I’ll take a look, thank you for the reccomendtions.
Well, my broad tastes do also cover science vs magic, it’s just that I don’t like that it’s sort of implicitly assumed. I did also like Gate; one thing that I particularly liked was that it was only the medieval counterpart that was underpowered. The Empire didn’t lose purely because magic is weaker than tech, they lost because they haven’t been leveraging magic properly. The true dragons, powerful wizards like Lelei, and the gods are way tougher than modern tech. But they’re rare and the Empire hasn’t made a policy of recruiting wizards and appeasing gods to use them in their armies. But if they had, well, their massed legionaries vs. machine guns ends one way, and Rory charging an entire tank division ends the other way.
Also have just almost finished re-reading sort of inverse Gate with the Laundry Files book 7. Base premise is that magic works based on thought, particularly solving mathematical equations, though this often has bad consequences for the thinker. So they ran magic the way magic traditionally works, until computers because it turns out computers count as thinking for this purpose. So the British SOE aka the Laundry is a secret British Civil Service organization that has magic detector and ward apps standard on their phones (which suck because it takes way too long to get all the paperwork in to upgrade to a new model) and they do paperclip audits and provide security with Residual Human Resources and are preparing for CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN when the Great Old Ones awaken from their slumber to eat our brains, and they’ve approved SCORPION STARE to let cameras serve as Basilisk gazes (which generate a lot more heat when changing carbon to silicon than the legends say) in case of emergency, with sophisticated automated targeting software for England’s CCTV camera networks
Cut to another reality, where human evolution went differently and they have pointy ears and for evolutionary history reasons are better at math and gained speech much later so they have lots of good old fashioned magic and enchanted gear and rule is enforced by magical geases in layers. Unfortunately they had their magic doomsday and the Dead Gods tore apart the moon so we see the five thousand soldiers of the Host Of Air and Darkness coming out of magic stasis and deciding they’re not going to be able to wait out the Dead Gods so it’s time to go raid another dimension where the Uruk can’t use mana properly so they’ll be a pushover. And so they come over and the Laundry hurriedly flips over to CASE NIGHTMARE RED and calls the military and Ten Downing Street as they prepare to defend Leeds and… well it turns out ultimately neither side is really designed to fight the other. They’ve got Basilisk wands and have full-body iron armor to ground out death spells and leave no exposed carbon for Basilisks and their main defense is anti-perception spells backed by burning out the minds (or CPUs) of observers as well as air defense basilisks, but they don’t have guns so they don’t have armor against guns and their dragonback mages cannot tell an APC from an AA missile launcher. Mostly they win because Britain doesn’t have artillery parked in Leeds, so the Laundry fires up SCORPION STARE. Which is not sufficiently bug-tested.
Summary
The SCORPION STARE system is adaptive by design. Unfortunately it was initialized with a set of training data that is lethally corrupted, reducing its ability to discriminate friend from foe. And it’s about to go all Skynet in the middle of Leeds.
Also the anti-Basilisk defenses of the Host do work against them, though maybe not 100% of the time and there are a lot of CCTV cameras in Britain.
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I like all kinda setting/timeline as long the writing is good… Just the chance to “be someone else” who knows differnet things than I, has different priorities, experiences different things and all that sounds interesting imo.
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Urban Superhero theme + Medieval stuff = Drunken creation.
Superheros are just a modern term for magic.
Chalk me as another for urban fantasy. Take all that sword & sorcery, elves, dwarves and such and timeskip to modern/near-future tech level. Add corporate shadowrun/cyberpunk dystopia to taste.
I’m kind of bored with medieval, but it’s okay if it’s done well.
Honestly I was thinking of writing where you play as a young mage in the roaring twenties(not connected with the Harry Potter universe).
Where the MC is just one of the few thousand(a few thousand wizards seems a lot) in the world and you are attending the most prestigous wizard school on the continent. The MC is just every other wizard, no famous powerful parents or a family line of wizards dating back before the ‘dragon-scaled plague’ in the third era. You the MC will just live the life of a casual school student. You are not even given the special destiny to save the world by some master wizard gone rogue and is evil and is planning on destroying the world. No none of that just school life.
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I like the idea.Like I like the first 3 or 4 books of Harry Potter,fun magic,teenage adventures,school drama etc.As the franchise turned a darker.more serious direction,it lost the charm for me.
Not saying it’s bad,but if I was looking for magic turf wars,I do think there’re choices interest me better.
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I am a sucker for historical settings, may that be as far back as the acient Greeks or somewhere in the last century. I love history. I don’t do well with games set in the future, since they are to difficult to understand for me.
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I quite like ancient history or medieval fantasy as it’s so fun and interesting to explore those worlds and also to what life was back in the past
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I have nothing against sci-fi, and fantasy settings, but I really like a modern setting.
Present day, or the near past or near future settings are easy for me to relate to.
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A agree, Im a fan boi for both fantasy and historical medieval settings.
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The best thing about the more historical games is that even when you’re done with the game itself, you can always explore the world and setting through other historical based books/games/documentaries/etc., like Ken Burns’ The West or, as @JESTERBoi mentioned, Red Dead Redemption.
