There’s a species that’s an awful lot like tyrranids (or the Brood). Dark matter engines are powered by void crystals that sounds an awful lot like dilithium. There are the grey men who engaged in all that kidnapping back in the day (although they are really amorphous in shape, and just take on a shape that vaguely resembles the species they’re interacting with). There are the aliens who built the Egyptian pyramids. The Void through which space travel occurs is reminiscent of the Warp from Warhammer 40K (the mutations that can be caused by exposure to raw Void are even called warping). And you can also just create folks that are fully at home in the Dark Matter setting.īeyond the ‘everything goes’ ethos, the Dark Matter setting does have its own elements … although even those lean towards pulling from existing material. Want to take characters from detailed existing worlds (official D&D worlds, third party worlds, your own stuff) and have them awkwardly get to know each other as they learn what space travel is all about? You can do that. Want to pretend this is TOS and visit a bunch of one-note theme-of-the-week planets? You can do that. And Dark Matter presumes that the galaxy is full of pretty much everything and every kind of planet. You can find pretty much any science fiction trope in here – laser swords, jokes about red shirts, hard light constructs, heading into the black to explore the ‘verse, etc. The philosophy of Dark Matter leans very much towards anything goes. I think that Dark Matter is as much, if not more, about enabling you to play your sort of science fantasy game, rather than pushing this particular setting. This is a campaign setting, so I feel like I should say something about the setting first, but there are ways in which the setting here isn’t terribly important – you can use the rules in Dark Matter to do your own science fantasy galaxy anyway. So, what’s your breakdown in that 300 pages? It’s about 50 pages of setting information, ~70 of new character options, ~30 of new equipment, ~45 on starships, ~60 of monsters, and ~20 of spells, with some appendices filling out the rest. And while the existing rules don’t change, you almost certainly do have to learn something new, because few science fantasy campaigns won’t involve flying around on a starship. You can add more – there are new character options, of course – but everything that you already have just works. If you want to make a new character specifically for a Dark Matter campaign, all you need to adjust is add a skill or three to your class skills list (data, piloting, technology), add some weapon proficiencies (blasters and some more specialized things), and check your updated starting gear options. Everything in your D&D books is playable here. You could take a character from your existing D&D campaign and have them whisked off-planet into a Dark Matter campaign and you wouldn’t have to change a thing. The core idea being that if you can mass produce certain magical items – to let you shoot energy blasts or fly or teleport – then you can create a magical economy where magic powers science fiction staples like blasters and jet packs and warp gates, while still having wizards and clerics and the like running around.Ī big thing about Dark Matter is that the basic rules don’t change at all. The basic idea behind Dark Matter is to take the existing 5E rules framework and use that to play in a science fantasy setting without modifying that framework or unnecessarily bolting a lot of extra rules baggage on top of it. For the sake of clarity, let’s note up front that this Dark Matter is unrelated to either the Dark*Matter campaign setting for the Alternity RPG or the Dark Matter television series/comic. Dark Matter takes the converse approach – “any sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology” – to push 5E out into space.ĭark Matter is an ~300-page hardcover from Mage Hand Press that invites the reader to dive into science fiction with “the world’s greatest roleplaying game” (a.k.a. One of the niftier roleplaying games to come out in recent years was Numenera, which got a lot of mileage out of Clarke’s Third Law – “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” ( editor’s note – what does it say when you think of an RPG published in 2013 as “recent?”) In Numenera, this phrase spoke to hypertech remnants of past civilizations – effectively magic to the lower-tech current residents of the world.
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