D&D General Who put all this Sci-Fi in my soup!?

[Reynard]

Sci fis a more modern invention.

Fantasy over laps with a lot of cultural tropes and mythology echoing back millenia.

Okay.
i'm pretty sure we are talking more about genre classification.

 

[Reynard]

And then you have things like this, and you WTF is this - I want to play in that!
View attachment 421181
Which is from March 1989, BTW.

Military Urban Fantasy is about as close as I can get, but I will totally run that game.

 

[Time_Feather]

Thank you guys for all this! I knew bits and pieces of these facets of the history of the publishings and magazines, but not the full breadth. I am definitely not qualified on delineating the lines of sci-fi and fantasy, but now I want to do a deeper dive on some of the magazines you guys have mentioned. I have always been much more of a fantasy guy - broadening my horizons is something I try to do though!

 

[Time_Feather]

And then you have things like this, and you go WTF is this - I want to play in that!
View attachment 421181
Which is from March 1989, BTW.

This has made my day, I don't even know where to begin.

 

[Dioltach]

That is the real "Vancian."

Also: The Sword of Shannara (1977) is explicitly a fantasy world built on an ancient high-science world, with a high-tech monster even making an appearance.

And even though modern readers sneer at Shannara for being derivative of LotR, at the time it was a massive bestseller. Anyone remotely interested in fantasy lapped it up - precisely because of the similarities - and presumably that included quite a few early D&D players.

 

[Yaarel]

Also: The Sword of Shannara (1977) is explicitly a fantasy world built on an ancient high-science world, with a high-tech monster even making an appearance.

And even though modern readers sneer at Shannara for being derivative of LotR, at the time it was a massive bestseller. Anyone remotely interested in fantasy lapped it up - precisely because of the similarities - and presumably that included quite a few early D&D players.

Yeah, all of the species are explicitly postapocalyptic mutations from a human nuclear war, . . . except for the elves who had always been mystically present.

 

[Yaarel]

The shake out happened pretty early on, though. What's the old addage? Science Fiction has a rocket ship on the cover, and fantasy has a dragon?

Despite fuzzy genre lines, I think anyone can look at Spelljammer and see that it is purely fantastical, with no real "scince" elements at all, even if many of the tropes of sci-fi are borrowed.

But genre pedantry is dead. Look at how many people call Eberron "steampunk".

Heh pedantry is alive and well, except the genre taxonomy is reorganizing.

 

[Zardnaar]

Also: The Sword of Shannara (1977) is explicitly a fantasy world built on an ancient high-science world, with a high-tech monster even making an appearance.

And even though modern readers sneer at Shannara for being derivative of LotR, at the time it was a massive bestseller. Anyone remotely interested in fantasy lapped it up - precisely because of the similarities - and presumably that included quite a few early D&D players.

Guilty. Never finished lotr. Shannara first 7 books.....