Editing Science Fantasy (section)

==Examples of Science Fantasy on /tg/==

'''[[Star Wars]]:''' Probably the best known "Science Fantasy" setting. While it originates from outside tabletop gaming, there have been vast numbers of roleplaying, miniature and board games set in Star Wars. Indeed, [[Star Wars RPG|the West End Games RPG]] laid the foundation for '''everything''' that wasn't in the films or Lucas's notes.

'''[[Supers|Superhero Settings]]:''' While individual heroes can be relatively pure Science Fiction, Horror, or Urban Fantasy, when you start glomming them together and try to make it make sense, you usually wind up in Science Fantasy pretty easily. (Yes, it still counts as /tg/; [[Mutants & Masterminds]], [[Champions]], [[Villains and Vigilantes]], [[Superworld]], dedicated [[Splat]] for generic systems like [[GURPS]] or [[Savage Worlds]], and over a dozen licensed games based on [[DC Comics]] and [[Marvel Comics]] all exist, and that non-exhaustive list doesn't even get into systems based on ''Japanese'' style super heroes.)

'''[[Numenera]]:''' A world presented in classic fantasy style... except it's actually set on an Earth billions of years into the future; all of the "magic items" are actually hyperscience devices whose underlying principles have been forgotten, spellcasters are either using psionics or hypertech gizmos, and the various non-humans and monsters are aliens from other worlds/dimensions, genetically engineered lifeforms, or robots.

'''[[Warhammer 40,000]]:''' Literally beginning its existence as "[[Warhammer Fantasy]] IN SPACE!", 40K is a classic example of the "tech first, fantasy second"( or is it [[Mork|"fantasy first, tech second"]] ?) aproach to Science Fantasy. The [[Space Marine]]s are techno-[[knight]]s cum [[paladin]]s, the [[Eldar]] are spacefaring elves, Dark Eldar tap into all sorts of "nasty faerie boogeyman" archetypes, [[psionics]] is essentially magic with sci-fi trappings, the [[orks]] are literally just [[orc]]s with guns and spaceships...

'''[[Expedition to the Barrier Peaks]]:''' This [[Advanced Dungeons & Dragons]] adventure module revolves around a band of [[Greyhawk]] adventurers exploring the ruins of a long-crashed alien spaceship.

'''[[Blackmoor]]:''' Is a [[Dungeons & Dragons]] setting in a world full of advanced science, and it's canonically the pre-apocalyptic past of [[Mystara]]. It's also the setting for the adventure modules "Temple of the Frog" and "City of the Gods".

'''[[Torg]]:''' Original in the sense it allowed multiple "realities" to co-exist (and duke it out) on Earth, so your average party could very well consist of [[wat|a clusterfuck]] of a cyborg Hulk, a prehistoric era shaman with his stone-tipped spear summoning a dinosaur to ride in battle, a suave Indiana Jones-esque adventurer and a [[ninja]] using both supernatural ninja powers and a machinegun.

'''[[Feng Shui]]:''' Put it like this; this is a world where psionic monkeys and cyborg techno-barbarians coexist alongside [[hengeyokai|shapeshifting animals]], [[ninja]]s and sorcerers.

'''[[RIFTS]]:''' Just... where do we start with RIFTS? To quote our frenemies on TVtropes: The tabletop RPG Rifts is set a few centuries after the high-tech world of tomorrow is utterly trashed by the return of magic. Human supremacist armies of cyborgs, chemically-enhanced supersoldiers, and Humongous Mecha traipse across the landscape. [[Atlantis]] has risen. Sorcerers summon demons and raise the dead. Rifts in spacetime spew out critters from other dimensions more or less at random. Elves and dragons and goblins (oh my) roam the wilderness. Killer cyborgs from another dimension want to kill all humanoid life on Earth. Gods battle Alien invaders. Vampires openly run entire cities. And that's just the tip of the iceberg.

