a strong bohemian element, and newer belief systems – including spiritualism, theosophy and the recently founded Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn – are beginning to gnaw at the edges of established dogma. Early Art Nouveau works have begun to grace the art world, and authors such as Oscar Wilde and Charles Baudelaire are extant on bookshelves alongside the likes of Walter Scott, Charles Dickens and Harriet Beecher Stowe.

There is much more we could say about the late 19th century as it actually was… but we’ll stop here. From this point forward, we address things as they diverge from the real late Victorian period and become our imaginary world.

Here there be dragons…

In the mid 1860s, American physicist Albert A. Michelson discovered that beyond the Earth’s atmosphere lay an envelope of another substance known as luminiferous ether. This invisible, odorless, colorless substance is generated only by enormous celestial bodies where there is a conjunction of light, gravity and organic life. Ether itself has a number of unusual properties, most significantly acting as a psychically based substitute for the element of oxygen in most reactions. It requires far less mass to maintain a consistently Earthlike level of gas pressure, and acts to a great extent as a heat insulation… but without causing a runaway greenhouse effect. Earth’s ether envelope is roughly spherical and is conjoined with the thinner envelope that surrounds the Earth’s moon. Lanes of ether link Earth and its moon to Venus and Mars, and possibly to points beyond our solar system. It is these ether “spacelanes” and “envelopes” that led astronomers to their first conclusive detections of organic life on the moon and the planets Venus and Mars, though it would be some years before first contact was made with the civilizations on those worlds.

Beyond the ether, there is a freezing vacuum – true outer space.

In the early 1870s, the rogue planet Nemesis passed very near to the solar system amid a cloud of bizarre meteorites, dust and highly charged gases. The black orb’s gravitation caused a number of catastrophes across Earth and its moon, as well as Venus and Mars. The meteorites that struck these bodies also introduced a number of highly unusual elements and previously undiscovered radiations, as yet unconnected with the electromagnetic spectrum, which included wavelengths that countered gravity, rendered matter easily mutable, and other bizarre marvels.
Charles Babbage’s difference engine is an early computing system that has been developed to a far greater extent than in our world. Since its invention in 1822, a number of industrial leaders and engineers (including Lady Ada Lovelace Byron and the American George Barnard Grant) have developed the difference engine into a marvel of mathematical precision. It is used for many applications, including a number of steam- and clockwork-powered automatons that can sometimes eerily simulate human intelligence and life.

Since the glorious early journeys of French inventor Henri Giffard in the 1850s, dirigible airships have become increasingly sophisticated and important in the industrialized nations. Now they are in use for industrial and commercial purposes, and there are even private “air yachts” for the very wealthy few.

An American expedition (the Symmes-McBride Expedition of 1818) succeeded in discovering an Antarctic gateway into the Hollow Earth. A primitive region of untapped resources, centered around a gravity-warping deposit of meteoritic ore, the Hollow Earth has been a target of business adventurers using mighty steam-powered tunneling juggernauts since the 1850s.

There remain a number of regions on Earth which have not yet been mapped or explored, many of which may sustain unknown creatures and beings hitherto considered legendary. The okapi, mokele-mbembe, human-eating plant, gorilla, bunyip and other beings may actually exist—safaris have been mounted time and again in pursuit of them. Closer to home, there are some photographs that claim to be evidence of some kinds of mythical beings—hellish black hounds and panthers, charming but unlikely trooping fairies and weird parallel cities underneath London and other capitols, and sinister little people that are said to live in hollow hills. There may be some connection between these beings and the scattered reports of tiny civilizations discovered by lonely researchers gazing long hours through microscopes at meteorite fragments from the Nemesis Cloud. Unknown “lost” civilizations are also believed to persist in remote areas, and legends persist that not all of these civilizations are populated by human beings. Some insist that there are offshoots of human evolution that persist in lonely places of the world; anthropoids of various sorts—and possibly other things.

Chemical advances continue to astound, with compounds discovered occasionally that are capable of amazing alterations to existing cellular structures – such as massive and sudden rearrangements of cellular structures, transforming human beings into animalistic forms, or animals into human-like forms. There are even rumors of compounds that have turned animals -- and human beings -- completely transparent to visible light, making them impossible to see with the naked eye.

Even more astounding are breakthroughs in electrical engineering and physics by such geniuses as Nikola Tesla, who has demonstrated that it is possible to transmit energy through the air. Tesla guns are in very limited use, given their difficulties with retaining sufficient electrical charge to launch their deadly bolts of supercharged plasma – literally, lightning—at a target. They are also notoriously inaccurate and have a very short range, compared to revolvers, Maxim guns, heavy artillery and other ordinary ordnance. But clearly these weapons are the way of the future.

Only the very first explorers have reached the other planets and Earth’s moon at this point; what they have found has been exotic and strange. The swamps of Venus and the canals of Mars are at least as weird as the underground warrens of the Lunites; men and women continue to launch private expeditions to visit these other spheres with great regularity while governments continue to squabble over more familiar spoils on our own green Earth.

Perhaps the most incredible advances have been in the field of Practical Spirituality. This extremely controversial field is focused on a scientific study of religious and occult theories, some of which have proven to have a basis in fact. It is now believed that there is a psychic energy generated by living things—it is nearly undetectable by scientific means (apart from key experiments involving crystal resonance and randomized card recognition), but it is a natural force that has vast power over the universe. Living things have an “energy field” that doubles for their body, and this apparently indestructible “soul” is evidently capable of passing from the known universe into a “spiritual plane” – which are separated solely by their frequency wave-particle vibration. It is understood that there actually is a substance known as “ectoplasm” that spontaneously forms when “spirits” manifest themselves in the material plane. Ectoplasm is theorized to be a partially solidified form of ether (see above), which sublimates back into luminiferous ether and escapes Earth’s gravity after a manifestation concludes. There are even photographic processes which have proven to be capable of recording spirits of various sorts, not all of them human in origin.

There are rumors also of other things in the world – holdovers of myths past, such as vampires in the Balkans or zombies in the Caribbean—but these are merely rumors. There is far more evidence of astonishing achievements by scientific geniuses that have demonstrated brilliance and madness in varying measure, such as flying warships and underwater colonies with pressurized air, but no one credits the rare report of a living man pieced together from the flesh of the dead, or a human brain kept alive in a vat of nutrient, or the preposterous claim of a physicist who insists that it is possible to travel through time as a man might pilot a boat. Such things are flatly incredible, even in a world of incredible things.

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In my next dispatch, I'll go into a bit more detail on what kind of characters and situations the game will be designed around, and what kind of fun that can ensue from creating personalities in this fictitious 19th century world...

Tags: design, games, larp, lj-cut because celestia complained, steampunk