Steampunk 2 steam and shellfire pdf download free

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About Us. Privacy Policy. Our Latest Newsletter. Product Reviews. Newsletter RSS Feed. Start Over Advanced Search. Products found in this section Visit settings like the most dubious city in the multiverse, Ankh-Morpork. Intervene in the cultural interactions Its contents — lavishly illustrated in color, by none other than the Foglios! To get the most out of your fantasy adventures, you need a game that lets you customize and perfect characters, monsters, treasures, and traps. That's where the ready-to-play Dungeon Fantasy Roleplaying Game comes in.

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You want help. You could use a guide. For the GURPS Low-Tech covers the basic tools used by historical adventurers from the Stone Age to the Age of Sail -- and still used by modern survivalists and post-apocalypse survivors when the high-tech toys fail.

Weapons and armor from antlers and rawhide to warhammers and heavy mail; adventure and travel gear from simple stone knives to early submarines; Fantasy - from ancient myths to popular films, stories of heroes and magic have captured the human imagination.

Building on the flexible, streamlined Fourth Edition rules, it helps you develop a campaign to explore the world of your favorite book or Fantasy settings are defined by their magic.

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Gift Certificates fnord23 Contact Us. The 19th century's heroes were adventurers, pioneers, and scientists, from explorers in the African jungles to inventors in basement workshops.

It covers the real events, politics, and personalities of the Industrial Age, as well as the weird science that could have been created. Read the Designer's Notes for free on Pyramid! Privacy Policy Contact Us. Frank would never entirely lose the sense of melancholy majesty that stirred his heart when he first saw an airship, moored in the troubled sky. Steampunk science and technology tend to look strange to modern eyes, because they draw on theories and principles that are decades out of date.

Turn that weirdness up to maximum, have the whole planet threatened on a daily basis by mad geniuses hiding in the London sewers, crash airships into submarines and spiritualists into steam engineers, and you can have a very entertaining game.

The strangeness here comes from the contrast between Steam Age concepts and what modern players are used to.

For example, implausibly efficient airships, implausibly soon, are commonplace in steampunk. The novel also has other, much wilder, scientific and technological strangeness. Likewise, Paul J. This kind of relatively minimal technological tweaking can suit rigorous alternate history campaigns, or games that are mostly just exercises in Victorian-style storytelling of one sort or another, but with just enough cool gear to keep technophile players amused.

Game Worlds 25 Clockpunk At the base of the mechanical technology which defines much of the aesthetic of steampunk lies a system of cogs and springs: clockwork. Hence, clockpunk. The snag with this is a simple one: power. Steam is important because it provides a compact source of useful power; clockwork can do some very clever things, but by itself it cannot drive a vehicle or power a factory.

Clockwork springs need to be wound up somehow, and TL4 power sources such as harnessed animals or windmills have their limits; they were replaced by steam for a reason. The sextuple-expansion steam engines detailed on pp.

Airships may come in early, too, probably propelled by steam. If heavier-than-air flight appears, it may use something implausibly complex, such as flapping ornithopter wings. Mad Biology Steampunk mostly features mechanical technologies, but there is an alternative — going back to the first days of science fiction.

While biology and medicine advanced considerably in the Age of Steam, they turned out to be vastly complex and subtle sciences. Period dreams such as synthetic life are still futuristic ideas today. This tends to be treated in fiction as leading to nightmarish screampunk stories.

If ith irships the technology is widespread, the world is likely a Airships are a common feature of steampunk worlds, whereas in body-horror dystopia. If you want esting feature for a setting in which all the scia plausible setting in which they stay around longer, you need to ences are advancing rapidly on superscience consider what that requires. It can certainly justify the sort of reliable, Airships need cheap but reliable workers to act as gasbag rigeffective medicine that adventurers appreciate.

In short, airships are indeed a good fit for a The Steam Age blurs, at its later border, into world of steampunk culture and technology.

This can be achieved by adding visual style of the period is known as raygun Gothic, a term some highly ingenious but essentially incremental achievecoined by cyberpunk writer William Gibson. This is particuments in mechanical engineering. A few subtle advances in larly appropriate because a lot of steampunk costume makers metallurgy during the Age of Steam, or very subtle tweaks to do love rayguns.

