Something like Forgotten Realms meets Star Wars?

[klofft]

I'm thinking of hybridizing D&D, d20 Modern, and d20 Future, but eliminating all arcane magic beyond 5th level, and the only base classes allowed from D&D would be divine spellcasters (of all kinds). Then I'd take the scifi setting and overlay Green Ronin's Book of the Righteous cosmology over it. But maybe that would be just too wacky.

 

[RodneyThompson]

When d20 Modern first came out, my brother was running a Ravenloft game, and I came home from college one weekend and ran a special session for his group. The players were hurled into an alternate universe, arriving in "Raven City" which converted the Ravenloft setting into a big city. It was very Shadowrun-esque, with a big megacorporation controlling Raven City, and a special paramilitary security force called M.I.S.T. that prevented people from moving through the toxic clouds that surrounded the city, isolating it from the rest of the world. It was a lot of fun.

Something like Forgotten Realms 2325 could be a lot of fun, and as some people suggested Dragonstar might be a good inspiration.

 

[GreatLemur]

However, I've also been fighting the urge to start work on a sci-fi setting. My initial thought was a setting already written, like Star*Drive or Traveler, but now I'm considering taking my fantasy setting 1000 years into the future.

I don't think the average (by which I mean Forgotten Realms-ish) fantasy setting would logically turn into sci-fi in 1000 years. More likely, it'd just turn into something like Eberron, where magic has been systemized, mass produced, and applied to the basic needs of society. That is, such a world wouldn't develop electric lights; it'd just find better an more efficient ways to provide convenient magical lighting for everyone.

If you want an excuse for a world to turn to technology over magic, however, you could always have powerful and convenient new technologies arrive from elsewhere. Or, of course, something unfortunate could have happened to the fundamental source of magic power, making it weaker, less accessable, or more dangerous.

 

[MoogleEmpMog]

Actually, I'll be using GURPS for this game, as I do for the fantasy version of the setting. Magic will be rare. Psionics will be a bit more common.

Ah, OK. With GURPS magic tuned low enough, you could reasonably have a fantasy world develop into a recognizably 'sci-fi' world. When you described it as "Forgotten Realms meets Star Wars," I figured you were thinking of advancing FR.

One question I would pose is, what is the difference between magic and psionics in your setting? If you're using rare psionics, (comparatively) common magic for the fantasy world, what, during the ensuing 1,000 years of technological progress, causes that to flip? If you're NOT using psionics for the fantasy campaign, is there any reason psionics isn't just what modern, scientifically-minded people call what their benighted ancestors foolishly referred to as magic?

 

[Olgar Shiverstone]

Using the philosophy that "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic", why not run FR as is? You'll need technical explanations for things that currently have magical ones (iI's not a wand of fireballs, it's a compact flamethrower! It's not a potion of helaing, it's a dose of nanomachines that repair tissue damage! Those aren't goblins, they're readioactively mutated humans!), but otherwise it might work pretty well.

 

[Pell-Mell]

In Dragon Magazine 277, they presented Greyhawk 2000. It is set 1000 years in the future and could be helpful for research for seeing what a modernized D&D setting might look like.

Since you are playing GURPS, you may want to check out the excellent GURPS Technomancer. Definitely a different take, as it is our world up to about 1945, when magic suddenly appeared.

 

[Angel Tarragon]

Also worth checking out is Magitech. It uses the old Amazing Engine system, but shakes up cultural conventions with fantasy races. For example, Germany is the Dwarven empire and fallout from WWII made most of the European a permanently anti-magical area.