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Kornaki
2013-08-29, 05:49 PM
Inspired a bit by Harry potter and the natural 20 story, I was thinking a bit about running a game where the players come from a land where Dnd style magic is plentifulish, and they encounter a civilization from across the sea which has modern technology. How would you hide the fact that they aren't using magic from your players? For example, guns would appear to be wands or staves, planes would appear to be strange dragons or rocs or hippogriffs (I would never describe something as a "metal" dragon or metal wand first because I don't think they had anodizing back then so they probably wouldn't recognize it as metal, and secondly because it would take about 6 seconds to realize what's going on then), etc. How long do you think the players could be kept in the dark about what's really going on? I feel like it wouldn't work very well but am interested to see if people have ideas

Morcleon
2013-08-29, 06:36 PM
Not very long. The instant they see paved roads, streetlights, skyscrapers, cars, microwaves, electric lights or anything of the sort, they will know. Or if they just talk to someone and that person is like, "Horse? That's not a horse, that's a car...". :smalltongue:

Besides, why would you want to keep them in the dark anyway?

Hamste
2013-08-29, 06:42 PM
Start them off in the wilderness. You might be able to keep them in the dark if it's very rural and you describe the citizens as dressed "funny" and in ways not clearly modern. Be careful to describe everything in a way someone with no knowledge of technology would see it (like magic glowing balls of light on long pools for street lights). It will still be obvious soon but you can keep them in the dark for a bit.

JusticeZero
2013-08-29, 07:25 PM
Style the technology differently. Make laterally alien agglomerations of technologies that exist but are not used in modern society. Use different types of connectors and plugs.

Lorsa
2013-08-30, 03:12 AM
Why do you need to keep the players in the dark? Isn't it enough to keep the characters as being clueless?

Ravens_cry
2013-08-30, 03:23 AM
Describe things from the perspective of someone in their shoes. Never use short cuts of familiarity and emphasize the alien weirdness of it all. The players will likely clue in pretty quickly, but if you immerse them in the home world first, it should help make the world that is closer to our own seem less familiar.

Knaight
2013-08-30, 03:42 AM
Describe things from the perspective of someone in their shoes. Never use short cuts of familiarity and emphasize the alien weirdness of it all. The players will likely clue in pretty quickly, but if you immerse them in the home world first, it should help make the world that is closer to our own seem less familiar.

Exactly this. Also, if something like infravision is in the game, emphasize heat profiles, using largely geometric terms. It's easier to avoid familiarity that way (given that you actively have to think regarding what heat profiles will look like in the first place), and it makes recognition that much more difficult.

Even when not using infravision, geometry heavy descriptions that consist largely of platonic solids in various configurations along with direct descriptions of color and texture when it comes to unfamiliar materials can go a long way. If you also describe magical items in these terms (to a limited extent) it will go further.

endoperez
2013-08-30, 04:31 AM
First, make sure that the players will believe it's magic. If the first instance they come across it makes them sure it's all magical, they'll believe it. It will be more difficult to change what a person believes to be true, than it is to deceive them constantly. Don't leave any doubt about it being magical in nature.

Have the players encounter something they don't understand, have them take it apart, and reveal the source of this thing to be a metal plate filled in strange runes. That is, a circuit board.

http://www.ece.illinois.edu/eshop/pcbdesign/WeidmannBoard.JPG

Once they know to look for these, they will find them in pretty much every piece of "magic" they come across. You can also describe the small rocks, pieces of metal, weird black clay (=plastic), metal teeth and claws, all covered in incomprehensible words in a weird language.

http://www.reatechnologies.com/Images/board.jpg

Perhaps their first mission is to get one "scroll" someone else found and get it back to wizards who can hopefully understand it (they won't). Even better, the materials might be useful as magical reagents. Perhaps they apply a metamagic effect to a spell, but then burn out. I can imagine a sorcerer using computer circuitboards to Maximize a lightning bolt.


Plastic is sure to be one big giveaway. Come up with a word that describes plastic but isn't it. It's not like wood, where you see grains, but it does have some other similarities. Perhaps suggest that it's collected from sort of a fungus.

The roar of motors and gunblasts are another dead giveaway. Consider replacing the motors we use today with silent electric motors, and gunpowder with some sort of railgun mechanism or bullets with plasma or lasers. It'd also mean they have more circuitry inside, making them appear all the more mysterious.

