Requires the use of the D & D ® Pl ' H db k Sorcery & Steam Credits MANAGING DEVELOPER Greg Benage WRITING Mark Chance, Gareth Hanrahan, Lizard, Brian Patterson, Ross Watson INTERIOR ILLUSTRATIONS David Griffith, Anthony Hightower, Constantinos Koniotis, Scott Schomburg, Mattias Snygg, Kevin Wasden GRAPHIC & COVER DESIGN Brian Schomburg EDITING Greg Benage ‘d20 System’ and the ‘d20 System’ logo are Trademarks owned by ART DIRECTION Wizards of the Coast and are used according to the terms of the d20 System License version 1.0. A copy of this License can be found at Greg Benage www.wizards.com. LAYOUT Dungeons & Dragons® and Wizards of the Coast® are Registered Greg Benage Trademarks of Wizards of the Coast and are used with permission. PUBLISHER Copyright © 2003 Fantasy Flight Publishing, Inc. Legends & Lairs™ is a trademark of Fantasy Flight Publishing, Inc. All rights reserved. Christian T. Petersen This work, or parts thereof, may not be copied without permission. PRINTING Bang Printing FANTASY FLIGHT GAMES 1975 W. County Rd. B2 Roseville, MN 55113 651.639.1905 www.fantasyflightgames.com Sorcery & Steam Contents CHAPTER ONE Steampunk Campaigns 5 CHAPTER TWO Character Classes 28 CHAPTER THREE Skills, Feats, and Spells 97 CHAPTER FOUR Steamcraft and Black Powder 123 CHAPTER Five Steamcraft Vehicles 153 Chapter 4 provides detailed information on new equipment and technology, from steam- Welcome craft devices to black powder weapons. The chapter also presents detailed rules for firearms Fantasy Flight Games is pleased to present in a steampunk fantasy campaign. Sorcery & Steam, the latest volume in our Legends & Lairs line of sourcebooks for the Chapter 5 presents comprehensive rules for d20 System. Sorcery & Steam gives players steamcraft vehicles, including dramatic chases and DMs everything they need to create a and vehicle combats. The chapter closes with steampunk setting or introduce elements of the descriptions and statistics for several common INTRODUCTION genre into their ongoing fantasy campaigns. vehicles that may be encountered in a steam- punk fantasy campaign. Chapter 1 presents an overview of the steam- punk genre. The chapter dis- An appendix at the back of the cusses what steampunk is, book includes a comprehen- what it looks and feels like, sive index and reproduc- and how to introduce it into tions of the equipment your fantasy game. The and firearms tables chapter describes the found in Chapter 4. changes steampunk technolo- gy will make to an existing campaign and provides The Open guidelines for creating Game steampunk settings and adventures. License All game rules Chapter 2 provides and statistics detailed information on derived from the character classes in a d20 System Reference steampunk setting. It Document are designat- begins with guidelines on ed as Open Game incorporating the existing Content. The introductions to indi- core classes into a steam- vidual chapters and section detail punk game. The chapter specifically the Open Game Content also provides three new found within them. All other text is classes and more than a designated as closed content. dozen prestige classes, complete with associated All illustrations, pictures, and dia- organizations that a DM grams in this book are Product can use in his steampunk setting. Identity and the property of Fantasy Flight Publishing, Inc., © 2003. Chapter 3 presents a handful of new skills, including Drive, Munitions, The Open Game License is printed in its entire- and Use Steamcraft Device, that allow char- ty at the end of this book. For further informa- acters to take advantage of the new technology tion, please visit the Open Gaming Foundation introduced in a steampunk campaign. The web site. chapter also provides guidelines on new uses for existing skills, as well as new feats and spells appropriate to a steampunk campaign. 4 CHAPTER ONE CHAPTER ONE: Steampunk Campaigns Steampunk Campaigns implies the existence of dozens of foundries and brass-works to make the parts, implies a caste of craftsmen and engineers to build and Introduction run the engines, a civilization whose vast demands can be sated only by mass produc- Sorcery & Steam is not really about steam, or tion—such industry does not happen in isola- sorcery either for that matter. This book is tion. Other technologies or artifacts can exist about science, and fantasy, and what you can without completely changing their surround- do when you put the two together. The text of ings, but it’s much harder to contain steam and this chapter is closed content. all its implications. Once the steam genie is out of its cast-iron bottle, progress will keep racing “Steam” is shorthand for industry and technol- ahead. To shamelessly quote Charles Fort, “it’s ogy, a conceptual gateway to a brave new steam-engines when it’s steam-engine time.” world of whirring clockworks, clanking gears, Fort was actually talking about the odd phe- and marching brass wonders. The engine of nomenon where different inventors simultane- this transformation is traditionally