Spaceships are likely to be propelled by rockets. Electronics are usually widespread, but are built around bulky, fragile vacuum tubes. If electronic computers appear at all, they may occupy whole rooms — despite which, sapient human-sized robots are another possibility. Paranormal Technology The borders of steampunk harbor technology with little relationship to anything seen in the real world, based on wildly unorthodox scientific theories or downright supernatural forces.

A Victorian-style enthusiasm for installing this technology in smoke-stained brick-built factories, probably full of downtrodden workers, can give such stories a steampunk feel. The tech levels of such settings probably diverge at some very low point, then rise several steps on their divergent path.

Quick and Dirty Steam-Tech Neo-Steampunk Futures As steampunk style has become popular, its influence has extended beyond overtly steampunk stories. This sort of thing provides lots of excuses to have futuristic worlds with technology and furniture that at least look like Victorian brass and clockwork, or formal Victorian-style cultures.

Indeed, much steampunk plays loose with technological details, so long as stuff looks good. For U. This method is best in very cinematic or whimsical games and when the invention is more of a MacGuffin or plot device.

Similar principles also can apply to information extracted from period sources such as product catalogs. Once you have the description, you can begin adding game information.

Weight should roughly match a real item of comparable size and build strength; see the Basic Set and GURPS tech supplements for examples. Note that one ton equals 2, lbs. Example: The Steam Mole is effectively a vehicle. Movement Rate: Find a modern-day vehicle with a similar function, and multiply both parts of the Move rating by 0. Round to the nearest whole number if the value is greater than 1, or to a single significant figure if it is less than 1. Cost is based on size and complexity.

If the machine is exceptionally good or bad at what it does e. Determine other capabilities based on what the description and plot function imply.

Gigantic Infernal Weapons Steampunk instruments of destruction need some extra guidelines. Weight for exotic fictional weapons is about 2 lbs. For something with more range, multiply the weight by the same factor as the ranges. Acc is typically 4. RoF is usually 1, with 2d seconds of recharge time between shots — these are erratic contraptions. Cost is calculated as for other machines; see above.

Weight and volume are doubled steampunk machinery is solidly built and often heavily embellished. HT generally remains the same. Other performance values e. Price can be kept the same, at a level appropriate to a 20th-century economy, especially for advanced steampunk machinery. For mature, mass-produced consumer technology in a setting where wealth is around 19th-century levels, reduce the price to between half and three-quarters that of the higher-TL version.

This rule replaces the rule for prices of Anachronistic Devices p. If nothing akin to the desired device appears in our history until TL8 or in hypothetical forms later , you can still convert it with the same rules, but base the retrotech on one of the first versions of the technology, double weight and volume again, double price for each TL above 7, and reduce performance details even further at whim.

Vehicles When defining vehicles with this system, use the same formula as for the descriptive approach pp. Cost is optionally reduced if necessary to fit the campaign. Weapons Steam Age guns tend to be bulky, cumbersome, and slowfiring compared to modern armaments. So, when converting weapons, apply the general Retrotech Approach guidelines above , and then reduce Acc by 1; halve Range values; halve RoF or double reload time for RoF 1 single-shot weapons; multiply ST and Bulk by 1.

Personal Equipment Constraints on Invention The same guidelines apply to miscellaneous equipment and consumer goods, if the GM wants to get this detailed about stuff in daily civilian life. Modern MP3 players are just too compact. When applying these rules for devices created at a divergent tech level, note one important concept: The effective TL of the device is equal to the sum of both elements of the divergent TL.

This makes inventing devices from a higher TL than the campaign world difficult — but not impossible! The best thing is for the inventor to have the High TL advantage p. B; invention skills are always IQ-based , which of course requires very high skill or amazing dice luck. Successfully inventing a device or two from a higher TL is fully sufficient justification for then buying Cutting-Edge Training and the associated skill with bonus character points. However, if the GM lets someone take the Gadgeteer advantage, that person should get some benefit from the significant point expenditure; the GM should allow for time to work on technological stuff.

