Hey y’all, I’m considering throwing some mild Sci-Fi elements into my Forgotten Realms campaign. 

Has anyone implemented Sci-Fi in their fantasy campaigns? If so what’d you do? And how did your players take it?

If you set the way back machine waaaaay back, read up on Expedition to the Barrier Peaks. Gary Gygax wrote that module back in 1980. I've had this module for ages, though I never played it. I always liked the way he worked Sci Fi elements into the Fantasy setting. It was definitely one of the stranger experiments in the early days of D&D.

I do love me some sci fi elements. Think Marvel's Thor Movies if you want the perfect blend between the two genres. Music can add to the sci find elements too. I have been on a Synthwave kick. It is very much like the old 8-bit game music but high fidelity. https://youtu.be/OILroqdZQ_A

Most of my game world's incorporate today's technology i.e. digital devices suck as tablets, phones, etc but powered by magic. 

My players really love the crossing the streams. Other great sources recently include Legend of Zelda BOtW, Mass Effect, and of course Star Wars

Listen to the Adventure Zone podcast - they have lots of modern world/futuristic stuff that they've just added in and given a thin sheen of fantasy/ 

Love TAZ

I haven't - but it can absolutely be done.

An amusing spin on this would be to reverse a stereotype here, and have in world creatures just assume that the advanced technology is magic ( rather than have people assume that advanced technology is magic ).

"Your Wand of Magic Missiles is very strangely crafted, and it appears to be crafted by the wizards Smith and Wesson?"

'Did he use six charges or only five'? Well to tell you the truth, in all this excitement, I kind of lost track myself. But being that this is a Wand of Magic Missiles, the most accurate offensive spell in the world, and would blow your head clean off, you've got to ask yourself one question: 'Do I feel lucky?' Well do ya, punk?

I homebrewed a Magic Item called the SwanStone for a campaign set in Neverwinter. It’s a combination of the Moonstone Mask (which provides the Message cantrip between other users, as well as psychic protections), and another homebrew, the Interdimensional Musicbox (which produces music from other dimensions, even across the Fourth Wall). It’s a thin, rectangular object with a mirrored finish on one side, and a logo on the reverse. 

One player immediately shouted, “It’s a cell phone!”

Everybody kind of loves them.

I find it odd that so many people differentiate between fantasy and science fiction.  Science fiction, as genres go, is a misnomer.  Fiction by definition

The point is, both are imaginary.  Where do you draw the line between fantasy and sci-fi?  In fantasy game, we see golems, and airships.  In sci-fi, we see robots and spaceships.  Fundamentally not all that different.  And with the application of Clarke's Third Law (Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic) and Terry Pratchett's Inversion (Any sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology) (see from HEX the Discworld series) there is no reason to draw the line to begin with.

Cases in point: Spelljammer.  Star Wars (don't care what you say: the Force is magic, deal with it).  Doctor Who.  Discworld.  Minecraft. 

Any fantasy setting where people still bother to learn how to build machines.  Any sci-fi setting that that acknowledges supernatural forces.  Interchangeable.

Sam, you are completely right.

The video game Mass Effect is a great example. People view that as Science Fiction - so those telekinetic and pyrokinetic powers your Adept character is using are not Magic, they're Psionics .

I think Clarke's Third Law and Pratchett's Inversion ( hadn't heard about that one, thanks! ) ring true and dovetail beautifully, because when it really comes down to it, Magic is a technology - it's a rational, repeatable, expandable system for manipulating natural ( magical ) laws for the purpose of creating specified known and targeted effects.

The reason it has effects that we can't reproduce in the real world is that Fantasy Magic is a technology manipulating natural laws and forces that don't exist in our world. 

Magic just has all sorts of different emotional and aesthetic connotations for most people, so a lot of people think it feels like a different thing.

Maybe that's why Pratchett's Inversion works, I think - when Magic is regularized and put to industrial applications, it strips away those emotional and aesthetic connotation and it looks like any other technology. 

I'm reminded of the "The Apprentice Adept" series written by Piers Anthony, a world of science and technology separated from a world of magical creatures and spells by nothing more than a thin veil between the parallel worlds. 

It can be done, it has been done, and it is, much like Sam and Vex have said, not a difficult stretch of the imagination. Have I done it? Yes, I have dropped many "futuristic" items into my D&D homebrew, from simple things like cuckoo clocks to fully autonomous robots (not golems). I even began toying with a tool that would work like a pokedex and earbuds like you see in spy movies. If you do it right you'll keep the players engaged and not break the immersion, however do be warned; there are some players that will simply blurt out things like "Oh! that's a clock!" when their characters haven't seen something that intricate...ever...

As a player, I find this sort of thing off-putting. This is by no means true of others, but I have a very specific opinion of what constitutes "high fantasy," and it doesn't include any science fiction elements. If a DM took the story in that direction, I might be willing to go along for the ride, but I can't say I'd be particularly happy about it.

