What would you say, is the best mix of Sci Fi and fantasy?

What would you say, is the best mix of Sci Fi and fantasy?

List examples and give your own settings if you've got one.

Other urls found in this thread:

drive.google.com/open?id=1jSJT0Jf5Yh3nw5lVXdOzVhAgwICELX9l4LRSIX9XDKo
orionsarm.com
orionsarm.com/page/233
twitter.com/SFWRedditImages

Any D&D setting where Expedition to the Barrier Peaks is a thing.

Lord of Light and Creatures of light and Darkness by Zelazney, obviously, along with Changeling and Madwand. More contemporary, I was fairly impressed by the Gods of Tarot series, as well as the bizzare take on vampires in The Madness Season.

>inb4 nu-jani throws a shitfit for an attractive girl being posted in the OP

Where it looks like fantasy but if you dig down a bit there's science. Like Xeen or Scrapped Princess.

Lord of Light and Dune are both really good at this. Basically any setting with mysticism towards sufficiently advanced technology. Even better when it's actually indistinguishable.

We often go back to our own setting, inpired by Scrapped Princess. Technology got so advanced and It fucked the planet so hard, today's post-disaster "fantasy world" magic actually feels like mystical and ancient magic.
The main schtick of the setting is that
>the atmosphere now also contains nanotechnology used to perform today's magic
>magic's performance is directly tied to your heart rate.
>there is an AI living in the nanomachine atmosphere who for SOME reason keeps the overall society at medieval stage. There is a powerful order of Inquisitors working for the AI

There is also a lot of other pretty cool things like Forest of the Giants which is actually abandoned mecha airport/factory or The Spider Tower, most probably a damaged orbital elevator guarded by spider legged tanks.

I've shilled my game pretty hard the past couple days, but since you asked, here is the WIP gdoc: drive.google.com/open?id=1jSJT0Jf5Yh3nw5lVXdOzVhAgwICELX9l4LRSIX9XDKo

The elevator pitch: In the 71st century the galaxy is still under siege of an eon long war between the higher dimensional "angels", the Celestials, and the demonic monsters known as Hellborne. As a posthuman spacer, your only defense against the fighting is your magic and your path of ascendance towards godhood.

Nanoswarms, AI gods, Dyson Spheres, primordial alien ruins and ancient alien factions, virchworlds, Hypercorp Kaiju and Superobot sized mecha, and much more...

The setting is highly influenced by Orion's Arm: orionsarm.com

If any of you actually read or skim my gdoc, drop a critique! I'm all ears.

It's always nice to hear Lord of Light mentioned. It's a fantastic work that isn't remembered enough.

I would like KD cheesecake more if all the women weren't so pouty

I'm still a fan of full fantasy but with space. Shame the only system that do that are Starfinder and Dungeons: The Dragoning, and I'd rather eat a fucking bullet than play any sort of Pathfinder ever again.

>The setting is highly influenced by Orion's Arm: orionsarm.com

Oh, I remember this. Actually I remember mostly this story.

orionsarm.com/page/233

...

Honestly I really like the way 40K mixes magic with heavy industrial-style tech

Star Wars.

Shannara, by the book and not the series.

Really, read the books. They're never known enough. Zelazny is good too, but too niche for my tastes (plus, all of today's Scy-Fy hipsters keep mentioning it, *ad nauseam*)

Easily my favorite part of the whole series was when you find out what exactly happened to the world and realize WHY the glass canyon from earlier in the show is fucking glass.

It's great how the whole setting works perfectly as an "lol generic fantasy" and how your perception of everything changes once you know the truth.

Digimon Story Cybersleuth, completely unironically. This game digs deeper into the technomystical trappings of the setting harder than any of the anime (except Tamers) ever dared to. Just for starters, the utility tunnels housing a lot of electrical and digital infrastructure in Japan means that the flow of data through Tokyo pretty closely matches the mapping of leylines laid out by ancient geomancers when the city was first being planned and built, and the creation of full-immersion virtual reality created a border marches between the physical world and an entire other plane of existence.

Why is it glass, then?

>orion's arm

Have you considered killing yourself? Like, I don't want to shit on you for coming up with a game, good fucking job, but could you not have picked a less autistic, and intellectually masturbatory website/setting?

lol, what makes you sperg so hard about the OA setting? It basically changed my life as a sci-fi writer.

Only if there are bork people

The one in which you don't handwave magic as unexplained science.

