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Dec 21, 2024

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Game Theme

Winter’s Oasis is a text-based roleplaying game based on the ‘Steampunk’ genre trailblazed by 19th and early 20th century authors. It blends an exotic, industrial aesthetic with an anthropomorphic community, and sets it in a world of fantastic exploration, where miles of verdant wilderness beckon and danger could lurk around any corner.

Steampunk

Steampunk is a sub-genre of science fiction and speculative fiction, frequently featuring elements of fantasy, that came into prominence in the 1980s and early 1990s. The term denotes works set in an era or world where steam power is still widely used — usually the 19th century, and often Victorian era Britain — but with prominent elements of either science fiction or fantasy, such as fictional technological inventions like those found in the works of H. G. Wells and Jules Verne, or real technological developments like the computer occurring at an earlier date. Other examples of steampunk contain alternate history-style presentations of “the path not taken” of such technology as dirigibles, analog computers, or digital mechanical computers (such as Charles Babbage’s Analytical engine); these frequently are presented in an idealized light, or with a presumption of functionality.
Steampunk is often associated with cyberpunk and shares a similar fanbase and theme of rebellion, but developed as a separate movement (though both have considerable influence on each other). Apart from time period and level of technological development, the main difference between cyberpunk and steampunk is that steampunk settings usually tend to be less obviously dystopian than cyberpunk, or lack dystopian elements entirely.
Although many works now considered seminal to the genre were published in the 1960s and 1970s, the term “steampunk” originated in the late 1980s as a tongue in cheek variant of cyberpunk. It seems to have been coined by the science fiction author K. W. Jeter, who was trying to find a general term for works by Tim Powers (author of The Anubis Gates, 1983), James Blaylock (Homunculus, 1986) and himself (Morlock Night, 1979 and Infernal Devices, 1987) which took place in a 19th-century (usually Victorian) setting and imitated conventions of actual Victorian speculative fiction such as H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine.

(Above text from Wikipedia)

Winter’s Oasis

Winter’s Oasis is the collaborative dream of a small number of dedicated friends, a combination of the beloved Steampunk genre and the essence of their mutual anthro community, creating a world where high industrial fantasy meets a range of animal characters reminiscent of Disney classics such as Robin Hood, TaleSpin, and DuckTales, as well as more recent works like Square-Enix’s “Chronotrigger” and even the older “Wind in the Willows” and “Redwall” stories your grandmother might be familiar with.

Each staffer and player brings to the table a different aesthetic and idea, and as it progresses, through hypothesis, experimentation, and understanding, we all turn the Oasis into a crucible of creativity where anything may happen — and often does. While the undercurrent of our world revolves mainly around the mechanical and industrial aspect of “steampunk”, the aesthetic runs the gamut.

The huge plains and parched deserts play host to characters styled after Gilded Age cowboys, while men in Victorian garb on the cutting edge of urban fashion and others in flowing tabards representing the Old Ways populate the high urban areas. The forests and mountains are inhabited by civilized tribes in kimonos and tunics, and even those who wear little more than a loincloth. There is no common thread among us but our love of the game, and no common color but the red in our veins.

Welcome to Winter’s Oasis.

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