"Why I never want VSF to be popular" Topic

John Treadaway (from another thread)John Treadaway 30 Sep 2008 10:05 a.m. PST

I agree with the criticisms of the name Cyberpunk: like many media invented names it truly sucks and yup: I know the etymological background of it but its still a crappy name (by my book) as it evokes nothing about the genre but everything about the writers who wrote it (which is why the name is, I figure, a media generated name: the protagonists will be for more interested in the writers as personalities than they are about the writers' work).

You could argue that describing the period (as I often have) as 'Wellsian' SF (after HG) is just as bad. All I would say is that I don't know who originated the term (not me) but I prefer Wellsian to Cyberpunk any day as it has no pretensions of sounding cool…

Which suits how I view the gaming period I guess: the last think I want Victorian SF gaming to be is cool!

John T

***

I agree wholeheartedly, but I thought this sentiment required a bit more expostulation.

I used to REALLY love D&D, when it was in three little brown booklets, was badly written with the most truly opaque rules system known to man, and when the figures for it were what the Hell you could find and quality be damned.

Back in those days, I desinged my own fantasy worlds and races, often vastly divergent from the JRR Tolkien / RE Howard basis of the game itself. I could always find players, my investment was minimal, and I enjoyed having other people explore my imagined worlds, or me exploring their's.

Then it got big, expensive, lavish with intricately modeled figures. It also became geek-trendy, and everybody played it.

Trouble was, the rules were extremely convoluted, players only wanted to adventure in the Forgotten Realms, and I could not find people to play my own version of things with impunity.

In short, it started to suck, and I got away from it.

NOW I play VSF, and, again, I play in my own world, peopled with my own creations, all modeled on other stuff, but with my own twists. Thus, the British army in red coats is vastly overshadowed by Naval Brigade troops in white suits and blue caps.

The population of Prussia has almost been totally wiped out by a freak accident involving poisonous gas, but it is the world's most powerful nation, ruled by Chancellor Bismark and his "court sorcerer" Count Von Zeppelin with a vast army of clockwork soldiers and gun-carrying airships.

The earth's core is inhabited by the goblin-like descendants of Piltdown Man, who were driven into the caverns ages ago by homo sapiens, have developed their own technology, and are now back for revenge.

Martian tripods and specially bred alien soldiers drop out of the night skies. They have developed an immunity to earthborn pathogens, but mankind has also reverse-engineered their technology, and the Royal Navy will soon build its own
ether-craft to tkae the battle to the enemy. Who knows what they will find among the stars?

Anyway, that's my setting. It is not everyone's setting AND THAT'S JUST THE WAY I LIKE IT.

God save us if GASLIGHT ever gets bought out by Hasbro.

[For those of you who play my PBEM game, note that this is a completely different setting]

Don't know whether to be disappointed or relieved that your imagination is so much more sparky than mine.

SOUNDS GREAT, KEEP IT UP !

Chick

"SOUNDS GREAT, KEEP IT UP !"

Yes, but just remember, your game/world is more popular than it was a moment ago and is thus less cool.

Enjoy your meteoric fall! :D

God save us if GASLIGHT ever gets bought out by Hasbro.

Well, I hope it is, because Buck and Chris deserve to be millionaires.
As for the effects on gaming, so what? Play what you want.

Isn't telling everyone how isolated you'd like to stay slightly oxymoronic? I vant to be alone….

But you can buy Gaslight on the "Target" webpage….

At least that is where I bought it from last year, they had the best price to boot…

I prefer Wellsian to Cyberpunk any day as it has no pretensions of sounding cool…

No; it has pretensions of sounding arty and intellectual. I don't see how that's any better.

Anyway, you just go back to your arrogant little ivory tower, and look down on the masses. I'll just play some games down here.

No one deserves to be a millionaire – if all of the deserving people were millionaires – then the really rich would be Trillionaires and we'd live in Zimbabwe or Bongolesia hoping for table scraps.

In any event, VSF is kind of growing on me – a bit – I've yet to actually venture forth and buy it – although I did look at the spiffy rules they had – some smaller company which I've not seen in print again. I just down loaded .45 Adventure (basic download rules) to try them out.

