If you were to look solely at the digital footprint of Steel & Scale, you would be entirely forgiven for writing it off as a one-and-done Kickstarter success. After announcing the books were on the way to the backers, the game’s Kickstarter campaign hasn’t seen an official update since late 2024. The Instagram account has sat dormant for roughly two years. However, investigating the halls of the UK Games Expo this weekend paints a very different picture.
Speaking to Geek Native directly at Stand 2-216, the team behind this industrial-fantasy hybrid proved that the game is very much alive. Sam Barker’s project, which originally raised over £15,000 from a modest but dedicated group of 141 backers, is not being consigned to the past. Instead, attendees at UKGE 2026 can get their hands on tangible, premium proof of life: a chunky, hardback Quick Start rulebook.
A hardback quick start is a genuinely rare combination in the tabletop roleplaying games space, usually reserved for massive studios with deep pockets. Yet there it sits, alongside a spread of evocative art prints and detailed bestiary sheets featuring creatures such as the Lich Oligarch, the Nightspawn, and Killer Clockworks.
Mechanically, Steel & Scale is built on a d20 framework, but it abandons rigid class structures in favour of a flexible, point-build character generation system. It’s designed to provide tactical depth while throwing high-fantasy magic into a world undergoing an industrial revolution, a setting where machines of war are just as likely to clash with dragons as with rival empires.
Based on our time reviewing the materials at the booth, the system and its setup look incredibly fun. The artwork is striking, and the layout of the character and monster sheets is crisp and easy to parse at the table.
While the game’s physical presence is undeniable, the studio’s future roadmap remains a bit of a mystery. Despite polite questioning from Geek Native, the publishers would not be drawn on their exact plans for the full retail release or any upcoming digital updates. However, it takes significant effort and capital to secure a booth at UK Games Expo and print high-quality hardback books. It is highly unlikely that a studio would go to these lengths merely to close the book on a project that began fulfilling to backers 18 months ago.
If you are at the Expo and looking for an RPG that drops magic into a world of machinery and smog, Steel & Scale is absolutely worth investigating. For everyone else, we will have to wait and see when the studio officially breaks its digital silence.
