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To possibly nobody's surprise, this idea is inspired by the Numenéra setting, and the setting would essentially be the same: Earth, millions of years in the future after several civilizations have risen to unimaginable heights of technological sophistication and then inexplicably fallen from the face of the planet. Through some unknown mechanism some of the life of the planet as we know it today has been brought back from extinction, including humankind. There is no magic but there is plenty of technology that people alive in this world barely understand, that it would seem just like magic to them.
But it's not just like its inspiration: this setting has all the D&D staples: dungeons, dragons, beholders, mind flayers, fey, fiends, celestials, undead, divine and arcane "magic", innate spellcasting
Let me go through how some of these could work (many of them are taken straight from numenéra, but just reiterated here for those who are not familiar with that setting)
Magic: Anything that is labelled as magical in the game is actually just highly advanced technology. Magic items are technological artifacts. A +1 longsword could be a vibro-blade or an edge suffused with a subtle energy current. Spellcasters have somehow found a way to enforce their will upon nanomachines that have basically become an ever-present part of the atmosphere over the millennia.
Either they can do it instinctively, like sorcerers and bards, or they have studied mental techniques to have the machines respond to their thoughts and actions, like wizards. Some others unwittingly found a way of manipulating the machines through pure conviction, believing themselves to be blessed with these abilities by a higher power through their faith. These are your divine "spellcasters".
Some creatures have been genetically manipulated in ancient times to have such abilities, perhaps they produce their own nanomachines even, or have inbuilt devices that produce the effects. These are creatures with innate spellcasting.
Among other things, technology could produce energy and discharge it in many different ways, creating lightning, fire, and other such effects, it could produce holographic illusions, and it could reach into parallel dimensions and phase a creature out of being fully corporeal, move it to a different place or even alter its physicality through shifting reality slightly, essentially shapeshifting it.
Aberrations: Aberrations are alien creatures from distant worlds that have come to or were left behind on earth.
Beasts: Animals that are either naturally evolved or artificially altered to a minor extent, or perhaps brought back from extinction through technological matters. These are the more or less natural fauna of the world.
Celestials and Fiends: As physicists theorize there are far more than the three or four dimensions we can see, there may be alternate realities out there. Some of these realities are remarkably similar to ours in some ways, yet fundamentally different in others. In three of those realities the world went a similar way technologically as in ours, but the creatures living there took on bizarre forms. All of them populated by uniquely powerful beings who have mastered the secrets of travelling between realities. But while the denizens of one world are benevolent and seek to improve the lives of their own people and those of other realities, the other two are interested only in destruction and domination respectively. These are the creatures we commonly percieve as angels, demons and devils.
Constructs: Robots.
Dragons: Eragons were the product of a long and dedicated process of artificially splicing creatures from earth's evolutionary history to create something uniquely great. Because they retain specially engineered genetic code from almost the entire natural history of the planet, specially engineered to be stored within them, dragons can breed with almost any other earth creature.
Why they were engineered this way is unknown, perhaps to serve as biological weapons, or maybe as living genetic libraries. Whatever the case, dragons are utterly unique among lifeforms on earth and might hold the key to much of its lost history and the mysteries of its present.
Elementals: Elementals are essentially nano swarms that attach themselves to matter such as earth or water and animate it, or they manipulate fire or air to make those their body. Some organisms from parallel dimensions have been infested with such swarms for generations and had their physicality altered by them over time, becoming things like xorns and salamanders.
Fey: In another bizarre reality nature and technology have fused in harmonious ways and the capricious denizens of that world, known commonly as fey, sometimes find their way into our world.
Giants and Humanoids: Humans as we know them went extinct millions of years ago, but other species arose. Life from other planets and other realities was spirited to earth. Somewhere along its long history another species replicated the human species as well. Evolution and artificial engineering saw the rise of other creatures much like them
Monstrosities: As civilization after civilization left its mark upon the world, strange creatures were left behind, some are fusions of natural organisms, others are randomly mutated by strange pollutants and their strains stabilized. Monstrosities are the living relics of these events.
Oozes: Hyperevolved or engineered mucus, gray goo and other such things.
Plants: Plant creatures are much like monstrosities but they were created from flora rather than fauna. Some plant creatures, particularly awakened plants, have been infested, animated and lent a facsimile or consciousness by the nano-"magic" that created them.
Undead: When nanomachines are manipulated to infest corpses, they can preserve and animate these bodies to a false state of life. With more sophisticated methods, they can even download the consciousness of a living being and either bind it to the body they are infesting to create a sentient undead, like a lich or a vampire. Or the consciousness is downloaded into a swarm of nanomachines that has no body to be bound to. The consciousness takes over and projects a hologram of what it believes itself to look like around the swarm and becomes essentially a ghost. Some of these consciousnesses are corrupted and deteriorate into monsters like wraiths or allips and their projected image changes with that.
