Fantasy in the future

So let's say everything usual about fantasy - elves, dwarves, orcs, fairies, dragons, vampires, werewolves, giants and so on - makes it somehow to the future where technology has reached sufficient development that some form of early FTL travel exists and galaxy colonization age is barely about to begin.

How would all those aforementioned exist in a world where technology more or less reigns supreme? Magic could coexist beside it, but would be considered more or less too dangerous or too demanding to pursue for whatever reasons.

Could fantasy species adapt to a technological age? Would they even be part of it or would they seclude themselves somewhere out in the world or the largely unknown galaxy?

>Magic could coexist beside it, but would be considered more or less too dangerous or too demanding to pursue for whatever reasons.

That's kind of boring, since at that point you basically just have a standard sci-fi setting only instead of coming up with some kind made-up name for the species you're just calling them elves and dwarves and whatnot.

Keep the magic.

There's no need for FTL. With the amount of genetic engineer, cybernetics, and population divergence by natural evolution and relative isolation, even within one system, it is inevitable that there will be numerous offsprings of the Homo Sapiens.

Like I said, magic is there, it's just that technology is far more convenient and would come at at a smaller expense/risk.

> elves, dwarves, orcs, fairies, dragons, vampires, werewolves, giants

What the hell has FTL to do with it? You don't need FTL to have dragons whose bones are made of graphene and its organs made of artificial nanomaterials.

Nothing? I just like the idea of those not wanting to be stuck to a single planet can move on out there and try to find a new home.

>elves and dwarves and shit

Pretty boring, but OP's post made me think about that post where the aliens are baffled that humans, having evolved in a magic dead-zone, were somehow able to leave their home system and actually make it to populated space using non-magical rockets.

The gist of the setting pitch was that humans are suddenly a terrifying new power in the galactic scene because we can learn magic just as well as other species, but we arrived on the galactic stage without the use of magic, which every other species required to get to this point. So some antagonist race invades and throws up an anti-magic field to fuck over the opposition, but the human mercs don't even notice and plow right through.

If you're triggered by HFY, you shouldn't have read this post.

???
There is a lot of planets in the solar system user. Since there is a lot of moons.

I'm a fan of high magic settings evolving into cyberpunk/soft sci-fi setting as time goes on. As magic becomes a dominant force, it begins to meld with technology. Look at League of Legends and its PROJECT universe for that, which is the canon future of its Runeterra setting.

I'm startled that you didn't hit the pile of HFY fiction based on that very idea on the way in.

Only barely relevant (I do think it was sci-fi fantasy ish) but what was that weird game about a bunch of hermaphroditic femme elves with flower dicks called. It was a meme on Veeky Forums for a while years back.

Starfinder has all of that and rules to convert what isn't listed in the core book in the Alien Archive.

...

>That moment when you realize magic in space is literally just super high sci-fi full pf post scarcity civilizations
>That moment when some star liche fucking rigs up stars as his phylacteries
>His whole MO is turning whole planets full of inhabitants into flesh nodes to project his mind into
>This one fucking dude is a level 3 civilization by himself

Hey OP I'm gonna steal your idea mmkay?

OP didn't come up with your idea, though... and I'm stealing that.

Hey, fuck you guy.

Fuck you! You tried to trick me into thinking you had an original idea, and now I find out that's just the premise of the Flood in Halo!

But why?

They're resource gatherers for a machine that decodes DNA?

Make technomancy a thing.

>Magic could coexist beside it

Nope is not.

You cannot have magic and science at the same time. Science is the understanding of nature and natural laws magic is... much more fuzzier to say the least, but usually revolves around things that do not obey natural laws, therefore being unnatural and subjected to his own rules that happens to interact with ours.

For example; What does it have to do with anything that if I paint some symbols in a wall that wall will suddenly become magic? What is a wall to start with? Is the matter? Is the space? Is it working within our timeframe? And from where does it gets its energy and what does to ours to break thermodynamics? And why it hadn't happened naturally through millenia of randomness?

>d fantasy species adapt to a technological age?

