Silkpunk Victoria

A Northeast Pacific Silkpunk campaign

"Yŏnghéng zìyóu." ("Always free.")
— Motto ("永恒自由") of the Free City of Victoria

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Welcome to Silkpunk Victoria

Silkpunk Taijitu^[一]

Silkpunk Victoria is a science fantasy role-playing game campaign set in an alternate history at the close of the 19th Century. It is a steampunk setting which nevertheless eschews the traditional privileging of Victorian Britain — or the American frontier — in favour of a re-imagined, Pacific-inspired ethos — and æsthetic — that is more eclectically cosmopolitan.

The Northeast Pacific

The campaign is based at the Free City of Victoria on the northeastern shore of the Pacific Ocean — the northwestern coast of North America — at the southern tip of Vancouver Island. To the north, beyond the holdings of the independent Vancouver Island Company, lies the Japanese territory of Nihongo Arasuka. To the east, on the mainland, is the Canadian territory of New Caledonia. To the southeast is the independent Oregon Republic. Inland is the Plateau Confederacy of Indigenous Peoples in the inland regions of the Fraser and Columbia River basins.

Techtoria laboratory^[二]

Further south is the independent California Republic. Even further south along the coast is the Qīng territory of Qīng Jiāzhōu. Inland are the Great Basin Confederacy of Indigenous Peoples in the northern region of the Great Basin, and the Great Range Confederacy of Indigenous Peoples in the northern region of southwestern North America.

Far to the southwest is the Hawai'i Protectorate, a Japanese territory established in the Hawai'ian Islands, with capital at Honolulu.

Clockwork, Steam and Thaumaturgy

Image - Sniper and automaton with killed giant automaton

Sharpshooter and automaton^[三]

The Silkpunk Victoria setting is characterized by the "clockwork and steam" technology of steampunk but adds a fantastical aspect: thaumaturgy, an emerging applied science employed to accomplish practical goals using principles and natural phenomenon which are not yet well understood. The most apparent aspect of thaumaturgy is ætheron, a recently-discovered noble gas used as the thaumaturgical lifting agent in airships, as the thaumaturgical power source for pulse-energy "Rousseau guns" and as the thaumaturgical propellant in the æolipile engines used in auto-carriages, airships, submarines and automatons.

Silkpunk vs. Steampunk

Ætheron-enabled airship with æolipile engine drive^[四]

One need look no further than the 1988 role-playing game Space: 1889 to recognize the privileging of Victorian Britain in early steampunk. Within a decade, as demonstrated by the 1999 film Wild, Wild West, that privileging had expanded to include a romanticized U.S. frontier. These creative works understandably reflected the perspectives and expectations of late 20th Century U.S. consumers of speculative fiction (and also of their typically U.S. creators). Often progressive for their era — the Space: 1889 rule book notes that its "use of the masculine pronoun . . . should in no way be interpreted as excluding either female players or characters" while Wild, Wild West featured a Black actor in a role originally portrayed by a white actor (and now with a cross-dressing sidekick) — most steampunk works nevertheless typically featured a cast of characters which mostly overlooked the vast majority of humanity in the actual Victorian Era at the close of the 19th Century. (The "Remarkable Victorian Women" of Space: 1889 are all Britons or Americans just was Wild, Wild West's James West is an American.)

Silkpunk Victoria attempts to ameliorate this privileging. While set in a locale which would seem to epitomize the Victorian era in North America, the changes in the setting's alternate history — which are broader (and earlier) than simply those of technology and æsthetics which are commonplace in steampunk — have been re-imagined to create a campaign setting with a Pacific-inspired ethos and æsthetic that is more eclectically cosmopolitan.

Image credits:
^[一] Original illustration by Bethany Jordan. No endorsement of Silkpunk Victoria has been made or is implied.
^[二] Original design by Russell Papp. No endorsement of Silkpunk Victoria has been made or is implied.
^[三] Original illustration by Dmitry Grebenkov. No endorsement of Silkpunk Victoria has been made or is implied.
^[四] Original illustration by MuYoung Kim. No endorsement of Silkpunk Victoria has been made or is implied.

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