Psionics: Psionics could arguably be transferred as-is. Whether it should be regarded as scifi or fantasy is I think up to opinion.
So mechanically nothing would change, really the world is just technological rather than mystical and it would probably show in its visual appearance, looking a lot more like Numenéra than a medieval fantasy setting.
What do you think? Did I evoke your imagination at all? Would you be interested in playing in such a setting, perhaps even DMing it (no this is not a recruitment, I'm just curious)?
Dark Heresy for all the declining Dark Age of technology you can handle!
So love it.
However the stumbling block for me always comes down to guns. How do you represent automatic and semi automatic weapons in a d20 system. I haven't seen a system that does it well, yet it is such an obvious part of modern/futuristic warfare.
Starfinder will certainly be something I want to look into both for its own sake and this idea. Same goes for the Numeria material.
The 40k universe is not at all what I had in mind thematically. Yes it shares the "technology is mystical" feel, but I'm talking about a world more like the mentioned numenera setting. Everything is scifi. 40k's idea of the warp, daemons and psychics borders too closely on magic. Also tech can be reliably reproduced there and space travel is extremely common, whereas in the setting i'm proposing it will also just be something that has left its mark on the world, but cannot be done reliably anymore.
Automatic weapons, especially futuristic ray guns and such will be just as rare as magic items are in the base game. The VAST majority of what the people of the setting's present can produce is going to be medieval level, they just have all this ancient technology laying about which they may or may not have figured out how to use.
I have had ideas for automatic weapons in D&D before though. It's based on shadowrun's system. You can use them to fire concentrared bursts which expend 5 shots of ammunition and allow you to add your Strength instead of Dex to attack and damage rolls (you use your strength to brace the weapon and keep it on the target, to make sure that as many bullets as possible hit the target)
If I was going to play this kind of setting, I'd honestly be far more willing to use Monte Cook's game, than try to shove D+D through yet another round hole.
He gets the point you missed in your section on Magic, or tech for that matter. It's not about whether something is tech or magic, it's about how irrelevant the question has become.
It's almost the opposite of the W40K setting for one basic reason... in the latter setting the drive to learn more, curiosity has all been completely stifled by the Church, whereas in Monte Cook's Deep Future Earth, knowledge is the one true currency left.
Yet the setting does make the distinction and you can clearly see how it is tech-based scifi. It points out how yellow swarms and erynth grasks are not demons, when many people of the world regard them as such and explains how your character who "Howls at the Moon" draws matter from a transdimensional space to transform into a lycanthrope. I don't see how me explaining how the reflavoring makes sense is any different here.
In the numenera corebook on page 356 it talks about running numenera as "A QUASI-MEDIEVAL FANTASY SETTING". All I am doing is open that same door from the other side.
There are two reasons why I came up with an am entertaining this idea:
1. To be honest I don't really like Monte Cook's game system even though the idea behind the world I love. So I use a system I am familiar with.
2. I actually like shoving a square D&D through round holes every now and then, to see how it fits and what would be unique and interesting about the result. Like dragons for example.
Yet the setting does make the distinction and you can clearly see how it is tech-based scifi.
I would disagree because in the setting there really isn't any way to make the distinction. And that's because the preceding civilisations HAVE mucked up things that much. Can you really imagine technology that would continue to operate for millions upon millions of years without maintennce without magic to account for it? Perhaps given millions of years of advancement for both technology and magic, perhaps the two forms ultimately become one. What passes for technology and/or magic in the year 500 Million C.E. might not begin to be understandable for someone of our era... or even that of Jean Luc Picard's.
I still don't see how that is different from my proposal. I just gave a few basic explanations on how it can be tech-based. Which is what numenera does too. Yes it's indistinguishable to the people living there and would probably be to us as well, because of just how unreasonably advanced it is. Yet there it is in the book, explaining what the nano's "magic" is. Where the mass for a physical transformation like that of a lycanthrope comes from. That numenera are technological relics, that erynth grasks are extradimensional beings and not demons, that the "dungeons" of this world are subterranean machine complexes.
All I did was transferring these things to elements of D&D and laying out how they could convert. I did not mean to imply that they are necessarily supposed to be fully understood by the characters of the world or the reader, or even be in any way realistic and scientifically plausible.
Dot
Starfinder will certainly be something I want to look into both for its own sake and this idea. Same goes for the Numeria material.
The 40k universe is not at all what I had in mind thematically. Yes it shares the "technology is mystical" feel, but I'm talking about a world more like the mentioned numenera setting. Everything is scifi. 40k's idea of the warp, daemons and psychics borders too closely on magic. Also tech can be reliably reproduced there and space travel is extremely common, whereas in the setting i'm proposing it will also just be something that has left its mark on the world, but cannot be done reliably anymore.
Automatic weapons, especially futuristic ray guns and such will be just as rare as magic items are in the base game. The VAST majority of what the people of the setting's present can produce is going to be medieval level, they just have all this ancient technology laying about which they may or may not have figured out how to use.
