So, I've been building my own fantasy world, sort of building the history as I run my local game. I'm running into a few pickles.
I'm really quite significantly fond of Might and Magic and Pathfinder's Numeria, and I am severely tempted to add some science fiction elements to my setting.
First, an explanation of time travel in my setting: First, it's obscenely hard to accomplish, requiring centuries of arcane research of an epic level or the scientific prowess of a post-singularity civilisation and worldwide infrastructure.
When you travel back in time, at the point of arrival you create a new universe parallel to the origin, split off from that point. Both universes remain intact (unless something seriously bad happens). Later, epic planar magic (or technology) may be used to bridge the two universes.
--
The current setting has an origin that involves time travel like this:
Timeline 1, Year 700 - Undead have killed everyone and took over the world a while ago. The end. A lich of significant power becomes bored and puts a few hundred years into developing two epic spells:
Timeline 2, Year 0 - Time travel. With this, he goes back in time and orchestrates the ascension of a brave warrior to godhood as the paladin patron of smiting undead. This creates a parallel timeline in which the first undead host was wiped out.
Timeline 1 and 2, Year 700 - Interuniverse travel. After returning to his own timeline and time, he creates permanent openings linking the two parallel worlds so he can have fun messing with an entirely living world at his leisure. The current game takes place in Timeline 2 at this time.
--
And my silly brain is tempting me to add the following to the history and add locations and things in the world to fit:
Timeline 0, Year 3000 - The world of science is prosperous and nice. Problems have been solved and everyone is happy. It doesn't matter terribly since something awful is about to happen. A vast starship is constructed, capable of safely (i.e. in orbit and not on the surface) harnessing the overwhelming energies required to travel back in time.
Timeline 1, Year -1000 - The time ship arrives. Its long passage through the aeons woke slumbering horrors that dwell in the void between space and time. For whatever reason, some cataclysm caused the ship to fall into the planet, breaking up and crashing over much of the landscape. Its fall drags with it the whispers of the void, introducing magic and the supernatural to the world. Life emerges from the aftermath irrevocably changed.
--
I like the idea of adamantine and other exotic substances and objects originating from this. It also means every now and then I can have other fragments of the ship lose orbit and fall whenever the plot demands.
But after discussing this with a few people (not my players, since I intend such things to remain secret until they discover things), I've generally found that they dislike it, saying it's too 'WoWish' or that the science fiction elements cheapen the fantasy. I've never played WoW so I don't really know much about how that relates.
I'd like to get a few more opinions.
I think many science fiction elements mesh fine with fantasy. Just take a glance at the Eberron campaign setting, which uses magic as a quasi-science.
Ever play any of SquareSoft's computer RPGs (e.g. the Final Fantasy series, Chrono Trigger, etc.)? There's lots of science fiction meshed into that fantasy.
You mention time travel in particular. One of my all-time favorite time-travel novels is The Anubis Gates by Tim Powers, which is a fantasy. Time travel was achieved through magic. And of course, there's the aforementioned Chrono Trigger.
Will your players like it? Alas, the only two ways to find out are to ask them, or to spring it on them. It's a gamble, but it might work.
(This is wierd. I have to post twice to get my message to appear at all...)
The Tenth Dimension
There is a video on U-Tube that goes into the theory that there are 10 Dimensions of space and time.
It gets foggy on the higher ones, but I have used D&D to fill in the blanks.
1: Length: This chart has length as does a fight in a narrow hallway.
2: Width: Chess, checkers, and most encounters take place in 2D.
3: Height: Ariel battles and multi level dungeons use all 3D.
4: Time: From birth to death, creation to destruction, or start to finsh.
5: Parallel Time: Time is a river.
6: Elemental: Normal in middle, but becoming more 'pure' as you move outward.
7: Ethical Afterlife: Astral or netherworld with gates to afterlife planes.
8: Truely Variant:
9: Far Realm:
10: Hyperspace:
1: Length: This chart has length as does a fight in a narrow hallway.
2: Width: Chess, checkers, and most encounters take place in 2D.
3: Height: Ariel battles and multi level dungeons use all 3D. This is normally all a being is aware of.
This is also how a being perceives their surrondings even when outside normal space.
4: Time: From birth to death, creation to destruction, or start to finsh. Measured in turns, rounds,
encounters, adventures, days, years, and adventure paths. Some spells effect the flow of time,
but to travel through time requires special spells not normally available. Basically, in the 4th
dimension, you are out of phase. Phase spiders can lurk invisably, sliding forward till a time when
someone enters their lair. That's why you can enter a sealed vault and be attacked by a phase
spider. If nornal space is a table top, then Phase Spiders are crawling around under the table.
