Con Con
There’s something special about going to a convention. The echoes of the gaming hall; the quipping of the celebrity panels; the unbridled enthusiasm of the attendees; the unbridled stench of same…. It all combines to recharge my gamer batteries.
If you’re following our exploits on Facebook, you know that Laurel and I just got back from Denver Comic Con. We came home from the long weekend with new art, new friends, and a renewed enthusiasm for several dozen fandoms. It always takes me a few days to come down from that geeky high, and the surreal stroll through the halls of the Colorado Convention Center left me eager to gush about the experience with all of you guys. But how, I wondered, could I justify a con-themed post in Handbook World?
Thus Con Con was born.
This is actually a device I like to use in my adventure design. If you’ve ever heard of Saonuihun’s Speeding Sphere Game, then you’re already familiar with the principle. Take a modern concept, ram it into the secondary world, and see what weirdness comes out the other end. The trick is finding the balance between the gag and the integrity of the fiction. A literal freaking pinball machine might be a bit much, but the concept of fantasy world real estate or dealing with tax season can inspire some fun storylines.
Laurel and I had a ball imagining what Con Con would look like in practice. Of course they’d gouge you in the dealer hall. Ticket scalpers would backstab you for your pass. Inns would jack up their prices. The rogues would all hold a big Disguise skill contest. Confused parents would wander the halls as their shrieking offspring pickpocketed all and sundry. It would be magical.
Question of the day then: Have any of you guys inserted a modern concept into a fantasy setting? What was it? How did it work out? Let’s hear it in the comments!
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I am dead set on making a salt refining facility coastside. A bunch of brass and bronze to Fabricate, a Permanent Wall of Fire, a bunch of gears to move the huge levers and elevators and weirs, all the brine I could ask for…and we distill the ocean water for its saline content and use the purified water for the wizardly steamworks in the upper decks of the Mage Tower. I got close in a 3.5 chat, but never got to truly implement. So until this actually happens and my caster starts getting a monthly income from my trade good, it shall be the goal of every spell flicker I create.
While that is indeed awesome, you are 500% getting attacked by sahuagin monkeywrenchers.
That just evolves me into a quest giver for level 2-4 adventurers. I stand outside my tower with a big golden Prestidigitated exclamation point above me, and tell the newbies that I need 15 Sahuagin wrenches. If they deliver, I’ll give them a couple scrolls and unlock the Academy area for them.
I’m at least a level 13 pure caster at this point, so it’s not like I have anything better to do.
Not me, but my previous GM decided to introduce a gunslinger class into our campaign. Seeing as I hate the concept of mundane firearms in high-fantasy settings, I kept making bad puns and quote McCree from Overwatch until he never mentioned it again.
Was it petty and passive-aggressive? Perhaps.
Was it effective? Definitely.
No regrets.
Did you quote McCree because his voice actor was the one who made the Gunslinger class? =)
I don’t mind early early firearms, myself. A good flintlock pistol makes for fine fantasy IMO, much better than the concept of “hand crossbows.”
(Didn’t mean to say “early” twice; “early early” would be like primitive hand cannons and such, and that’s perhaps a little too early for me.)
Holy crap, Matt Mercer actually voices McCree… not sure if coincidence or fate?
The thing about the flintlock is, every time I see fire arms introduced to a high fantasy setting, the magic kinda goes away… both figuratively and literally. The only place that didn’t make it feel like it was replacing magic is Warhammer, and that’s only because magic in that universe is by its very nature the more powerful but volatile alternative to firearms. I don’t roll up a character just to play a cheap street magician… well I did once, but only as a cover, and he wasn’t even a caster.
The figurative magic I can understand, but the literal magic? Why would it go away just because guns were invented? I want enchanted guns with mithril bullets and stuff, myself.
It’s silly that default D&D doesn’t have them, honestly. They have the ingredients for gunpowder, they are the reagents for Fireball.
It’s a tough road to go down. You start getting into questions like, “Why don’t we create magical traps that trigger to produce food and water, thus eliminating the need for farming?” That way lies the Tippyverse, and it is a long way from pseudo-medieval.
Eh, thought of another way, gunpowder isn’t the huge revolution in D&D that it was in real life. There were already ways of making things explode, after all. Guns would start seeing more prevalence on the battlefield, but adventurers are found less often on battlefields as they are fighting small but elite threats that probably have more potent means of offense.
Also I don’t know how food and water is a concern in a world where one can double the yield of all crops in a mile radius for a year with just one spell, and also it can be conjured from thin air.
