ITT: You Give Me Ideas, I Steal Them

[Citizen Keen]

I am working on a new campaign. I am always working on a new campaign. Anyway, it's got scifi and tech (much like RIFTS and Shadowrun). What I want to know is...

 

What are some cool tech/magic hybrids? Creatures, items, places, whatever. And I'm not just talking guns with +1 ToHit enchantments. I'm talking AWESOME hybrids. Some things I've already thought of:

 

• Full conversion cyborg-angels, in which their wings are the only visibly natural part of them left.
  
• Sky Giant Special Forces Commandoes rappelling off of clouds and laying waste to the land-bound.
  
• Halflings on tiny rocket motorcycles with built in machine guns, like a miniature version of CarWars.
  
• And lest we forget, Vampire Ninjas.
  

 

Now you give me more ideas, and get all cranky when they appear in a post later, only blended and awesome.

[Curufea]

Re: ITT: You Give Me Ideas, I Steal Them

 

Well, my first thought is from the Bas-Lag books (I will, one day, continue the New Crobuzon Hero conversion)-

 

Criminals technologically/biologically changed/enhanced to do heavy labour or to work in dangerous conditions (or even just as punishment). All the changes are ugly and functional - and usually limit the criminal in some manner (ie replacing the bottom half of their body with tank tracks means no reproduction, and no going indoors). The changes often reflect the nature of their crime, and are either mechanical or biological in nature (ie grafting on octopus tentacles, or replacing the mouth with a bird's beak).

In New Crobuzon, they're called the Re-Made and are the lowest social class with huge amounts of bigotry against them.

[Citizen Keen]

Re: ITT: You Give Me Ideas, I Steal Them

 

Bas-Lag books? I've never heard that phrase. But that's China Mievelle, right?

[Curufea]

Re: ITT: You Give Me Ideas, I Steal Them

 

Three books set on the world of Bas-Lag, two of the books use New Crobuzon as their central location - a city in Bas-Lag.

Perdido Street Station, The Scar, Iron Council.

[JTesla]

Re: ITT: You Give Me Ideas, I Steal Them

 

One of my favorite Rolemaster Companion books has always been Dark Space, it included Soft Tech which could best be described as biological cybernetics. With the typical – magic vs technology bit, Soft Tech was the answer. Magic and science can be used to work with the living organisms.

 

There were virus level organisms, spores, living grafts like swords, energy projectors and brain buds, full suits of armor, and even creatures. Almost everything that could be done with cybernetics could be done with the biological based technology. My personal favorite was always the armor, one was crab like, another was wolfish in form. For transportation one thing I remember was a enormous snake with a clear membrane on its head. The pilot and passengers would sit in this clear membrane area.

 

Just a thought.

[Cancer]

Re: ITT: You Give Me Ideas, I Steal Them

 

Giant cyborg raptors ... there was an old Roger Dean image where he put a bird's skull on the front end of a model of an SR-71. (In fact, there's a number of old Roger Dean images that lend themselves to this sort of speculation.) Let something like this wild, and suddenly regularly scheduled air service comes to a screeching halt.

 

Remember that if it develops that there's a large-scale ecology of cyber/magic/tech organisms, remember to fill all the niches in the ecology, not just the apex predators (which are the coolest and receive the most attention). Scavengers, parasites, and ambush predators make for nasty surprises to the unwary.

 

Imagine cyberjackals that lurk around, just waiting to pull down big things that are hurt or malfunctioning so they can "kill" it and take its components (power cells would be the obvious ones). Mystic maggots (that'll eat anything) that combine magic sense with tech sensors to find stuff hidden or discarded at the metaphysical boundaries, so corpses (and treasures) don't accumulate there and stink up all of metacreation (and to snarf up the cached goodies that mage-types leave to keep non-magicals from finding them). "Tape"-worms, parasitic things that exist as millimeter-size bug-like things when outside a body, that infest cyborgs, hijacking the self-maintanence capacities to build big (and very different) versions of themselves inside the cyborgs. Or, perhaps, which override the cyborg's "brain" and cause it to seek out the nest of the mother parasite, an immobile something the size of a railroad car that lives at the bottom of an ant lion-like crater several city blocks in size and consumes anything that its progeny causes to jump in the pit....

[Citizen Keen]

Re: ITT: You Give Me Ideas, I Steal Them

 

While these are all super cool ideas, they're not quite what I'm looking for. :wink:

 

I'm more interested in ideas involving super-cool things that require both tech and magic. The above ideas, while awesome, seem to be cyborg animals and bio-engineered creatures - I can see both existing without technology. Basically I'm working on a campaign that's a classic High fantasy campaign in which those deviously inventive gnomes eventually got around to cold fusion and nanotechnology.

 

More examples:

 

• A Druid's Grove protected by metal and plastic eating nanites, so that no technology could get close.
  
• Stone Golems with shoulder mounted rocket launchers.
  
• A Minotaur with Doc Ok style tentacles shooting out of his back, who pins people with his robotic arms and pounds them down with his big ass wood club.

 

Am I making my vision more clear?

[Lethosos]

Re: ITT: You Give Me Ideas, I Steal Them

 

*drops Dragonstar by Fantasy Flight Games into Keen's lap* There you go--you can cull the information from this in any way you want to. They used to have a Living Campaign set in this, of which I enjoyed immensely, but went bust for lack of fiancial support, I think. One of these days I'll look into ressurecting the organization, but that takes a much larger time and effort than I know of.

[Citizen Keen]

Re: ITT: You Give Me Ideas, I Steal Them

 

Ah man, that looks sexy. Not quite what I'm shooting for in terms of scope (I'm going to limit myself to a planet), but worth picking up regardless.

