Having just finished GMing an Iron Gods campaign for Pathfinder along with the announcement of Spelljammer returning to D&D I figured now is a good time to talk about the Sword and Plant (S&P) genre. When we talk about writing games S&P we have to remember that we can start from several positions, with the easiest being to introduce sci-fi elements into a fantasy story, like the John Carter of Mars series.

If we go Carter we’ll be tossing sci-fi elements into a fantasy setting. A great example of this is Yor, Hunter from the Future (1983). In this classic Yor, a caveman, discovers he’s not living in prehistory but the post apocalypse. The film transitions from fighting mutated cave people and dinosaurs with spears to robots and an evil overlord with laser guns.
Its certainly a movie of its time but Yor offers us a great outline for how to write a John Cater style S&P story. At low levels keep the story as normal, maybe with a bit of extra weirdness the spellcasters can’t explain, then introduce the sci-fi stuff with a bang. The number one thing to avoid with this type of S&P story is playing your hand too soon. Lets compare two adventures that did this, Iron Gods: The Fires of Creation and Legendary Planet: The Assimilation Strain. Both of these are multipart adventure series designed to be sci-fi adventuers in the Pathfinder setting.

In Iron Gods: The Fires of Creation, the very first combat encounter is a robot. No preamble, no setup, not even a ‘construct’ instead of a robot, just a straight up robot fight after you meet the two main NPCs in town. Then you’re exploring a crashed space ship 8 rooms later. It all happens so quickly that by the time your at the end of the book facing an android who’s about to set off a nuke, the sci-fi aspect of the story has just become … mundane.

The Assimilation Strain, on the other hand features no overt sci-fi elements. There is an evil alien and a labratory, but all of these are vague enough that most groups could get away with just shrugging and saying its a weird alchemy lab.

I can tell you right now, the group playing the assimilation strain was drooling by the time they got some hard sci-fi in the following books. Whereas for the Iron Gods players, the ghostly wizard they were fighting halfway through the story felt much weirder than any robot or alien did.

For those preparing a Spelljammer game this is what you should be looking for. Weirdness only stays that way if you have something to contrast it to. Root characters in a grounded world before they rocket off into the phlogiston and fight Neogi Mindspiders or a coven of space hags who’ve taken the form of three world eating suns. That doesn’t mean they have to be rat catchers, just that fantasy should lead into the stars.