I wondered if it would be possible to wed D&D with some great sci-fi novels of the last decade, and, while I was at it, to reconcile some contentious D&D elements with in-game explanations. Below is one idea:
Thoughts, or other ideas for a convincing fusion of fantasy and sci-fi tropes?
[sblock=A CYCLE OF SOULS]Some decades ago, the world was suddenly metaphysically sealed off from the outer planes.
Ever since, souls now "recycle" ie., reincarnate.
It is normal for common folk to have some memories of one or more previous lives; recall is usually very murky, shards of memories often emerging in dreams.
(There is a subculture of 'dreamers' who happen to have vivid dreams of a previous life -- human or otherwise -- and neglect their daily lives as often as they can afford to, preferring to sleep for long hours and dreaming of a better life.)
Otherwise, daily life for common folk is more or less the same as it was before.
Few mortals suspect that the cycle of souls may be part of a secret war beyond their wildest imagination...[/sblock]
[sblock=THEOLOGICAL VIEWS]Druids condone this "natural" separation from the outer planes, and embrace the primal eternal cycle of reincarnation.
Clerics preach that to be devout to one's god is to be rewarded with reincarnation into a better next life. A worthy few are believed to find enlightenment, their bright souls piercing through the veil into the astral sea, forever ascended to the heavens beyond.
Necromancy that binds whole souls to corpses is a vile disruption of the reincarnation cycle. Standard law declares that true necromancers be purged, spiritually cleansed of necromantic desires (as to not taint the next incarnation) and executed.
Abberations (unnatural creatures) are thought to lack souls and so can be slain without any guilty conscience. However, it's a point of contention exactly which monsters are unnatural and soul-less or not. Others say that to kill a goblin, for example, is okay either way -- if it has no soul, it doesn't matter, and if it does, it's doing a kindness to release the soul to another hopefully better life.[/sblock]
[sblock=ALTERED COSMOLOGY]The Shadowfell has mostly dissolved into an ethereal veil. Newly deceased souls no longer gather there. Nobody knows for sure if there is another limbo for departed souls or how they find their next incarnation. The Raven Queen is dead or gone. Only ghosts -- souls which cannot or refuse to reincarnate -- linger in the ether. Isolated pockets of shadow also remain: grey wastelands decaying around the edges, dark domains bound by powerful evil entities, and fading battlefields (hinting perhaps at some war of annihilation that preceded or caused the dissolution).
In the Feywild, there is an undercurrent of fear and uncertainty. Many parts of Faerie are said to be at all-out war. Some faerie folk are being drafted into armies, and they know not why, cannot agree why, or are tight-lipped about it. Having a fey patron for protection is important for incursions into the Feywild; however that is no guarantee of safety, as webs of alliance are more fickle than ever, and powers are shifting for reasons unknown.
Demons and devils are very rare but do exist. Having one's soul devoured by a demon is probably the worst fate imaginable. For devils, souls are a precious commodity, and the older the soul, the better. Some suspect the devils of having engineered the reincarnation cycle, creating a soul engine for fermenting souls into greater potency. Others believe that these demons and devils were merely trapped here, and now hunt to satisfy demonic hungers, try to create gates to Hell to escape or deliver a payload of souls, or lie dormant until awoken by the foolhardy.[/sblock]
[sblock=ASTONISHING METAPHYSICS]Since the world is closed off from the heavens, nobody knows where souls go to and come from. Sages wonder how new souls can be born into the world, or if the population must remain constant (or decrease due to necromantic and infernal attrition).
A very few of the wisest (or craziest) of sages speculate that all souls pass into a timeless limbo. Esoterically, that may mean that, with every reincarnation, a soul may be reborn into any time period (after the rift) in the past or future. This would explain how some divinations are able to accurately predict that which has not yet happened, because the diviner is able to draw upon memory fragments from a previous life that has not yet lived in this time but will live.[/sblock]
[sblock=THE PORTALS (optional)]Magic portals have appeared throughout the land, transporting a person to another faraway portal in the blink of an eye. In an age of terrible monsters and dangerous wilderness, these portals are invaluable to the safe passage of common folk from one location to another. Prosperous towns have sprung up around many portals as gateways of commerce. Some warlords have built fortresses around portals and charge a toll for passage. Nobody knows how many portals -- large or small, obvious or invisible -- exist. Many monsters seem to avoid the area around portals.
With magical detection, each gateway radiates an unrecognizable aura. From the Feywild, it would appear as a hole of nothingness -- as if, astonishingly, a small island was torn out of the fabric of Faerie and reshaped into a portal. The ethereal vicinity of every portal is completely impassable to mortals. Some suspect that the portals have a dual purpose: in the earthly realm, a gift of safe passage from the gods (or other powers), and for souls, gateways to a spirit realm between incarnations.[/sblock]
[sblock=HEROIC SOULS]There are heroes that seem to be semi-immortal because they seem to defy death with improbable ease. It is believed that they have mighty potent souls strongly bound to their physical forms.
