I'm looking for a setting that combines space ships, lasers and the final frontiers with arcane magic.
Imagine if your classic DnD Wizzards boarded the Serenity and smuggled goods with Captain Reynolds.
Show me what you got.
Posted Nov 6, 2018, 10:30 AM UTC
Sounds like Stars Without Number: Revised to me. You should take a look (there is a free pdf version). It's an excellent game!
Just had a quick look and this looks really good.
SWN already has some support for magic classes and importing magic stuff from other OSR games, but the author is currently working on a 40+ page supplement that adds more space-magic content:
Take a look at dragonstar
Spelljammer.
Hippo-people. In. SPAAAAACE.
Can you give me some more details?
It looks like a setting for AD&D 2E?
I'm not sure I can still find the books for such an ancient ruleset.
PDFs of the boxed set and some/all of the supplements are on DriveThruRPG
From the product info:
Jeff Grubb came to the meeting with an agenda: he wanted to push the boundaries of standard fantasy. He had an idea too, one that began with a single image: a knight standing on the deck of a ship in space, unprotected from the elements. In other words, Grubb proposed "D&D in Space".
Basically, sailing ships in space; connecting most of the campaign settings of the time. And miniature giant space hamsters.
A lot of people run it with 5e, depending on your needs.
smh "ancient"
I used to be big into Spelljammer, but it's important to consider that it's kind of a quasi-Victorian view of Space with intentional breaks from realism some may find undesirable. It uses air envelopes and gravity planes to make the imagery of boarding parties from ships that kind of resemble boats are a thing in the setting.
Starfinder has dnd vibes (well actually pathfinder vibes) and seems decent.
Seconding Starfinder & Dragonstar.
Spelljammer.
Stars Without Number is my choice. The author is currently building a Space Magic system for it. Well, he has one, but he's making more. As is, though, you can do Space Magic just fine.
The Cypher system is a good engine, also.
There's a hack of Lamentations of the Flame Princess called Machinations of the Space Princess. I haven't read it, but it looked neat.
GURPS or HERO or D6 Space/D6 Fantasy or Genesys or Cypher...
Build it yourself. That way it will be perfect for you.
or Savage World or
Esper Genesis is interchangeable with 5e Dungeons and Dragons
The rules for space combat are a little abstract, but Numenera (with the "Into the Night" space supplement) could fit the bill. The core concept of Numenera is that tech is "magic" to most people, since it's a billion years in Earth's future and many civs have come and gone after rising to tech levels that are literally not comprehensible to baseline humans, who have returned (somehow from somewhere, nobody knows) and are rebuilding a medieval-level society out of the alien detritus of the past.
I ran a Night campaign that had the players transported to a giant (breathable) waterdrop in orbit, where they discovered a derelict alien clam spaceship infested by parasites, took it over, crewed it with "native" humans stranded in the waterdrop generations ago.
The campaign involved a time travel device inside the moon, ghost cities on Mars, floating, half-living cloud cities populated by upside down green aliens on Venus, and gradually upgrading/repairing their ship. Had a couple of space combats including repelling boarders, EVA, and pew pew lasers.
Like I said, the space battle mechanics are really abstracted; I felt the need to homebrew it a little bit to make it a bit more robust (especially since I was including upgrading the ship's systems, so I needed that granularity to matter.) But you might find the setting compelling.
Wh40k?
Alternity with all the Sourcebooks on magic etc. I run that for a couple of years.Wonky level system but very cool anyway.
You can always check out Equinox.
Starfinder is this
Some guys and i made one of those. It also has Martians and spider people. You can find the recordings on twitch if you search for goldenwh dinosaurs.
Mine's a bit more of the other direction, Magic + Space. I've been idly tinkering with a conversion to use Scum & Villainy (a Firefly/Star Wars/Cowboy Bebop sort of hack of Blades in the Dark) for use in my Shatterlands setting, a straight up medieval fantasy world that was destroyed by an eldritch apocalypse and now survives as continents and islands orbiting the corrupted core of the planet. Traditional magic has all but disappeared since the apocalypse, but there are still occasional mages and clerics about. Technomagic has stepped up to fill the gap, powered by crystals that form on the underside of the floating islands where they are exposed to the strange radiations emanating from the eldritch core, including things like boltcasters and airships. Airships that can be used for things like smuggling and piracy.
The WOIN system has separate setting books for fantasy (OLD) and sci-fi (NEW) that are designed to be compatible. So you could drop the magic system from OLD (and the careers that give you access to magic) into NEW and have it work just fine.
DarkSpace by ICE. Cthuhlu type of horror mixed with sci-fi- with Magic!
It's a book series, but Darkwar by Glen Cook might give you some inspiration.
I've heard lots of good things about "Black Company" by Cook and it's on my reading list. So maybe I'll just replace it with this. Thanks for the tip.
The black company is a better series (first 3 books at least), but darkwar does have the pretty cool translation from medieval fantasy->steampunk/magic->scifi/magic.
That's exactly what Starfinder is, sci-fi fantasy.