Food and water is a concern because genre expectations include feudal lords and dirt-farming peasants. You can certainly imagine worlds where these things don’t exist, and they might make more sense from a simulation standpoint than mirroring the primary world’s development. But the problem is that I happen to like dirt farming peasants every once in a while. Question reality too hard and you Trogdor all over their thatched roof cottages.
Exactly why I think guns can exist peacefully. You don’t have to consider all the implications that went with guns, you can just have them living in happy anachronism with all the medieval stuff.
I feel like “happy anachronism” would make a solid username. 😀
Oh wow, there was quite the discussion while I was gone.
Anywho, I didn’t mean that one was a result of the other…well not directly at least. It’s about what gunpowder means to the plot as a catalyst: sudden technological advancements. At some point the creative mind behind the setting will usually attempt to pit the magical against the mundane, and that never goes well for the magical.
There would be no competition. If magic were to win it would look unimpressive: a wielder of cosmic powers raining death upon a bunch of dudes with pointy sticks. The orchestrator, the GM in our case, would have to hedge the battles in favour of the underdog… almost exclusively, to the point where plot armor is given to the mundane forces.
Name one piece of fantasy fiction where magocracy is the positive outcome… It always goes “the age of man is at hand”, but never have I seen “a utopia shaped by mind and spirit” or something such.
I guess the point of this rant is that I like to have fun while playing a spellcaster, and technology encroaching on the established domains of magic is never fun to me, no matter who “wins”. Hence my, arguably not very firmly founded yet intense, contempt for the gunslinger.
I more-or-less agree with what you said, but since you asked me to name one, Little Witch Academy (Netflix) is an anime where magic is dying. Academies that teach it are on the verge of bankruptcy, and the non-magic world is firmly dismissive of the magic world. Despite this, the main character, Akko, is determined to study magic and use it to bring happiness to the world.
I’ve always wanted to do a riff on this notion, swapping the relative power of magic and mundane. Ancient legend tells of the ancient “iron magic” that nearly destroyed the world. After millennia of rule by dorky wizards, and new Scion of Iron returns.
He can take a magic missile on the chin and keep coming. He seems impervious to even the strongest of poisons. He can do more than one chin up. He is the Barbarian, and with his ancient trove of Men’s Health Journals, he is unstoppable.
His battle cry of, “C’mere ya nerd!” can be heard throughout the lands. And even the most learned of mages quakes in fear at the rumor his devastating swirly attack.
Yeah! Like in Hellboy or Ghost Rider or Devil May Cry!
I foresee dark times in your future:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/4/49/The_Dark_Tower_teaser_poster.jpg
Fantasy gunslingers are about to become very popular.
Never read the Dark Tower unfortunately. Are guns an established part of that universe? Because I’m completely ok with that…
What I specifically meant was the shift in theme mid-plot. Like the archetypal elf ranger tossing away his bow for a musket halfway through the adventure, for example. Is there even a way to make such a thing not seem heavy-handed?
I won’t pretend to know how much The Dark Tower inspired Pathfinder’s gunslinger class. But I will point out that there is a strong connection between “the man with no name” western motif and the knight errant / wandering samurai. It’s especially present in the Steven King series thanks to the ties between protagonist Roland Deschain and Childe Roland from the Browning poem.
Anywho, watch the trailer. There’s a reason “The Dark Tower” is classed as fantasy:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GjwfqXTebIY
Funnily i cant stand firearm in pathfinder for a very different reason. Being a big gun afficionado, i find flintlocks and co way too boring so i never even consider firearms unless im allowed something more modern.
Garbage trucks for big cities. Figure fantasy cities have to deal with waste management too, and if you’re creative you can have a lot of fun. For me, I had elephants that wore a Ring of Sustanence on their tusks (much more economical than feeding in the long run, ajd can be passed down when they die to save on costs) dragging a wagon with a gelatinous cube in it. The garbage collectors would bring the elephant around the city and shovel waste into the cube. The cube would dissolve organic matter, and at the end of the day they strain out the inorganic stuff and dumped it in garbage dump. The best part is that it opened up some nifty stuff for the players, like when the evil head of the Garbage Collection Guild tries o get rid of competition by sending goons to release g-cubes from rival carts, resulting in rampaging oozes through the streets of major cities. A nice low level side quest for an urban setting.
Nice! That is exactly the sort of thing I’m talking about.
Those modules I linked take place in exactly this kind of city, my solution to the sanitation problem was “The Guild of Sweeps.” They use alchemically treated “slime prods” to herd groups of smalls oozes through the gutters. Good times.
