D&D General Who put all this Sci-Fi in my soup!?

Mustrum_Ridcully said:

There was a movie about an aircraft carrier being displaced to a time shortly before the attack on Pearl Harbor, and once they realized were and when they were, they were considering intervening with their modern fighter jets. Was it called Philadelpha Experiment?

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Nope, that one was The Final Countdown (which plays out like a Star Trek episode).

The Philadelphia Experiment is based on the conspiracy theory about making a US warship invisible and accidently teleport. But the movie does involve a couple of sailors falling overboard through time.

Mustrum_Ridcully said:

So they send an aircraft carrier group through the portal to explore this world. And they find the world has life - including dragons. So we get fighter planes fighting dragons, and they presumably will find land and maybe some sort of medieval or fantasy civilization (perhaps under Dragon control). And now they start doing whatever heroic multi-national heroes would do if they see oppression like that!

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In the Doomfarers of Coramonde (Brian Daley) a wizard attempts to summon a tank to fight a dragon. They end up with an APC and it's crew from the Vietnam war.

MGibster said:

I kind of think golden ages of past civilizations with magical wonders are the default for most D&D settings. It's where all those magical artifacts and dungeons come from.

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Sure... as long as some of those "magical" wonders were actually technological.

môrgondír said:

Nine Princes in Amber would be the fantasy standout or exception to my general preference of 'lack of advanced technology in fantasy', but I'd also accept 'out-of-place' fiction (A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Three Hearts & Three Lions, etc).

If in their story, a GM made the inclusion of tech fit narratively with everything else in their story, I probably would not take great exception to it.

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This is the Way.

Is this topic more of a Reese's Peanut Butter Cup than a soup?

"You've got your science fiction in my fantasy!"

"Well, you've got your fantasy in my science fiction!"

Mustrum_Ridcully said:

Wonder if the writers for Reign of Fire saw that cover.

There was a movie about an aircraft carrier being displaced to a time shortly before the attack on Pearl Harbor, and once they realized were and when they were, they were considering intervening with their modern fighter jets. Was it called Philadelpha Experiment?

This kinda gave me an idea for a different type of setup:
Maybe we find some kind of wormhole in the Pacific or Atlantic Ocean. And we figure out that we could send a ship through, the other end is located on another planet's water surface, and the planet has breathable atmosphere.

So they send an aircraft carrier group through the portal to explore this world. And they find the world has life - including dragons. So we get fighter planes fighting dragons, and they presumably will find land and maybe some sort of medieval or fantasy civilization (perhaps under Dragon control). And now they start doing whatever heroic multi-national heroes would do if they see oppression like that!

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Philadelphia Experiment was a whole different thing, attempting to make a naval ship invisible and instead teleporting it or something equally weird. Supposedly a real event, though no one is really sure of what actually happened.

The aircraft movie was The Final Countdown, and is of course, purely fiction.

And I do wonder if Reign of Fire was inspired by that painting.

Tales From the Loop / Things from the Flood involved time travel and accidentally connecting to water on another planet, respectively. Could be slightly modified to land someone/something in a Medieval time frame, and then modern tech becomes the source of magic.

Another good idea that could be pulled into fantasy is Another World, though it is certainly far more Sci Fi than Fantasy.

Stormonu said:

Tales From the Loop / Things from the Flood involved time travel and accidentally connecting to water on another planet, respectively. Could be slightly modified to land someone/something in a Medieval time frame, and then modern tech becomes the source of magic.

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Tales from Loop fascinates me because it feels so animistic, Nordic style.

In earlier periods, the mountains and lakes take on a mysterious life of their own, with haunting wondrous and frightening events. Today the environments of modern technologies, junkyards and electricity wires, are manifesting a new kind of nature being: sotospeak the troll and dragons of modern places.

Paul Farquhar said:

It’s not really a space alien though, just a non-human species.

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It says it travelled through space to arrive on Earth. Sure, it's only flavour, but isn't that the point? As ancient as Earth's history is by that time in Conan's timeline - Atlantis has already fallen, for instance - this alien species is older and stranger.

To the OP, most D&D worlds exist in a post-apocalypse setting. Otherwise, why are there so many ruins and monsters, versus (usually) widely scattered low-tech population? With that in mind... why would all the previous civilizations necessarily be low-tech/medieval?

My current campaign is such a world. The campaign takes place a thousand-ish years after an apocalypse event... which itself was thousands of years after the initial apocalypse event. While the second society was medieval, the first was super-tech / nature-friendly. Most of the campaign involves the newest (third age) explorers pushing into the survivors from the second age, with occasional artifacts found from the first; the latest few stories actually involved exploring some still-intact 1st age facilities.

So the PCs have some high-tech capentry tools, some weapons made of reforged hi-tech materials, and a couple "wondrous items" that can't be recharged (like a "shoxbox" = defibrilator = revivify) from that glorious scifi hitech past. And they've fought some robots, a cyborg-ized recurring BBEG, and discovered that their amnesiac friend (PC) was actually a bad cyborg/android/clone copy of a 200-years-dead explorer of a 1st Age facility. But with Dragons! (one was flesh and blood... but one was an "organic robot" - technically a cyborg, but T-100 Terminator style)

Now, what I generally strive to avoid is the "current age" society to have swords, lasers, spells, fighter planes, plate armor, spaceships, potions, and cars. (Unless that's the point of the setting.) Maybe some experimental, unreliable "guns" ("boomtubes" in the current campaign, sealed, 6 shots, can't be reloaded, and only produced by a specific dwarf clan with a monopoly contract with the Empire... which allows the Empire's ships to have shipboard "cannons" when no one else does... but they have to constantly buy new ones!), but science is capped. Logical? No, but can be explained away easily with corruption and magic: No wizard wants a world where a peasant with a rifle can invalidate his decades of research and growth!