D&D 5E The tech types of your homebrew settings and characters

[Minigiant]

So in your settings, what "high tech" or "alternative tech" equipment are available to your player and nonplayer heroes, villains, and adventurers outside of normal magic items? Do you use 5th edition rules for them? What about 5e rules for inspiration.

Does your setting have firearms? Which ones: renaissance, modern, or futuristic?
What about explosives?
Poisoncraft?
Regular old masterwork items?
Does your setting have "Magictech" items and weapons? What about steampunk and clockwork gadgets and arms? Runes?
Which races are associated to which types of technology?
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In my setting, goblins are associated with renaissance firearms. The ones they make tend to be shoddy and unreliable and they have soured the opinion of gunpowder firearms. There are few gunsmiths and little gunpowder outside of goblin lands and the cost of a quality pistol is high. But little is as scary and a mob of pistolgoblins. If you kill them fast, it's a great haul and the next adventure becomes much easier.

Tiefiings have laser pistols, power armor, and other futuristic equipment. They gave up part of their humanity to some devils for supreme intelligence and advanced quickly through technology. But their lack of humanity and the infernal influence cause their nation to fall to ruin. So there are tiefling laser rifles out there but few energy cells for them. Venturing in the ruins of tiefling cities can be great for your career. Of course those who live there might have the laser rifles, spy drones, smartphones, and energy shields already.

Gnomes are all over the place. They got so into wacky gnomish tech that they lost their link to the fey. Unlike the goblins and tieflings, there are many gnomish smiths to make you an automatic heavy crossbow, collapsible shield, grappling gun, or spring boots and repair them.

Also top tier medicine is my setting is straight up replacing injured, failing, or missing organs with crafted magical ones. Rich nobles, adventurers, and special military soldiers wounded in battle in end up looking like "magic cyborgs and mutants". Metal arms and grafted legs. Again expensive.

The main thing is that anything can be out there. It's just expensive and hard to get. A noble's bodyguards might have all kinds of high tech equipment. A troll with an arcane chainsaw for a hand is a possibly at the bottom of an abandoned wizard's tower. And the guys who took over the tower might look like a evil cowboy posse.

What about yours?

 

[wedgeski]

I've never liked the idea of firearms in D&D, but I could be persuaded if a player of mine ever really wanted to do it (Critical Role's Pathfinder gunslinger mash-up looks really fun).

I use interesting poisons if there are PC's who would benefit, and if it doesn't just unbalance the game of course. It helps to give martial characters an extra level of support capability if they feel they can affect a foe's ability to fight beyond just doing him a load of hit point damage.

Clockworks, hydraulics, and other complex mechanisms are all part of the genre IMO. I love arcane machines or engines as foes, and use them way too much. The possibilities always seem endless!

I also based a 4E campaign on a version of Monte Cook's Chaositech and called it "Necrotech": machines, mutations, and augmentations all derived from necromantic secrets. It'll be a while before I inflict that on my PC's in 5E though.

 

[Ralif Redhammer]

That sort of technological craziness sounds pretty awesome.

I just did a Renaissance-era campaign with firearms and some magitech. Most of the PCs never really cottoned to the firearms, oddly. I was using the Lamentations of the Flame Princess firearm rules until the DMG came out, then I switched to those.

 

[Ath-kethin]

My campaign is Bronze-age tech with a strong Lovecraftian influence, so I have clockwork creatures and machines as well as Star-Trek level tech occasionally.

I think the use of gunpowder by goblins is awesome, and makes perfect sense. In my campaign, goblins developed the Way of Shadow monk discipline, but honestly gunpowder makes more sense.

 

[AaronOfBarbaria]

So in your settings, what "high tech" or "alternative tech" equipment are available to your player and nonplayer heroes, villains, and adventurers outside of normal magic items?

That greatly depends on exactly where the characters are currently or originate from. It runs from stone age through space-fantasy in my preferred setting.

Do you use 5th edition rules for them? What about 5e rules for inspiration.

Where I can, I use the 5th edition rules - and where I can't it is usually because I am making a different assumption about the availability of an item than its design makes sense for, like how the more advanced firearms/alien weapons are allowed to be more powerful under the assumption of extreme rarity and I actually assume situational rarity that isn't always "you've got no way to get more ammunition." so I tone the damage down a bit.

Does your setting have firearms? Which ones: renaissance, modern, or futuristic?