Anything with wheels or visibly rotating wheel-like parts isn't an animal. No one will mistake a car for an animal. Tanks and other vehicles moving with tracks are easily recognized as machines. You need to avoid things with wheels. This isn't THAT difficult - assume that there are no usable roads where cars etc could go. Lots of swampy areas, rivers and lakes, etc. Use hovercraft, airplanes, use modern zeppelins instead of helicopters for hovering in the air and carrying lots of cargo without worrying about fuel, etc.

For even more fun, have the first ground-moving machines the players get to examine be something weird. There are some machines used by the logging industry that have legs and walk. They could be described as weird insectoid golems with huge scorpion-like tail that ends in a blade, or a claw, that is used to clear out a forest for an advance outpost.
A radio-controlled machine like that is a very convincing "golem". Make the legs a weak point the players can abuse, and the players might even accept the eventual wheel- and track-based "golems" as the enemies adapting to their party's actions specifically. At least if there's enough time between the first encounter and the next one.

http://cdn2.listsoplenty.com/listsoplenty-cdn/pix/uploads/2010/09/giant-spiderbot-forest-walkign-machine-for-logging.jpg

Mastikator
2013-08-30, 07:17 AM
Not very long. The instant they see paved roads, streetlights, skyscrapers, cars, microwaves, electric lights or anything of the sort, they will know. Or if they just talk to someone and that person is like, "Horse? That's not a horse, that's a car...". :smalltongue:

Besides, why would you want to keep them in the dark anyway?

Exactly.
The magic using world needs to have magitech equivalents.

Hopeless
2013-08-30, 08:03 AM
In my Post-apocalyptic Legend game you should have seen my players reaction when they found a cafeteria within an underground survival shelter... they stripped it of any kitchen utensils they could find!:smallbiggrin:

GungHo
2013-08-30, 09:03 AM
There are similar items/themes/monsters in Pathfinder if you're interested in a way to spin this. They have roboscorpions, androids, and other items from a crashed space ship. The populace seems to describe them as either golems or horrors from beyond. They have no basis for rationalizing it any other way... and neither should the characters, even if the players know full well what a giant death robot would look like.

Science Officer
2013-08-30, 11:17 PM
Maybe, instead of bringing the players to a modern world, have some space-farers arrive and describe them ancient astronauts (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_astronauts) style. Suits of armour, halos of light, though chariots of fire might be too obvious.

NecroRebel
2013-08-30, 11:35 PM
It might be better if, rather than having the tech-using society be on a distant continent, you had them be someplace reasonably close to the main area so that even if the PCs' society hasn't had contact with them other magic-users might. That way, you can plausibly have some magic-users who style their magic items and architecture on that of the tech-users, and have the party encounter these tech-styled magic-users first. Then, you can describe the first truly tech-based items the party encounters as being very similar to those foreign magic devices, implying that they, too, are simply foreign magic devices rather than something different.

Kornaki
2013-08-31, 10:34 AM
Why do you need to keep the players in the dark? Isn't it enough to keep the characters as being clueless?

I do trust them to keep player/character separation well, but I think they would enjoy the aha moment and the work they put in leading up to it also.

Thanks for all the good ideas guys I'm sure I'll be using lots of them. I especially like the circuit board = magic rune idea.

NichG
2013-08-31, 12:12 PM
You could also go far beyond the modern tech level and have everything be powered by voice-controlled nanite swarms, teleportation technology, or projected force-fields. So when someone says the equivalent of 'Computer, Tea, Earl Grey, Hot' in their programming language, a cup of tea just seems to materialize out of thin air.

Even without going that far, you could have cities where everything is alive (that is, computerized and motorized) and everyone has neural implants that can be used to control their environment. Basically Ghost in the Shell. So someone gets a look of concentration and all the city lights within a 2 block radius go out, or flash blindingly bright, or whatever. People can hack eachother's chips, puppet their bodies, mess with their perceptions, etc. Then you can play up the fact that the PCs seem to be immune to being directly controlled by this strange magic, and make it sound like its some racial trait.

Basically, its hard to make technology that the players themselves live with every day incomprehensible, but go outside of that experience and it soon becomes indistinguishable from magic.

Kornaki
2013-09-01, 02:18 PM
That's a good idea Nich. I'm definitely at least giving everyone subvocalization implants and earbuds so the party thinks everyone has telepathy