Broken Gears is a pen and paper RPG created by the roleplaying group at Cambridge Uni – and they’ve written it up (the complete system) and uploaded the Creative Commons liscenced PDF for all to read and use.

Now, theirs is a slightly different flavour of Steampunk – but Steampunk it is. The year is apparently 2052, but the world is still surrounded by steam engines, air ships and difference engines (a la Babbage). You can read more of the background yourself, but it seems to be a combination of post-apocalyptic and Steampunk, with the British Empire still in existance and the world struggling to recover from a terrible, technology lead war.

I’m sure I’m not doing it justice, and I can’t say I’ve played it myself yet – but I’ve had a quick read and the background information seems very nicely Steampunk. Even the flavour text that the document opens on, has a lovely tale about the Difference Engine in the Tower of London called Erasmus. Sounds like fun to me.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 26th, 2006 at 11:31 pm by Tinkergirl and is filed under Books.