steam ously invent the same complex machine within power, which worked so many changes in his- days of each other, without any knowledge of tory during the Industrial Revolution, but the the work of the other. When a technology is underlying technology is really irrelevant. It ready to be born, it seems to push itself out doesn’t matter if the machines are driven by wherever there is a receptive mind… steam, or oil, or elementals, or magically bound demons; it’s the presence and concept of the Adding steam and all it implies to different machine that’s important. times and settings is referred to as “steam- punk.” The ill-fitting “punk” epithet is derived The machine, too, is a symbol of greater from the “cyberpunk” genre of science fiction. change. Other great constructions, like castles (One of the first steampunk books, The or monuments, can exist in something of a vac- Difference Engine by William Gibson and uum: Their mere existence implies compara- Bruce Sterling, was authored by two leading tively little about the society that built them. lights of the cyberpunk movement, but the Machines, however, require a significant infra- term “steampunk” was coined before the structure. A gigantic steam-powered factory book was published.) Where cyberpunk 5 put technology into fast-forward and then ence and industry. It’s new and wonderful and examined what that did to society, steampunk challenging, but it’s also familiar and accept- took the scientific dreams of the Industrial able, unlike magic. Revolution and ran with them. The Difference Engine puts clockwork supercomputers, com- Of course, all that relates to the common set- plete with digital imaging and artificial intelli- ting of steampunk fiction, which is an alter- gence, into a Victorian London greatly changed nate-history version of Earth. Adding steam to by the presence of such technology. This high- fantasy, where magic isn’t a cryptic, ambiguous lights one key trait of steampunk fiction: mystery but a relatively common force that can “Steam” doesn’t merely bring into existence be manipulated, channeled, and used to throw real machines, like trains or cotton mills, but fireballs, can go in two ways. Magic and its creates anachronistic or impossible technolo- practioners may be opposed to steam and see it gies such as computers, television, cybernetics, as a terribly common and clumsy method for or even mecha. Steam, then, is an agent that the masses to get what should be reserved for suspends disbelief and advances technology, a the learned masters of the arcane. Alternatively, plot device for including plot devices. Instead both magic and steam can be yoked together by of merely building on existing devices of the brute industry, where the spells and mysteries time, steam takes modern-day technology and of magic are broken down, analyzed, and mass- recasts it with brass rivets and bubbling boilers produced. China Mieville’s excellent (and in a new setting. highly recommended) Perdido Street Station CHAPTER ONE: Steampunk Campaigns describes a sort of “industrial fantasy,” where Victorian steampunk is the most common thaumaturges are craftsmen just like engineers, expression of the genre. The Victorian age was and conjured lightning elementals power mag- the time of the great factories, of great strides ical engines to catch leviathans from other in industry and technology, of railways and sci- planes of existence. ence and workhouses. Titanic smokestacks belched the fumes of thousands of furnaces Steampunk isn’t about steam. It’s about techno- into the gray skies, and technology did trans- logical advancement down different paths or at form the world. A little push, a little extrapola- a faster pace. It was steam power that triggered tion, and there’s the steampunk computers or and drove the historical revolution, a change superweapons, like two sub-critical masses of that swept away the old orders more efficiently uranium mounted on separate trains that are and completely than any philosophy or trundling headlong towards each other. The Renaissance. Steam is change, movement Victorian age was also the time of the scientif- towards the unfamiliar and the wonderful. ic romance, and most of Jules Verne’s books, especially 20,000 Leagues under the Sea and The Steampunk Aesthetic From the Earth to the Moon can be gleefully subsumed within steampunk. Most depictions of steampunk have a common “look,” with motifs and images cropping up Once Wells enters the field, the genre runs into time and time again, and any steampunk game the border of the pulp series of the 1920s and should mention at least some of these. 30s. (Beyond pulp and the ivory-tower science Obviously, the trappings and mechanisms of fiction of the 50s and 60s, we can dimly steam power—cogs, pipes, boilers, lightning glimpse the seeds of cyberpunk, which brings rods, valves and the like—are everywhere, but us full circle on this whistle-stop tour of the even things not improved by technology have history of steampunk.) Pulp and steampunk traces of steam.