You Got Peanut Butter in My Chocolate...D&D and Science-Fiction

[Arkham]

I used to be really bugged by Sci-fi in fantasy, but I gradually got over it.

Now I prefer the inverse to Clark's Law:
Any sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology.

Lightning railways, fireball-rifles, rods of messaging that look kinda like telephone handsets, or PDAs... gimme it all.

 

[Savage Wombat]

I like the occasional god that's really an A.I. in disguise - or in this case, the Aeii.

They were magical programs that oversaw the terraforming project that created the campaign world.

One of my players still fondly remembers rolling a 00 for a divine intervention check, and having his goddess (Brione, goddess of the dawn) destroy the dungeon in question with a blast from the anti-meteorite orbital defense laser satellite.

Surprise!

 

[Arrgh! Mark!]

I have no real problem integrating magic with tech - one of my longest running campaigns had a bunch of barbarians and savages exploring the taboo land; an ancient city with a rather impressive amount of fallout.

These things can be interesting, but only if the setting allows them. It's a ton of fun to come across a suit of power armor in something like the wilderlands and take this piece of ancient tech to a wizard who doesn't have a clue how to run it. But that is a place where tech levels are important and you can only really buy plate in half a dozen places in the world.

On the other hand you have integrated modern fantasy - Eberron is basically it and can be a bunch of fun. But the tech/magic has a reason to be there.

The problem I feel is not that tech is in the game, but that often it isn't explained well enough. Sort of "Well, here's a laser gun. It's made by dwarves. From Spaaaaacccceeee!"

Yeah, okay. Nothing wrong with dwarves from space. But I'm a firm believer that genres shouldn't chop and change while in the same story. Want a fantasy/cyberpunk? Cool! Just don't make it a hard sci-fi halfway through the game.

And not enough people know that S+S has always had a ton of tech in it.

 

[painandgreed]

I know just a wee bit of military history. Enough to know that by the time you get to flintlock rifles, the age of the sword and spear are over for anyone that has the option to choose.

I would contest that, since bayonets on the end of the rifle is basically a spear and they remain an important weapon. While perhaps not a weapon of choice, it is a very deadly hand to hand weapon that figures in modern warfare. Even then, many of the 19th century bayonets were bascially shortswords and meant to be used as such if needed. No matter how good guns get, until they stop requiring ammo, bladed weapons will still be useful in warfare.

 

[Thurbane]

In general, we stay well clear of mixing Sci-fi into our ongoing D&D campaigns, but for one-shot adventures, modules like Barrier Peaks, Temple of the Frog and When a Comet Falls can be a lot of fun...

 

[Celebrim]

I would contest that, since bayonets on the end of the rifle is basically a spear and they remain an important weapon. While perhaps not a weapon of choice, it is a very deadly hand to hand weapon that figures in modern warfare. Even then, many of the 19th century bayonets were bascially shortswords and meant to be used as such if needed. No matter how good guns get, until they stop requiring ammo, bladed weapons will still be useful in warfare.

I would contest that, but its just not worth the effort. You be one of the 80%-99% (depending on time period) of people who fixed bayonets and got blown away by some sort of firearm, and I'll risk being one of the 1-20% of people who reloaded and got stabbed to death - usually by a lancer, spear, pike, or some other purposed melee weapon and not a bayonet on the end of a musket.

 

[deClench]

Two great tastes that taste great together.

I just got my copy of Dragon 352 this weekend, and I am almost done reading the China Mieville material. I really dig it and I now look forward to reading Perdido Street Station in the near future. However, it got me thinking about how much the setting deviates from the "standard" expectations of a traditional D&D campaign world. Personally, that's not a problem for me, as I'm comfortable mixing elements from sword & sorcery, high fantasy, horror, and science-fiction in my D&D gaming (which is probably one of the reasons why Eberron appeals to me). But what are the general attitudes towards science-fiction elements and technology in today's D&D players?

Unreservedly, I say "yay!"

I love mixing all my favorite "flavors" together--including fantasy and scifi. It doesn't always work well, but it can be wonderful. I wish there was more material that did the same. I get bored playing the same thing all the time and want to be challenged with a new perspective every so often.

 

[deClench]

Lightning railways, fireball-rifles, rods of messaging that look kinda like telephone handsets, or PDAs... gimme it all.

Man, I really wanted that to say rods of massaging.

 

[Ed_Laprade]

I think you can mix in the trappings of SF without the actual nitty bits. As was mentioned, Star Wars does a good job of this. Eberron is also good at it as well.

So long as its not taken too far - trying to actually recreate hard SF in fantasy - then its fine. McCaffery's Pern would work reasonably well in D&D. It's certainly not hard SF by any stretch.

I should hope so. Her original story was pure fantasy with scaled Dragons. But John Campbell wouldn't print it in Astounding (the best paying market at the time) because he only printed sf. So he suggested that she add a prolog and viola, it's sci-fi! (Which, IMHO, was the worst thing that ever happened to Pern. Oh, and what happened to the scales? They're still there in the first half of Dragonqust, where Lessa agrees to go with the Dragonmen. Just one sentence really, but its there. She changed her mind about scaled Dragons after reading Hot Blooded Dinosaurs, then added the 'hide flaking' to doubletalk her way around it.)

 

[thedungeondelver]

The case for mixing Sci-Fi and fantasy in D&D (of any stripe) is very strong. Going down the list - just of the things I know of - we find:

Erac's Cousin (Ernie Gygax's replacement character in his dad's original GREYHAWK campaign) traveled to "Barsoom" via the non-explained method used by John Carter et al. He met the august Warlord of Mars and learned to fight with two swords before returning to GREYHAWK.

The original DUNGEONS & DRAGONS rules note that androids (among other creatures) are wholly the purview of the referee for creating the stats for.

SUPPLEMENT II: BLACKMOOR touches on that campaign world's extraterrestrial/superscience origins.

Articles such as CLOCKWORK MONSTERS & FACELESS MEN and HOW GREEN WAS MY MARTIAN in THE STRATEGIC REVIEW detail adventures in SciFi settings during D&D games and should work as "adventure fuel" for the like-minded D&D referee.

As noted elsewhere in this thead, TEKUMEL: EMPIRE OF THE PETAL THRONE is a fantastic/science setting with extended D&D rules (or it was, originally).

In the original DUNGEON MASTER'S GUIDE a methodology was outlined to introduce ADVANCED D&D characters in to GAMMA WORLD (and could just as easily work for METAMORPHOSIS ALPHA) as well as BOOT HILL.

Of course the (in)famous module S3 EXPEDITION TO THE BARRIER PEAKS outlines adventures in a crashed starship in the WORLD OF GREYHAWK setting.

In a "if you blink you'll miss it" moment, C1 THE HIDDEN SHRINE OF TAMOACHAN two SciFi elements pop up: a fully-working model of the WARDEN II generation starship (perhaps deposited there ages ago by the ancestors of survivors from the crashed starship in S3? hmm...) and what is essentially a sci-fi gadget: a "rod of shocking" complete with rather modern rubber handle and recharging method.

Later, more "direct" efforts such as SPELLJAMMER and the like weren't as such to my liking, but they do exist.