PLOTBUNNY! PLOTBUNNY!

So I was just reading the PDF version of the opening pages of the Steampunk supplement for the GURPS rolplaying system. And I read that advanced mechanics had been developing all through the 19th century. And I thought about what would happen if World War I had steampunk technology. And now there’s a plotbunny the size of a turkey gnawing on my brain. I also just played Rise of Legends at a gaming place, which is an RTS based on Rise of Nations with a crazy steampunk race in it. Steampunk is currently the main thinking part of my brain.
So what would a WWI steampunk thing be like? Well, tanks and mechanized warfare would be nothing new. Cavalry would be useless, unless it was also mechanized, like steam-powered spider machines or something. With guns. Robots would be in there too. Because robots are cool. Big mechanical steam-powered clockwork guys with guns on their arms.
I figure what happened was that during the Italian Renaissance and the subsequent enlightenment of Europe, Da Vinci’s inventions became much better known, and eventually
Newton came into public knowledge that way as well, but the Industrial Revolution was longer-lived and continued alongside the wars and maneuvering that brought Europe into the Great War. So we have to suspend physics in some sense, because Da Vinci’s flying machines can’t realistically work, but we can more than make up for that with sheer awesomeness.
The naavies are highly mechanized, the Ottoman Empire has light tanks and fast spiders for desert combat and maneuvering, Imperial Russia has enormous snow-walkers that melt the ice with their steam, Great Britain has a huge armada of steam powered dreadnoughts, Germany and France have legions of high-tech soldiers backed up by masses of robots. The stage is set.
I figure what I’ll have to do is research WWI history, pick out a battle to write about, write a short story concerning that, and then turn it into a campaign setting.
Woo, I’m pumped. This is so awesome…

~ by pieboy on June 22, 2006.