It's true that magic is essentially technology, in one sense. But on the other hand, magic is mystical in a way that technology is not. We don't think of strange chants and rituals when we think of technology. Part of the appeal of magic in fantasy is this mysteriousness, the idea that it's something not entirely known, that can't ever be entirely controlled. Science Fiction does draw on similar tropes, but it goes about it in a different way. Magic generally involves manipulating fundamental forces with only the mind and some fancy words and gestures, which is entirely unlike any technology that exists in either our world or in science fiction. The point being that the results may be similar, but the approach and the methods are not necessarily so.

So your mileage may vary. But I'd carefully consider what kind of players you have before you start throwing science fiction elements into your world. You may find some of them don't really like the idea, whether they have a reason or not. Some people just have an emotional reaction to this sort of thing.

I'll also note - this does depend to an extent on what kind of science fiction elements you're introducing. Some concepts we think of as science fiction, like say time travel, might be easier to swallow than things like laser guns and spaceships.

I think this is solely an emotional reaction. Like I said - people feel that they're different - even when it ain't so.

I can use technology with only some fancy words and gestures "OK, Google - Call Mom", "Hey Alexa, turn up the air conditioning". It exists in Science Fiction, too "Computer, Earl Grey tea. Hot".

Mystical is a personal, emotional, evaluation of what is being done - nothing more, and that's based on whether or not you think what's happening is explicable, or not. Mystical is an expression of how ignorant someone is of the underlying process. I very much doubt that high-magic is very mysterious or mystical to Arch-Mages.

However, you are correct that emotional impact is important to your players, and how they feel about the game. They may not like elements they think are explicable ( like laser rifles ) even though they are just as ignorant about the works of those as - say - a Summoning Circle.

Mystical is not solely a personal, emotional evaluation. It's an accurate description of the way magic is portrayed in many fantasy settings and most fantasy fiction. Magic is a symbolic practice, associated with supernatural entities, that doesn't obey the natural laws of our universe. Technology doesn't operate by symbolism and no supernatural entities are involved.

Fantasy fiction is also rife with examples of even very powerful magic-users, such as archmages, failing to understand something about magic with disastrous results. In most D&D settings, magic is not something fully understood by anyone short of the gods or other sufficiently powerful otherworldly entities. And even then, these entities are sometimes surprised by the way magic operates.

That's not to say there aren't fantasy settings that overtly treat magic as technology. Take Eberron for example. But this is a conscious choice, one that's clearly different from the norm of mysteriousness. In this case, where magic is portrayed as following clearly definable laws, then yes it's less distinguishable from technology. Pratchett does this with Discworld, but again this is a conscious choice, one that you don't see being made by Tolkien or George R.R. Martin or hundreds of other fantasy authors.

I did consider Alexa and advanced AI, but though these things are analogous, they're not really the same. I can ask Alexa to play some music for me, but I can't ask her to conjure a ball of fire out of thin air. And certainly, I could create some other kind of voice-activated technology that did serve this purpose, but it still wouldn't be magic. At a fundamental level, these things are not portrayed as working the same way. The effects might be indistinguishable, but the process is not. And when I interact with Alexa or voice-activated technology, I don't find this to be mystical or mysterious.

It's clear that there's an element of the personal and the emotional in this assessment, but perception matters in fiction. Things that provoke different emotional reactions are different when it comes to this kind of medium. Explicability, as you called it, is a choice made by the author, or in this case, the DM. But the default in most D&D settings is that magic is not explicable in the same way technology might be.

Your campaign could be similar to Gamma World. Long long ago man reached an amazing level of technology, then for whatever reason the world is destroyed. Over the course of hundreds of years, people have come back but are still at a medieval technology level and many have mutations - pointed ears, tough skin, darkvision. Deep in some dungeons guarded by constructs lie "magic items of the ancients".

I agree that perception matters in fiction, and personal experience. But perception has very little to do with reality. It's kind of related to it - but not closely. Humans are notoriously bad at perceiving reality accurately.

Magic only sometimes deals with so-called supernatural entities ( and that's an entire other discussion, but if something exists in this reality,  then it's a natural creature of this reality - even it if is beyond our understanding of our reality; supernatural is another emotional not rational term ) - and I could argue that in those cases, the magical/technological techniques are being employed by the supernatural creatures in that case.

However, let's break it down:

Either Magic is a system with known, repeatable, causes & effects, or it is not.

If it's not - if it's completely chaotic - then it's pretty much useless. Do I get a rabbit, or a fireball when I do this little dance? If I can't predict that, maybe I shouldn't do that little dance. If magic is completely chaotic and non-predictable, then I grant you that in that case, it is not a technology or a science.

However, In most fiction, and historical magic systems - it does have repeatable and systematic effects. The concept of spells says, I put these causes in, I get these results out. That's a system. And with most systems - and in most portrayals of fictional magic - humans start to extract out generalities and overall systemic principles. The Laws of Magic is a concept that spans multiple fictional worlds and systems ( with a caveat that in the world of Jim Butcher's Dresden Files the Laws of Magic were also a system of jurisprudence ).

