Science Fantasy
I have always been a fan of science fantasy, in all its forms and definitions. Whether it be a combination of science fiction and fantasy (Expedition to the Barrier Peaks, Dreadstar, The Dying Earth), science fiction as fantasy (Claw of the Conciliator, John Carter of Mars), fantasy as science fiction (Gamma World, Star Wars) or anything in between, I love the genre-bending and breaking of it all. I love the boundary-free nature of science fantasy, which lets one’s imagination truly flow wild.
My favorite slice of science fantasy, I think, is science fiction as fantasy. This is where the technology is so advanced, at least in some aspects, that it seems like magic. As Arthur C. Clarke wrote, ”any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” For some reason, I actually find the idea of ultra-advanced technology more open-ended than magic for what it can do. More liberating. The knowledge that nanotechnology, gravity manipulation, and artificial building materials can create the landscapes found in a Roger Dean painting is somehow cooler than, “oh, it’s just magic.” Maybe it’s because making an island that floats in the air seems like such a colossal use of magical power, but if we’re talking about a civilization that could do it technologically, then it would be so advanced that doing so would be a small, almost artistic endeavor. It’s easier to imagine, for some reason.
Perhaps it comes down to that idea that having limitations actually encourages rather than discourages creativity. With magic, you can do anything. But with technology you can do almost anything. It’s that “almost” that is the key. Because you start asking, well, what can you do, then? And your imagination takes off. The limitations become a scaffold upon which to build, and if there are only a very few–if we’re talking about really advanced, ultra-tech here–then that scaffold allows you to build some really amazing stuff. But if there are no limitations at all, you can kind of freeze up. Or stagnate. You’ve nothing upon which to build. Obviously, this is not true all the time–I have certainly written about a lot of wild and weird magical stuff in my career, much of which I’m really proud of–but it can happen. (It’s also why fantasy writers and designers create “magic systems” so that there are rules and limitations even on magic.)
Lastly, I’ll mention that it is interesting to me that science fantasy offers a way to have wild, virtually-magical like stuff without the rest of the trappings of fantasy: the pseudo-Medieval world, for example, or the dudes with beards and pointy hats. The aloof, tree-loving elves and the dour, stone mining dwarves. Don’t get me wrong–I love traditional fantasy, but it’s nice to take a break from it awhile too. I guess this is kind of the flip side of the previous point, because these are limitations that traditional fantasy might have that science fantasy does not.
Far Future + Post-Apocalyptic
It should come as no surprise, then, that the game that I am working on is science fantasy. it takes place far, far in the future. You might say it falls in the “dying earth” mold of Vance, Wolfe, or Harrison, but the focus is a bit different. It’s also a post-apocalyptic sort of setting, with artifacts and structures of the past being very prevalent. But it’s not just one civilization’s ruins upon which the setting is built, but many. Due to the time scale dealt with, there has been opportunity for many civilizations to rise to great prominence and then eventually fall, recede, or evolve beyond comprehension.
These past great and advanced eras leave the world reshaped and utterly changed. And that’s the point. It’s a place so far in the future, so swathed in ultra-advanced technology, that anything is possible. But because that’s all the past, it’s still quite manageable.
Manageability is important for an rpg. It’s vital to think about the GM. In a game where everyone’s got ready access to all the ultra-tech they want, it’s really hard to manage the game. In a post-apocalyptic setting, however, the PCs have to earn their funky gadgets with weird powers. In a sense, the GM controls the flow of power just as she controls the flow of xp in most games (which in turn equates to power). Or, as a more direct comparison, consider the similarity between the post-apocalyptic setting and the traditional fantasy rpg setting. In both, the PCs wander about dangerous ruins looking for things that will increase their own abilities and power. And in both, it is traditionally the GM that determines what they might possibly find (although it’s ultimately up to the players where they look, and how they use what they find).
One interesting difference, however, is that in the fantasy setting, many of the treasures found can only be used by one person in the group. Or rather, it is one kind of person. Usually the wizard. But technology knows no such distinctions. So in this kind of set-up, if the group finds the strange device that can hurl blasts of green flame, any one of them can potentially wield it.
