D&D General The D&D Multiverse: Too Weird to Live, Too Rare to Die


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I don't know that it's icky but there does seem to be a very cognitive dissonance for most fantasy fans that seems to make scifi stuff unfun, I don't seem to see that as much in reverse from Scifi fans when thier scifi get's a little fantasy. But that may be because star trek and star wars are full of that kind of stuff.
Clarke's Third Law helps a good bit there. To a large extent you can rationalize any appearance of magic in sci-fi as being technology beyond the observer's comprehension.
 


Clarke's Third Law helps a good bit there. To a large extent you can rationalize any appearance of magic in sci-fi as being technology beyond the observer's comprehension.

And there are a lot of counterfactuals (or at least probably) that are kind of taken as a given to be acceptable in non-hard SF: faster-than-light travel and/or communication, time travel, psionics (sometimes and to some degree), non-laboratory nanotech and probably a number of others I'm forgetting. Most of them you can't press on too hard (or alternatively if you do you find that, yes, indeed, they are viewed even in setting as violating some laws of physics as we understand them on 20th Century Earth), but still nobody except the really hard SF fans will choke on them (and even among them they'll sometimes give one a pass).
 


Tech and magic are practically the same thing in my game. My world is a retro-future Earth, post magical apocalypse.
Very much in keeping with The Dying Earth and other primary influences on Gary.

I did start playing in the 80's. Gonzo has always been a part of my world.
I also started then, but absorbed much stricter genre dividing lines as part of my aesthetic, so my games were much less gonzo. I feel like the 80s were largely the dividing line. Folks more influenced by older fiction tended to have more blurry boundaries, and folks more influenced by Tolkien and post-Del Rey fantasy fiction sharper ones.
 



Though strangely enough, I haven't read much of Gary's Appendix N.

My influences were more Thundaar, He-Man, and Blackstar. Heavy Metal magazine and kung fu theater.
Mine also include kung-fu movies, plus Tolkien, Beowulf, Latin class, and living in England for a while. :)
 


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