D&D General Magitech and Science Fantasy are Fundamental to D&D

[Shardstone]

I agree! That's why my Scavenger setting is a Bronze Age Science Fantasy world. A strange combination, I know, but I've found that the mythic areas of fantasy mix very well with contemporary science fantasy ideas. You also get a bonus theme in the form of "past and future clashing, assimilating" which is really fun to play with. Fantasy-minded characters being exposed to quantum physics and magic for the first time really makes you wonder "What is their human experience like?" and "How will do these people cope/adapt to this weird world?"

On a wider level, creatives are starting to realize something: Fantasy is always built off the "understanding" of the day. So, thousands of years ago when people are talking about elements making up the world or what have you, religion and myth and mysticism/magic are created based off these concepts. But now we have a different understanding of the world, and its totally normal and cool for Fantasy, even classic Fantasy, to build off this new understanding. We have different ideas of efficiency, aesthetic, weaponization, etc as well. This means that for many creatives, how magic is used is a lot different than in the classic canon, but still mystical and sublime.

This manifests in all kinds of ways. Descent Into Avernus, as mentioned earlier, is but one of many. I mean, why wouldn't the legions of Hell invent chainsaws and chainsaw swords and war vehicles? If you've been in battle with infinite resources for eons and eons, I'm pretty sure your technology level would rise quite a bit! I mean, have you seen the concept art of Zariel's war ship? It looks like its from Star Wars!

So, yes, I think Magitch and Science Fantasy, in many many many different forms, have a place in and are fundamental to D&D. It doesn't matter if its something as simple as chainsaw swords or as wild as power armor; Fantasy is based off our understanding of reality, and our contemporary understanding means we can create new but "true" ideas of magic and the sublime.

 

[bloodtide]

As a kid, I loved things like He-Man, Thundar and such cartoons. D&D had Blackmoor with some tech, as did the Mystrara Setting. And the old 1E DMG even had a bit about conversions.

2E spelljammer had some nice touches too....

 

[Pedantic]

I've never cared for mixing them aesthetically, mostly because a lot of pulpy science fiction tropes don't make a ton of sense with any kind of reliable magic, but I am all about magic as a technology with the societal implications that brings.

There's the whole emerging genre of progression fantasy that's some combination of Isekai, xinxia, and (often directly called out) D&D conceits, and some of the better works focus explicitly on how one can have a society with individually powerful people that grow stronger through experience wandering around. Though, it's a genre at least partially inspired by poorly translated web novels, so the delta in quality between the best and worst books is pretty staggering.

 

[Vaalingrade]

It's kinda fun seeing the Fantasy purists desperately trying to wrestle the stick away from 'modern' fantasy fans, yelling t them about their magic robots and 'sci-fi' psionics and using words that sound 'too scientific' and all around desperately trying to ignore that the 'good old days' were when speculative fiction hadn't been sundered into sci-fi and fantasy by screaming nerds who needed definitive genres to fight over.

Or pretend one of the most popular sci-fi franchises ever isn't about space wizards and the most popular fantasy isn't about magic coinciding with the modern world.

 

[RangerWickett]

I like whatever lines Robert E. Howard was blurring in his Conan yarns.

About a decade ago, a friend was running a Conan game, in which we were ascending a tower of a scorpion cult, which had three wizards working for it, each of whom had their own mystical specialty.

The first was an illusionist who used drugged gasses and mirrors to mess with our perceptions. We defeated him by shattering all his mirrors and pouring mead to put out the censer of drugged gasses, so he had nowhere to hide.

The second was a sculptor who could cast his consciousness into various clay golems in his laboratory, and if you destroyed one, he'd just take over another. We defeated him by breaking all the clay sculptures he was not yet animating, so he had nowhere else to run once we focused on him.

Then we got to the third wizard, and the GM was getting kinda sleepy, so he described him as "being in, y'know, like a big black mecha suit." We rolled initiative, but then the GM said he needed to call it and sleep.

The next week we came back and the GM clarified that the damned sorcerer had clad himself in the iron skin of a black devil, and that the devil's blood was steam, and its eyes glared searing beams of red light as like the fist rays of dawn, and its joints scraped and ground like hammer and anvil and the dolorous wheel of pain.

