Crossing the Delaware by Air?

If you’ve long felt that the only problem with the American War for Independence is that it didn’t have enough airships, then you should check out the Kickstarter campaign for Steam Patriots.

Steam Patriots is a “transmedia interactive project” from Noble Beast Books, publisher of speculative fiction in print, digital, and audio forms. Its past titles include Steampunk Holmes.

The image above is a detail of Patrick Arrasmith’s scratchboard illustration “George Washington with Airships.” See the full image at the Steam Patriots site. It “will be included in the interactive iPad edition and will be sold separately as a poster.”

I first heard about this project some months ago, but apparently a necessary part of launching a Kickstarter campaign these days is to create video promotions and previews. That seem circular to me, but then I’m old enough to remember when videos were harder to produce than manuscripts, photographs, and drawings.