Whatever happened to no-holds-barred space fantasy...

Whatever happened to no-holds-barred space fantasy? Not just space opera settings where there happens to be magic/psionics/the Force, but totally gonzo settings where dragon-riding knights with supermagical plate armor and dimension-slicing longswords (still with a 90% fantasy aesthetic, no sci-fi powered armor here) defend star systems from extragalactic invaders who wield antimatter flintlocks and communicate with magical ansibles.

These were extremely common until the end of the 80s, to the point wherein there was little distinction between fantasy and sci-fi. Bookstores placed those on the same shelves. RPG-wise, Spelljammer was a perfect example of this kind of setting.

Afterwards, fantasy and sci-fi divorced from one another. You now have screeching autists rallying against any blending of fantasy and sci-fi, even when gonzo space fantasy was the order of the day in previous decades.

What happened?

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Adding this.

Like you said, sci-fi and fantasy just got lumped together as "fantasy" previously, because anything could happen. But as mediums and genres evolve, people want more clear cut lines. Some people like the elves and swords, and others like the aliens and blasters, and sometimes they don't want them all mixed together in a stew. So a split happened, simple as that.

Though I would love to see a few more space fantasy games out there.

I should add that Warhammer 40,000 is one of the few lingering examples of these, probably because it was conceived in the 80s.

You would hardly see anything like Spelljammer or Warhammer 40,000 conceived past the 80s.

Some people got tired of it, and wanted more things that were specifically fantasy or sci-fi. Not everyone's into it, and the overabundance could've easily fed into making people want just one or the other instead of both. Personally, I still love it. Been trying to make a world to run a game like it. The problem is that you have to hit a balance with all of the pieces, or if there isn't a balance, at least something where the guy with a laser-gun isn't going to immediately end a swordsman.

Starfinder is an ATTEMPT at space fantasy that falls flat on its face, god damn it.

The Endless series of strategies is an awesome science fantasy universe. Endless Legend is the most fantastic of them but Endless Space and Endless Dungeon are also great and exactly the kind of pulpy magical space you are looking for.

...

The Endless series really deserves a tabletop game. Maybe with the Fragged Empire system or something.

In comics, classic Cosmic Marvel really stretches and breaks the definition of sci fi and incorporates tons of absolutely insane and fantastical and supernatural things into an outer space setting. The Annihilation Saga is particularly great.

>tfw I want to run a near future science-fantasy game, but most people REEEEEE when even so much as a shipboard cannon pokes its' head into their fantasy, let alone muskets are early space travel, unless it's Shadowrun or Final Fantasy. And even then I get called a weeaboo for even bringing them up by the normies.

Superhero comics are really the most overlooked kind of science fantasy settings. Sure they dress things up as science most of the time, but both DC and Marvel are at the end of the day giant kitchen sink sci-fantasy settings, both of them being heavily influenced by Jack Kirby's particular style.

Ever read the story The Road Not Taken by Harry Turtledove? I think that could be a good way to introduce the idea of Age of Sail spacefaring to people.

Sci-fi is a "mature" genre about realistic fiction that follows real world physics now, got no room for being creative when we have all these autistic nerds to please with "believability"

Did you actually expect something quality out of something derived from D&D?

What you're describing is a very D&D-like aesthetic. I mean, there's no one thing that you said which belongs to D&D (you can be nothing like D&D and have dragon-riders, you can be nothing like D&D and have extragalactic invaders, etc), but when you throw it all in together, and you use sci-fi tropes but hold a fantasy aesthetic, and turn the power level up to 11, that's a D&D-like setting.

If you do the same thing and welcome a scifi aesthetic too that's a 40k-like setting.

The point is that I don't think this sort of thing was ever popular outside of tabletop gaming and Heavy Metal magazine. And these settings still exist in tabletop gaming, and Heavy Metal is still going strong, so what are you talking about?

>The point is that I don't think this sort of thing was ever popular outside of tabletop gaming and Heavy Metal magazine.

They were popular in the 60s, 70s, and 80s.