Another great thing about truly far-future post-apocalyptic settings is that artifacts of the past aren’t recognizable to the characters or the players. It can fun sometimes, and a bit funny, to play a game where your character finds a blender or a shotgun and has to pretend that he has no idea what it is, but that kind of irony can get old, in my opinion. In a far-future science fantasy setting, devices from the past are as mysterious as magic amulets and wands. In fact, probably much more so, because this is stuff that no one (or maybe virtually no one) alive can fashion. Or perhaps even catalog. There’s more room for mystery and strangeness in a world where it is impossible to define it all.
Lastly, this kind of setting is great for rpg campaigns because with the various bits of ancient tech and knowledge available, it is easy for a GM (or a designer) to create different locations with very different flavors. One isolated community might have recovered and mastered some device that produces energy golem slaves that do their bidding. An inhabitant of another might have stumbled upon some dangerous chemical or radiation that transforms the entire village into horrific monsters. Still another might worship some isolated artificial intelligence gone mad as if it were a god. In yet another locale, some eons-lost process might have turned everything to glass, and the inhabitants of the region must contend with this bizarre environment. Traveling across the face of this strange world provides the opportunity for any number of interesting scenarios and weird locations.
It Fits the Bill
In the end, what I wanted was a setting with wild possibilities. I wanted upside down cities, ships that sail across solidified oceans, creatures that exist on more than one level of reality at a time, and so on. I wanted the source of power to be strange and mysterious, and I never wanted that mystery to fade with regulation or definition.
I wanted the PCs to have access to some fraction of these wonders, but in a manageable way that didn’t overwhelm the GM. I wanted something where the GM had some say in how these wonders did or didn’t fit into the course of the game, to make sure that she was comfortable with it all. Where a GM can add in as much or as little weirdness as she wants, at the rate she wishes.
A setting with a rather simple society built upon the remnants of a vastly powerful (perhaps out-of-control) civilization seemed to make all of these requirements work. Characters live in a world where the craftspeople around them fashion simple garments of cloth and leather, and tools and weapons of iron. But they are also keenly aware that all around them are the ruins of civilizations that reshaped matter–both organic and inorganic. They know that the world is still filled with wonders crafted by mysterious people of the mist-shrouded past who routinely traveled to the stars and even to other dimensions. As they go forth to forge their own future, they have access to the mysteries of the past, at least if they can rise to the challenge and recover and master some of it. That, I think, is a setting where a lot of interesting stories can be told.
And that, in my opinion, is the key to a good roleplaying game setting.
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Hi Monte!
Of course preaching to the choir here, I think it is the best of both worlds. I have always considered Shadow World to be science fantasy, since while it is mainly a fantasy environment, it is the homeworld of a long-dead, ancient spacefaring civilization with a few still-functioning artifacts and installations still around. Interestingly many of the SW players and GMs seem to reject this aspect of it (which is fine of course), while Space Master purists don’t want anything to do with ‘that planet.’
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When reading your playtest report, was wondering, whether it was something set in fantasy or maybe steampunk. Knowing now that our was science fiction is interesting. When I think of the games I played, they all were to complicated. Not always the rules, but the works itself. Maybe treating technology more like magic will work much better since magic comes on manageable doses: spells, rituals and the like. Technology always comes as full blown toolkits with all the explanations we can manage to extract from current science. Being far in the future will also help achieving that.
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Sounds fun, and personally Science Fantasy is one of my favorite genres. For videogames I see a lot of ideas titles like ‘Too Human’ or ‘Anarchy Online’, but also comes to mind a few Animes ‘Mai Hime’ and ‘Mai Otome’ as a couple of examples.
So eys, I can see this as somethign quite promising.
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Awesome. This is similar to the campaign I am running for my kids. They don’t know it yet but it’s post-apocolyptic (1000′s of years later), technology so advanced and pervasive (nano-tech) that it seems like magic. Allows me to mostly run a fantasy setting, but branch into cool sci-fi directions with artifacts, locations, flying ships, etc. I also like the ability to do tie-in side-adventures from pre, during and after the apocalypse. It would be fun running two consecutive adventure paths with a group within the same complex/structure, one in the future “sci-fantasy” setting, the other in the pre-apocolyptic time period. The earlier group causing the issue that the sci-fantasy group has to contend with. (Maybe they are seeing video archive clips, that are then the sessions from the pre-apocolyptic play.)
