tl;dr this links to a pdf that provides guidance and world-building for a role-playing game master/referee to run a one-shot adventure that involves an astronomy puzzle, maybe. (I've not read too closely, to avoid spoiling for myself.) The text largely eschews any stats so people can adapt it to their system of choice. The initial conceit seems to involve the literal players astrally projecting into the characters they create, who are denizens of some exoplanet imbued with magic. The players traveled there after our Hubble Telescope disappeared.
There's like 3 things in that whole PDF that have "stats" associated at all (recommended levels, chance of getting hit by some arrows, some damage dice.) Those stats are mostly basic numbers. If you can't convert that to a different system then maybe it's worth learning one RPG system well.
It does specifically ask for a "Perception check" at one point, and makes heavy use of easy, medium and hard DC checks, neither of which translate over to a system like Mothership very well and are very DND-centric
Not really. GURPS has a Perception stat that's derived differently than D&D and can differ per sense if a character has specialized in better hearing, sight, etc. Perception checks are very much a part of GURPS. Savage Worlds has a Notice skill that acts almost 1:1 to Perception. GURPS and Savage Worlds (and lots of other games besides) both also have the concepts of "easy", "medium", and "hard" checks.
That there are some systems that do not have a Perception style mechanism does not mean that the adventure is "DND-centric", that just means you're running a system that probably doesn't act as a simple translation target for the adventure.
My favorite roleplaying game involves a bunch of Hong Kong action heroes fighting global conspiracies and occasionally traveling through time. The adventure doesn’t fit the genre well, although I certainly could convert it.
First, but kind of because I’m nostalgic. Also I’m a bit bitter that the cool dry erase character sheets I got with Second Edition had significant errata, making them less useful.
My first thought that was D&D wouldn't be a great system, because you have to put the Hubble Space Telescope into the universe, and that really ruins the fantasy world vibe.
With a little effort, you could work this into a Cyberpunk campaign, as Night City is set in the United States after all. Or you could just create a more story appropriate version of Hubble in the world of your choice.
I read through the campaign, and it seems fun enough if done right.
I put a train engine in my D&D campaign, the Santa Fe. The paladin asked for a translation of the text on the side, and the wizard cast the "Read Language" spell. I actually looked up the meaning of Santa Fe, which is "Holy Faith" and the paladin took it as a sign.
The problem of fitting the Hubble Telescope into your fantasy setting is one of storytelling. You simply don't refer to it as the Hubble Telescope. It’s a bizarre artifact. The fantasy world is already full of bizarre artifacts, so that’s fine. It’s not magical, yet constructed using techniques and materials unknown to any artificer or wizard. To anyone in the world, it’s just a giant tube with a curved mirror in it and some thin sapphire plates on the side. Does it say “NASA” in giant letters on its side? Yes, but no one in the game knows that. It’s just some indecipherable script that literally no one, regardless of level, can decipher because not only does NASA not exist as a word, the Latin alphabet doesn’t exist.
The real world and fantasy world interacting is a trope that has existed for centuries.
A friend of mine played a D&D game where the party got sent to real world Earth. None of their magic worked. After they killed the first cop that stopped them, the half-orc barbarian promptly accident shot himself and died while examining the dead cop’s gun.
This, I also feel like pop culture has forgotten overtime just how much inspiration (and in many cases ripping it out of the source material 1:1) early D&D took from science fiction / fantasy mashup classics like Jack Vance's Dying Earth.
There's not much difference to a common denizen of a fantasy world between a wand that shoots bolts of lightning and polished chrome laser pistol tube, or between a flying carpet and hover car. It's all the same to them, and the whole "our ancestral civilizations were so knowledgeable in the lost occult arts that they could shape magic into common objects" when it's really just forgotten high tech sciences is always a fun bit of world building.
This kind of material absolutely belongs in fantasy and I really hope that someday sci-fantasy makes a big comeback, some of my favorite reading books and inspiration for tabletop material have come out of them.
Dying Earth and the Book of the New Sun would be the big two I'd recommend, though their settings are very similar they're very different in tone. Book of the New Sun would be better if you want a more serious read about that kind of world while Dying Earth is more of a collection of (very) humorous and whimsical short stories about a bizarre setting and it's even more bizarre inhabitants.
Hard to be a God was a good read I enjoyed and feels like it falls into this category as well, from the point of the "higher beings."
A lot of famous early pulp fantasy didn't make as much of a concrete distinction between science fiction and fantasy either and tended to blend the two freely. I think most people would think of Conan as pure fantasy but there were a handful of stories about him encountering otherworldly alien beings and sci-fi technology, or ancient highly advanced civilizations whose progress is incomprehensible to (in Conan's world) modern inhabitants. IIRC there was at least one Fahfrd and the Grey Mouser story where they come across an interdimensional traveler.
If other people have recommendations too I'd love for them to chime in. It's a genre I feel is definitely underrepresented.
The Fafhrd & Mouser story (one of them, anyway) is The Swords of Lankhmar, which is absolutely fantastic.
Michael Moorcock is another writer who often mixed fantasy and SF. His Dancers at the End of Time series is brilliant and hilarious. Or more straight-faced and pulpy, the Hawkwind and Elric stories are great.
And Jack Vance, of course. As well as The Dying Earth, he did a bunch of comedy-oriented stories in the same setting, starring Cugel the Clever and Rhialto the Marvellous.