Not just derived from D&D, but made by Paizo:
>say they'll fix all of 3.5's problems, then release a game with all of 3.5's problems and its own unique set of problems
>ban people with dissenting opinions
>deny caster supremacy exists, then state that caster supremacy is just PF's balance working as intended, in the same post
>fuck up simple math over and over again in everything they make
Set your expectations low. No, lower than that. Keep going. Lower. Even lower. At the bottom now? Get the shovel.

You know what?

The new Voltron show is pretty much this. The main characters are space knights, the Alteans are space elves, there's straight-up magic (which they don't even call something else - it's just magic), and the main bad guy is essentially Space Morgoth, or at least he seems to be at first. Pic related is a legit spess witch.

It's pretty refreshing, though it has a few flaws.

I dunno, the Weatherlight Saga in Magic: the Gathering, for a more mainstream example, was kind of the definition of this sort of thing. It still crops up here and there in MTG, though typically only on designated "sci-fi fantasy" planes now.

>typically only on designated "sci-fi fantasy" planes

Mirrodin, Alara (Esper), Kaladesh, Phyrexia, ??????

Even the sci-fi stuff is actually fantasy stuff in disguise, when you think about it.

The guns all the galra and alteans use shoot magical energy. Pretty much all the alien firearms we've seen are actually wands of blasting with a gun-like chassis and trigger.

Star Wars.

But hey, it's popular! That means it must be good! Right? Guys?

Yes, those are what I was referring to (as well as Vryn and arguably Ravnica), as opposed to MTG around the era I mentioned, where magitek was just sort of a given across the parts of the Multiverse we saw and you didn't really get much in the way of outliers like say, Kamigawa or Tarkir.

They fixed some of 3.5's problems and not others. Then they started churning out splatbooks, and that made new problems, but not nearly as many as 3.5 had with splatbooks.

No one got banned for criticizing PF's balance. I know because I did that all the time when I posted there, the designers just tell you that you're wrong and/or they don't care. A few dudes got really offended by that and acted like cunts and got banned for being cunts.

Anyway, there are people who are still playing Pathfinder, and if they're still playing Pathfinder THIS late in the game then they've probably found the game they like and aren't going to change, and I expect that Starfinder is exactly what they want, the same game but with a change of scenery. I'm still waiting for the first fluff books myself, that's all I care about from Paizo.

OP mentioned that.

It's primarily sci-fi with the magic stapled on.

Hell, there are totally magicless parts of the Star Wars galaxy.

But sci-fi/fantasy isn't just a question of blasters-vs-wands. Star Wars is a mythic-hero-story in every way. Science isn't a character in Star Wars. Science and the author's ideas about science don't shape or limit the action. The action is defined by the cool heroic stories that the authors want to tell, and then the technology is just there to fill plot holes and move the action along, the way that magic does in a fantasy setting.

Star Wars isn't scifi with magic stapled on, its fantasy with spaceships stapled on.

It's hard to combine the two and not make it seem like "elves...IN SPAAAAAACE."

The only thing I can think about that does it awesome is what little I've seen of Rifts, sort-of 40k, and Gamma Worlds (kinda).

You're probably right, I'm probably underestimating how popular that stuff was before my time. But D&D itself was more popular in the 80s, and I think its also fair to say that fantasy grew and flourished by moving away from D&D.

What about anime? Didn't 90s anime have a lot of magitech, and magical spaceships, and magical princesses from distant planets?

I think you guys are right there. Oldschool magic (which I'm not SUPER familiar with) had this vibe of, "This is medieval fantasy and it feels like medieval fantasy, but magic can get really advanced and look like technology, especially for the people who travel between worlds".

Whereas later settings draw more and more of a distinction between magitech settings and mystical settings.

sry my links got mixed up

It depended on where you were within the main setting of Dominaria, since it was so vast, but that was often the case, yes. The ships in pic related there fold themselves into portals.

This post immediately made me think of pic related

It's there if needed, but I don't feel like a setting should have only one or the other, you know? Most adventuring happens in the 16th century fantasy empire, but if one travels abroad:

>planets instead of planes
>leyships powered by a giant heart and the crew's feelings
>not!Egypt pyramids which are actually flying octagons from the first race
>spinal weapons measured in "kilodragons" and above
>magical implants that siphon ambient mana
>orbital elevator shaped as a tree made of perpetual lightining
>Sun is hollow
>prana=light=soulstuff
>sacrophysics is a thing

Too bad they're all garbage.