If the players spot that, either they have to be allowed to pursue that technology, or the GM has to refine the campaign assumptions a little further to turn the idea into a dead end. Alternatively, as a compensation, the PCs might gain completely new and crucial scientific knowledge as a result of their failures perhaps as clues for another adventure or bonus points for improving their science and engineering skills. In such games, whenever an exotic or experimental vehicle fails a HT roll, the attack roll for an invented weapon equals or exceeds its malfunction number p.

B , or an operator gets a critical failure on some kind of operation roll, the GM can roll 3d on the following table for inspiration as to the consequences.

Ordinary off-the-shelf devices still use standard critical failure or malfunction rules. Some of these effects are quite harsh; a kind GM can allow Luck or hasty use of repair skills to avoid problems or reduce them to manageable levels. Diving for Cover p. B may be indicated. A vehicle starts running in reverse, a device does the opposite of its normal function, or a weapon backfires, doing its normal damage to the user.

Free Inventions Some steampunk or proto-steampunk stories are designed around a hero or a party owning one big, unique, amazing machine that facilitates the plot. This is usually a vehicle of some kind, which gets them to the scene of the adventure and home again, although they might conceivably possess, say, the only weapon that can defeat certain world-threatening villains, or an analytical engine which grants them unique insight into criminal activity in their city.

This could be represented by Unusual Background Invention p. B at the or point level. However, burning damage per second to anyone at the controls or inside the device. Users inside burning vehicles or machines may suffer Suffocation effects pp. From now on, the user must make an appropriate skill roll once per second of operation, with failure meaning the device fails immediately. At that point, it must be rebuilt completely before it will work again. It can never be used again.

Weapon users or passengers in a vehicle are blackened but unhurt, but the machine is a total loss. Weapons or other devices begin firing wildly until all ammunition or power is expended; vehicles take off at top speed in a random direction.

Hence, if the concept of the campaign is based around such an invention, the GM could simply give it to the PCs for free. Magic and Psychic Powers Some steampunk stories feature paranormal powers, even outright magic. This can take almost any form, but the most common and atmospherically appropriate versions make at least some reference to historical ideas about such things — which may have passed as respectable science for a while. This field had, after all, made a number of useful observations and discoveries which contributed to modern chemistry.

Alchemy can thus make an interesting and appropriate element in early-period, clockpunk-flavored games, providing an array of cool effects and character abilities in the absence of big machines or modern science. It might even be the true science which gives useful insights into the nature of reality, leading into a very different, more magically flavored alternate Steam Age.

Game Worlds 30 there; the basic ghost template on p. Despite a large element of what would today be considered mysticism, alchemy is at heart a science of matter and transformations. Alchemists also saw the difference between organic and inorganic matter differently from modern science, but they were concerned with both; some noted historical alchemists were also skilled physicians for their time.

Alchemy skill itself would mostly serve as the theoretical basis for all of science and engineering, replacing most of Biology, Chemistry, and Physics as we know them in relation to real-world technology. Alchemy could be used to analyze alchemical concoctions or phenomena. Practical alchemists should take some of the following skills at the setting TL: Mediums A basic assumption of traditional spiritualism is that certain psychically gifted people have the ability to act as mediums, perceiving and talking with the dead.

Such a medium has one or both of Channeling p. B41 , which permits ghosts and other spirits to speak through them, or Medium p. B68 , which grants the ability to speak with spirits and especially ghosts. Many also have Spirit Empathy p. B88 , which grants useful understanding of spirits. Then, they should make full use of the invention and gadgeteering rules pp. What is actually possible would have to be up to the GM, given that historical alchemy was often willfully obscure, but one keyword is transformation.

More active and less scholarly protagonists might simply have a large array of off-the-shelf weird technology. Victorian Magical Practices Victorian belief in the paranormal see The Victorian Paranormal, below involved more than studying old beliefs Occultism skill, in GURPS terms ; there were serious attempts to make things work. Hence, steampunk games with a paranormal element have plenty to draw on. Spiritualism If Victorian psychical researchers were correct, ghosts are a psychic phenomenon, a residue of the living after their deaths.