In the setting we’re running, metal elementals are a thing. They can be any metal. They can be sentient. They can reshape their bodies, given enough time.
Thus an aluminum elemental named Boeing was born from an extremely good random encounter roll, when we were stranded in the middle of nowhere. Boeing was not good at landing (it just glided/smashed into the ground, then reformed) so once it was in the air, it tended to stay there as long as possible. It gave us a lift to where we were going, and made friends with our ranger, and flew off to be remembered fondly ever after.
That is by turns creative, ridiculous, and awesome.
Also, I would like to propose a new metal elemental: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uGe8qID9gSs
I feel like that video is doing the reverse of what you were asking for. Those guys seem like they came straight out of a campaign. =P
One day… One day my Playlist / Van Art campaign will happen…
Amok: One time I painted a bowl of fruit on the side of a van – I called it Van Gogh. Get it? Van Gogh?
I don’t actively include magically produced replicas of modern technology, but I’ve thought about it. Most thoughts about it are induced by reading discworld books, in which it’s often the premise of the book itself.
Pratchett may or may not have been a strong influence on those modules I linked. Also of note, Pratchett may or may not be the name of my dog.
So your dog is a Schrodinger’s Pratchett? That sounds like something he would have approved of. =D
Here we can see Schrödinger’s Pratchett in a state of quantum flux: https://www.handbookofheroes.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/12439024_10209532007923800_7211725108659695078_n.jpg
Well I did put an artificer laundry machine in the D&D game I’m running. It turns everything you put in it blue.
I’m also going to put a artifice gun in the game. Though this is more my having always loved the magic guns from FF Tactics. It will however be coin operated since finding ammo for it would be impossible for the players given it’s a relic of a fallen civilization but I decided ammo for it should still cost something just like ammo for other ranged weapons.
Wait a minute… I thought gunslingers already shot money at their enemies?
Ah, flintlock firearms. According to Pathfinder it takes 6 seconds to reload a musket, and only 3 to reload a flintlock pistol. This is without feats of course, with the proper feats and equipment it’s a free action.
I once wrote up a gunslinger archetype to solve this problem. It was based on carrying a load of pistols and dropping ’em after each shot.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MsuH1msEkvM&t=1m3s
funnily thats actually how it worked in the wild west. People see old pictures and other depiction of cowboys and bandits wearing 2 or three pistols and they thought they would use two at a time in a badass way but in reality, they only ever used one because it was more accurate and faster to fire like that and you would just swap to the next gun when the current one was empty because it took so long to reload
You mean I’m a game designer AND a historian? Man I rock!
If you’re curious, I believe the archetype made the cut as “goblin pistoleer” over here: http://paizo.com/products/btpy9hsp/discuss?Veranthea-Codex
The schtick is that you’re allowed to move around enhancement bonuses and enchants between your gun collection, rearranging them like a wizard preps spells each morning.
Also fanning: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fanning_(firearms). The older pistols (revolvers actually) had to have their hammers cocked before every shot, so you were busy with one hand to cock the hammer by “fanning” and with the other to hold and aim the pistol.
I see… Bender, santa, elvis and the cheese burglar in the other portraits. Rogue’s Gallery indeed.
Pictured here, Santa: http://www.dccomics.com/sites/default/files/GalleryComics_1920x1080_20141210_HQ_HOLIDAY_1_547d1d2794b712.49106254.jpg
😛
I want to insert a “modern” superhero organization into my homebrew world, in the style of My Hero Academia or One Punch Man. (or, to a lesser degree, Venture Brothers)
It just makes sense that a world with people like Clerics and Summoners and Kineticists and Paladins. They’re basically superheroes, right? I think the term ‘adventurers’ seriously undercuts their impact, and there’s a lot of room to develop as a GM and a Player Character when you consider the public perception of a world where a notable minority of the population are packing such power.
The problem of PC power always seemed strange to me. If you look at the numbers, a group of 1-6 exceptionally powerful dudes banding together as a cohesive unit OUGHT to be the default state of things. I mean, why wouldn’t CR 10+ monsters do the same thing? Super teams on both sides only seem logical. The problem is that always fighting against “the evil antiparty” tends to mess with the game’s math. I know I wouldn’t want to deal with the mirror match in every encounter.
I think this is a case where the numbers want the GM to come up with an explanation. Maybe there’s some kind of cosmic parity that means there must always be X number of “heroes” and “villains” in existence? Defeat one and another rises.