If you say so.

What world or franchise are you describing good sir?

I'm working on a hard sci-fi setting turned into a space setting when we discover space gods living inside our solar systems gas giants. Eldritch stardrives which sing like whales, Churches living in the rings of saturn, Crusaders who fly through space under their own power, wielding blades blessed by jupiter.

Sorry, it's just the relevant aspects of my homebrew

Cool!

Also cool.

I thought that hard sci-fi meant more grounded sci-fi? I love the idea though,

Makes me nostalgic for Dragonball

A world full of deities, galactic conquerors, forbidden techniques, witches, dinosaurs, shapeshifters, wish-granting dragons, androids, nazis, vampires, old hermit sages, magic swords, eldritch abominations, and other bullshit is my ideal fantasy

Thanks user

Not him, but I think it means that it was hard sci-fi until humanity found out a lot of exceptions to the rule. I imagine it began like:

"How the hell our nuclear pulse battleship is being pierced by arrows?"

Not that guy but I don't think hard scifi precludes giant space-gods.

Now, when you talk about "blades blessed by Jupiter", that starts to sound like you're using alien technology as magic (where "blessed" means "infused with power using technology I don't understand", that doesn't ruin a hard sci-fi setting, and indeed a scientific approach would suggest that higher intellects would have access to technologies that humans can't make sense of, but any unexplained technology is an element of soft scifi).

Typo, a hard sci fi setting that becomes a space FANTASY setting.

this guy gets it.

I think OP pines for the off the rocker settings where fantasy and sci-fi incestuously mingle because why not.

I love the setting of Dragonball and I don't think Toriyama ever did it justice. Its like he just wants to draw awesome places and things and then he doesn't know what he wants to happen to them.

Dragonball Z is basically the definition of powerlevels style anime but I don't think that was ever the plan, more like something he fell into.

Dragonball was a comedy as well as action. And aside from Journey to the West it was influenced by ancient & medieval Chinese travelogues about the bizarre peoples & creatures which supposedly existed outside China

You're right, and that's my favorite part. "You meet STRANGE THINGS when you go out into the wider world! And there are some times when you have to fight and then there are other times when hijinks ensue." I think Toriyama did his best work when he was focused on that approach and I think his worst was when he was focused on drama and powerlevels.

That's what I was trying to say, I shouldn't say he "didn't do it justice" because Dragonball and parts of DBZ were awesome. But the best things about it aren't really the parts that it is best known for.

I'm with you. I want space knights killing solar dragons with laser swords.

More along these line's. wrote on the spot, expect errors

You are Jeremus Smith, captian on the North American joint forces mobile weapons platform /Hawking/, currently en route from venus to mars. The Hawking ain't no slouch, state of the art engines, fuel scooped right from the belly of the sun, body modifications to you and your crew allow her to push G's most humans could only dream of. Still, you're looking at a sold two months. People would have killed for that kind of time a century ago, but to you it crawls, because you know that it wont get much faster. Forget the limits of flesh for a moment, There is only so much that a ship can take, so much energy an engine can put out.

Three weeks out you hear the song, and know, instinctively, that it comes from /outside/ the ship. You have heard what whales back on earth sound like, and its the best comparison you can make Absurd, you know as well as anyone else that sound can't travel through space, but you hear it, the crew hears it, and nobody can tell where its coming from, unstill the sensors pick up something coming out from beltwards. You see it on the screens, a bright point of blue light, you don't believe the figures being shown about its speed, until in a split second it turns from an approaching light, to a full blown ship screaming past you, its engines flame scouring bright contrails through space. It has wings, flaps, a pointed front. Its areodynamic. You sweat to god you see veiwports, faces, looking out from it, but its blazed past before you can register, cameras fail in its wake, its taking out your eyes. no way, something with flesh could get that sort of speed unless they started accelerating out in the oort, planned this attack a century ago.

