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

[Reynard]

Spinning off the Revel's End/Prisoner 13 thread because I don't want to thread jack that one.

D&D has always embraced what we would call "magitech" and science fantasy. The pulp authors that dominate Appendix N did not make the same kinds of genre distinctions that became more common in publishing later on. The line between magic and science and fantasy and future were much fuzzier (see: Vancian).

Long before Eberron, D&D depicted nations that codified magic into science analogs. Long before 3E's "sheens" robots and layers made appearances in D&D. "Lovecraftian cosmic horror" IS science fiction.

What are your favorite blurring of lines between sci-fi and fantasy in D&D? What kinds of science fantasy have you embraced in your games and campaigns? Where do you think D&D needs MORE science fantasy?

 

[Lakesidefantasy]

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

 

[Oofta]

In yesterday's game the BBEG was based on a Nevermind Gnome Mastermind that I described as having Doc Oc tentacles and and a "gun" that had different functions that fired his gadgets. He was doing experiments and dissecting brains, as all mad scientists are wont to do.

Other things include monsters being grown in those glass cylinders you see in the movies and of course flying ships. I even had an entire campaign set in a set of spheres orbiting the planet with each sphere having a slightly separate environment. Constructs that may or may not be sentient, giant clockwork mechanisms that acted as refineries for misguided prayers to a lich. There's "small magics" at play in most of society, little things that make people's lives easier.

I guess I just never assumed that if magic existed it would only be used for what primarily boils down to, with a few exceptions, combat magic. PC class spellcasters focus on one niche of magic and are specialists in their field. Other types of magical craftsmen can get results just as powerful, if not more so, than wizards even if those craftsmen couldn't cast a fireball with a snap of the fingers to save their lives.

 

[Reynard]

In yesterday's game the BBEG was based on a Nevermind Gnome Mastermind that I described as having Doc Oc tentacles and and a "gun" that had different functions that fired his gadgets.

For some reason the first thing I thought of was this is a great reskin of a beholder.

 

[Oofta]

For some reason the first thing I thought of was this is a great reskin of a beholder.

Maybe when they're a higher level. They killed the mad scientist at the end ... or did they?

 

[overgeeked]

Spinning off the Revel's End/Prisoner 13 thread because I don't want to thread jack that one.

D&D has always embraced what we would call "magitech" and science fantasy. The pulp authors that dominate Appendix N did not make the same kinds of genre distinctions that became more common in publishing later on. The line between magic and science and fantasy and future were much fuzzier (see: Vancian).

Long before Eberron, D&D depicted nations that codified magic into science analogs. Long before 3E's "sheens" robots and layers made appearances in D&D. "Lovecraftian cosmic horror" IS science fiction.

Amen.

What are your favorite blurring of lines between sci-fi and fantasy in D&D?

I love when the two are slapped together with no explanation at all. I think the explanation cheapens the science-fantasy.

Expedition to Barrier Peaks. A spaceship crashed. Go explore it. Only the PCs don’t know it’s a spaceship and have to explore it like any other dungeon. The referee gets to explain and describe the tech in vague, in-context ways that the players have to figure out on their own.

Robots in the three original D&D books. No explanation. No reason why. They just exist. Because it’s fun.

What kinds of science fantasy have you embraced in your games and campaigns?

All kinds. I drop radiation and mutations into most games. I steal blatantly from sources like Gamma World and Traveller and cheesy sci-fi and horror movies. I love anything-goes gonzo games. That’s absolutely my favorite style.

In non-D&D terms, mix DCC and MCC in a blender. Pull freely from any relevant source and go.

Where do you think D&D needs MORE science fantasy?

Literally everywhere.

 

[Reynard]

When I ran Descent into Avernus I turned every dial up to 11. I had a squad of Doom Troopers in power armor with beam rifles and chain swords descend on the party as a random encounter. It was glorious

 

[Lakesidefantasy]

I ran the 13th level of Undermountain: Trobriands Graveyard as a Mad Max: Furry Road adventure complete with motorcycles, post-apocalyptic rat rods, and mechanical purple worms.

I have to admit, it was such a blast that I ran it twice.

 

[Stormonu]

I don't know about embracing, but in the history of my homebrew, when the dragons went to war in the First Dragon war, some of them wore power armor:

Spoiler

 

[Kurotowa]

The urge for low magic that doesn't meaningfully disrupt the pseudo-medieval setting is a mix of two things, IMO. One is Tolkien and his idealized pastoral gentry, and the other is the Hollywood mishmash of Arthurian epics and its near cousins of Robin Hood and Ivanhoe and the rest. If you want your D&D to be close to those, you want magic to be non-intrusive and minimally employed.

If you go to any other literary branch, then it's a different story. The pulp science-fantasy style of A. Merritt and Henry Kuttner and C.L. Moore was all about treating magic as a previously unknown science, and putting it in the hands of a clever protagonist mean exploring every shortcut and exploit possible. Or if you go over to the more sword and sorcery genre of R.E. Howard or Fritz Leiber, then magic may be a lot less safe but it's definitely omnipresent and highly influential.

I think different people have different genre expectations of D&D, often with very little self-awareness of what those expectations are. It's had a lot of influences and different setting books have gone in different directions. It's possible to find (or make) a corner that conforms to what you want, but again that requires people to clearly understand what those wants are.

 

[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.