They are merely that minority of spirits of the dead who have enough psychic strength to interact with the material world. GURPS Horror has an extensive treatment of ghosts, although most ghosts described by spiritualists are less horrific than the terrors enumerated Steampunk The Victorian Paranormal In a period of dramatic social and technological change, with radical scientific theories undermining traditional religious beliefs and with strange ideas being carried around global empires, some people inevitably turned to interest in the paranormal.

Some were true scholars, prepared to doubt and test what they were told. Others were looking for comfort or guidance. Still others were gullible and open to being conned. The period certainly saw a widespread interest in spiritualism — attempts to communicate with spirits of the dead, mostly involving specialist mediums.

Starting in when Margaret and Kate Fox of Hydesville, New York, reported receiving messages from a spirit haunting their cottage, this movement gained many adherents throughout the English-speaking world. Ghosts and spirits remained mysterious and terrifying, but they also offered comforting reassurance that a part of a person might really outlive bodily death. Other ideas had their adherents.

The idea of Atlantis was adopted by fringe theorists looking for a grand theory of human history. And some people just thought that traditional ritual magic worked. At the more respectable end of this spectrum, the Society for Psychical Research was established in London in , and it began investigating a range of paranormal phenomena, without much success.

Its American counterpart was founded in , and this sort of research has continued to the present day. However, if the campaign features several types of spirit such as elementals, demons, etc. A typical Victorian medium works in a trance state, which may require some time and concentration to accomplish. Hence, these advantages may be acquired with the Preparation Required limitation p. B on their advantages. Conversely, an exceptionally talented medium may have the Autotrance perk p.

B — although members of the public may doubt the authenticity of someone who seems to claim that contacting spirits is easy! Ectoplasm Victorian spiritualists often spoke of ectoplasm, a tenuous substance of which a ghostly manifestation could be formed.

Ectoplasm allows the ghost to touch the living and to have a sense of touch, but not to exert significant force.

The material form of a ghost with this limitation can use its sense of touch and touchonly powers in the material world, but cannot apply any ST, and has DR 0 and HP 1, regardless of its attributes as a spirit. B95 , and so can eventually reconstitute themselves. Astral Travel If ghosts and spirits are psychic entities, then the realm where they exist may well be the astral plane. Such encounters may be unnerving, making Fright Checks a periodic consequence of astral travel.

Ritual Magic Another model for steampunk magic is the practices of 19th- and early 20th-century ritual magicians, such as the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. These were primarily well-off, scholarly types who investigated historical magical activities, then tried to derive underlying truths and make them work with a lot of wishful thinking and sometimes outright doubletalk.

Their kind of magic takes a long time and uses arcane symbolism such as astrology or the Tarot which requires extended study. The claimed effects are usually subtle, although they can be quite powerful. Of course, the Path of Gadgets could give this magic a very useful role in a technology-oriented campaign. Then compensate by allowing magicians to apply Hermetic modifiers from Appendix A of Thaumatology, which are actually derived from period sources.

Alternatively, to reflect the occasional Victorian belief that magic was better understood in the Mysterious East, use the Chinese mystical modifiers from the same appendix. Incidentally, although the Path of Spirit provides beneficial effects relating to the spirit world, it gives limited abilities at best in communicating with spirits. This can lead to the historically authentic situation of magicians teaming up with mediums.

Period vs. In other words, how much Steampunk and the campaign is to be a historical setting and how much the setting has a more modern feel — just with brass, rivets, and fancy costumes — or at least exhibits overt rebellion against the period norms. Game Worlds 32 According to the ancient doctrines, the soulless elemental spirits were evolved by the ceaseless motion inherent in the astral light. The question of social attitudes is covered in depth in Chapter 4.

The GM and players should review that and discuss what they want to experience and what everyone is comfortable with, so that expectations can be managed. If weird technologies and paranormal powers are both present, it can be interesting to have them linked, at least in some vague way using a bit of pseudoscientific bafflegab. Lastly, there is the nature of society. Most steampunk societies are based on Steam Age culture, to a greater or lesser extent.