Yes. Renaissance-level firearms are the most common sort, but they are still expensive compared to a bow or crossbow. "Modern" firearms are the cutting edge of what is available commercially, and prohibitively expensive (i.e. you could buy 3 suits of full plate, or a revolver and a moderate stock of ammunition). Anything more advanced is less common than even magic items, as it is either many thousands of years old and only recently discovered, or it has managed to make its way out of the effective quarantine zone that the Immortals have stuck all tech they view as too dangerous to let folks use in and still works somehow - or it is fresh off a space ship and likely in the possession of someone that'd rather kill you with it than let you borrow it.

What about explosives?

Black powder, and dynamite, but they aren't widely used because magic usually does the same job with less risk involved.

Poisoncraft?

Yup.

Regular old masterwork items?

Depends on the item. Anything that I can think up a benefit for being better made that isn't +s to rolls, there is a masterwork version available. Otherwise "really well made" is just a descriptive.

Does your setting have "Magictech" items and weapons?

Depends on how you mean "magitech". There are bi-wing planes with engines that you "fuel up" by casting spells into, but nothing is further into the magitech theme than that as of yet.

What about steampunk and clockwork gadgets and arms? Runes?

Steam power is a thing, clockwork gadgets work, but runes are only involved in specific spells (i.e. glyph of warding, or symbol).

Which races are associated to which types of technology?

Gnomes (and some others) built a flying city and the bi-planes that protect it, as well as other gnomes figuring out how to build dirigibles. It is an ancient culture of elves that has been preserved by the immortals which has the highest end tech, but they are secreted away from the setting at large.

Other than that, no race is particularly associated with a specific sort of technology - it's more about proximal location, like all the folks along the Savage Coast being the ones more likely to be found using firearms due to their invention occurring in that area.

My interested in D&D back when I first started can be almost entirely attributed to Final Fantasy and other console RPGs, so I feel very much at home in the Mystara setting where a similar approach to tech has been taken.

 

[Azurewraith]

I currently have my pcs running through a dark cave after being captured so they haven't got a clue... little do they know the drow temple they are stood in is a mindflayer space ship that crash and then "cloaked" to become a drow temple where they "made" people into driders with varying degrees of success. They also made a lovely organic cleaner these cute black fuzzy things will devour any dead flesh with ease but only the dead flesh great for cleaning up murder hobo tendency and keeping their wounds clean the pcs got their hands on one of these oh did i mention that they are unstable and upon maturing go crazy and eat anything and everything? There is also a speed boat with a fire elemental trapped in its engine in there as well. Almost forgot the suite of "battle Armour" iron man style

As for the rest of the world im thinking pretty basic medieval maybe with major city centers having some minor eberron style stuffs like magelight lamps

 

[KahlessNestor]

In the homebrew slowly cooking in my head I am toying with the idea that only dwarves have black powder and firearms, and not even all dwarves. Kind of a secret society that does dirty work. Dwarves guard the secret tightly and any non-dwarf seen with a firearm is immediately targeted for death to protect it.

 

[Redthistle]

They also made a lovely organic cleaner these cute black fuzzy things will devour any dead flesh with ease but only the dead flesh great for cleaning up murder hobo tendency and keeping their wounds clean the pcs got their hands on one of these oh did i mention that they are unstable and upon maturing go crazy and eat anything and everything?

My warped mind has already cross-bred these with Star Trek's tribbles. They're born pregnant ... and hungry.

 

[NotActuallyTim]

The setting I'm working on currently has Dwarven diving and underwater excavation equipment, Gnomish electro punk lightning guns, Human/Dwarven Age of Sail navigation by longitude and lattitude, Halfling cryptography with highly trained independent messenger dogs (armed and armored), Human Waterborne agricultural techniques (non permanent), Halfling plumbing and other pressure based technologies, Orcish chemistry (and alchemy!) and of course, ram-jet powered hydrogen filled airships with a variety of interesting liquid armaments.

Oh, and thanks to some special metals present in the setting, Metallurgy is literally a magic system unto itself.

 

[Unwise]

I like settings on the cusp of change. In my games everybody can see that firearms are about to overtake the world, but they have not yet.

Firearms are simple weapons to use, everybody is proficient so that is their big selling point at this stage. Real warriors use bows, to better effect, but they know they are a dying breed and that this new fangle technology will eventually become common and cheap enough to spell the end of 'real warriors'.

I really like Gothic horror too, so that necessitates including Victorian era universities. So chemistry is emerging as a separate but related field to Alchemy. Surgery is up to 1800s standards and is very powerful when combined with a bit of magic or alchemy.

The existence of Gunpowder should not be understated as a plot device. The ability for mundane people to make things blow up with bombs opens up so many plot and tactical opportunities that I would not plan a game without it.