And those laws can be built upon to discover new chains of causes and effects. That's the idea behind the concepts of Spell Research or Spell Formula. 

So you have a system of techniques, with repeatable effects, from known causes, that can be generalized out to their underlying principles, re-applied, and extended back to to new chains of causes and effects.

That's the loop of Technology, to Science, to Experimentation, to applied Science, back to Technology.

You're are 100% correct, however, when you say that magic "doesn't obey the natural laws of our universe". That's because fictional systems - and non-functional historical systems - of magic attempt to manipulate natural laws and natural forces which don't exist in our reality. They are sciences and technologies for a different set of natural laws and alternate realities  ( or possibly as a result of a flawed understanding of our own ) but that doesn't make them a fundamentally different class of techniques than science and technology - other than in the emotional connotations of the reader or player.

You are also 100% correct when you state that those emotional connotations matter, and need to be taken into consideration.  You are - perhaps - arguing a practical point of game mastering, while I'm arguing an ontological point. While I think someone is mistaken when they consider magic something fundamentally different and mystical - all that matters when they're a player at my table is whether they're made unhappy or not by the inclusion of a phaser rifle in the Elven Woods. 

You argue that fiction often portrays Mages which don't fully understand the techniques they are employing - often to surprising or disastrous results. That is true - but that is also a facet of other incompletely understood sciences and technologies - I would encourage you to read up on the accidents that occurred during the Manhattan Project, especially the criticality accidents of the Demon Core, which lead to the deaths of Harry Daghlian, Louis Slotin, and others.

There is a difference between a set of laws and techniques being incompletely known and being fundamentally unknowable. 

You can't ask Alexa to conjure a ball of fire - that is correct. I also can't ask my cellphone to drop me off at the mall, nor - in D&D - are we surprised that a summoned animal can't explode for 20d8 fire damage. In neither system do you expect any component to perform any arbitrary function - there are laws and limits in both. 

Your statement that you don't find Alexa mystical, is exactly my point. You perceive Alexa as a technology, so you feel that there is a chain of causes and effects that - if you applied yourself to them - you could unravel. A mystical view of magic is that we feel that we can't follow or understand that chain. In both cases we don't understand the chain ( unless you are personally capable of rebuilding the Alexa technology yourself, in which case you have both my respect and my apology for making assumptions in your case), and in both cases the chain of causes and effects exists ( or magic is a uselessly chaotic mess, remember ) - so mysticism is solely an emotional difference. 

You say " but it still wouldn't be magic " or " The effects might be indistinguishable, but the process is not " - but I don't think you've managed to define what you mean by "magic". You reject the idea that mysticism is solely an emotional effect.  Alright - in that case, what is it objectively? What is the actual difference - outside of purely an emotional perspective ( which was my argument, and which you seem to reject ) - between a system of science and technologies matched to a different ( expanded? ) set of natural laws, and what you seem to be defining as "magic"?

Vedexent, you've gone way off track. The point is that this isn't an ontological argument at all. The OP asked about implementing science fiction elements in a fantasy setting and how players react to it. In this sense, magic and technology are not interchangeable, and that's all that matters in the context of the original question.

Last time I checked, this forum was for practical DMing advice, not meaningless semantics.

Quote from jreggers >>

Vedexent, you've gone way off track. The point is that this isn't an ontological argument at all. The OP asked about implementing science fiction elements in a fantasy setting and how players react to it. In this sense, magic and technology are not interchangeable, and that's all that matters in the context of the original question.

Last time I checked, this forum was for practical DMing advice, not meaningless semantics.

But that's the thing, this is not meaningless semantics. The argument is that fantasy and sci-fi are in fact (usually) the same thing just presented differently; fantasy with a magicky feel, and sci-fi with a sciencey feel. And how that translates to a game of D&D is that literally any sci-fi element could be introduced without causing a dissonance, as long as the tone of language used to describe it remains within the fantasy paradigm. "The monsters resemble tall goblins, and they are carrying some sort of crossbow which hurls firebolts!", "A fantastic vessel descends from the heavens. This is surely the great Galleon of Umarin, the first of all the gods!", "You find a small device, possibly of gnomish design. It resembles an obsidian hand mirror, but when you look into it it shows only a script that you cannot decipher. Perhaps some magic could unlock this further?", "As you approach the portal (which seems to be made from a single seamless sheet of mithril), the two steel statues you noted earlier spring to life. The constructs seem to be some kind of golem, but to your horror they open their eyes and begin to blast beams of eldritch energy in your direction", and so on. 

Will any given player enjoy this, or will they be unable to avoid yelling "it's a clock!"? That is surely just person to person thing. Try it out on your players, or if you fear there are high fantasy purists involved then discuss out of game.

To simplify matters further: modern weaponry as well  as lasers and antimatter rifles exist in D&D.

Quote from Sam_Hain >>

To simplify matters further: modern weaponry as well  as lasers and antimatter rifles exist in D&D.

 Yeah, one of players chose the antimatter rifle as a gear choice during character creation. I'm tempted to let him keep the "mysterious and ancient staff of power".