(Very optional) Even when dying or slain, these souls stubbornly cling to this life. If the body is healed and made whole, the spirit rushes back into its shell and the hero is miraculously revived. Clearly, such souls are more than mere mortal spirits, but something greater.
With a strange predilection to adventuring and danger, sages speculate that these heroic souls are destined to be trained towards some final challenge in the spiritual realm.
Unlike common folk, many of these heroes claim to be unable to recall anything useful from their past lives (whereas some ordinary folk claim to remember a past heroic life with some clarity).[/sblock]
[sblock=TYING IT ALL TOGETHER: A War of Souls]There is a great sci-fi trope of a future war between transhumanity vs the AIs (specifically, artificial intelligences that have achieved singularity and now hostile to their creators).
In a fantasy setting like this, I imagine a secret war being fought in a "future" or timeless realm. Here are mortals who have ascended to transmortality by melding body and soul (like PC heroes, above). Their opponents are MIs (magical intelligences), arcane entitities that have achieved sentience, perhaps with the infusion of souls. The war was and is being fought on several fronts: the Shadowfell has been mostly decimated, now the Feywild is involved somehow, and both sides have agents and proxies in the mortal lands.
I think it would definitely be the transmortals who created the portals and the cycle of souls. It might be the gods who metaphysically sealed off the world by not allowing in any new souls into the world, because they were perplexed and alarmed and wanted to self-contain the problem. In another sense, there may not actually be any real metaphysical shell surrounding the world -- rather at some point, all the "regular" souls had departed to the astral sea as normal, and ever since all new souls are coming from the transmortal realm.
I haven't thought it all through, but my pet theory is that a group of wizards or such wanted to gain power according to the usual tiresome cliche, but instead of foolishly trying to become the most mighty of them all, these mages were attempting to outsmart the gods themselves (perhaps not so foolish, as many gods and devils don't seem to be all that smart). So they crafted magic items to greatly boost their intelligence, but in an ironic and astonishing twist of fate, the magic worked too well -- a magic intelligence inside one artifact became self-aware and ended up controlling its wielder and absorbing the other magicks. A melding of supreme intelligence and limitless arcane potential, these new entities seemed unstoppable. Only the transmortals have a chance to stop them...[/sblock]
Thoughts, or other ideas for a convincing fusion of fantasy and sci-fi tropes?
[sblock=A CYCLE OF SOULS]Some decades ago, the world was suddenly metaphysically sealed off from the outer planes.
Ever since, souls now "recycle" ie., reincarnate.
It is normal for common folk to have some memories of one or more previous lives; recall is usually very murky, shards of memories often emerging in dreams.
(There is a subculture of 'dreamers' who happen to have vivid dreams of a previous life -- human or otherwise -- and neglect their daily lives as often as they can afford to, preferring to sleep for long hours and dreaming of a better life.)
Otherwise, daily life for common folk is more or less the same as it was before.
Few mortals suspect that the cycle of souls may be part of a secret war beyond their wildest imagination...[/sblock]
[sblock=THEOLOGICAL VIEWS]Druids condone this "natural" separation from the outer planes, and embrace the primal eternal cycle of reincarnation.
Clerics preach that to be devout to one's god is to be rewarded with reincarnation into a better next life. A worthy few are believed to find enlightenment, their bright souls piercing through the veil into the astral sea, forever ascended to the heavens beyond.
Necromancy that binds whole souls to corpses is a vile disruption of the reincarnation cycle. Standard law declares that true necromancers be purged, spiritually cleansed of necromantic desires (as to not taint the next incarnation) and executed.
Abberations (unnatural creatures) are thought to lack souls and so can be slain without any guilty conscience. However, it's a point of contention exactly which monsters are unnatural and soul-less or not. Others say that to kill a goblin, for example, is okay either way -- if it has no soul, it doesn't matter, and if it does, it's doing a kindness to release the soul to another hopefully better life.[/sblock]
[sblock=ALTERED COSMOLOGY]The Shadowfell has mostly dissolved into an ethereal veil. Newly deceased souls no longer gather there. Nobody knows for sure if there is another limbo for departed souls or how they find their next incarnation. The Raven Queen is dead or gone. Only ghosts -- souls which cannot or refuse to reincarnate -- linger in the ether. Isolated pockets of shadow also remain: grey wastelands decaying around the edges, dark domains bound by powerful evil entities, and fading battlefields (hinting perhaps at some war of annihilation that preceded or caused the dissolution).
