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One more quick Friends at the Table plug to say that they released a 20 minute episode of just Austin explaining the podcast, what past seasons were and future ones will be. It's a good way to get acquainted with what it's about, and see if you might be interested.

 

Also it's Austin so just go listen to him for 20 minutes anyway.

 

There is also a text guide, if you just want a quick read, that attempts a similar thing:
http://careydraws.tumblr.com/post/144810140520/the-space-tragedy-season-of-streamfriendss

 

(it's a bit older tho)

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That's the announcement I was referring to geeeeeez!!!

 

But yes it's a good thing to listen to if you're interested.

 

Also I legit teared up on last weekend's Beastcast. The last episode featuring Austin (as a permanent host - I can only assume/hope he'll still guest sometimes!!! please!)

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Austin announced they're gonna do a steampunky style short adventure for 12 (iirc) or so episodes, so they have a shorter campaign to show off as an example of what the podcast is all about.

 

I know the internet at large ain't a big fan of steampunk, but I like it when it's done well (Dishonored!), and I have all the faith in the world in Austin's GM'ing and all the players'... playing. It's gonna be goooood.

 

I think the core setting of Blades in the Dark is more Industrial Fantasy, rather than steampunk (and I'd argue that Dishonored is as well), because it's not "Victorian, but with steam powered everything" but rather "Victorian, but with magic".

 

In any case, I super excited for them to play Blades, because the system is super cool, from the little I've read of it. Highlights: a really flexible action system that gives players a lot of control over how they do what they do; rules for flashbacks, so that planning missions doesn't get in the way of doing missions; a "positioning" system, so that the results of your actions vary based on whether you've got a Controlled, Dangerous, or Risky position vis-a-vis the action; and a character sheet for the group as a whole, so that you get advancement outside of your individual character. I'm excited to see how they take to the game.

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That's a fair argument, although I dunno I'd probably put them in the same bucket. :P He also mentioned Perdito Street Station which is 100% steampunk... or so I'm told. I never read it!!!

 

Rules for planning flashbacks is fucking awesome. I knew nothing about the system but now I'm even more excited haha.

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I have always seen Steampunk has being similar to the Fallout universe. Fallout is what happens if the future that folks in the 1950s saw came to pass, and Steampunk is what happens if Jules Verne's vision of the future came to pass. Fallout definitely chooses to lean into the nuclear war side of things, but you could just as easily see that setting extrapolated instead to sci-fi like Buck Rodgers or War of the Worlds. In the same way, I think there's a bunch of different paths you can take from Jules Verne, each with their own interesting story to tell, but I don't think a single tone in inherent to Steampunk.

 

To be fair, I don't necessarily think there's a tone that's inherent to Cyberpunk either. For every Shadowrunner in the margins of society, there's a wage slave with a fairly normal life that might have a different story to tell that's just as interesting and not quite so dystopian. 

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That's a fair argument, although I dunno I'd probably put them in the same bucket. :P He also mentioned Perdito Street Station which is 100% steampunk... or so I'm told. I never read it!!!

 

Rules for planning flashbacks is fucking awesome. I knew nothing about the system but now I'm even more excited haha.

 

I've never read Perdido Street Station, but I know that Blades  doesn't advertise itself as steampunk anyway.

 

The flashback system is really neat. Basically, if you're on a job and decide you want something in the past to have been true (like, "I bribed that guard earlier" or "I sabotaged their magic alarms"), you take a certain amount of Stress (the game's sort-of equivalent to HP) and then we just flashback to the scene of you doing that thing. The idea is to encourage Ocean's Eleven-style action, where it's revealed that the characters had planned for this all along, instead of spending hours as players bickering over the minutiae of a plan.

 

Blades is very close to the top of my list of games I want to play.

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He also mentioned Perdito Street Station which is 100% steampunk... or so I'm told. I never read it!!!

 

If you had asked me if I'd ever read a steampunk book, I would've said no, but I've read Perdido Street Station and I have a bit of trouble articulating reasons it shouldn't qualify. I guess it has a lot of steampunk-y elements, but there's a lot of other stuff to the setting as well - magic, multiple fantasy races - that are never associated with steampunk normally, and it doesn't feel to me like it has the customary machinery fetish, either.

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If you had asked me if I'd ever read a steampunk book, I would've said no, but I've read Perdido Street Station and I have a bit of trouble articulating reasons it shouldn't qualify. I guess it has a lot of steampunk-y elements, but there's a lot of other stuff to the setting as well - magic, multiple fantasy races - that are never associated with steampunk normally, and it doesn't feel to me like it has the customary machinery fetish, either.

I don't really think of Perdido Street Station as steampunk fiction, not like The Difference Engine is. To me, steampunk set out to ask what it would look like if the mechanisms of communication and control from the age of transnational corporations were present in the age of transnational governments. That's very distinct from Mieville's replacement of Tolkien's aesthetic and societal outlook with Dickens' as the foundational genius of modern fantasy.

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That's a pretty good definition Gormongous and one that Dishonored and Blades in the Dark would probably fit into. I suppose I just prefer Industrial Fantasy as a term, because it's more descriptive and has less baggage.

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I'm baffled that you're all saying it's not steampunk despite it being classified as steampunk, like, everywhere else.

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I'm baffled that you're all saying it's not steampunk despite it being classified as steampunk, like, everywhere else.

If you're describing steampunk as the aesthetics of a work's setting, maybe Perdido Street Station is steampunk, but genre definitions usually touches on more than aesthetics (except on the internet, where aesthetics are king and KonoSuba and SAO are considered part of the same genre).