'''[[Shadowrun]]:''' A world where The Magic Comes Back meets cyberpunk, so you've got dragons running megacorporations, elves with laser pistols, dwarves building killer robots and cyborg orcs & trolls all duking it out on the mean streets.

'''[[Pathfinder]]:''' Shamelessly using this trope, Pathfinder has everything from a "crashed alien spaceship in a land of barbarians" region on the planet itself to sourcebooks detailing the other worlds in the solar system, so you can involve interplanetary travel as much as you like. Its successor/spin-off [[Starfinder]] is basically Pathfinder set 1000 years later, so everyone lives in space after Golarion vanished.

'''[[Starfinder]]:''' AKA "Pathfinder '''''IN SPACE'''''". More Science Fiction to Pathfinder's High Fantasy, and thus even further into Science Fantasy.

'''[[Draenei]]:''' A race from [[World of Warcraft]] who originated on an alien planet, were rescued from demonic invaders by [[angel]]-like beings made of divine magical energy, and traveled to Azeroth in gargantuan fortresses magically propelled between worlds.

'''Escaflowne:''' An [[isekai]] anime in which fantasy races conduct war centered around the use of Guymelefs; [[knight]]-like giant [[clockpunk]] [[mecha]] [[magitek|powered by the crystalline hearts of]] [[dragon]]s.

The later books of the '''[[Discworld]]''' started to veer into Science Fantasy; towards the end of the series, it became sort of a [[steampunk]] series with wizards in it.

[[Monte Cook]] wrote a [[splatbook]] all about this concept for [[Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition]] called "Arcana of the Ancients".

'''[[Exalted]]''', as a setting, arguably approaches Science Fantasy from the other side; it's a very Fantasy setting, with a very finite cosmology very different from our own; and yet, it frequently has Science Fictiony trappings (Mecha and a lot of social science fiction, notably) in keeping with it veering heavily in the Hard Fantasy direction.

===And finally===
When you get down to it, [[Dungeons & Dragons]] even in its initial early years throws in a lot of science concepts, Often from the pulpy side from [[Expedition to the Barrier Peaks]] with a crashed space ship, Giant space hamsters, Aberrants from behind the stars, and tons of source and ecology books that give a surprising level of detail to monsters and magic. Like Hard Fantasy, The wider D&D multiverse doesn't operate on a modern understanding of physics but on that wacky seventeen, eighteen, and nineteen hundred speculative future and pulp fiction. Genre is always dependent on the current section, so treating the world as a pure magical medieval or pulpy anything goes world is up to group preference.

We list it separately because it has multiple sub-settings that are especially Science Fantasy, so as not to break up the main list. Here are those settings:

*'''[[Dragonmech]]:''' A [[Dungeons & Dragons]] setting where the collapse of the moon and resultant cataclysm has prompted the various races to emigrate into city-sized magic-powered mecha.
*'''[[Dragonstar]]:''' A [[Dungeons & Dragons]] setting where magic and science coexist, allowing for an interstellar empire run by dragons where cyborg wizards duke it out with laser-packing orcs.
*'''[[Spelljammer]]:''' A [[Dungeons & Dragons]] campaign setting that revolves around using magical ships (and by ships we mean "sail the seven seas" type) to fly between "crystal spheres" (fantasy solar systems) by way of an [[plane|alternate dimension]] called the [[Phlogiston]].
*'''[[Eberron]]:''' Another D&D campaign setting. Eberron is based in "wide magic", where sufficiently understood magic is indistinguishable from technology. While the baseline mixes pulp of the [[Industrial Revolution]] and [[The_World_Wars#The_Interwar|the Interwar]], many applications wouldn't be out of place in science fiction: Instead of sinks, bathrooms have devices that magically clean the user's everything, portals to the moons (and perhaps even beyond) are possible, artificial limbs of both the magical and biological alien variety exist and [[Quori|two types]] [[daelkyr|of aliens]] seek to invade it.

[[Category: Gamer Slang]]
[[Category: Setting Aesthetics]]