Steampunk Road Dispatch

The idea of Steampunk Road started to germinate about two years ago as Thomas Dolby’s A Map of the Floating City online alternate reality game was nearing its completion. A goal of Steampunk Road is to take technological elements of AMotFC and reuse them (and hopefully improve upon them) to create a new game. These include the Google Maps API, forums, trading, and chat.

Other than that, the two worlds are only connected by the fact that many of our earliest travelers are from AMotFC. That includes our most intrepid traveler, Calvin Hobbes, whom you can find most every day traversing our map in his gondola.

Oh, and there is one more thing from AMotFC: the curious artifact found at “the top of the world”. Have you found it on the map? That particular item was inspired by our experiences in A Map of the Floating City, where they could be found in abundance.

Hint: The item in question is easier to find on the public map. You need to zoom in quite a bit to see it there, and you need to zoom in all the way to maximum zoom to see it on the game map. Be sure to click the exclamation point when you see it in order to reveal the artifact.

In Steampunk Road, you create a persona and travel the world. You can create any kind of character you like, but we have a suggestion: Be nice to your fellow players.

Now, perhaps your preferred persona is just not a nice person. That is fine. There is nothing wrong with that. Almost everyone likes a good villain.

But people only like a good villain in so far as they are not the unfortunate victim of his or her evil deeds. Whereas you might find it fun to be mean and annoying, others may just experience the mean and annoying parts without the fun.

So use your creativity instead and reveal your character’s nefarious flaws in ways enjoyable to everyone. If you can’t do that, please choose a persona that is nice and helpful instead. Thank you!

P.S. Steampunk Road strives to provide ways for players to easily report other players’ misconduct. Please make use of them whenever appropriate.

We can’t define “steampunk”, but we will still say a little bit about the universe of Steampunk Road. It is a time of global peace, when people are free to travel the world and trade. It is a world technologically ruled by steam: steam engines, steamships, and even steam-powered airships. Every object is a hand-crafted piece of art, finely tuned to its purpose.

But it is also a world you can help build. Create a persona, choose your vessel, and travel the world. You can collect treasure and trade with other fellow travelers. You can form a guild and compete for members. If you have not already entered the world of Steampunk Road, then register today.

Steampunk Road has the ability to launch vessels on random voyages. We use this ability to make the public map more enticing to potential new members. If you do not wish to be launched randomly around the globe, the solution is very simple: login. Only vessels of captains who have not logged in over the past ninety (90) days are considered inactive and randomly launched.

If you do not mind your vessel traversing the map but you do not want the email notifications of docking and welcome messages that come with it, you can turn those off in the “Settings” menu. Of course, you have to login to do that, so you will be safe from random launches for a time anyway. Still, the options are there should you anticipate being away from the game for a long period of time (which we hope you never will).

Welcome to the Steampunk Road Dispatch! This is the place for all of the latest missives from and about the Steampunk Road – everything from tips about how to play … to pleas for assistance … to rants about programming – a real potpourri of prose, and maybe even some occasional verse.

“What is Steampunk Road?” you ask.

Steampunk Road is an online alternate reality game (ARG) set in a steampunk^* universe where you can travel the world as captain of the vessel of your choice, discover hidden treasures, trade with fellow members, form a guild and compete for members, find a missing boyfriend, and reveal a global conspiracy of epic proportions. Register to begin your adventure today!

If you have a question about Steampunk Road or a suggestion for a future topic here on the SRD, please leave it in the moderated comments below or in the forums. Thank you for reading.

^*Steampunk is a little harder to define, and we do not think we can do it justice. Consider the word blue. Blue is a color, and many things are blue, but no one thing is definitively blue. You can also feel blue, sound a blue note while playing the blues, and talk a blue streak. Steampunk is a lot like that, with as many definitions as people who use it. Here is one slightly less evasive definition.