A few days ago I posted that I would help an anon flesh out his steampunk setting.
I gave some ideas, but I had a scene form in my mind that I wanted to write up and post.
Here is the original thread >>44270899
So this was delayed by rather dramatic events in my personal life, but I'd promised anon I would write this up and post it, and I always keep my promises, eventually.
So here is some writefaggotry accompanied by random steampunk images of varying relevance, submitted for your approval.
Also, please post any alternative stories, ideas, images, or settings you may have.
Party on.
>in before wah wah I don't like thing
Eagerly monitoring this thread OP
I don't like Steamrollers
Carry on OP. Shame OC has been destroyed on this board.
I just have shitty ideas but I've always wanted to play a steampunk game where fairy tales and Lovecraftian gods are real. Monsters and people have begun clashing since humans figured out a way to detect them through some kind of optics. Dwarfs, elves, trolls etc. are real and they're either hostile, indifferent, or somewhat cooperative. Humans are using their newly invented weapons and scientific studies of monsters to defeat them. There are beings hidden everywhere, kinda like in Spiderwick, in every alleyway there's a cat freak and under every hill there's a stone giant sleeping. You could have epic battles between humans with laser muskets and clockwork armor vs. ancient slumbering dragon gods.
>>44353418
Rebecca stood at the train station, shielding her eyes from the sun with her clutch as she looked off at the distance for any sign of the incoming train. He sol-goggles kept the bright desert sun from damaging her eyes, but the glare still bothered her somewhat.
She impatiently pulled out her ornate pocket watch, ignoring the Amerindian time setting and wrinkled her nose at the local time for this strange desert nation.
Only a few minutes had passed since she had last checked and only few more remained until the train was due to arrive and there was not even a wisp of steam on the horizon.
She snapped the watch closed and tucked in her waistcoat, securing the chain.
She anxiously glanced around the platform, the relaxed demeanor of the other people simply adding to her irritation.
Exhaling slowly, she reminded herself that the others had little reason to be nervous. It was her inheritance and future riding on this venture, not theirs.
She spotted her recent hire, a young apprentice tinkerer, chatting with two girls that were clearly not local women. The handsome blond youth had made a pretense of going over to help the travelers with their trunks, despite them clearly having one of the strange, black clockwork trolleys they have here.
Like the ones she had rented, they rolled along effortlessly pushing the heavy skiffs designed to transport cargo, their cogs and mechanisms hidden beneath sealed black glass.
Her mechanic tinkerer, who had remained loyally by her side as she waited, had informed her about how the glass both protects the gears from the sand and grit, while also trapping heat for the steam. He had gone on at length about the elegant genius of the design, but simply did not have a head for such matters.
>>44353733
The beauty of hiring a former masterwork Cogwright from the New World was that she could confidently leave all mechanical matters to him.
Of course his eccentricities were odd and often unsettling, at the moment he was a peculiar sight indeed.
Beneath his wide brimmed sunhat, black sol-goggles, and the perennially unkempt tangle of whiskers obscuring his lower face, you could not make out any features save his round nose. To add to the oddity, he appeared to her to be attempting to encourage a coffee bean grinder to forcibly mate with an oil collector using only a screwdriver and a clockwork probe; And he seemed to be succeeding.
Rather than speculate on the purpose of such a pairing, she returned her attention to her new hire.
While his masters's overalls though clean, bore faded stains and signs of wear, her handsome new acquisition's uniform was pressed, clean, and professional.
But the young man's looks had little to do with the hire.
His sol-goggles had been pushed up onto his forehead, and even as he chatted with the two traveling young women flashing him their cheerful smiles and whatever else, his eyes quick met hers and assessed he was not immediately needed before returning to his flirtations.
He was smart, devilishly smart, and she had snatched him after an unjust discharge from an Amerindian university and he had jumped at the chance to learn from a master cogsmith.
Although the young man had been spending far too much time off shift with her lazy pilot for her tastes.
>>44353816
Her pilot.