To be fair, third generation "-punk" descriptors ARE entirely aesthetic, at this point. I've literally never seen a definition of dieselpunk from author or critic that wasn't just "I like the look of machinery after the death of Victoria but before the Second World War."

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I mean the beginning of this conversation was me describing what I believe steampunk to be without addressing aesthetics, so I'm not part of that general you!

 

I'm just saying that this is literally the first time ever I've seen Perdito Street Station be denied the genre classification of steampunk. I've heard it mentioned a lot, both positively and negatively, but never without the steampunk descriptor.

 

Dieselpunk is defo a mistake, though. *nods*

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The first Google return for "Perdido Street Station steampunk" is someone saying that someone told them it was steampunk but they didn't agree, and then a bunch of people echoing that sentiment. I'm in Denmark right now, though, and might be getting atypical results.

PSS is just not steampunk to me. The technological aesthetic is mostly there, but not the world or its themes. It's as much steampunk, in the way I understand steampunk outside of cosplay, as Alien is cyberpunk.

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NeCQFfM.png

:P

 

I'm not really trying to disagree with you, just expressing my continued bafflement.

 

I'll also drop the tangential bomb that I think "industrial fantasy" could just as easily be "steampunk fantasy" in many, many cases. Depends on the context, obviously. Dishonored is one where I'd definitely call it "steampunk fantasy" by instinct. Steampunk inherently involves industry, and Dishonored also has that whole hopelessness that, in my (possibly incorrect) opinion, is intrinsic to (both cyberpunk and) steampunk.

 

also i think you hit submit before finishing the post but maybe you're editing to fix it now

 

edit: and there it is

 

It's probably just one of those cases I mentioned earlier where the aesthetics are driving the genre classification more than the themes. I'm willing to believe you. For now.

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Dishonored doesn't have any steam-powered technology though. In fact, the entire premise of Dishonored seems to be "what if the industrial revolution was fueled by whale oil instead of steam" (while Blades in the Dark asks a similar question, replacing "whale oil" with "ghosts"). I've always thought of steampunk at least in part being about "what if steam-powered technology had gone further?"

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I suppose so, but then what about all the "steam" punk that's just clockwork bullshit that doesn't involve steam at all.

 

I think focusing too much on the word "steam" (which I know is hard to do because it is the name) is the wrong way to go about it.

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lol
 

Clockpunk

Clockpunk portrays Renaissance-era science and technology based on pre-modern designs, in the vein of Mainspring by Jay Lake, and Whitechapel Gods by S. M. Peters. Examples of clockpunk include Astro-Knights Island in the nonlinear game Poptropica, the movie The Three Musketeers (2011 film), the game Thief: The Dark Project, and the game Syberia.
 
The term was coined by the GURPS role playing system.

 
nevermind then

(I actually would argue that you're focusing too much on the aesthetics and not enough on the thematic elements. If steampunk is (as I believe) about dystopia/hopelessness resulting from the industrial revolution and/or war, then Dishonored fits it to a T. If steampunk is (as you seem to be implying) about, well, steam, then 99.99999999999999% of that which is categorized as steampunk is... not.)

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I always used to consider steampunk to be a version of cyberpunk without a move to digital technology. i.e. it is still relatively high-tech but everything is done in elaborate mechanical contraptions instead of slick digital gadgets. 

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21oaba.jpg

 

That's my podcast at number 5! Pretty cool, except at the time it only had one episode, 15 downloads, and one review? How does that work? Is it purely dumb algorithms where, for a brief time the way it calculated things projected that, with 100% five star reviews in under a week, that growth would maintain? Or something? Or is there an actual Apple person who personally picks these lists?

 

Does anyone else here who has experience with podcasts know how this stuff works, and why a goofy niche objectively unpopular podcast like mine would top something like Filmspotting, even for a moment?

 

EDIT: This was taken about 11 hours ago. It's already sunk to number 10 on the charts, whatever that means. Still beating Filmspotting, so take that NPR!

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The algorithm is opaque, of course, but I think the idea behind it is to give new podcasts a chance to find an audience before they're buried. I don't think projected growth factors into it, and I definitely don't think any real people are involved.

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I have a thing for the forgotten genius. Alongside Chris Crawford and Mel Croucher we now have Eskil Steenberg. The Swedish developer who didn't make Minecraft, he made Love. This is one of the best chats I've had, but since nobody seems to know about him it's not been the most popular one so far, but I would highly recommend checking it out. Dude is amazing. Like, he's still doing games but he's also decided to try and re-engineer the internet as a side project. As a side project! Also, we seriously break down and define what a game actually is, which I realise doesn't exactly sound like a party but it was legit thrilling. 

 

declandineen.com/checkpoints

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Oh man, I remember hearing about Love way back in like 2008. I'll check this episode out.

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Just finished the second season of Friends at the Table. While it has a similar down ending to the first season, it feels like everyone involved really followed there character and things ended up pretty good for the galaxy, all-in all. I'm hugely bummed that it's over though. I still have the wrap-up and reader questions to get through some time next week. I wish I'd finished in time to submit a question or two, but maybe someone else had the same questions I did, or maybe i can get Austin to reply over Twitter.

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I'm still listening to and enjoying The Wonder Of It All which is now weekly. It used to be about films, The Thing, Horror's ending problem, Sacrament, Candy man are all episodes but now it's about anything last week they discussed Garth Ennis and traditional Irish weekly magazine Ireland's Own before that Inspector Morse. The guy is smart and funny and enjoyable to listen to. Give it a listen.

.

http://thewonderofitall.xyz

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