How do you like your Sci-Fantasy done?

Endless Legend is in that weird blend of sci fi and fantasy, upfront it looks fantasy, but the deeper you look, the more sci fi it is
it's a labratory world for a long extinct precursor race that primarily relied on Nanomachines Son!

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By Genzo.

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fantasy with spaceships and laser guns

What I'd give to play in a sci-fantasy game Holy shit. Best setting ever.

I lean heavier on the Science-Fiction side, but that's because I want to the Fantasy to have a big splash.

Think of Blade-Runner with cheap space travel but the mundane worries about dealing with the Future!TSA. It's not hard for most of us and we'd easily accept any equipment the GM put there.

But then the 'plane' comes in, something that looks like this , and you end the session there.

I want the Fantasy part to really hit when it shows up.

I like it asimovian, with a coat of humor and bombastic planets.

The latest Voltron was kinda awesome for this. A weird and wonderful science-fantasy universe full of impossible but awesome looking planets.

Like Flatland.

This, having magic just to turn it into a science is boring

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It's so weird looking at Endless Legend, knowing the lore twist, because it's such a great fantasy setting that knowing all the magic is actually supposed to be technically not magic proper feels so weird. It's also a shame how quickly a game of it goes by once you know what you're doing, and I really wish there were a, I dunno, bigger version of it out there? I mean, the other games just don't play the same, but there's just not enough out of Legend to last.

Star Wars.

Rare

the opposite of what seems to be the consensus here, actually. I like fantasy settings where the magic becomes understood by its inhabitants and treated like a science, because to them in their perspective, it is part of their science. Elder Scrolls, Eberron, and many MTG planes are good examples of what I mean. Most of the people here who thing of magic scientifically analyzed seem to place that as something tacked on to worlds with conventional sciences as we understand them. That doesn't interest me, that's bad modern fantasy, not science fantasy. What interests me are settings where all of the conventional sciences of the setting are fictitious, and the magic of the setting is inherent to these fictional sciences. When I go into a science fantasy setting, I want to see technological worlds that would have developed if something like Greek myth's understanding of the world and its mechanics were science fact, rather than a world with atoms and natural selection BUT ALSO magic.
Good science fantasy are settings where their science is fantasy, not settings where there's fantasy added to OUR science.

This, so much this.

Shadowrun.

I agree, though in my attempts to build a magical physics setting, I tend to just get overloaded thinking of the implications of the principles I'm establishing and it goes nowhere. Too many factors to consider and it's too easy to miss something huge.

Destiny and Riddick sum up what I like best in Science Fantasy settings.

I think the best part of Destiny was the Hive and their interactions with the other races in the setting. For example, the Vex are a race of time traveling robots that simulate entire timelines to gain a foothold in understanding how things work with the ultimate goal of making them win all possible events.

That said, they couldn't simulate or understand a being like Oryx who is beyond causality and in the game there is a mission where there is a potential time like where the Hive have comeplete defeated the Vex in their entirety. That said, another aspect of the Vex is, in spite of their ability to travel through time they are small fry and the only logical conclusion they have for things they can't compute or understand is simply to worship it with religious praise.

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Looks like sci-fantasy.
Acts like hard-scifi.
Is actually cosmic horror.

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Maybe I'm nostalgic, but I really liked the sci-fi dome-homes and commonplace interplanetary travel mixed with laser-swords and tech-magic of the original Phantasy Star games.
With a touch of eldritch abomination for good measure.

i prefer to write my own.

What is that? Kinda looks like morrowind art.

Philippe Druillet, French comic artist who made a comic series which can basically summed up as humanity desperately trying to maintain its galactic empire in a universe ruled over by Lovecraftian horrors with unstoppable power.

I plagiarized some of Horizon for Tolkeen and Lazlo in a Rifts game. It worked better than expected.

is Lone Sloane the right one?

Yes. Enjoy.

What part, the history recreation or the huge tits in skintight bodysuits?

Magical economies and romcom.

Like regular fantasy, but with thinly-disgused technology standing in for magic and monsters.

If only I didn't kinda hate the Vaulters.

whimsical hand waving like Star Wars.

Or

Dark. Like Event Horizon. The fantastic parts are horrific things that defy explanation, and mock humanities attempts to order and codify the vastness of the universe.

Same. Definitely the most boring race to play as.

I actually saw them first in Endless Space and their lore just really turned me off. It came across as too "perfect". Like they had an ideal society and everything was well.

Has he ever worked with Jean Giraud?

pardon me, yes, on the Mœbius pseudonym

The Season 3 never part.

Heavy on the sci, light on the fan.

Destiny's lore is pretty sick, my man.

Oryx and his family are also a fucking sitcom.

So any actual book recommendations beyond the usual suspect already mentioned in the thread?

Lord of Light is an absolutely beautiful work of science-fantasy. A blend of Hindu and Buddhist myth and faith with high sci-fi concepts, and an absolutely gorgeous writing style. A short excerpt from the first few pages of the book-

>His followers called him Mahasamatman and said he was a god. He preferred to drop the Maha- and the -atman, however, and called himself Sam. He never claimed to be a god. But then, he never claimed not to be a god. Circumstances being what they were, neither admission could be of any benefit. Silence, though, could.

Swords, magic, starships and lazers

Or something like this

Or, the original Thundercats. Glorious sci-fantasy goofiness everywhere. How I did love it.
Except for Snarf. Fuck snarf.
And the whole "My sword has a new power every week to stop the latest threat" thing. Even as a kid I hated that.

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I just got through the baroque cycle. It was great, but i would have a hard time recommending it to someone who is not very determined, or very fast.

That album is glorious glorious undiluted cheese and I love it.

I prefer it to insert fantasy elements into a primarily sci-fi/modern setting instead of putting sci-fi/modern elements into a primarily fantasy setting. So it would be like Shadowrun or Final Fantasy 7 and 8.

That said, I prefer pure fantasy overall.

Like this.

JRPGs seem to be pretty good for that. I think it really took off in the PS1 era, where things like Final Fantasy VII had cars, guns, robots, and lasers alongside swords, magic, and dragons. I was actually surprised at how much I enjoyed that juxtaposition in FFVII. It was also my first experience with JRPGs, so I was discovering two new genres at once, and that discovery alone was a lot of fun. I still like it a lot, but as time went on, I developed a preference for pure fantasy.

Just want to chip in here to mention Exalted, which very much has an alternate system of underlying physics of the world. At the visible, mortal level it's essentially our own when dealing with mundane stuff but as soon as you have any way to, for instance, start interacting with the gods of stuff or when you know about motes or when the loom gets wonky and someone suddenly drowns on air, it becomes very obvious just how different things are.
Not to mention, you know, exalted throwing around crazy magical powers and shit.

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I know next to nothing about the new Zelda. Can you explain how it's science-fantasy?

Advance magitek in the form of the Shieka-slate that allows you to access various abilities as well as acting as a map and also mecha guardians. and giant robot like the one link is fightinig.

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I felt the same about Hellgate London. It seems like the curse with these kind of games.

Campy.

Stuff like Cthulutech and 40K.

Magic shouldn't be the classic say some words to cast fireball but instead more like 40K psychic powers. Basic level of magic should be understood and treated like science-lite but the more exotic and advance stuff is too strange, changing , and mind warping to properly classify into simple scientific rules and terminology. The more powerful magic users have their minds slowly changed by magic allowing them to barely comprehend the more advance stuff. Science and technology can be fused but it is extremely hard to do so.

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