Just remember the less popular the period
the more likely that your Victorian wish list
will remain just that, a wish list.

This is Wierd… I just bought into everything everyone has just said!!

[As for the effects on gaming, so what? Play what you want.]

Geez John, with an attitude like that you'll never be a grumpy, elitist, unreasonable nitwit spouting garbage and expecting people to take it seriously.

Your point about D&D is spot on – it was mor fun when fantasy was about using one's imagination (oh, and ripping off books, mustn't forget that !).

But, sadly, although I too miss those days I think the blame lies fairly squarely on the shoulders of the D&D players. I loved D&D, I bought AD&D andwas just knocked out – wow it was wonderful – like the old game, but with an extra armour class. Then the modules appeared. I had dozens of dungeon levels yet to be explored, but still I bought G1, G2, G3, D1, D2, D3, and Q1. And T1, and some judges guild stuff, and, damn it, I made my gaming buddies go adventuring in these crocks of . The only "module" I don't regret was The City state of the Invincible Overlord – the rest I should have left on the shelf.

When the other guys wanted to DM they bought a module as they hadn't yet created a world (I had vast nations with a history and culture being developed to make it "real") – we should have left it at that – even these undermined the ongoing ethos off the game as we "needed" 5th level characters on the new DM's first outing 'cos that's what the module said we should use.

We fuelled the market – and so did everyone else – and it was a big big mistake, and now I don't play RPGs. There's a morale in there somewher.

Mephistopheles – you're Victoriana campaign sounds brilliant, I will steal as many ideas as I can and claim them as my own !

Cyberpunk is near future SF as written by William Gibson. Nothing to do with VSF (however you want to term it.) Is it getting confused with "Steampunk"? (Which is a pretty dopey name.)

adster is correct, but steampunk is considered a subgenre of cyberpunk that takes the themes and tones of cyberpunk and applies with anachronistic technology from the Victorian era.

I'd also say steampunk is a subgenre of VSF as well. Wells, Burroughs, et al. are definitely not steampunk at all.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyberpunk
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steampunk

We used to call Wells Science Fiction , Tolkien Fantasy and Burroughs Science Fantasy (not Sciencey enough to be SF, too much interplanetry stuff to be fantasy). Alternatively "adventure yarns". On the whole, who cares ?

But – taking TW's defintions – how can Wells not be steampunk (even though he died a long time before the term cyberpunk was coined ?) From the wiki link :

Cyberpunk is a science fiction genre noted for its focus on "high tech and low life."

Time machine = high tech
Morlocks = low life (subterranean cannibals ? surely it's not possible to get lower than that !)

darthfozzywig "Yes, but just remember, your game/world is more popular than it was a moment ago and is thus less cool."

Damn.

richarDMB "But you can buy Gaslight on the "Target" webpage…."

Got a link?

Andrew Paul "Anyway, you just go back to your arrogant little ivory tower, and look down on the masses. I'll just play some games down here."

Then how come I can still hear you?

Jovian1 "No one deserves to be a millionaire…"

Except me.

"I just down loaded .45 Adventure (basic download rules) to try them out."

Is that VSF or pulp (and no, let's NOT start the argument all over again. I just want to know if it's H.G. Wells or Dashiel Hammett)?

D6 Junkie "Just remember the less popular the period
the more likely that your Victorian wish list
will remain just that, a wish list."

Damn.

CAPTAIN BEEFHEART "This is Wierd… I just bought into everything everyone has just said!!"

One of us… One of us… One of us…

Whatisitgood4atwork "Geez John, with an attitude like that you'll never be a grumpy, elitist, unreasonable nitwit spouting garbage and expecting people to take it seriously."

Uh… yeah! What?!

20thmaine "Mephistopheles – you're Victoriana campaign sounds brilliant, I will steal as many ideas as I can and claim them as my own !"

At last, an intelligent poster! However, be warned, this is TMP. Somebody (other than I, who could care less) will probably copyright my ideas for me and then sue you, prosecute you, and throw you in a dungeon for IP violations. YOU ARE WARNED!!!

adster "Cyberpunk is near future SF as written by William Gibson."

