Blurring the lines between sci-fi and fantasy

>The intrepid party of adventurers slowly realizes that their entire known generic fantasy world is an enclosed section in a vast, impossibly advanced construct, positively buzzing with artificial and biological creatures wielding incomprehensible tools and knowledge.
>Magic is environmental nanomachines
>Legendary items are fusion age tech
>Demons are rogue AI
>Gods are gestalt nanomachine AIs responding to the desires and delusions of the enclosed sentients
>Flora and fauna are still flora and fauna; advanced technology has done a remarkable job of keeping an enclosed ecosystem healthy
>Dungeons are long-forgotten service tunnels and technical rooms

Is this a tired cliche, or would you enjoy a storyline like this?

It's not a BAD setting, but the problem is that it doesn't BLEND the genre's. You get one big "Oh shit" moment, and that's only if you do it well. Then you're just playing a sci-fi game instead.

>the problem is that it doesn't BLEND the genre's
What would you criteria for blending fantasy and sci-fi?

You're treating the introduction of sci-fi concepts as a point of no return. How are you supposed to blend sci-fi with anything if you can't introduce sci-fi concepts?

The OP post implied a point of "Ha! It was all a ruse by science this entire time, you're all in space"
Blending the two would result in something like Destiny, Star Wars, Demon: the Descent, 40k, that sorta thing. If you're wanting more Fantasy that leads into Sci Fi. Expedition to the Barrier Peeks, Endless Legend, Lunar, any of the later Final Fantasy games.

What said.

If you want to blend it, then fantasy has to have a bigger part than the coat of paint you slather over the robots.

So, Numenera?

science-fantasy and magitek are fairl well-known tropes
magic and science blended together is a bit less popular than sci-fi with fantasy paint on it, but it makes things fun

Most popular "sci-fi" setting are pretty much this kind of shit including Star Trek,Stargate and Star Wars.
And yes I know, most of the public called them science fiction setting.

However, they are what know in autistic circle as futuristic fantasy.
And this cave drawing forum is home to Internet most autistic circle.

The PCs' revelation won't change the world they're from. There's still a fantasy world back there.

If they return, there's no guarantee their drastically altered worldview will find widespread acceptance. The opposite may be true.

So what makes this part sci-fi rather than fantasy. People still live their lives. Magic still works through ritual and conviction. The supposed machines driving it are as invisible as they have always been.

Nothing has changed except the perspective of a few characters.

I would recommend the book "hard to be a god".
>Star trek like communist Federation
>first directive
>Be a spy sent to medieval world to observe and subtly help growing of a new civilization
>Be OP as fuck with advanced gear but still stuck cause murdering tons of people would not solve your problems
>Get depressed as fuck

Then the sci-fi "explanation" is largely irrelevant, and you still haven't blended them. You just have two different descriptions for the same world, which is only good for that "ah-ha!" moment.

There could be potential with something escaping the enclosure. The creators did to good of a job creating deadly monsters and now a heap of dragons are loose and the party ia called to stop them as seasoned adventurers.

But that's wrong.
The point isn't that the same world has two descriptions. The point is that there is a larger reality outside of the commonly accepted known world.

In the Allegory of the Cave, the discovery of a sun-lit outside world doesn't instantly blink the cave out of existence. Nor does the fact that there are still people restrained in the cave make the outside world irrelevant for some reason. It's just incomprehensible to them.

>There's still a fantasy world back there.
No there isn't. If the gods and demons are AI and magic is nanomachines, then it's never been a fantasy setting; you've just been playing with blinders on. Once the truth is revealed, the ignorance that supported the fantasy interpretation is gone forever. It's just a pure sci-fi setting with a bunch of very ignorant people/LARPers living in it.

Fantasy is more than just a set of window trappings. Magic is only magic because it's NOT scientific. Just because sufficiently advanced science is indistinguishable from magic does not mean they are in fact the same thing; it just means your perspective is not all-encompassing. Once you've acquired a perspective where you CAN tell that it is, in fact, nanobots, then the bar of what constitutes "magic" has moved. If all the fantasy aspects fall short of that new bar, it's not a fantasy setting anymore. For it to remain fantasy, there must remain aspects which never cross that bar. No matter how many explanations and scientific evidence the party gains, something must remain outside, explainable only from a viewpoint that abandons pure logic.

It is definitely a cliché, but that doesn't mean it can't be a lot of fun.

Magic is not a hard requirement for fantasy, guy.

Besides, perception is everything in this case. You might disregard it as 'playing with blinders on', but that's ignoring the entire philosophical point.

These people are living in a fantasy world (defined as such because of the otherworldliness of the setting and the relative strangeness of its inhabitants) because their confinement in it renders them completely unable to comprehend the sci-fi world that exists concurrently.

Sure, the tone of the game changes once the PCs expand their horizons, but absolutely nothing is stopping them from rejecting the new information and living on within their unchanged world of origin.

I'd say reducing the allegory of the cave to "You don't understand the technical details of how things work" rather misses the point. And even if it did that only reinforces the point that the fantasy world interpretation is entirely wrong, no matter how many NPCs believe it.

Besides which, it still don't blend the genres because they aren't interacting at all.

Read old pulp stories with muscular barbarains and ray guns. OD&D runs with this kind of wackiness, check out the Expedition to the Barrier Peaks.

>I'd say reducing the allegory of the cave to "You don't understand the technical details of how things work" rather misses the point.
It doesn't. It's allegorical.

>Besides which, it still don't blend the genres because they aren't interacting at all.
They interact in the PCs.

So.. Xenoblade?

This

Fantasy in a setting where the world has had 7+ world dominating fallen civilisations
You basically described numenera

It's an allegory with a fundamentally different meaning to the story proposed, as they suggest entirely different things about the nature of reality.

>They interact in the PCs.
In what way? You're expecting them to hold two (fictional) contradictory world views while role playing. Most people struggle with one, even if they're engaged.

Endless legend does it well, even when you realize its technicly sci fi, it still feels very fantasy.

What is reality?

>fantasy and scifi blended right

RS Bakker's Prince of Nothing books are the only series I can think of that does it well.

Slaaneshi alien transhumans battle Middle Earth to save their souls from the Warp

That sounds kinda cool. How depressingly grimdark is it?

I like the idea of demons being rogue AI.

In hindsight, how much of Final Fantasy is sci fi?

>How are you supposed to blend sci-fi with anything if you can't introduce sci-fi concepts?
Well if it was me, I'd make the Fantasy setting be the ruins of a Sci-Fi/Modern setting. Because I read a lot of Terry Brooks when I was a kid and the idea appealed to me.

Better idea: space wizards.