You could mount a hook under the table and claim the contents of your bag of holding are in
a bag tied to that hook. The farther you get from normal time, the more blurry and grey the
world seems. Looking at the entire flight of an arrow it seems to be a streak from the bow to the
target. If a character (Such as a Cronomage) goes back and warns someone of the ambush
they were involved in, then that creates a split in the timestream, and that happens in the 5th
dimension.
5: Parallel Time: Time is a river. Actually its a branching cluster of rivers all braching from the
highpoint where the world was created. This is what the planeshifter sees. They only see the
major branchings. Did a character expect an ambush? Did the Nazis lose WWII? Did dinosaurs
become extinct? Note that what you had for breakfast creates a very temporary fork in the river
that quickly merges again. The tributary where the Nazis won kind of died out when their economy
collapsed when there was nobody to conquer, and then their gene pool was too limited to support
human survival. If you move, and you use your character with a new gaming group, the new campaign
is a different branch of the same timeline.
6: Elemental: In the middle it's a mix similar to the world you came from. As you get farther in any direction it becomes just one element. You can only find the elemental areas your culture believes in unless you make your planar knowledge check or you took the feat Illuminated.
7: Ethical Afterlife: In the middle is the outlands and Sigil if you are playing 3.5. 4th edition will put you in the astral sea. In any case there are gateways to infinate planes of the various afterlives. For Fringe that's just Heaven and Heck, unless your a Native American or something. The Watchers may be lawful neutral beings from Niravana or Purgatory.
8: Truely Variant: In the Narnia books this looked like a forrest with pools of water that were the gateways to other worlds. In the Phantom Toll Booth it was a super highway with off ramps to strange symbolic worlds. Both OZ and Wonderland were accessed by different means each time. It's sort of an earthlike world with tunnels running underneath it and occasional twisters carrying houses from one rift to another.
9: Far Realm: It looks like utter caos where weird lifeform are constantly springing into being, then being ripped apart by other weird lifeforms. The Flumps and Aboliths escaped from here to less complex planes of existance. You need to be Illuminated to find the citidals where certain dieties have gathered like minded and bodied creatures. Note such places may become 4 dimentional worlds at any moment and vanish from the far realm leaving only sealed gateways. One such place is the realm of the living crystals. They value only symmetry. The Tholians were considered freaks and were cast out into the Star Trek universe. Spend too much time in The Symmetrverse and your flesh will crystalize.
10: Hyperspace: The oneness. This misty realm has no up, down, self, other, here, or there. If you can go there you can return anywhere. Your hyperdrive has a part that insures you return to the proper universe. Make sure it's in good repair.
So basicly, this litch made a branch in the time stream, a spaceship crashes from his previous world to his new one, and since the ship passwd through the far realm, it brought back horrors. Maybe your players would be more receptive if the time ship brought in dinosaurs. I think it would make more sense if the timeship came from a different time stream altogether.
Note that a world with only undead might temporrally die out. Maybe the litch is trying to survive. Note that vampires need blood to unlive.
Ask your players what they want.
So, I've been building my own fantasy world, sort of building the history as I run my local game. I'm running into a few pickles.
I'm really quite significantly fond of Might and Magic and Pathfinder's Numeria, and I am severely tempted to add some science fiction elements to my setting.
First, an explanation of time travel in my setting: First, it's obscenely hard to accomplish, requiring centuries of arcane research of an epic level or the scientific prowess of a post-singularity civilisation and worldwide infrastructure.
When you travel back in time, at the point of arrival you create a new universe parallel to the origin, split off from that point. Both universes remain intact (unless something seriously bad happens). Later, epic planar magic (or technology) may be used to bridge the two universes.
--
The current setting has an origin that involves time travel like this:
Timeline 1, Year 700 - Undead have killed everyone and took over the world a while ago. The end. A lich of significant power becomes bored and puts a few hundred years into developing two epic spells:
Timeline 2, Year 0 - Time travel. With this, he goes back in time and orchestrates the ascension of a brave warrior to godhood as the paladin patron of smiting undead. This creates a parallel timeline in which the first undead host was wiped out.
Timeline 1 and 2, Year 700 - Interuniverse travel. After returning to his own timeline and time, he creates permanent openings linking the two parallel worlds so he can have fun messing with an entirely living world at his leisure. The current game takes place in Timeline 2 at this time.
--
And my silly brain is tempting me to add the following to the history and add locations and things in the world to fit:
Timeline 0, Year 3000 - The world of science is prosperous and nice. Problems have been solved and everyone is happy. It doesn't matter terribly since something awful is about to happen. A vast starship is constructed, capable of safely...
I have a question, what happens if in the newly created timeline(s) this epic spell is also repeatedly cast ?
