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>>26795478

Time passed like this for a long while, as time is often want to do.

Then the first of the aliens in a colonising ship.

Note that this is a hard science-fiction so colonising ship is maybe too strong a term, their ship was a spike travelling lazilly through what the robots call "space" at less than the speed of light, and when it hit the earth it produced from where they were stored as information on the ship's internal computer banks many colonists whose bodies were made by the ship.

The aliens were strange worm-like creatures completely different from man or robot or dog. And these worms preferred the embrace of the earth where they could build vast and elaborate tunnel complexes in mountains and underground, mining out untapped ores and making strange devices that they would trade for supplies and other things with the robots.

Of course, having a bunch of giant worms burrowing through the earth of their masters upset the robots, but their inherent wish to preserve sentient life caused them to hesitate in doing anything about the coming of the worms until the worms had saturated quite large amount of the planet's mountains and the crust of the planet itself. So, faced with an intractable problem, the robots and the worms came to a rough peace of mutual indifference and occasional need, with the worms avoiding damaging human changed areas in exchange for what aid the worms felt they needed (though in general, the worms seemed happy just worming around and the robots seemed at their happiest ignoring this slight kink in their maintenance of the earth).

Then another alien race fell to the earth, and that was when the trouble began.

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>>26795713

Let me be blunt here: They were orcs. Oh, not exactly the same as the fictional race; they were somewhat humanoid but not to quite the extent of being just large, muscular green humans. But humanoid they were, and close enough to make it difficult for the robots to at first do anything about the problem they caused.

You see, like the first space ship, it was empty of live aliens, but instead of making fully formed adults, it had millions of embryos and sperm, and thousands of artificial wombs.

The original plan seemed to be for the ship to land, produce millions of children and using complex robotic and computerised learning system, quickly get those children upto speed with the technology and civilisation of its originators.

Except that the ship had a hole that went through all three backup system for that.

The end product was millions of confused, barbaric and violent cave dweller level aliens.

And the ship landed in a medium sized city, and before the robots who were trying to maintain the city knew, they were overrun by orcish warbands and hundreds of robots were killed - the largest number since records had begun.

Eventually, as the death toll among robots rose and the threat posed to man's earth was realised, the robots tentatively began to fight back and with the aid of the near magical technology left to them by humans, were easily able to contain the orcs to their "original" birth lands.

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>>26796014

However, the robots quailed at wiping out the orcs for good, and kept this warlike stale mate going for a long time... long enough for the Orcs to learn and grow more and more technologically, so where the orcs were weilding sticks and stones, after only a few thousand years the orcs had reached the level of industry and chemically propelled projectile weapons.

Part of the problem and speed withwhich they advance is to do with access to some left behind human literature and knowledge that the orcs have, over the millenia, been able to at least partially decipher them, jump starting certain technologies and giving them a small amount of access to the near magical wonders of technology that humanity possessed when they died out.

I'm also going to take a liberty with the ancient myth "The Lord of Rings", where the orcs of that tale lived in a metaphor for the creep of industrialisation, so they lived in the city of mordor, which belched forth smoke from its factories and foundries and poisoned the air and land as it did this.

But what is the cultural equivalent to industrial factories? Why, an overly complex legal system of course.

So let us say that the orc found and translated a load of human legal texts... and just for the hell of it, the complete works of ayn rand (because atlas shrugged has all that stuff about steel and trains and anthem has a detailed description of a light bulb).

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>>26796435

So we have our classic fantasy setting: the elvish robots, the hobbit-esque Dogs, the dwarven Worms, and the orcish orcs, all in a 100% hard science fiction setting.

let us now add magic: go the clarkian route, but we do it like this:

Humans embedded their technology, all Culture-y force fields and ST:TNG style replicator stuff under the ground and in the air - getting the worms to avoid the underground stuff is one of the main things the robots and worms interact over, but some of it has been damaged over the eons, with the upshot that there are areas where this technology is easier or hard to control.

In the air are nanite things, they're not that well distributed or as powerful as the underground stuff, but they can be used to perform basic intangible holograms and make meager rations out of CO2.

However, there's a catch, 3 of them to be precise; 1, you have to give the system 24 hours notice that you will be using an effect at some point in the next day (vancian magic), 2, the system decides (via some opaque and poorly understood means even according to the robots) if a person is able call up an effect based on their "life experience" (basically the XP and levelling system) and 3, The system is all linked into the old human financial and banking system, and you have to be able to afford the effect you're asking for using the universal currency (which is of course called Mana).

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>>26796930

The question I bring to you /tg/, is what system to use for it? You have a setting where you can play intelligent talking corgis with robot butlers, humanoid robots with access to magical forcefields, early flintlock rifle weilding orcs from a society of hyper-selfish train obsessed legalists (there's an underpinning thing with anarcho-capitalism where you need a robust court system to handle contract disputes, so lots of orcs lawyers! yay).

But what system elegan/tg/entlemen, WHAT SYSTEM!?

GURPS

Traveller

If you want to do kitbashing Shadowrun

>>26797059

All of that babbling just to ask what system you can play hard science-fantasy LotR?

It's just GURPS.

I'm disappointed because you said you were going to blow my mind.

Also those dogs don't seem much like hobbits.

This already exists. It's called The World of Synnibarr.

>>26797059
I don't know, I'm really sorry, but GOOD LORD THIS IS THE BEST THING I'VE READ ON TG IN MONTHS.

>>26797896

Why do you say that?

>>26798044

Not that anon, but I dig the idea of a world of dogs and robots, the two things that really rely on us for existing, sans humans.

>>26798059

I see, cool foundation

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I am interested. Unfortunately I don't have anything to contribute, but this sounds like an awesome setting.

The robots and dogs thing sort of reminds me of Clifford Simack's "City".

Also, you can't really have what you refer to as "Hard Science Fiction" here (it's not a completely accurate term) with Culture-eqsue force fields all over. You could really justify just about any sort of magic with "technology got advanced enough", but I believe what you're trying to do here is "a setting where there is no technology that cannot be explained using current science" (else there wouldn't be a technological reason not to have FTL spaceships), and in this case force fields are out (blow your mind again: the Culture books are anything but hard science fiction).