Who also co-wrote The Difference Engine, which IS Victorian.

Thomas Whitten "I'd also say steampunk is a subgenre of VSF as well. Wells, Burroughs, et al. are definitely not steampunk at all."

True.

But – taking TW's defintions – how can Wells not be steampunk (even though he died a long time before the term cyberpunk was coined ?)

There is an optimism I find in Wells work that I don't find so much in the steampunk novels. I guess I just find the feel, mood, atmosphere different between Wells and steampunk.

Thanks for someone saying it first. Steampunk is the subgenre of Cyberpunk that deals with the 1900s.

And I don't think that the D&D modules were bad. I was a young kid when I discovered gaming (13 years old), and those modules helped me run games for my friends. Without them, I wouldn't have gotten as into the hobby as I did. PLUS, modules allow us gamers to share a common history. Even though I didn't go to high school with Murphy or my buddy Paul, or any bunch of guys I meet at a con or game store, we old grognards can all talk about the common adventures we had "In Search of the Unkown," or at the Barrier Peaks, or the Tomb of Elemental Evil.

1900? This is the problem I have with steampunk- too many people tie it to a particular time frame. That would make it inextricably VSF, and really the two overlap sometimes but are properly not so highly connected; the punk element is often missing from much so called steampunk, an overused term, which is why there are other names for such things; Vernian Process calls his works "steamwave", and a lot of what I get into I prefer to call AMF (anachronistic mechanised fantasy).

Much of Wells and Verne can be considered steampunk, but to call everything like it steampunk is like calling Disney's Cars Dieselpunk or Star Trek, with its overwhelming focus on computers, Cyberpunk.

Steampunk and VSF can separate as War of the Worlds is VSF, as is The Time Machine since it doesn't deal with an ordinary person surviving in an overindustrialised, money-operated, greed-driven world, or against a terrible dictatorship; but some learned hero having an adventure.(might be steampunk if written from a Morlock perspective?)

And, why should I dump something the instant it becomes cool? Isn't that just another form of bandwagon-jumping, to run for a new not-so-big thing which has to die if it becomes popular so I can run for the next not-so-big thing. Nothing against anyone who can live like that, things get created that wy. But to me it feels like being a "tween" with the polarity reversed.

*way

chironex "Much of Wells and Verne can be considered steampunk…"

Okay. What? Things To Come, maybe? I'm not even sure I agree with that one, but what are you referring to?

"And, why should I dump something the instant it becomes cool?"

Nobody says you should. Why do you have to take MY story, juxtapose it into YOUR life, and then tell me why it doesn't work? I never said you should drop anything, just gave my reasons for why I dropped D&D.

As to the why, well, like I said in the OP, it just stopped being what it had been. I could no longer find people who wanted to adventure into their/my imaginations, but just started meeting uber-gamers who wanted to show how much butt they could kick in a published setting.

If that isn't your experience, or if it is your experience but you enjoy it, by all means continue on. Nobody is trying to stop you.

Maybe not Things to Come, in fact you will have to sort through the lot to find proper steampunk undertones; it's usually more subtle forms of revolution and rebellion, so more commonly you might use the words Edisonade and Scientific Romance. Nemo, with his misanthropism and desire to change the world, is closer to a steampunk character, and some of his other characters hate the way the world has developed and rebel against it, though not necessarily turning to Ludditism. Steampunk seems to have become a "we'll call it that for now and sort it out later" kind of word.

as to your point about D&D, that does sound quite the steampunk attitude; there is a story in Steampunk Magazine 4 that shows characters with exactly that attitude, not really against technology but against it being so much part of life we humans cannot create or think without it. Everything is delivered instantly, done for us, so we don't even realise we are being ruled with an iron fist, every thought removed from our minds, until we are deleted as useless things that don't give money and power anymore.
This is not every steampunk fans attitude, so they will accept VSF or AMF as steampunk, as long as the characters use steam age tech to produce 21st century or further results. However I do agree on the munchkins who seem to be a product of the age of products available for every purpose and no imagination. Those who are adapting steampunk into a lifestyle seem to talk about that no end.

Sorry, there I go again.