Yes, there are no crippling limitations and each case actually offers some advantages in some situations, so there is no point in segregation, but on the other hand it would mean that if some species are better than others at some task that field is going to be mostly dominated by that species(dwarfs have lower volume and mass than you making them perfect for space travel, for example)(Orcs are physically stronger making them more fitting for mercenary work) it even could be argued that a well ordered caste society will outrun the "jack of all trades" humans easily(and since elves rely on magic that don't exist they too would disapear unless they are really intelligent or have some other special trait).

If the "others" are actually races rather than species then it means that in a superconnected world, racemixing will unify them all in one race through time in an unavoidable process(mixing is much faster than speciation) and you get... well humans, a bit weird humans but nothing realy out of the ordinary.

>if you pay attention you might notice these big honking cuts in this person's face
Thanks, good to know.

>You cannot have magic and science at the same time.
Sure you can, if you aren't an autist.

Shadowrun disagrees.

Science just explains what should happen. Magic explains why that can be wrong on occasion.

>cyborg vampire

Omg, it's Microsoft vs Apple again.

I think the only way you can really get away with having a sci-fantasy setting is if magic use is technically universally available, but represents an actual hazard to the user's health. Aside from the intellectual side of learning how to cast spells, it'd also require a substantial amount of physical conditioning to even use. i.e toughness/constitution are the core attributes for magic use and we get bodybuilding muscle mages.
That way, it becomes more expensive to just create a tonne of mages to automate society, than it is to experiment with the magic of boiling water to make turbines spin. Your mages might just outright die if you've got them wizarding around the clock, and that represents a serious loss of resources for a kingdom.

Otherwise, technological innovation basically ends at the printing press, because you can just teach your whole society to use magic to conjure food instead of dicking around with vertical farming. Space colonisation would be only considered if population density on the home world was too great for comfort, leading people to consider that the orbs of the aether might be worth giving a shot at living on. That's if it's not feasible to just build new dimensions to shove people in.

If you're not particularly concerned about the survival rates of magic users, you could also create the fantasy-setting equivalent of The Matrix if you really want to see how far that rabbit hole could go. Magic users are farmed to make society actually function, and then their burnt out bodies are recycled to feed the people.

How about magic being a natural force in the world, similar to other forces (tectonic, electromagnetic, tidal etc)?

While harnessing the other resources requires usage of tools, magic can be harnessed via force of will. Hence why it requires a lot of chanting and prancing about and fucking with runes and such; all are later discovered to be tricks to sort of “goose the caster’s mind” into the proper mindset (or trance) for casting.

Once this is discovered, magic can then be harnessed not via chanting and waving and faffing about, but via technological tools.

Could this work?

I imagine that the existence of magic would actually increase the development of technology since magic could allow for experiments that otherwise would be put off by centuries for lack of a technology based alternative.
Imagine wizards using all seeing eye spells to discover bacteria and viruses long before the invention of microscopes and using that to move on to developing vaccines early as well.
Some technolgy might never be invented because a magical equivlant is already available but others may come about earlier and some things may require a mix of both, for example FTL technology makes the ships and magic acts as the exotic matter that creates the warp bubble.

Space wizards are fucking cool. If there was a game where you could only play caster classes, it better have space wizards.

>You cannot have magic and science at the same time. Science is the understanding of nature and natural laws magic is... much more fuzzier to say the least
If magic exists it is presumably (but not always) part of the natural laws.
Magic is sufficiently advanced science and science is sufficiently analyzed magic.
Good examples of franchises where magic and advanced technology coexist
Shadowrun (obviously)
The new Voltron series
Outlaw Star
Star Wars

Seriously, OP is looking for Starfinder lore.

This is a dwarf in power armor, fighting an alien reptile that's basically a klingon.

This is a good guy cleric of a death god, who hails from a former hive mind race, calling up dead soldiers on some alien planet to help him fight off some alien monster probably.

His race has three sexes, and is addicted to making choices.

This is a vesk, reptilian klingons, technomancer using his technomagic to study an alien artifact.

Here's a necrovite, aka a space lich. They hail from notPluto, where they have an entire undead society.