One of the DMs I regularly game with has some anachronisms in his setting; there are ogre-powered elevators (ogres are a surprisingly integrated race in his setting – they also frequently run rickshaws and palanquins) and modern-ish plumbing, for example. We mostly accept the weird as a result of a setting involving literal supernaturally intelligent mages and creatures with odd physiologies.
Plumbing and waterworks can be a really cool element in setting design. I didn’t think about it much until I saw the Pompeii exhibit at the local history museum, but one of the artifacts was a section of lead pipe. I guess it’s kind of obvious with the famous aqueducts and all, but I think there are a lot of cool adventure ideas buried in there:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanitation_in_ancient_Rome
Obnoxious taxes, membership fees and required agents. One of my Pendragon Player Knights, who was quite rich, and really into Horsemanship (a skill in Pendragon, which also defaults to knowing about breeding horses) was eager to get an Arabian stallion in order to be able to breed them in England. So he went out to get one in the Middle East, at that time (circa 520 C.E.) part of the Roman Empire Eastern part (also known as Byzantium). He traveled to Constantinople (then the largest City in the western world), as a Mercenary Knight, and wanted to hire himself out to somebody that went to Arabia, or whereever they bred these Arabian horses. When he arrived at the gates, he was asked his purpose for entering the city. “Mercenary”. Ok, then you will have to pay taxes on your weapons. So he paid. Then he went in search of employment. First become a member of the Mercenary Guild, for a fee, otherwose you’re not allowed to offer yourself as a Mecernary. After two weeks in the city and still no offers, or contacts, he visited the Mercenary Guild hall for the first time, and found out that he needed an Agent, otherwise he could not be hired. So more money went out of his purse… Eventually, after spending far more money that he wanted, he was hired, and after some more adventures, finally arrived back in Logres (arthurian england) with two Arabian Stallions, where he started breeding and selling them. The money he made from that, unfortunately, more then made up for the money he lost during his trip to the Middle East.
My own experience with Constantinople comes courtesy of the SCA. When I was still fighting heavy, my persona was Varangian Guard. Dudes take their mercenary work seriously!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varangian_Guard
Of course, I only knew about them because of the Miklagard Overture:
http://www.darklyrics.com/lyrics/turisas/thevarangianway.html
Fu11Sim4Lyf said Elvis, but I know Lupin when I see him.
Gimme mah nerd points! >.>
+50 NP
One time my DM introduced a cursed book that allowed the reader (In our case a surprisingly smart fighter that learned Hellish Rebuke from a tiefling NPC that he was definitely gay for) to cast necromancy spells, but cursed them to only speak in Infernal. We called up a dryad (I think she was a dryad at least, can’t remember) that the party had befriended who spoke Infernal and she informed us that the book was called “Necromancy for Dummies”. In a different campaign with a different DM, I played a Warforged bard-barian that ate magic-infused rocks. We were investigating a magic carnival and I came across a wizard selling “Rock Candy Cotton” made from said magic rocks. Turns out the wizard knew me, and recognized my model number from when I was in the factory. Long story, I know.
I kind of want to see the cover art on “Necromancy for Dummies.” I imagine it’s a color-inversion on the standard triangle-headed dude, so that his eyes are all black and such.
Do concepts of universal human rights count?
That’s racist against demi-humans.
Srriously though, I do enjoy creating settings where contemporary era concepts are inserted into pre-contemporary settings, but I try to imagine how it would evolve organically within the setting I am designing – I don’t tend to play it for the anachronism.
Even more than biology (as mentioned in a previous comment) I have something of a hangup about making myfantasy settings follow plausible societal patterns. This is probably because that is my area of greatest academic interest.
Do you read the Discworld novels? They take a similar approach, and are a personal favorite.
Guilty as charged!
I mean, just having everything not be all terrible all the time is pretty modern. If there’s not widespread illiteracy, disease, famine, and kids dying of stupid nonsense that’s pretty modern by itself.
It’s also pretty modern for the culture not to be a horrible mess of draconian laws, xenophobia, homophobia, misogyny, slavery, and people cheering at public executions of people who’ve done trivial things. (Conversely, you can give goblins and orcs a plausiblely functional evil society just by plugging the real world middle ages – or any time prior – as their social structure)
I am partial to the idea of rogues acting gangsta, and bards acting like a combination of the stereotypes of rock stars, movie actors, and rappers.
In a totally different note of introducing modern things, I’m pretty sure a decanter of endless water would greatly simplify giving a town plumbing, or, if you were more creative with it, building a car (the decanter turns an internal waterwheel that in turn turns the wheels of the vehicle)