FF VIII

>ctrl f Phantasy Star
>nothing


Besides that, I'm currently in a Nechronica game that features:

>undead / mutated / cyborg player characters struggling to survive in a magitech driven post-apocalypse
>Giant religious cyber knights
>Abysses of lovecraftian horror spawning endless magical bioweapons
>Lots of mythology references and inspiration

...

OG Phantasy Star art was great

anarchy online is still my favorite by far
>cyberpunk dune with nanomagic and sprinkling of arthurian legend

Jodorowsky's Matabaron cycle.
It's a mix between space opéra and epic mythological stuff. "Science stuff" justifies any miracle

Add Creatures of Light and Darkness to that list.

bump

Space Opera (the game)

I run a post-Sci-Fi fantasy game. The players are descended from a genetically engineered race of NPCs on a planet originally constructed by a galaxy spanning Sufficiently Advanced Technology empire as one big super-LARP. The players have enough PC DNA to be counted as PCs by the omnipresent AI that runs the back end of the world.

The players originally didn't know any of the sci-fi shit and just thought we were playing a generic DnD clone. They now have a spaceship and are headed towards another Game World that is a post-Apocalypse STALKER setting on one continent and a Fallout meets 40k setting on the other.

Might and magic 6. It feels like a pure fantasy game, until you find out the invading demons are crashed aliens invading. Gotta bust into an old earth empire base and steal laser guns so you can bust into the crashed ship and ruin them.

muh dick

Shadowrun.

...

>Scrapped Princess
One of my favorite anime, and one I never see mentioned. I'm glad someone else here has seen it.

Imagine Pacifica with modern Mogudan's sense of proportions.

Star Wars.

it's a fairy tale. says so in the opening crawl.

I'm currently running a game with a homebrew system that uses 5e as a framework. It's a bit more on the fantasy side of things than sci-fi, but there are definitely some sci-fi elements.

In summary:
>There is a race that uses technology similar to Stargates to traverse the cosmos
>They travel to planets that harbor life and harvest the latent magical energies of that planet, which they then use to fuel their crusade
>Planets with sentient life are basically a jackpot, as sentient life only arises on worlds with huge amounts of magic
>Thanks to their superior technology, the aliens normally have no trouble crushing opposition, as most of the worlds they visit have yet to surpass the Bronze Age
>The planet that player characters hail from has sufficient technology to put up a true fight
>Rather than obliterate them, the aliens instead force an occupation as they harvest the magic
>Those willing to join their empire will be allowed to leave when the planet dies
>Likewise, those unwilling to join are kind of ignored, but the aliens strike back in retaliation if necessary
>Players are part of a resistance movement seeking to overthrow the occupation

Currently, my players have only just found out that the Empire is alien to their planet. They've yet to deduce their motives.

They also don't know the actual reason that the aliens are harvesting magic.

Pic unrelated.

I really like a lot of ideas from Dune although I hate the fact that dune shields are thrown around as a way of justifying swords in the same setting as guns.

Regardless, I've taken some core concepts from it and the matrix essentially with the main idea being aliens who use psychic powers to traverse the universe but some races can't naturally express this psychic ability without modification or technology.

Humanity was one such race and during antiquity humanity was enslaved and basically put into a shared dream state while their psychic energies were harvested from them during their life time. All the while most things in the dream world were reflected in reality (i.e. if you and another person had a child your sperm and their egg would be extracted and used to conceive said child that would then be joined to the dream).

It isn't until a race similar to humans freed themselves and freed humanity in the process who awake to an earth that looks nothing like the earth they knew in the dream and is also inhabited by various alien species along with venus and mars having been terraformed over the several thousand years this was going on.

the opposite of your shitty pic

There are projectile weapons in Dune, aren't there? I felt like the big battles were a big mix of melee and ranged combat with (relatively) slow projectiles.

But yeah, people do have a tendency to just use shields to excuse future sword fights.

There are projectile weapons. The primary use of the shield is to dissuade the use of lasers because hitting a shield with lasers will cause an explosion similar to an atomic bomb (even though they have nukes in setting and have used them).

My big take away from the series is basically training and grooming people to superhuman ability and "Psychic powers" similar to what the Guild Navigators have plus the benegeserits and the Mentats.

Did a sci-fantasy based off of Hellgate: London with some DOOM for taste. Is that a good enough blend?

Sounds interesting, please tell more.
How do you fluff it from 5e?

Yeah, Dune is definitely more about the limits of human potential, both individual and as a species, than providing detailed battle scenes. That's probably why most of the big confrontations are knife fights/sword duels than pitched battles.

post-disaster settings.
Humanity or whatever made it to the stars, made lightsabers, datastruction, and shit. Then interstellar war broke out for X reason, it's every man with a phaser, lightsaber, or magitekk glove for himself. Capital ship smashes into planet, The people survived, had their communication cut off, and then a few thousand years pass.