Which is to say, it was a f***ing mecha suit, but it was suddenly a hell of a lot more evocative and in-line with the flavor of the world.

We defeated him by figuring out he had a pile of dragon eggs made of the same black devil skin, and that if those eggs shattered, the fiery soul of the unborn dragon would explode with all the fire it would have breathed in its life, so we lured the iron-skinned devil toward them and then toppled the fell monstrosity upon its own nest of oblivion.

(We tripped the iron golem so it would fall onto the big pile of rockets and have a chain reaction explosion that blew off the top of the tower and nearly killed us.)

 

[Lakesidefantasy]

It's kinda fun seeing the Fantasy purists desperately trying to wrestle the stick away from 'modern' fantasy fans, yelling t them about their magic robots and 'sci-fi' psionics and using words that sound 'too scientific' and all around desperately trying to ignore that the 'good old days' were when speculative fiction hadn't been sundered into sci-fi and fantasy by screaming nerds who needed definitive genres to fight over.

Or pretend one of the most popular sci-fi franchises ever isn't about space wizards and the most popular fantasy isn't about magic coinciding with the modern world.

Come on, that's not a fair characterization and you're kind of punching down on us here. We're simply lamenting from our position on the margins of the gamerspace that we can't find others of our kind to play with. Because, like you've indicated, space wizards and modern magic are more popular than low fantasy and mystical magic.

In the end we're going to play Dungeons and Dragons with the people we can find, and that usually means the party will consist of several powerful magically endowed characters and maybe one grumpy rogue wishing he could experience the dream of a low magic game.

We're already in pain, why do you gotta' beat down on us like that.

 

[overgeeked]

Come on, that's not a fair characterization and you're kind of punching down on us here. We're simply lamenting from our position on the margins of the gamerspace that we can't find others of our kind to play with. Because, like you've indicated, space wizards and modern magic are more popular than low fantasy and mystical magic.

In the end we're going to play Dungeons and Dragons with the people we can find, and that usually means the party will consist of several powerful magically endowed characters and maybe one grumpy rogue wishing he could experience the dream of a low magic game.

We're already in pain, why do you gotta' beat down on us like that.

Even in geek spaces there’s a hierarchy. Even geeks feel the need to look down on other geeks.

 

[Lakesidefantasy]

About a decade ago, a friend was running a Conan game, in which we were ascending a tower of a scorpion cult, which had three wizards working for it, each of whom had their own mystical specialty.

The first was an illusionist who used drugged gasses and mirrors to mess with our perceptions. We defeated him by shattering all his mirrors and pouring mead to put out the censer of drugged gasses, so he had nowhere to hide.

The second was a sculptor who could cast his consciousness into various clay golems in his laboratory, and if you destroyed one, he'd just take over another. We defeated him by breaking all the clay sculptures he was not yet animating, so he had nowhere else to run once we focused on him.

Then we got to the third wizard, and the GM was getting kinda sleepy, so he described him as "being in, y'know, like a big black mecha suit." We rolled initiative, but then the GM said he needed to call it and sleep.

The next week we came back and the GM clarified that the damned sorcerer had clad himself in the iron skin of a black devil, and that the devil's blood was steam, and its eyes glared searing beams of red light as like the fist rays of dawn, and its joints scraped and ground like hammer and anvil and the dolorous wheel of pain.

Which is to say, it was a f***ing mecha suit, but it was suddenly a hell of a lot more evocative and in-line with the flavor of the world.

We defeated him by figuring out he had a pile of dragon eggs made of the same black devil skin, and that if those eggs shattered, the fiery soul of the unborn dragon would explode with all the fire it would have breathed in its life, so we lured the iron-skinned devil toward them and then toppled the fell monstrosity upon its own nest of oblivion.

(We tripped the iron golem so it would fall onto the big pile of rockets and have a chain reaction explosion that blew off the top of the tower and nearly killed us.)

Sounds like fun. Were you playing Dungeons and Dragons?

 

[RangerWickett]

Sounds like fun. Were you playing Dungeons and Dragons?

 

[Lakesidefantasy]

Even in geek spaces there’s a hierarchy. Even geeks feel the need to look down on other geeks.

Sounds like a fair description of my middle school experience.

Sometimes the geeks are eating each other alive in a futile attempt to gain acceptance from the preps.

I don't know if that means anything but it sounds cool.