Steampunk Your D&D 4E, Part I

Dear Uncle Pernicious,

Last night me mates and I were chasing a black-hearted necromancer through a dark dungeon and he jumped through a magical portal. ‘Not such a big deal,’ thought we. Our wizard figured out the command word and we followed him through. We came out the other side in a city! But not a regular, normal, sane city…it was a place of dark, soot-covered buildings impossibly tall, carriages that hissed and smoked and moved without horses, and people with round little windows over their eyes who used magical rods that belched fire and launched some kind of sling stones with unearthly speed. (And they hurt. A lot.) We gave up on the necromancer and high-tailed it back to the real world.

My question, Uncle, is what kind of a place was that? And what kind of people could possibly adventure there?

Yours,

Regdar

My dear nephew,

It sounds like your portal took you not only across your world, but to an alternate one. As I was not with you, I don’t know the exact name or details of that other place, but your description leaves no doubt about its nature:

STEAMPUNK.

Steampunk is a world of What If? It’s a place where the past that was meets the future that never happened, where technology is the new magic, and where society is bright with possibility and dark with pollution, repression, and crime. In short, it’s the perfect place to adventure!

But how does a D&D Dungeon Master run in a steampunk world? After all, there is no techno-Victorian flavor text in D&D manuals, nor are there mechanics for mundane or fantastical firearms, robots, steamships, or submarines. Must a DM create a world and its ruleset from whole cloth? No! With a slight amount of reskinning, you too can run a D&D Steampunk game. I am currently running a Steampunk campaign set in the homebrew world of Arcium, and it the next few posts, I’ll explain how I did it. Read on, brave DM!

Step 1: Understand the Underlying Mechanics

One of the best things (in my faux-humble opinion) about 4th Edition is how the rules work together. Feats, powers, skills, and stats for weapons, magic, and monsters use the same base mechanics. More importantly, they interact in predictable, logical ways. Notice, I am making no claim about game balance since that concept is debatable, but if you like the way the 4E rules work, then there’s no need to change them at a fundamental level.

Notice that the name or description of a rule has no bearing on the way it works. Take a crossbow, for example. Its stat line (Prof +2, Dam 1d8, range 15/30, Price 25 gp, Weight 4 lb, Properties Load minor) says absolutely nothing about a crossbow. The rule values do not describe a stout bow fitted to a wooden stock with a mechanical trigger that fires a short heavy bolt with an iron tip, because that’s all “flavor text.” Flavor text describes how a thing looks, how a character interacts with it, and how it might appear to observes in a shared world. True, the rule text was designed as a numerical way to approximate the flavor text, but once the rule is generated the numbers can be separated from the description and then applied to other similar things.

So, stop thinking of “Prof +2, Dam 1d8, range 15/30, Price 25 gp, Weight 4 lb, Properties Load minor” as a crossbow. Think of it as “a widget that does moderate damage with reasonable accuracy at a distance up to 50 yards that takes a little effort to reload.”

Step 2: Decide What Your World Looks Like, Ignoring the Rules

Steampunk as a genre means many things to many people. Some like a cinematic Jules Verne-style setting, while others go in for a more Gibsonesque dystopia. That part is up to you. Start designing your world. What kinds of social structures are in place? Governments? Bureaucracies? Monolithic religions? Go nuts. Then start thinking about the technology that is available, since that is a fundamental part of the steampunk milieu. What races are present? Absent? What classes are common? Which are gone entirely? And which are new?

In Arcium, there are fives basic races: humans, elves, dwarves, dragonborn, and gobbers (goblins) who live in a large republic governed by a Prime Minister and the Fraternal Moot of Peers and Worthies. Technology is pervasive, and magic is shunted to the periphery, either as shamanic magic by savage races like orcs or as ecstatic religious fervor by fanatics of the Holy Adamic Church.

In the pre-campaign stage, I sketched out a northern Viking-style land in case a player wants to run a barbarian, but I don’t see them integrating into my pseudo-Victorian society on a regular basis. I also don’t see a place for the monks with their Shaolin priest flavor in my world, so they go away. The idea of the tinkerer and inventor is central to my view of Steampunk, so I pull in the Artificer from Eberron. And while I’m there: Warforged? Can you say…robots? Sentient mechanical men are perfect for my world!

Step 3: Embrace Re-skinning

Probably sooner rather than later, you will run up against the “but D&D doesn’t have _______ in it!” problem. Don’t panic.

Find a rule, piece of equipment, magic item, power, or monster that has the mechanical properties you want. The more fundamental or pervasive the rule, the better. In Arcium, I decided that I wanted to have muskets and pistols be fairly common (and also crazy-tech versions of firearms, but we’ll discuss those later). I also wanted to eliminate bows and crossbows from general use, because they felt very medieval in flavor. Solution: I replaced the “crossbow” flavor text with “musket” and replaced “hand crossbow” with “pistol.”

Stop right there. I know what you’re thinking: “A black powder weapon takes longer to load! You can’t fire every round!” or “But a bullet hits harder than a bolt. Maybe I should up the damage!” or “A musket isn’t as accurate as a crossbow. Shouldn’t I take a point off the accuracy?” or “Shouldn’t there be a mechanic for misfires?”

Sure, you can do all those things. You can also rewrite all the rules to your heart’s content.  Then you can figure how your new mechanic interacts with every other rule (and the new ones that come out). And if it is fair for other “similar” rules at that power level. You can do all the things the designers at WoTC have already done…minus the salary. Have fun.

I found it wasn’t helpful to try to make game mechanics model real world physics or logistics. That’s what I do when I play GURPS. When I play D&D, I prefer to look at things from a different perspective: what is the campaign function of a particular mechanic? In Arcium, I needed muskets, right? Wrong: that’s flavor text. I needed “a widget that does moderate damage with reasonable accuracy at a distance up to 50 yards that takes a little effort to reload.” Sounds like a crossbow mechanic to me, so I changed the name, added a fictitious name, and voila! Behold the Durenberg Carbine Musket (Prof +2, Dam 1d8, range 15/30, Price 25 gp, Weight 4 lb, Properties Load minor).

One important caveat: don’t try to compare things your campaign needs to things your campaign doesn’t have. I don’t need to point out to anyone that a firearm probably hits with greater impact than a crossbow, but it doesn’t matter because I don’t have crossbows. How does my Bic pen compare to a quill and inkpot? It’s irrelevant to me, because I don’t have the latter. The “campaign function” of a Bic or a quill is that it can write words on paper.

Okay, my example worked for something basic, but how do I model Dr. Hawthorne’s Oscillating Ether Raygun? What about reskinning a +3 phasing crossbow? Then describe it like “a big rifle with an ether modulator and pulse generator with a projectile stream that, being ether, passes right through cover?” Boom. Done.

Step 4: Remember Re-skinning Works Both Ways

D&D 4E is predicated on certain assumptions. One of these is that characters will accrue magic items as they progress in level. Without these items, they will be less capable of destroying the foes and overcome the challenges geared for their level. But if your steampunk has no “magic” what do you do? Re-skin the other direction! Instead of starting with a piece of tech and finding a mechanic that fits, take the mechanic you need to include and invent some flavor text to make it fit in your world.

The fighter in my campaign was due for a +1 weapon. If the weapon he got was a “musket”, we simply take a crossbow mechanic, add the “+1 magic” mechanic, and add the flavor text “Your musket is equipped with the latest brass rangefinding and accuracy peepsight.” Look, it’s more accurate and hits a little harder because your shot hits closer to the mark”…more accuracy, more damage…like about +1 to each!

More to come later,

Uncle Per

Next Installment: Tweaking Character Classes and Powers

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