Steampunk?

When I started to think about the world of Jarmusch Obliterast I knew a few things, and I had my share of unknown ones (and still I do). What did I knew?

-I had this character, a spymaster, a though guy, with a long dusty old coat.
-I wanted to make it in a steampunk setting, mixed with some elements from horror and fantasy stories.
-I wanted to tell his story in chapters or episodes of few comic pages. There would be a underlying plot joining loosely the differents installments, but each chapter would have to be able to be read and understood by a new reader with almost no previous explanation.
-Politics, intrigue, mysteries, adventures... there would be place for a wide range of stories to be told.
-I wanted to have fun with it.

Today, I'm going to center in the steampunk part of the equation. What means steampunk? As I was trying to undertand it, I wanted to go beyond the fancy clothes with gears and pilot-goggles. I wanted to know which was the essence of the steampunk, going back to its origins. As a literary movement, it owes a lot to the works of writers like Jules Verne and H. G. Wells. Science Fiction with a Victorian taste. That was OK, but I needed to deepen more, if I wanted my setting to work. The thing was that once you had left the stories and ideas bare-boned, you found yourself in a world where the concepts of the Classical Mechanics were still applied, no quantum physics. Yes to Newton and Tesla, nothing about Planck. That was something with what I could work.

This way, I decided to build up a world where all devices where still steam-based, a kind of Victorian Age, but not on Earth. A world where man had risen up as the dominant species, and other elder, wiser and more magical races (elves, dwarves, orcs, ...) were in decline or dead long ago. I knew that I wanted magick to be something strange, uncommon to face, not unheard of, but dying as science took over the world. Keeping the basic ideas simple, playing with them, I hope to create a background where the sense of wonder, danger and excitement can take place.

It's somenthing what I'll accomplish, no matter how long it takes.

It'll be a pleasure to share the journey with you, if this appeals to you. Our ship sets sail on the 5th of November.

See you on the other side of the page.