And Now For Something Else Completely Different! Josh Roby's Renegade Jennys and Boilerplate Jacks

More steampunk swashbuckling goodness that Bishrook would have loved to bits.  It's still under development and playtesting, but rest assured that when it IS published, it's joining my library.  (I've got a couple of Mr. Roby's other games, like Full Light Full Steam, and I backed his supplement for Houses of the Blooded, so I admit a certain positive inclination toward his work.)

Steampunk has a problem, although the degree to which it impacts your game depends on a number of factors such as which rule-set and setting you are using, the composition of your play group, and whether the GM is prone to pettifoggery on certain historical details.  Namely that the 'default' group is generally European (thus white) and tends to be middle-upper or upper class to one degree or another.  To be fair, there are exceptions!  In my (somewhat limited) experience, that's how things turn out--diversity, should it arise, is more likely in settings where you have Elves and Dragons walking around (see Castle Falkenstein, which is one of my favorites).  Diversity among PCs is generally hampered by the underlying social conventions of the historical setting, and while your mileage may vary, trying to explain how a couple of street rats are hanging around an heir to the throne and his bodyguard is the sort of challenge that can make or break the willing suspension of disbelief the same way that 'you all meet in a tavern' can do for dungeon delvers.  It's possible to do this well, to be sure, but it works against the grain.  That isn't necessarily a bad thing (flouting social convention is grist for the plot mill!) but sometimes those limits get in the way more than they spur ideas.

Renegade Jennys and Boilerplate Jacks blows that problem right out of the water...and the sky...and sets the remains on fire.  This is a steampunk game I shan't be ashamed to introduce to my Cub when she's older.  Think Firefly with some technical redesign inspired by Jules Verne and you'll have the general idea!  The deeper I get into the beta playtest, the more I like what Mr. Roby has done with this.

In brief:

• Atlantis popped up out of the seas about fifteen years ago, and the resulting damage humbled the usual cast of Great Powers.  Their Empires are still here, but not quite the overarching mammoths they were historically.
• PCs are all outcasts and misfits, banding together for mutual profit and protection.
• Magic is back, along with neato keen whizz-bang Atlantean Artifacts that add a certain Brisco County Jr. touch to the whole.

What does this mean?  This means that your crew is as like as not all of one sort of person.  Not all white, not all European, not all straight, not all cis-gendered.  Instead of hanging around in the usual haunts like London, Paris, Vienna, they're visiting other places on Earth ("ports of call").

Is this 'unrealistic'?  Is this 'fantastic'?  You bet!  And it will be awesome.

More information here...
https://www.patreon.com/joshroby?ty=h
http://joshroby.com/downloads/RJBJ/

This of course also puts me in mind of one of my favorite Colonial Gaming supplements, published by my friend Ed Texeira (Two Hour Wargames) so my house version of RJBJ is probably going to have Lemuria in it as as well.  

Colonial Lemuria was written by a British Gent of Sikhish extraction, and the basic idea was to provide for miniatures wargaming match-ups that were possible but historically implausible, like Imperial Chinese versus Zulus or Raja Indian steam-elephants versus Dutch mercenaries.  But you know this already, yeah?

http://www.twohourwargames.com/cole.html


UPDATE: aaaaand a slight edit, because a sentence that was complete in my head was not complete on the page and I didn't notice until way too late.