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.....

 

[Vael]

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.

Nuts ... add another campaign idea to the pile.

I've always found that I prefer DnD that is a pretty big tent, genre-wise. It's why Eberron calls to me. It's why I want my players meeting in taverns that are more Mos Eisley Cantina than the Prancing Pony.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

It wouldn't interesting to have a setting in which a traditional fantasy realm has been impacted by explicit sci fi influences.

So, for example, you'd have your traditional mountain / forest / city people with their proto-European medieval settlements and conflicts. But then your have a fourth species that are aliens who crash landed hundreds of years ago and have had to adapt using the remains of their scavenged technology.

This was one of my favorite ideas for how to integrate Dragonborn into Greyhawk.

A time-displaced colony ship crashes in a somewhat isolated mountainous area not strongly claimed by any nation. The ship can still generate power and is keeping most of the dragonborn in cryonic suspension pending a safe enough environment to release them.

They're struggling because they can only maintain something kinda like the future-tech life they're used to in or near the ship. They were prepared for colonizing an empty planet, and having one stuffed to the gills with native inhabitants is a big problem. So they're trying to terraform their mountain home into something livable and it's a slow process...which can be sped up by getting input of rare resources, especially rare metals and crystals...like what an adventurer might acquire in their hauls.

Hence, a small proportion of their species goes out to be adventurous, but they have to be very sparing, and ready to accept the lack of medicine, lack of infrastructure, and other characteristics of this medieval society.

Good thing Dragonborn have a bonus to Charisma!