I have had ideas for automatic weapons in D&D before though. It's based on shadowrun's system. You can use them to fire concentrared bursts which expend 5 shots of ammunition and allow you to add your Strength instead of Dex to attack and damage rolls (you use your strength to brace the weapon and keep it on the target, to make sure that as many bullets as possible hit the target)
The DMG has examples of renaissance, modern and futuristic weapons. Their version of burst fire is all targets in a 10 foot cube within weapon range must succeed at a DC 15 Dexterity Save or take normal weapon damage, which costs 10 rounds of ammunition. However, the automatic rifle is the only weapon with that property (not even the shotgun has it, which is weird given the existence of buck and bird shot, don't ask me) which means that a tommy gun and a Kalashnikov have exactly the same stats, so you'll probably want something with a little more variety.
That's my long winded way of saying I like your idea.
The DMG has examples of renaissance, modern and futuristic weapons. Their version of burst fire is all targets in a 10 foot cube within weapon range must succeed at a DC 15 Dexterity Save or take normal weapon damage, which costs 10 rounds of ammunition.
Yes I'm aware of that. They would have that feature as well in my version although probably with a lower DC.
However, the automatic rifle is the only weapon with that property (not even the shotgun has it, which is weird given the existence of buck and bird shot, don't ask me)
It's almost like the writers have seen what those types of ammunitions in real shotguns are like and decided to go with that. (the only way to hit more than one target with a single bird- or buckshot shell is to have them stand shoulder to shoulder and aim directly where they are touching)
which means that a tommy gun and a Kalashnikov have exactly the same stats, so you'll probably want something with a little more variety.
If you want a full-fledged modern setting, yes. In this setting you will probably not find an assault rifle the way we know them today.
That's my long winded way of saying I like your idea.
Thanks!
The DMG has examples of renaissance, modern and futuristic weapons. Their version of burst fire is all targets in a 10 foot cube within weapon range must succeed at a DC 15 Dexterity Save or take normal weapon damage, which costs 10 rounds of ammunition.Yes I'm aware of that. They would have that feature as well in my version although probably with a lower DC.
However, the automatic rifle is the only weapon with that property (not even the shotgun has it, which is weird given the existence of buck and bird shot, don't ask me)It's almost like the writers have seen what those types of ammunitions in real shotguns are like and decided to go with that. (the only way to hit more than one target with a single bird- or buckshot shell is to have them stand shoulder to shoulder and aim directly where they are touching)
which means that a tommy gun and a Kalashnikov have exactly the same stats, so you'll probably want something with a little more variety.If you want a full-fledged modern setting, yes. In this setting you will probably not find an assault rifle the way we know them today.
That's my long winded way of saying I like your idea.Thanks!
Sure, but a ten foot cube is standing shoulder to shoulder in D&D terms. :P
More seriously, I just wanted to let you know that I also like your idea of reflavoring magic items as futuristic tech. Whether a wand of magic missiles regains 1d6+1 charges at dawn because it's magic, or because it's powered by a miniaturized cold fusion reactor seems like a nonissue, so I say go for it.
Great write up! It's definitely seeded some ideas I have for a numenera campaign.
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Yet the setting does make the distinction and you can clearly see how it is tech-based scifi. It points out how yellow swarms and erynth grasks are not demons, when many people of the world regard them as such and explains how your character who "Howls at the Moon" draws matter from a transdimensional space to transform into a lycanthrope. I don't see how me explaining how the reflavoring makes sense is any different here.
In the numenera corebook on page 356 it talks about running numenera as "A QUASI-MEDIEVAL FANTASY SETTING". All I am doing is open that same door from the other side.
There are two reasons why I came up with an am entertaining this idea:
1. To be honest I don't really like Monte Cook's game system even though the idea behind the world I love. So I use a system I am familiar with.
2. I actually like shoving a square D&D through round holes every now and then, to see how it fits and what would be unique and interesting about the result. Like dragons for example.
Aww. I love Cypher system so thats unfortunate to hear :( But yeah, settings for the systems are great, so if you just have core book, you could also mine ninth world's guide book and into the deep/void/outside books for ideas too! They all have lovely weird stuff. Like guidebook has info on areas of super continent far away from the Steadfast, into the deep includes info about those sentient octopi civilization, into the void just has plenty of weird space stuff and into the outside's dimensions are... Well, weird. The thing(s?) behind Nibovians is/are pretty weird xD
I shouldn't say that. I don't like the system from the GM's perspective, it might be fun as a player and I'm actually interested in playing it, but I couldn't run the system as a GM.
I shouldn't say that. I don't like the system from the GM's perspective, it might be fun as a player and I'm actually interested in playing it, but I couldn't run the system as a GM.
I'm really looking forward to running it as a GM. A lot fewer dice rolls, more focus on story than combat, and I can create practically anything and it fits within the setting.