It seems to me if it happens more than once in any particular timeline it is extremely likely to happen in the "new" timelines as well, will this not result in a large number of timelines pretty soon ?
I actually think your idea has alot of potential, if the future world was locked away from magic, alternate planes and thus divine interference it might have allowed for science to prosper.
In particular it might be interesting to see what happened to the future world after the void has been ripped open, allowing magic and outer planar entities into the future world
|
I ran one time travel campaign before... oh the headache...
turned out through rolplaying the characters were their own fathers... and went time hopping again to turn out to be their own grandfathers... and turns out they are their own sons as well...
and the intermingling... oh! The mage was the half brother to the warrior who was the nephew of the rogue who was father to the cleric who was his own father! it got... weird...
*Shrug.* Ultimately, sci fi and fantasy are practically the same genre, just with different words slapped on the phlebotinum, and those who argue against their mixing are either coming from a dark ages Europe simulationist standpoint with regards to fantasy (which 3.5/PF is not remotely designed to emulate) or are just coming from an internally inconsistent platform. After all, we're talking about a game where giant robot demon spiders with laser vision are a core monster. You really can't take the purity of something like that too seriously.
D&D was spawned from a science fiction series, and indeed there's a lot of sci-fi intermingled with early D&D.
It's only later that people obsessed with renfaire-esque "simulation" demanded everything fit into their bizarro take on dark ages history.
So yeah, D&D and sci-fi go together wonderfully :)
The Tenth Dimension
There is a video on U-Tube that goes into the theory that there are 10 Dimensions of space and time.
It gets foggy on the higher ones, but I have used D&D to fill in the blanks.
That video grossly misrepresents science in an attempt to 'educate' but ultimately creates and propagates false ideas of dimensional theory.
As for my setting, it is entirely unlikely that any more time travel will be experienced. Since time travel creates a new universe in which stuff is different, time travel will not affect the world they live in at all. The only reason it has done so is when this timeline itself was split off and created.
So no time travel for the players. Ever. It's too much hassle.
I have a 3rd party sourcebook from the 3.0 days called the Starfarer's Handbook, for a setting called Dragonstar, which is all about Sci-Fi in a fantasy setting. I bought it because of the rules regarding purely sci-fi elements are better than the rules in D20 Future forhte same things, but it's definitely worth looking at for anyone who wants to play a Fantasy/SciFi blend.
But after discussing this with a few people (not my players, since I intend such things to remain secret until they discover things), I've generally found that they dislike it, saying it's too 'WoWish' or that the science fiction elements cheapen the fantasy. I've never played WoW so I don't really know much about how that relates.
I may jump from topic to topic, so please bear with me while I try to keep this reply on course.
The reference to World of Warcraft is simply with your ship breaking up over the planet. Within WoW's first expansion (Burning Crusade) a planar ship from Draenor comes through the twisting nether into Azeroth (the main world of WoW). The ship breaks up and crashes, scattering its ruinous expanse across the world, particularly in NE Kalimdor. The ship's inhabitants --the Draenei-- eventually join the alliance.
That is where your friends are drawing their parallels.
In actual fact, craft crashing over pseudo medieval world (effectively melding of science fiction and fantasy RPG elements) is a tried-and-true combination, having been used a number of times since the inception of D&D. Two examples include:
1. Expedition to the Barrier Peaks
2. Warhammer Fantasy Battles (read the part about 'The Warhammer World')
Just on melding science-fiction technology and fantasy as a whole; there are also a number of novels that deal with it. To me, none stand out more than a lot of David Gemmell's Drenai Saga. David Gemmell is superb at describing technological legacies in a sword and sorcery fueled milieu. Without giving too much away, I must insist that you read the Swords of Night and Day, for those descriptions alone. You could use those same descriptive tools to flavor your creation. (As a fan of his work, I want you to get the most out of it as a great story, so I tentatively cringe having to tell you that you would do well reading Legend, The First Chronicles of Druss the Legend, Legend of Deathwalker, King Beyond the Gate, Waylander, Waylander II/Realm of the Wolf, Hero in the Shadows, White Wolf --and maybe Morningstar and Knights of Dark Renown as well-- in order to get the most out of it.)
Further reading of David Gemmell's work also include Wolf in Shadow, Last Guardian and Bloodstone. These books deal with time travel and alternate timelines.
Science Fiction does not cheapen fantasy at all, in my opinion. Handled correctly, it can add an interesting dimension for your players to discover.
I have actually been considering using Expedition to the Barrier Peaks. :)
As another source of inspiration, I'm pondering Panzer Dragoon. To meld science-fiction things into a very fantastic presentation.