She felt her scowl crawl across her face even before she looked around the platform for him.
She absentmindedly tugged at the thin dark scarf the silly local laws made her wear as she scanned the thin crowd.
He was nowhere in sight, the train was due to arrive, it was vitally important that they make this deadline and he had disappeared.
She sighed, shaking her head at herself.
Why was she surprised?
Why was she disappointed?
He had to be the least disciplined, laziest, and generally worst employee she had ever heard of.
And by far, the worst part was that he knew he could get away with it.
There were only a few airship pilots in the skies that could reliably escape Albian privateers.
The number of pilots that had out flown the Steel Condor band of airship pirates could be numbered with two hands.
Her pilot had done it three times.
That sort of expertise was invaluable when your business model was centered around transporting high value cargo, along the shortened flight plans unprotected by the Zeppelin Force.
By avoiding the exorbitant protection tariffs, her company could offer lower prices than the West Bharat Trading Company, New Constantinople Shipping, or any of the other global transport companies.
By serving the same high end clientele for less overhead, she could make a fortune in a relatively short time.
That was the plan at any rate. She had so far been surviving on local jobs and had not been able to land any major companies or production workshops, until now.
A major Albion cogsmith workshop had one of it's recent shipments of widgets lost over the atlantic and wanted to try an alternate shipping method.
This flight could finally establish her fledgling company that she had sunk her entire inheritance into and she wanted to leave nothing to chance.
>>44353948
A sudden smatter of gasps and applause drew her attention.
A small crowd, including her young employee and the girls, had formed around a wrinkled eastern man in robes, sitting on the platform floor.
Two knives were sliding back and forth in front of him, apparently by the force of his mind.
Her scowl deepened into a frown.
He was a Falun initiate, one of "The Meek." That Law-wheel cult that had been spreading out of the east.
Personally she cared little for religion and had dismissed these cultists at talented charlatans, but the people of this desert nation had other feelings.
The production workshop that crafted the widgets she was expecting was in a large town to the south. There were rumors of a religious protest against these proselytizing cultists that turned violent and that the entire city was seized in a riot.
If this delayed the shipment, her contract would be violated, she would have to return the deposit she had already spent, and she would likely be ruined.
Damn the Law-wheel.
The sound of a steam whistle in the distance disrupted her thoughts.
She looked out the large glass windows protecting the platform from the tracks, out to the horizon.
The wisp of steam was clear as the train roared from the horizon towards the station.
The steam weakly trailed behind, seeming to desperately cling to the screaming machine tearing across the desert.
The streamlined metallic beast was barely visible as it threw sand in either direction, the engine was another foreign looking tapered bubble of black glass, with standard passenger and cargo cars trailing behind it.
Barreling upon the station, the engine suddenly released a terrible blast of steam.
The large metal plates lining the tracks groaned as the steam buffeted them, the force of it aiding the screeching brakes as the train slowed into the station, the cars rocking on their momentum compensators.
>>44354012
Impatiently, she smoothed her skirt, waiting for the train to pull into position.
"See? What'd I tellya, boss-lady?" Her pilot had materialized at her side.
She turned to chastise him for running off and her comment froze in her throat.
The top of his official overalls had been pulled down and drooped about his waist, while his chest, admittedly well muscled beneath a tremendous layer of fat, was contained only by a sleeveless undershirt so stained it looked to have been designed by a colorblind monkey with dysentery.
He was holding a stick with several steaming pieces of truly foul smelling meat, the grease from the meat running down the stick, covering his hand, and trickling down his arm.
He plucked one piece of meat from the stick with his other hand and popped it into his mouth.
"These desert folk know their trains even better'n they know their cookin' he continued, chewing open mouthed as he talked.
He licked the grease off his fingers before placing his arm around her shoulder.
She stiffened up and prayed that the thin shawl or whatever they called it was thick enough to protect her clothes from his glistening fingers.