People still have some technology and the means to maintain it, as it was considered important. Reactor leaks and escaped genetically engineered beasts filled the wilderness. An ancient weapons platform shoots down any craft that try to make it to space, and this, combined with the warnings of their ancestors, keeps people focused on the planet, not the sky.
People have technology, but not necessarily the science behind it. The best tinkers can recreate a photon saber from basic minerals, but have little idea on how they are doing it, and thus little idea on how to innovate. These are never as good as the artifacts made out of machined materials, but these are rare, and in an ever dwindling supply.
Things like capsule storage technology have rendered some conventional problems obsolete, while things like dead batteries have caused strange problems to become everyday ones.

Perhaps, if you wished to expand it, make it the story of not a planet, but of one solar system with similar constraints, and weapons platforms lurking in the dark void surrounding the system. Space travel is treated much as old-fashioned naval travel: Expensive, dangerous, slow, and rewarding, except you really do drop off the edge of the world if you go too far. Naturally, communications and travel technology will shake things up, but megafauna, a fundamental lack of understanding of their technology, and old dangers keep things from going too smoothly.

He Man and She Ra, in my opinion, was a great mix of Sci-fi and Fantasy.
Just wish I could pull this off in my games.

I don't believe in a 'best' setting, I like a lot of variety cause some things do different things better.

For example, various Final Fantasy games have done Sci Fantasy in different flavors (6 does magic punk, 7 does more traditional steam punk, 8 has a mixture of shiny futuristic/magic/modern aesthetic, 12 is a sci fantasy setting that with a huge gap between high tech empires and dirt poor fantasy commoners, 13 has bizarro robo gods controlling humanity, the list goes on). Then there's stuff like the SaGa series where your race options include human, mutant/elf, monster, and robot. And the Shining Force series is a low key post sci-fi apocalypse that's rebuilt itself to medieval level societies.

16-1700's with modern guns, cell phones, and style, with nothing else.

Gloryhammer, where you have ancestral laserdragons, robogoblins and neutronium powered barbarian cyborgs fighting with swords, axes and hammers made of star crystals against demons throughout the Solar System.

The common factor in FF settings is that they're uniformly piss poor.

Also from Square, Blue Dragon has a pretty interesting one.
Super advanced future society, Scienced so hard they Magick'd, made full planets full of life and shit that were actually planetary-scale factories that grew their own materials. Fucked eachother's shit to mutual extinction once the self-replicating metal gears and mewtwos in wizard hats hit the mass-production stage, a gorillion years later humies have hit a basic fantasy level, except with the occasional reverse-engineered water purifier, auto turret to keep out the wildlife and wild robots, or gigantic fucking drill machine to ??? with. Societies are troubled by badly damaged robotic superweapons, an automated tsunami piston, and more things that wouldn't look out of place around the ruins of a standard 30 year fortress.
The ancients Magik'd so hard that ghosts are a thing, and magically mutated life forms are exceptionally common, as are orderless mass-produced robots who just keep maintaining and bringing shit back to make more robots. The moons (there are 8?) are actually automated laser cannons that occasionally suffer a bug and turn a place into swiss cheese. Exploded swiss cheese.
Leftover super-tech dots the landscape. Most of it just looms ominously, and crushes people with falling plates of metel, sometimes an eggplant-looking motherfucker turns one on and starts sawing the planet in half. Such is life.
Sometimes kids find really old ancient hard candies, eat them when an automated-amusement park voice pirate lady tells them to eat them, and their shadows turn into mythological creatures that let them enjoy rpg systems and jobs.

Sheep men maintain nomadic tribes, spikiness of hair and intensity of constipation dictates power level, monkey-bats and great sabercats are mythological animals, and piles of sentient shit rise up to attack unsuspecting innocents because Akira Toriyama touched it.

The Midgar part of FFVll was actually pretty good and you know it.

How do you feel about original Spelljammer?

that was crazy cute

Those are some hot and constructive opinions you've got there, user.

Actually, I'm reminded that Shin Megami Tensei is also a pretty sci-fantasy setting. Cyberpunk demon summoning where you and your trusty arm computer hack your way through the war between heaven and hell.

Just makes it worse. It lets you know they can do good work, but they mostly couldn't be arsed.

I'm thinking a third nuke will fix JRPG retardation.

To be fair, calling it a homebrew system is jumping the gun. I've really just modified it and made some changes, namely the inclusion of mana rather than spell slots, as well as cooldowns on spells, and generally balancing (nerfing) a lot of the offensive spells. I also added new skills to better fit a sci-fi setting, with things like Interfacing, etc.