There's a sourcebook for Rolemaster/ Spacemaster called Darkspace; bioware , hardtech (science), undead and creepy Cthulhu aliens from beyond reality.
I'm stating the obvious, but the Gamemastery Guide has some tools that can help with that, as discussed here.
Here's a quote from that thread:
What there is, though - as far as space goes - is a lengthy discussion on creating planets, elements of alien worlds, space travel (via portals, vessels, spells, and such), and extraterrestrials, providing details and advice on what GMs who want to run such games should consider and include should they want to take their games in whatever directions they please.
I'll trim it down for making my point.
In the 5th dimention, new time streams are both being created and destroyed. Think of your time travelers as beavers. They divert the stream, and the rest of the 'current' stream dries up. The Gods, played by Mark Trail and Smokey the Bear, find the timestream full of just undead, and dig it under, because it looks like a small brush fire.
Any dam they don't like, they trank the beavers, move them, and kick down that dam.
Do you like Steven King? How about his time travel story?
Any excess timelines will be eaten.
The monsters who you never saw all of were great.
For the purpose of my setting, original timelines must remain. This is used by the undead to bridge the old world (theirs) and the new one they split off.
Since there is no magic in the first timeline, it's unlikely that a gate can be used to travel there.
To bridge the gap there would have to be some kind of awesome epic endeavour from both sides. Linking a technological wormhole thing with a magical gate. Sort of like Arcanum, I suppose?
The dying earth series by Jack Vance (think vancian system) are a mix of science fiction and fantasy. So right there, the idea that advanced technology has no place in a fantasy setting is nonsense. Pierce Anthony is also another example of setting that mixes high technology and fantasy elements.
Check Gygax's list of inspirational reading for D&D in the back of the old DMG. There are scads of sci-fi sources, including the above-referenced Vance, plus Sterling Lanier's Hiero's Journey (a major inspiration for 1e psionics), and Poul Anderson's The High Crusade (in which aliens land in Medieval England, only to have the local baron commandeer their ship and return to their home planet demanding tribute...). And Roger Zelazny's Lord of Light, in which the demarkation line between fantasy and SF is intentionally blurred to the point of vanishing.
And then in the early days of the game, there was the "Temple of the Frog" adventure and the City of the Gods and the EGG of Coot, and the Starship Warden, and Murlynd with his six-shooters, and so on... the list is endless. SciFi was an integral part of D&D from the very start.
The Expert D&D "Castle Amber" adventure shamelessly centered around time travel, if that specific gimmick is what you're worried about, so there's ample precedent there as well.
I ran one time travel campaign before... oh the headache...
turned out through rolplaying the characters were their own fathers... and went time hopping again to turn out to be their own grandfathers... and turns out they are their own sons as well...
and the intermingling... oh! The mage was the half brother to the warrior who was the nephew of the rogue who was father to the cleric who was his own father! it got... weird...
My Planescape game was almost as bad. It included time travel and dimension hopping. I purposely included events that confused the hell out of the PCs at the time, only to explain them later when they time traveled and set the events into motion. The game wraped up with PCs stopping an invasion by the Far Realm that resulted in the one of the characters being resonsible for sending himself (as a baby) back in time to Sigil where he grew up as an orphan.
Check Gygax's list of inspirational reading for D&D in the back of the old DMG. There are scads of sci-fi sources, including the above-referenced Vance, plus Sterling Lanier's Hiero's Journey (a major inspiration for 1e psionics), and Poul Anderson's The High Crusade (in which aliens land in Medieval England, only to have the local baron commandeer their ship and return to their home planet demanding tribute...). And Roger Zelazny's Lord of Light, in which the demarkation line between fantasy and SF is intentionally blurred to the point of vanishing.
And then in the early days of the game, there was the "Temple of the Frog" adventure and the City of the Gods and the EGG of Coot, and the Starship Warden, and Murlynd with his six-shooters, and so on... the list is endless. SciFi was an integral part of D&D from the very start.
The Expert D&D "Castle Amber" adventure shamelessly centered around time travel, if that specific gimmick is what you're worried about, so there's ample precedent there as well.
OOh i forgot about lord of light. That one was one of my favorites. Hindu Gods, check. Armies of men weilding mideval weapons, check. Space ship. Che..wha?
There is a two story paperback called Wizard World, I think.
Anyway, this kid grows up in our world, then discovers magic things happen when he sings. Turns out, the wizard who defeated and killed his father sent him away assuming he wouldn't return. When he came back, he was referred to as a Mad Wand, or an untrained Wizard.
In that, mixing magic and science is possible, but destructive. Kind of like how in Fringe, the two universes are crushing each other. If you want the two timelines to not hurt each other, fine.
I think people who grew up in a magic world would have trouble driving a car or firing a gun.