You are about to ask for its heading, but something happens to its trajectory on the screens, it slows, turns, breaks, seems to skid, to fucking drift, as if its in some sort of fucking drag race. It does a U turn, comes along your other side. As you imagine what that sort of delta v must have done to the ship, a word from science fiction cereals of days past comes unbidden to your mind /inertialess drives/. And the song, the fucking song, like its being beamed directly into your head, all high whines and low hums, getting faster and faster. Weapons have been trying to draw a bead on it for thirty seconds now, but those computers aren't trained for this sort of trajectory, as it comes in on its second pass, close enough to /touch/ Who the fuck ever heard of combat at less than a kilometer, as another set of cameras and weapons fall to enemy fire, one last video clip is preserved on the screens. Someone in there opened on of those veiwports, leaned out through it holding a god dammed sword, and speaks. He dosn't just speak, we fucking hear it, through the vacuum of space. "Prepare to be boarded"

Sounds cool!

So Earth doesn't get space-magic from the planet-gods, its more like other humans/humanoids show up who are already using it?

I guess everyone would eventually
just inspired me to write something off the cuff about a hard-ish sci fi space captain encountering space fantasy pirates

I was just wondering because it seems like the most interesting period in your setting, the point where your hard-scifi technology allows you to go into space and then this causes you to encounter space-magic. And then you have a terrestrial society that has to reconsider everything it's ever known.

If I were writing this I would emphasize a secular revolution as the defining element of recent Earth history. Maybe even a flourishing of religion before that, such that today's secularism was almost forgotten, and then it swings back with a secular revolution.

As in, people JUST BARELY stopped believing that space was full of gods. Which allowed them to overcome their differences and do great things. Which allowed them to go to space. And find out that it's full of gods.

I dig it.
The first manned spacecraft make their way past the belt, and they start to hear things.
Jupiter, the closes gas giant, the largest, the loudest speaks to them.
Jupiter has been very lonely these past few cosmic epochs. With only sister saturn and brother neptune to keep company.
It never noticed the probes we sent, the cameras. Failed to differentiate them from the great lumps of iron and nickel that are floating around anyway. Any plastics or exotic materials that made there way into its atmosphere where dismissed as anomalies. The giants where simply to big to notice our early attempts at exploration.
A maned craft, a human soul, that's another thing. Not a big thing necessarily, but a visible one, like if a new star winked into existence on the scopes back at earth, distant and faded as if its light just reached us, but bright as polaris itself. such a small difference in the great sky so filled with starts, but we would know, and we would care.
Jupiter see's life up close, and having done so, now knows what to look for. Earth shines like a beacon when it uses the right filters, but earth is so distant, and there we are so strong. Closer, we are scatterd through the belt, great iron hungry infections. Jupiter sees hands, tools, entertainment, worship. It looks back to that manned vessel, and beckons.

...is Jupiter trying to fuck that space man?

There is an uprising by the asteroid miners in the belt. They are uneducated, expendable, barely know enough to operate the space habitats they use, and what they do know is but practical application rather than inner workings. Their homes are black boxes to them, the maintenance routines like incantations and rituals. Yet somehow they fight. They are so much faster than they should be, with so much more firepower than they should have.

Back at home, religious cults are found building spacecraft in there basements. The door kickers break in, expecting to find a bomb from all the materials being shipped to the place, so many red flags, but instead found what later was discovered to be an engine in progress. They claimed that god told them how to make it. Month later, it turns out we didn't find them all. Across the globe they launch in some sort of exodus. A hundred homecooked starships leave earth, and although it didn't show up on any recording equipment, anyone who was close to one on that day would swear that they sang.

Sci-fi's emphasis grew less and less on fantasy and 'magic' and more toward speculative fiction. It's not even trying to appeal to autistic sci-fi nerds, it's people wanting to read about an idealized reality rather than any kind of fantasy. Massive problems with experiencing the unfamiliar.

Ah, so its like, some of the religious humans heard the call and left earth a generation ago, and they've been with Jupiter all this time, and these are the dudes in the whalesong-ship that we encounter later?