I also stole a mechanic from Mutants and Masterminds wherein defenders roll against attackers, adding modifiers where necessary. I honestly prefer that to rolling against a static value.

Are you kidding? Most likely the next nuke that gets dropped is just gonna make WRPGs retarded instead.

Soul Hackers is quite possibly the best setting for anything ever.
Devil Survivor is a nice, very versatile one, Devil Survivor 2 is a bit too much Evangelion for most games.
Digital Devil Sage, I feel, would work absolutely fantastically as a tabletop game. Post-apocolyptic gang wars, except some people can turn into monster-men with crazy magic powers, more mundane applied powers, and an actual, in-canon way to explain away experience points? (It's eating people and getting their Hindu-points) Tabletop gold.
Devil Summoner has a great atmosphere that is unfortunately very, very hard to carry in tabletop. Film Noire but Supernatural at the same time takes too much control.

On that note, Supernatural.
You have fantasy creatures, most of whom have very specific requirements to kill them that makes a lot of advanced tech useless, in a modern setting. Magic and such exists, but carries risk, both because you start getting close to monster territory, and it makes you visible. I feel like it would translate well, since a particular scenario is easy to draw out relative to tabletop progress.

Judging by the way Square's been chasing the FFVll dragon for the past 15 years, no, they really can't do good work.
They made a great setting in a game that mostly caught on because it was prettier chrono trigger without time travel and a scapegoat bad guy for the dumdums by accident, and haven't ever done it again.

I got Blue Dragon and Bahamut Lagoon mixed up in my head when reading this. I own Blue Dragon but didn't get too far into it, I should try it again someday.

Destiny

I unironically love the Destiny setting, desu.

Everyone in DDS transformed. Only those who had special tattoos like the protags and the leaders became special monsters. What? You didn't think the demons you were eating came from no where did you?

I'm writing a Newtonian level of alternative physics that provides the appearance of standard magic with a few differences in execution. Since magic is a learnable and testable system, it's indistinguishable from science. But it isn't really sci-fi, either.
Ultimately the whole reason I began writing it is because of I love hard sci-fi, but find reality too constraining.
Anyway. Most of the combinations of fantasy and sci-fi (that I've read/seen) and that I enjoy are on the "light" as in "barely explained" end of the spectrum.
Endless Legend (great game from great devs)
Adventure Time (yeah, I know, sue me)
Helck is kinda neat too.

A dnd-esque world that has simply passed through that narrow window of time occupied by early renaissance technology, and has naturally progressed through modern technology and beyond.

I can't think of a single fucking setting like this, despite its premise being so simple. 99% of modern to slightly-beyond-modern fantasy is always either "secret world" or shadowrun "big event reintroduces magic to our world". Most authors seem to find it impossible to distinguish modern-era setting from the setting being actual modern earth. And of course, if it's in the more distant future, it's always aliens. Magic aliens, but never elves from earth forming a breakaway empire.

The bas-lag series very much takes this attitude towards victorian-era technology, and combined with sufficiently advanced magitech it pretty much is sci-fi in parts, but I can't think of a single series that goes all-out with this, despite being such a simple concept.

Except Bright, but plot and setting wise that was a steaming pile of shit that doesn't make the slightest bit of sense.

I couldn't become a hero so I reluctantly decided to get a job

Yeah it blows my mind that people can't fathom the idea of ye olden fantasy settings advancing beyond their medievel stasis

Banestorm from Steven Jackson Games.

Bane?

Someone has to like shit, why else would it continue to get pumped out

That's true, otherwise GW and WotC alike would've gone under decades ago.

>7 does more traditional steam punk

I wouldn't call it traditional, mako technology looks similar to steampunk because of tubes and valves but it operates by conducting a magical gas in a way that resembles more electrical connections, theres no actual furnaces, pistons or flywheels.

It's actually industrial as all fuck, in terms of both aesthetics and themes. Mako energy is such an obvious parallel to oil that I'm fucking impressed it flew over both of your heads.

Whoops, I just used the wrong words cause I was tired., I meant 6 was magic steampunk and 7 was magic cyberpunk.

6: Airships, technological revolution, victorian era aesthetics, trains and pipes and cog like machinery being common, rebellion.

7: World spanning evil corporation throwing away human life and the lifeblood of the planet for profit in an eternally dark megacity with a huge distinction between rich and poor. Human experimentation is commonplace, with cybernetic gun arm grafts, human super soldier programs, and eco terrorists.