So recently I've been paging through the Legendary Planet 3pp AP, as well as the 1e Distant Worlds book, everything about Numeria and its AP, and 2e's Doorway to the Red Star adventure, and I was wondering about writing up adventures and settings for ""sword and planet/sword and stars""-type adventures in Pathfinder.
I have always been very intrigued by the idea of interplanetary adventures in Pathfinder, and have always liked the inclusion of elements from scifi in the fantasy world of Golarion (and in fact in fantasy in general). For example, I've always been fascinated by the idea of ""naturalized"" alien races in fantasy worlds, and elves in Pathfinder are literally aliens from another planet! You can play a space alien right out of the corebook! This isn't even counting the plethora of ""construct"" ancestries in 2e.
In addition, the fact that Golarion is greatly post-apocalyptic helps as well, since there is the idea of fledgling societies forming around the ruins of the past in Golarion which I feel is conducive to the inclusion of weird and otherworldly pulp elements. Also, more specifically, Golarion has the status of being the Cage for Rovagug, which I feel is a great plot point for ""sword and planet"" type campaigns.
In these ways, I've been working on worldbuilding setting elements for such adventures. Currently, I'm working on a city set on a fantasy world in my personal setting that will be a major port for interworld adventure and such.
I'm very curious to hear what you all think about this. What are your general thoughts on the topic? Have you tried to include these aspects in your game?
edit: to note, I know Starfinder exists, but a. I personally dislike it since it simply doesn't work for me and b. it doesn't really fit the tone of the original scifi stuff in Pathfinder that I'm discussing in the post.
I've introduced Traveller T20 elements to my mystara campaign. There is also a book called Technology Unleashed,but it gets a bit adult with some of its rules. Otherwise if that's not a problem,then I can't recommend this book enough.
My campaign is a typical fantasy world, however the equivalent of a Star destroyer is discovered under the city that will become the base of my setting which moves to the stars.
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I've always felt like interplanetary adventures are akin to interplanar adventures. An alien environment, alien cultures, and even alien physics. The only difference in my mind is that on another planet, you can look up at the stars and know that your own home is out there somewhere.
Even in standard fantasy planetary teleport exists for a reason.
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I've always felt like interplanetary adventures are akin to interplanar adventures. An alien environment, alien cultures, and even alien physics. The only difference in my mind is that on another planet, you can look up at the stars and know that your own home is out there somewhere.
Even in standard fantasy planetary teleport exists for a reason.
To note, I've heard of Legendary Planet by Legendary Games, but personally that crosses the thin line between ""sword and planet"" and ""basically bog standard fantasy with a slight palette swap"" too much.
Ironically my intro into Sword and Planet was this obscure article in the back of Dragon magazine 102 (or 101) called ""Iron Lords of Jupiter"" (?) which basically was ""John Carter of Mars but on Jupiter and also Jupiter just has really thick cloud cover over its rocky surface in the same way Venus is the steamy stone age jungle planet"".
I do like Scifi x fantasy, which is basically what the old pulp stuff is, but I feel sometimes stupid stuff goes unexplained. Dragonstar for DnD 3.0 is a setting that I also feel is sort of like Starfinder before Starfinder, but it has it's own problems.
ps: I also dislike ""planetary teleport"" since it's a really awkward stealth retcon of spell mechanics/lore that I feel is rather underhanded/needlessly confusing.
Ironically my intro into Sword and Planet was this obscure article in the back of Dragon magazine 102 (or 101) called ""Iron Lords of Jupiter"" (?) which basically was ""John Carter of Mars but on Jupiter and also Jupiter just has really thick cloud cover over its rocky surface in the same way Venus is the steamy stone age jungle planet"".
Edgar Rice Burroughs actually wrote a novel where John Carter wound up on Jupiter. It wasn't a jungle world and the reason the gravity wasn't heavier than on mars was "centrifugal force". This would appear to be the extreme opposite of hard SF, not soft but gaseous SF, like Star Wars.
I was in love with the John Carter and Carson of Venus books when a kid and never quite got over it. So D3stro 2119 you are commanded to move to Perth, Western Australia immediately so I can play in your Campaign.
I have a sword and planet type campaign planned, which rips off the idea of stargates from, well Stargate, and the PCs will go to a Dyson Sphere and interact with the 3 godmind type AIs that maintain it. One, the one charged with defending the Dyson Sphere, has had nothing to do for billions of years and has gone insane.
On another topic, PF1 with high tech and Starfinder are not nescessarily in competition. You go for PF1 with high tech if you want higher fantasy with more powerful magic.
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There is also a book called Technology Unleashed,but it gets a bit adult with some of its rules. Otherwise if that's not a problem,then I can't recommend this book enough.
It is this one?
Dungeon Magazine 92 was Polyhedron Magazine 151 too and had a interesting article about speljammer. I think it has some stuff you can use. You can find it on the Internet.
There was another number of Dungeon with material for a Gamma World setting. Again, you can take things from there.
There was GDS "Space: 1889" too. You would have to adapt the rules, but it was a Barsoom-like setting with a sword and Victorian mad tech theme.
Yup. I came across this book looking for a d20 Transformers. Battlechangers Ironworks and that book are pretty good. I love Dragonstar as well.
There was GDS "Space: 1889" too. You would have to adapt the rules, but it was a Barsoom-like setting with a sword and Victorian mad tech theme.
"Space: 1889" was an excellent game that deserved more players than it got.
It had a Barsoom-like setting but only on Mars. We flew there in our zeppelin. The rest of the solar system was different.
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There was GDS "Space: 1889" too. You would have to adapt the rules, but it was a Barsoom-like setting with a sword and Victorian mad tech theme.
"Space: 1889" was an excellent game that deserved more players than it got.
It had a Barsoom-like setting but only on Mars. We flew there in our zeppelin. The rest of the solar system was different.
I hadn't it, but read some material in Challenger, the GDW magazine. Seeing GDW going under because TSR sued them was very sad, they had a good magazine and good products.
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Ironically my intro into Sword and Planet was this obscure article in the back of Dragon magazine 102 (or 101) called ""Iron Lords of Jupiter"" (?) which basically was ""John Carter of Mars but on Jupiter and also Jupiter just has really thick cloud cover over its rocky surface in the same way Venus is the steamy stone age jungle planet"".
Edgar Rice Burroughs actually wrote a novel where John Carter wound up on Jupiter. It wasn't a jungle world and the reason the gravity wasn't heavier than on mars was "centrifugal force". This would appear to be the extreme opposite of hard SF, not soft but gaseous SF, like Star Wars.
I was in love with the John Carter and Carson of Venus books when a kid and never quite got over it. So D3stro 2119 you are commanded to move to Perth, Western Australia immediately so I can play in your Campaign.
I have a sword and planet type campaign planned, which rips off the idea of stargates from, well Stargate, and the PCs will go to a Dyson Sphere and interact with the 3 godmind type AIs that maintain it. One, the one charged with defending the Dyson Sphere, has had nothing to do for billions of years and has gone insane.
On another topic, PF1 with high tech and Starfinder are not nescessarily in competition. You go for PF1 with high tech if you want higher fantasy with more powerful magic.
On the topic of ""hardness"" of scifi, I would argue that that whole thing is basically meaningless (in fact a great deal of so called ""hard scifi"" is actually ""gaseous"" as you put it), and that simply categorizing scifi as "high", or "medium" or "low", etc. makes much more sense.
Having said that, I've been working on making a setting that is in the sub genre of "Sword and Stars" which is basically a classification I use to describe a setting that incorporates medium/high scifi stuff with medium/high fantasy elements. I am also working on writing campaigns and adventures for this setting.