The presence of exotic technologies may lead to changes in society as technological progress did historically , or at least to social tensions. What is the social position of a mad scientist or a magician?

If runaway progress makes technological skills invaluable, will traditional hierarchies be transformed into more of a meritocracy rare in published settings, Steam Age hierarchies being as they were? Will analytical engines be used to construct an all-too-modern surveillance society?

And will steampunk technology be used to make global empires stronger which seems to be the norm in published settings , or to fight against them? The Mob Has Spoken!

Normal social structures break down under the strain. But this implies a breakdown in the social formalities which are a part of what appeals to many people about the genre. Riot and revolution are usually best kept as an ultimate threat, the thing which PCs must prevent — or the ultimate goal toward which they work, aiming to reshape society into something better.

Political agitation often leads to public demonstrations and rioting in the streets. Political candidates may hire mobs to cause unrest around election times, and in many games, the French Revolution is recent history; no one needs to wonder what a mob might do if given its head.

Those who want that result, however, will need to be expert in Propaganda, Public Speaking, and avoiding or escaping the agents of a ruling class that turns brutal when threatened. Note that social disorder may trigger Fright Checks of a special kind; see pp. I believe that is Miss Anastasia Quayle, the lady scientist. I understand that her investigations of thermodynamics have contributed substantially to the Great Project in hand.

In any event, the Earl gave a final grunt and turned his attention to the nearest knight of the realm. Oswald cast one last glance at the mirror, only to realize that Miss Quayle had evidently become aware of his attention. She met his reflected gaze with a vulpine smile and — oh lord — an unmistakable wink.

He respected Miss Quayle most intently, for more than her scientific brilliance, but at this specific moment, he was suffering definite concern for his social prospects. The Spirit of the Steam Age Even without an added dose of steampunk weirdness, Steam Age society often resembled the proverbial swan — seemingly elegant and serene, but actually propelled by a lot of frantic action below the surface.

This was a period of massive technological change, with Western societies shifting from muscle-powered agrarianism to steam-powered industrialization, and yet essentially medieval systems of government by hereditary monarchs and aristocrats tried very hard to retain control.

For the most part, the traditional ruling classes did a remarkably efficient job of staying on top, perhaps because, in times of rapid change, many people cling to traditional certainties. Some modern-day steampunks, with their fondness for Victorian formality, may even be chasing the same certainties. And yet, change happened anyway. Most people within the developing societies probably saw the rapid rate of scientific and technological innovation as a good thing, bringing prosperity, health, and hopefully wisdom — but not everybody agreed.

Alongside a few upper-class How to nostalgics, there were workers such as the original Luddites, who found their old jobs replaced by mechanization, and any promised new jobs slow to appear, and who responded by attacking the changes and smashing the new machines.

Meanwhile, new communications technologies brought their own wrinkles. The Steam Age basically created the modern concept of mass media, and for the first time, it was possible to become famous just for being famous. Of course, these new media could spread new and radical ideas — or be used for counter-propaganda to challenge them. In GURPS terms, while the Propaganda skill was invented long before this time, it acquired completely new toolsets, making it much more powerful.

And the ruling classes were fully capable of adapting new ideas to reinforce their power. Be Steampunk 34 A Flawed Era? Few good roleplaying-game settings are all sweetness and light, but even so, some gamers may have special difficulty in treating one based on the Steam Age as just a fun place full of fancy costumes and nice manners. In truth, the real 19th century was hardly a utopia.

Alongside the primitive medicine with an, at best, evolving understanding of the causes of disease, and not much in the way of anesthetics for most of the period , choking pollution from the coal-fired engines and medieval sewer systems , and harsh legal codes, this was not a tolerant age by modern standards.

To begin with, it was the Age of Empires after all — notably dominated by the British Empire — where imperialism was the order of the day. Even dedicated anti-slavery activists might seem painfully patronizing to modern readers. Thirdly, sexism was quite normal.