"See, these guys got their act together. Not like them crystal miners they got down A-frick-a way. They don't have no civilization. They just fight over them crystals and who gets to sell them to us all day and all night. No class, that bunch. I could tell you 'bout the time me and my Albian buddy, he's th' one that runs that club now, we got into a real hassle that way."
Thankfully, the massive glass doors that protected the platform from the steam parted just then, sending a wave of heat to crash upon the waiting people.
As the gears hidden in the station walls rolled the doors aside, Rebecca stepped forward, away from the grip of her hairy pilot and looked for her cargo car.
>>44354235
The cooled steam trickled down off the station walls into grates beneath her feet, no doubt collected for the crafted oasis just in front of the station.
"There. That one is our car."
Her tinkerer had been joined by his apprentice, who had apparently abandoned the giggling girls upon the train's arrival.
The pilot shuffled up, licking the grease off the empty stick before moving on to his hand.
"You heard the little lady, move your britches and get your kit together."
The other two direct the skiffs towards the car and for the first time that day, Rebecca had hope that this could really work.
Well, that's it.
I think I caught all my numerous typos.
Please let me know what you think.
I hope that one anon finds this.
>>44353648
This is a pretty good idea.
Lovecraftian works best when the gods and monsters are largely unknown.
I like the idea of humanity discovering new technology that allows them to see the fey world.
And then when a few members of humanity starts experimenting on them, they have no idea what they've awoken and start a war that nobody is equipped to finish.
It's good stuff.
Just break physics and you can do whatever you please.
This is no different from the Alcubierre Drive.
>>44353648
Have you ever read Hellboy? It's right up your alley.
>>44354353
Bretty gud.
>>44356153
Thanks!
>>44353418
That picture reminds me of Hitler's plan to build a 3m gauge rail network across Europe.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breitspurbahn
>>44358053
Hitler was into steampunk?
Who knew?
>>44358317
Hitler liked monumental scale - the visual impact and symbols of strength, and the practical merits of large size also factor into it somewhat as well (though large scale buildings and operations can have big disadvantages, and Hitler is well known to ignore those)
Overall though I'd call that more Dieselpunk
>>44353418
Pretty cool pic OP, the writfagging isn't bad either.
>>44358747
Thanks.
I tried to find the most appropriate and awesome steampunk imagery to go along with the scene.
>>44353418
If you're going to write about steampunk, you need to really get into the mindset of the times, something that most steampunk settings are scared of doing.
Nationalism, Communism, Colonialism, the birth of nations and the creation of terrible technologies that will unleash a Pandora's box of suffering, thought not just yet. To make it really "punk", need to get into the nitty gritty about what all this punk is doing to the world, both good and bad.
>>44354322
>>44354235
>>44354012
>>44353948
>>44353816
>>44353733
This is a very good start, but it would also be good to portray it from different perspectives. I always liked seeing how more primitive societies reacted to highly advanced ones, and how they incorporated their technology.
>>44359420
This is good advice.
I tried to touch on some of the nationalism a bit in my scene.
>>44359535
>I always liked seeing how more primitive societies reacted to highly advanced ones, and how they incorporated their technology.
This would make a decent short story, with a jungle native encountering the crew of the airship.
Writing from different perspectives is very important when establishing a setting.
>>44359644
Don't be afraid to show just how bad Colonialism treated some of the natives. Just because the technology is advanced, doesn't mean that the mindset has evolved. You'll still have your missionaries proselytizing, forced labor, occasional genocide, and evermore futile resistance (well not always so futile), as well as the boons of civilization like education and advanced medicine (well, advanced for the time).
Steampunk South Africa is something I'd like to see expanded on for example.
>>44359832
Yes.
Candy coating colonialism serves nothing.
The same goes for only having villainous characters see the value of forced labor and occasional genocide.
Sometimes the heros in some settings have sensibilities that would offend modern society.
Avoiding that perverts and distorts the writing to no good end.
>>44354586
>And then when a few members of humanity starts experimenting on them, they have no idea what they've awoken and start a war that nobody is equipped to finish.
