Space 1889 and Colonialism

#1

I’ve owned Space 1889 since the GDW version. The science romance setting struck an 11 year old me strongly. I’ve run it many times in the last 30 years - most recently in 2011.

Oddly when it fell out of print in the UK it was German print house Uhrwerk Verlag/Clockwork Publishing that brought it back to life. It’s fantastic elements still resound with me but the happy jolly view of European Imperialism and Colonialism sticks out like a sore thumb.

Has anyone else run it in recent years? How have they addressed the Colonialism themes?

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#2

Not 1889, but for Steampunk that deals with colonialism, take a look at Renegage Jennys and Boilerplate Jacks (and the StoryGames thread). It’s a steampunk game but told from the point of view of the colonised. It also draws on a lot of real-world events and locations from the 19th century. It’s only when you start looking around that you realised there was a lot more to the world than what the Europeans typically wrote about.

If I were to run another steampunk game, I’d start from the same position: the PCs aren’t the typical upper-class Europeans spreading Empire and Civilisation to the Natives. Instead, they’d be the people outside those power structures (for whatever reason), with their stories illustrating all the places where colonialism doesn’t come across as idyllic.

I ran a short playtest campaign of it at the local games club. That went really well, despite some speedbumps with the mechanics.

Unfortunately, Josh has realised that publishing the game would take more time, effort, and money than they want to invest, so there will be no further development on the game. If I were to run it again, I’d convert the mechanics to Cortex+ or Fate, but keep all the background and setting material, and probably the scenario/Port-of-Call format.

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#3

Hey I remember that S-G thread! :slight_smile: I hate the CSA surviving in alt-history–it’s a huge flaw with the reissued Space 1889 that helped turn me off getting it. (That and, you know, colonialism. That said, I have a reprint of the original GDW rules on my bookshelf.)

A friend of mine and I kicked around the idea of putting the Punk back in Steampunk by having working class tinkerers building steam-powered mechs in the dark depths of a London where Queen Vic was more Maggie Thatcher than our timeline, but it remains vaporware :slight_smile:

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#4

Heh. See also Sunless Skies that I’m currently obsessed with.

#5

IIRC one of the early editions of Victoriana got crap from various circles for positioning the PCs as actively opposed to the colonialist and exploitation capitalist elements of the setting. When I did my History of Steampunk & Victoriana RPG lists, I was a little shocked at how few games addressed those problems and how many actively embraced them.

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#6

Time to run that through a clockwork condenser, and distill out its steamy goodness into a receptacle suitable for play!