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The underlying reason why I like the cyborg magic wizard thing is that it’s the pinnacle of my favorite premise: What If people treated magic like we do technology. Example from talking about various reasons that an eagle flying Frodo to Mount Doom might not actually have been wise:
Fellbeasts, though, seem to be as good in the air as the eagles, so Sauron can basically have a Nazgul and three fellbeasts and the Nazgul sits on a fellbeast pearched on Barad-Dur 24/7 switching fellbeasts every eight hours so it’s rested.
Then the eagle shows up two months in and Sauron sees it and yells INCOMING AT 7 O’CLOCK! And the fellbeast takes off and it’s Frodo and an eagle against a Nazgul and a fellbeast in an aerial duel.
The idea being that just because something is magic doesn’t mean it can’t be studied and used. But the thing is that studying magic doesn’t mean it stops being magic, it just means you know the rules. So if the rules are different from technology, I want to see things designed around those alternate rules. Brandon Sanderson does this pretty well; basically what I like about The Stormlight Archive that it’s hard to find elsewhere is how they use Soulcasting and Fabrials to support the Shattered Plains campaign and how they react to Highstorms and how Azir uses Shardblades. Highstorms mean cities need to be built in the shadows of rock formations to allow for buildings that aren’t basically bunkers. So people who are not Azir and do not have a system of government patterned after Imperial China (probably a specific dynasty but I couldn’t name which) deal with this by siting their cities near big natural mountains. Azir is the butt of jokes about their paperwork but do use that paperwork to have a good civil service, so they see this problem and then they glance at their small number of precious magical swords that could cut through anything, and four weeks later they’ve finished up with the approval process and five guys with magic swords go into the middle of a giant plain of rock to a point where Azir has decided a city should be and they start digging.
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I like that Sauron basically acts like a control tower of an airbase.
“Incoming hostile airborne!”
*Activates air raid siren.
As for treating magic as we do with science, I’ve got a different view from yours.
One of the charms in a magic system is that they’re unknown. Mystical, mysterious, dangerous, Lovecraft-like, you name it. If you start analyzing magic scientifically, I think the magic will lose those charms. It will stop become supernatural magic; it will become applied magic.
Which is, honestly, one of the fun ideas I’ve been toying around in my WIP.
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Yeah, that was specifically what I was going for. It is RAF Fighter Command in the Battle Of Britain if they had Fellbeasts and Nazgul and the Eye instead of aircraft and radar. If it weren’t an illustrative example I would have worded it differently so it wasn’t so obvious. As is, the only thing to note is that there’s one Nazgul sitting there 24/7 and switching Fellbeasts instead of three or more pilots switching in and out of the cockpit, because Nazgul and fighters are tireless and humans and Fellbeasts are not.
Well, what I really want is basically you analyze it and then, well, now you know that a Basalik’s gaze works by converting 1% of all carbon in its line of sight into silicon explosively and that this requires the Basalisk to be able to actually clearly see the thing and it can’t be a fuzzy dot on the horizon. Then you ask how this works and your scientists just shrug helplessly.
So what you do is you have trained Basalisks with non-carbon eye shields, and then when the enemy sends their dragons at you what you do is you nudge the Basilisks to face towards the dragons and you get out of the way and you lift their eye shields and then the dragon explodes.
This is actually from The Laundry Files, though the Laundry is more towards the cyber wizard end so what they do is they find a way to make a computer program that lets a linked pair of cameras act like a Basilisk and then they authorize the development of SCORPION STARE to install this program on every CCTV camera in Britain so when CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN occurs and the Great Old Ones awaken from their slumber to eat all our brains (that is basically how CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN is first described) they can turn on an AI image recognition software so they have automatic look-to-kill capability for when Nyarlhotep turns half the people in London into zombies because CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN is basically that he does that.
The people who have trained Basalisks are the Host Of Air And Darkness, who are fleeing their homeworld because it’s been trashed after the Dead Gods awoke and destroyed their moon then descended to devour what little was left, and they see the Laundry doesn’t really have any wizards and they’re all magically powerful and they’ve got their Lovecraftian unicorn cavalry and some air defense basilisks and a dragon squadron, so their plan is they just charge right into Leeds, storm the enemy palace, capture their All-Highest aka Queen Elizabeth and forcibly transfer her network of geasa to their control, thus giving them total control over all of Britain.
Agent First Of Spies And Liars facepalms really hard at this point.
Obviously what happens next is a spoiler, but the key point is that the Host Of Air And Darkness is all kitted out for fighting people with Basilisks; they wear full-body iron armor so there’s no exposed carbon on their soldiers and they have layers and layers of illusion spells because the inviolate law of warfare is “If you are seen, you are dead” and this helps them some but unfortunately while this works on even electronic systems for the same reason SCORPION STARE works it turns out that bullets do not need to see a dragon to kill it. So things go badly for both sides.
The other thing is, this is basically a crossover except this is only The Laundry Files and not The Annals Of The Morningstar Empire. The Dead Gods awakening and destroying the moon is how the Host Of Air And Darkness describes it; the Laundry notes this down as when they had their version of CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN because both sides treat magic as technology, it’s just that the Host has greater magical resources and the Laundry is better at science, so the way they treat technology is very different.
I don’t really have a preference but I have noticed that modern day tends to be more detailed for obvious reasons so I enjoy that.
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Boy are you gonna be happy when you hear about Eberron.
I actually have but I don’t have a DnD group that is also interested, pretty much.
Medieval fantasy or honestly just anything pre 1800’s.
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