In any case sci-fantasy opens up so many doors (without closing any … even allows for gods.)
Is your system going to be flexible enough to allow for play in different time periods, or set primarily in a specific Fantasy-esque world?
Excited to see what you come up with.
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Hello Monte, this is Terry from the Crimson Castle in Tuscaloosa,Al. I would love to see more of this. Maybe even use some of our players here to help play test. At the moment we have a group that is playing D20 Modern.
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I always loved Skyrealms of Jorune for much the same reasons, because it was Fantasy but after an “apocalypse” of sorts (severed contact with Earth). Bronze age (?) Fantasy but with “magic” that might have just been high tech. I also loved the French RPG Agone for many of the same reasons (hint of post apocalypse there, too), but mostly with the ruins of old empires and fractious new ones cemented over the lines of old which gave it a great sense of history.
I’ve always lamented the fact that a game that was advertised in Games Quarterly never made it to publication, and it sounds quite similar to what’s described here in many ways… It was called A.I. and it took the ‘technology as magic’ trope and ran with it, you played post humans in a far fling future, who had to “grow” their tools, all under the watchful eyes of the citadels, AIs which had roamed the galaxy and returned to find a ruined Homeworld, each with perhaps different agendas…
Anyway, to my mind, a fun next step would be to take the allegory of Tech as Magic one step further and make it almost literal, analogous to the tech of cyberpunk. You might have craftsman that specialise in magics, like software engineers, who can mete out “upgrades”, or artificers which specialise in the latest hardware like the gadgets of today– and perhaps mass produced magic items for daily use in the worker-abused “dwarven mines” under the mountain. I guess a bit like Harry Potter in a way: “Woah, he’s got one of the Penumbra 2000s! Crikey, those things do generate a lot of sparks when they go off!!” That kind of thing. Make it like Shadow Run (but pure Fantasy) with Industrial Espionage, data heists, etc.
Anyway, very much looking forward to hear more on this setting! -
I’ll admit, I wasn’t too keen on the whole Science Fantasy concept, but I’ve started to really get into it with my own project. Strict fantasy genre seems too confining in what is expect of it and just overdone at this point. And Science Fiction these days is having a bit of an identity crisis. Science Fantasy seems to be a far more “honest with itself” genre.
As pointed out, when something isn’t possible in fantasy, sometimes the justification just isn’t that satisfying. When you have “X” and “Z”, it’s takes some convincing to say that “Y” isn’t possible. Even then, you are still left with one of those “They can put a man on the Moon, but they can’t make “X” happen” moments. In science fantasy, if something isn’t possible, you are in a better mindset to accept such limitations and the justification for those limitations feels a bit more feasible.
“Magic can’t do that” is such a poor excuse in comparison to “those nanites didn’t survive the second apocalypse.”
And it’s just surprising at how much story possibility opens up when you drop an apocalypse on a world.
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I’m far more comfortable with fantasy as science fiction: a “magic system”. Very high tech always makes my table go like: “What the hell. This breaks conservation of energy.” or “There’s no way you can do that, you’d imply that space is not homogeneous, and I don’t think you want to get into the implications of that…” or even “But if this stuff is capable of doing that, I should be able to reverse engineer it this way and obtain the part that does that, and then apply it here and make this and…”.
Which gets out of hand very quickly, and is annoying. So I rather say “here, this is how physics work in this world. There’s magic, and magic does this, in these ways. Yeah, it breaks the world apart, but hey, that’s how it works.” It gives a starting point to build upon, it can be analyzed and experimented upon, and if things really get bad you can just say “a wizard did it”. That’s a last resort I want to have, ’cause I’ve had my share of quantum physics debates at the table and would rather not waste time on those again.
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Science Fantasy is definately my cup of tea! That’s what got me into Dave Arneson’s Blackmoor among other things. The one thing I am worried about is the Post Apocalyptic part. While not necessarily a bad thing, many Post Apoc settings seem a bit too depressing for my taste. I need a sense of hope and optimism in my settings even if they have their share of darkness… Will be following this project!