 

Don't worry, DoJ - you'll still get plenty of my money.

[Trencher]

Re: ITT: You Give Me Ideas, I Steal Them

 

Skeletons with blasters.

Manyarmed spiderpeople with nano whips. They can make nano webs and other traps too.

Mummies who's bandages are made of clear plastic not cloth.

Cyborg were bats.

A silver golem with a disco ball for its head. It can blind people

Clean orks in gestapo like dress uniforms suported by well groomed orks in black armani suits. They are well armed with laser weapons and mechs.

Uhmm.. Some creature that looks like a cross between the terminator (without flesh) and a gigant twoheaded lion who breathes fire. Ok no more ideas..

[JTesla]

Re: ITT: You Give Me Ideas, I Steal Them

 

How about a grenade launcher that upon impact a monster is summoned? Or perhaps the grenade doesn’t harm the living, but raises the recently deceased as zombies that attack their former allies. While we are on the topic of zombies, you could also do cybernetic enhanced zombies, and not just arm or leg replacements. Zombies are tough, give them a huge cannon for an arm, line them with explosives for a walking bomb, or slap in a large obtrusive flame thrower that shoots out of their mouth.

 

For some reason my mind is just tracking towards magical creatures right now, dragons and fairies to name a few. Cyber fairies? Getting away from cybernetics, you could always do a race of fairies that are technical masterminds. They use magic to piece together and power technical gadgets. They could even have little aerial fighters the size of shoebox. Just because they are small doesn’t mean they have to be weak, fear the fairy ion cannon.

[Citizen Keen]

Re: ITT: You Give Me Ideas, I Steal Them

 

Trencher, JTesla, thank you. That's exactly the kind of stuff I like. The Mummy is exceptionally cool. I'll keep the world posted as I come up with more. Please feel free to do the same.

[Trencher]

Re: ITT: You Give Me Ideas, I Steal Them

 

Evil icecream that instead of giving you icecream headache makes you psychic and you go mad of hearing the voices of the lost souls in hell.

[ghost-angel]

Re: ITT: You Give Me Ideas, I Steal Them

 

Here's something I've wanted to use or seen used..

 

Nanite Faeries

Artificial organims designed to look like little pixies, but are completely constructed from a nanite infrastructure. Power is generated via solar recharge in their wings, raw materials are ingested and used (leave a plate of silicon, and other raw materials out and they eaten the parts they use leaving a plate of uneeded/unusable material in the morning. They have AI, capable of learning and work especially well in groups.. I'd imagined them being used in green houses, nature perserves and other 'natural' settings as gardners/caretakers. But I always kind of wondered what might happen if they learn to self replicate and don't like the noisy big folk in their gardens?

[Enforcer84]

Re: ITT: You Give Me Ideas, I Steal Them

 

Steam Powered Golems

Magic Powered Armor

Cyber-Dragons

A crystal ball Internet

Rune Rail Guns

Mages with AI "familiars" robots, androids, etc.

[Citizen Keen]

Re: ITT: You Give Me Ideas, I Steal Them

 

Enforcer: You stole my sig! (I mean, I abandoned it, but you stole it!)

 

[Blue Jogger]

Re: ITT: You Give Me Ideas, I Steal Them

 

Cyber-zombies

 

I had one where there was a way to keep someone alive when they were near death, by having some of the organs replaced with cybernetics ones. Unfortuately, the process was extremely painful and required heavy medications which coupled with the weight of the cybernetics made them seem sluggish (think borg, but in full metal armor).

 

The scary part, was for some reason, they didn't seem to need to sleep (they did, but not as much, and they could be doing something repetative while napping). So while you could easily outrun and outdo them, they gained the upper hand while you slept or rested.

[Enforcer84]

Re: ITT: You Give Me Ideas, I Steal Them

 

Enforcer: You stole my sig! (I mean, I abandoned it, but you stole it!)

 

Any book is a children's book if the kid can read!

[Trencher]

Re: ITT: You Give Me Ideas, I Steal Them

 

A cyborg with a frogs head and a tounge of razorwire.

Small gnomes dressed in long green trenchcoats, and instead of heads they have sheprical lcd screens who write what they say.

[Lethosos]

Re: ITT: You Give Me Ideas, I Steal Them

 

Ooo! Ooo! Cybered-dragons with lasers and missile racks. That's nastier than the orignal, if you think about it...

[Vanguard00]

Re: ITT: You Give Me Ideas, I Steal Them

 

Djinn-inhabited computers? No CPU, just a captured semi-omniscient being.

Consider a mechanized infantry unit consisting of zombies, goblins, vampires, what-have-you, but the guns are science-based. No real working parts or anything; just magic-powered versions of the industrial version we know and love.

D&D-style pantheons of 'gods' who are in reality super-advanced Artificial Intelligences.

I really like the nano-faerie idea (I had something similar in mind).

Planes, trains, cars, motorcycles, etc, that don't run on gas but "spirit juice" or something (distilled essence of magic or magic-beings).

What we would consider "natural" science (phones, computers, calculators, etc), but they run on magic-based crystals or runes or something similar. Nothing too complex or even meaty, I admit, but it could be flavorful.

Modern glass-and-steel buildings that don't use modern engineering to hold them up (structurally unsound), but are reinforced by "earthquake runes" and "wind sigils" and the like.

Labor unions comprised of elementals (earth for moving stuff, air for helping to build high-rises, fire for welding and the like, water for...um...mixing and/or cooling stuff, maybe). Again, not terribly interactive, but could provide good background.