In the Feywild, there is an undercurrent of fear and uncertainty. Many parts of Faerie are said to be at all-out war. Some faerie folk are being drafted into armies, and they know not why, cannot agree why, or are tight-lipped about it. Having a fey patron for protection is important for incursions into the Feywild; however that is no guarantee of safety, as webs of alliance are more fickle than ever, and powers are shifting for reasons unknown.
Demons and devils are very rare but do exist. Having one's soul devoured by a demon is probably the worst fate imaginable. For devils, souls are a precious commodity, and the older the soul, the better. Some suspect the devils of having engineered the reincarnation cycle, creating a soul engine for fermenting souls into greater potency. Others believe that these demons and devils were merely trapped here, and now hunt to satisfy demonic hungers, try to create gates to Hell to escape or deliver a payload of souls, or lie dormant until awoken by the foolhardy.[/sblock]
[sblock=ASTONISHING METAPHYSICS]Since the world is closed off from the heavens, nobody knows where souls go to and come from. Sages wonder how new souls can be born into the world, or if the population must remain constant (or decrease due to necromantic and infernal attrition).
A very few of the wisest (or craziest) of sages speculate that all souls pass into a timeless limbo. Esoterically, that may mean that, with every reincarnation, a soul may be reborn into any time period (after the rift) in the past or future. This would explain how some divinations are able to accurately predict that which has not yet happened, because the diviner is able to draw upon memory fragments from a previous life that has not yet lived in this time but will live.[/sblock]
[sblock=THE PORTALS (optional)]Magic portals have appeared throughout the land, transporting a person to another faraway portal in the blink of an eye. In an age of terrible monsters and dangerous wilderness, these portals are invaluable to the safe passage of common folk from one location to another. Prosperous towns have sprung up around many portals as gateways of commerce. Some warlords have built fortresses around portals and charge a toll for passage. Nobody knows how many portals -- large or small, obvious or invisible -- exist. Many monsters seem to avoid the area around portals.
With magical detection, each gateway radiates an unrecognizable aura. From the Feywild, it would appear as a hole of nothingness -- as if, astonishingly, a small island was torn out of the fabric of Faerie and reshaped into a portal. The ethereal vicinity of every portal is completely impassable to mortals. Some suspect that the portals have a dual purpose: in the earthly realm, a gift of safe passage from the gods (or other powers), and for souls, gateways to a spirit realm between incarnations.[/sblock]
[sblock=HEROIC SOULS]There are heroes that seem to be semi-immortal because they seem to defy death with improbable ease. It is believed that they have mighty potent souls strongly bound to their physical forms.
(Very optional) Even when dying or slain, these souls stubbornly cling to this life. If the body is healed and made whole, the spirit rushes back into its shell and the hero is miraculously revived. Clearly, such souls are more than mere mortal spirits, but something greater.
With a strange predilection to adventuring and danger, sages speculate that these heroic souls are destined to be trained towards some final challenge in the spiritual realm.
Unlike common folk, many of these heroes claim to be unable to recall anything useful from their past lives (whereas some ordinary folk claim to remember a past heroic life with some clarity).[/sblock]
[sblock=TYING IT ALL TOGETHER: A War of Souls]There is a great sci-fi trope of a future war between transhumanity vs the AIs (specifically, artificial intelligences that have achieved singularity and now hostile to their creators).
In a fantasy setting like this, I imagine a secret war being fought in a "future" or timeless realm. Here are mortals who have ascended to transmortality by melding body and soul (like PC heroes, above). Their opponents are MIs (magical intelligences), arcane entitities that have achieved sentience, perhaps with the infusion of souls. The war was and is being fought on several fronts: the Shadowfell has been mostly decimated, now the Feywild is involved somehow, and both sides have agents and proxies in the mortal lands.
I think it would definitely be the transmortals who created the portals and the cycle of souls. It might be the gods who metaphysically sealed off the world by not allowing in any new souls into the world, because they were perplexed and alarmed and wanted to self-contain the problem. In another sense, there may not actually be any real metaphysical shell surrounding the world -- rather at some point, all the "regular" souls had departed to the astral sea as normal, and ever since all new souls are coming from the transmortal realm.
I haven't thought it all through, but my pet theory is that a group of wizards or such wanted to gain power according to the usual tiresome cliche, but instead of foolishly trying to become the most mighty of them all, these mages were attempting to outsmart the gods themselves (perhaps not so foolish, as many gods and devils don't seem to be all that smart). So they crafted magic items to greatly boost their intelligence, but in an ironic and astonishing twist of fate, the magic worked too well -- a magic intelligence inside one artifact became self-aware and ended up controlling its wielder and absorbing the other magicks. A melding of supreme intelligence and limitless arcane potential, these new entities seemed unstoppable. Only the transmortals have a chance to stop them...[/sblock]
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