-Havard Blackmoor
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Well, here’s hoping this could allow me to play something based on Mary Gentle’s Golden Witchbreed / Ancient Light, or better yet, Julian May’s Saga of the Pliocene Exiles.
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Sci-fi, fantasy and the western are all related.
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Sounds a lot like Thundarr the Barbarian. That would be a good thing, to me and my friends at least. We have pondered the awsomeness of such a setting for a long time.
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Like the sound of it Monte. I think this form of setting (without constricting to rules system – will judge that separately I think) works really well in an episodic construct as well. Also you wouldnt need to create a holistic “setting” as such, you could create either modules or locations that could be stitched together as the GM sees fit. As long as you give the players a long term goal (like finding the Dark Tower) then stitching the “world” together is up to taste and GM feel.
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Yeah, I think that’s the feel I’m going for in a way. I’ll paint in some broad strokes, and then provide a ton of ideas and guidance for GMs to stitch together locations and weird stuff for adventures as they need to.
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Hey there Monte!
Congrats on your new endeavour. I just wanted to add my (humble) 2 cents on a way to further improve what you’re doing.
After buying most Malhavoc press products, as well as D&D & Pathfinder, there’s one particular aspect where you’ve always lagged behind (mostly due to cost) but that now you at least have a way to solve.
Art.
Yeah, because no matter how great the setting, how cool the rules, there’s always that first impression that follows everything around. And let’s face it, art has never been your forte.
Anyway, enough nagging & trolling.
Please use Kickstarter to fund some awesome art for Numenera. That’s all I ask & hope for since I’ve read that you’re already giving support for IOS & tablets.
Godspeed!
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That’s funny, to me Malhavoc’s art has always helped me envision the rules, ideas, settings and themes. From Dead God’s Fane to Ptolus, I can’t remember that I’ve seen a really poor piece of art. Wizards might have had more colour, more slick and more conformist fantasy art, but with Malhavoc’s art, I really got the feeling that it was new and fresh.
But with the first pieces of concept art coming out – and to me, at least, they look pretty good – and with the Kickstarter goal being met in spades, I’m sure the art WILL be awesome.
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My most successful d20 game was run using (mostly) straight 3.0 rules, before the publication of the 3.x Gamma World material, in a post-apocalyptic setting. It mixed elements of the Ringworld stories (they were in a section of a technologically sound, but magically created, Dyson sphere .. and a war between the builders of the sphere had caused a sun-jet to hit near the part of the sphere where the story was taking place) with the writings of Secharia Sitchen (a more concrete version of “The Chariot of the Gods”), and typical D&D fantasy elements. There were also Illuminati elements, and other genre-mixing elements. The non-d20 mechanics were things like a spell point system (before the 3.0/3.5 spell point system was published in Unearthed Arcana) and an allegiance system in place of the alignment system (before d20 Modern had been published).
The mix if genre’s, and interwoven stories, kept the players guessing, right up til the cliffhanger ending (which never got resolved, as 2 of the 5 players moved away).
I still think about ways to run that game using other elements. My current gf doesn’t do much sci-fi, so I think about ways to do it as all fantasy. I also wonder about what game system I’d use.
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What happens when magic is the only way to create technology that emulates magic? The idea of only having creation magic which only creates technology. Or the reverse…Got to watch the chrono/techno-magic however for the paradox effect is a very nasty possibility. Once time space is discovered all bets are off. What happens when the NPC cannot be effected by technology (dispel tech/anti-tech) and how would magic be able to create technological items that were immune to themselves or make individuals immune to tech? Then let’s get into the “religious” techno magic that only works for believers(or against believers). Techno deities who were created by zealot factories that power the artifacts/items. Just ideas from an old gamer…lol.
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I like the idea of taking Arthur C. Clarke’s quote literally, but to me it has always been more than just technology is magic. It extends to scientific understanding, so that means that you can have “magic” without the constraints of having to have a physical item. “Magic” is just the next stage of scientific progress, one where people can influence reality without the aid of machines. You can still have this fit within the science fantasy setting as access to this kind of understanding would be extremely limited, and only within the grasp of a few, very powerful characters. Like some other posters I point to the Dark Tower Saga. The primary villain is actually a real wizard, but it still fits within all of the sci-fi elements of the setting.
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