(d20 Modern) d20 Future Tech

From time to time, I'll express an outrageous opinion like "my favorite books are audacious trash" and it will seem like a joke, even to me, but then I'll read a book like d20 Future Tech (Rodney Thompson and JD Wiker) and my honest reaction is "aw man, this isn't even a little bit trash, what am I supposed to do now?"

It's a silly impulse, to be honest. It's pretty obvious what I'm supposed to do now - add new gadgets, spaceships, mechs, and robots to my d20 Future games, possibly curating the lists to fit with the needs of my specific campaign setting. Because that was the use case the book was intended for, and it does it competently, with no major mistakes.

I guess the suggestions about how you might go about mixing combat scales (character, vehicle, mech, and starship) are a bit . . . optimistic, but that's no great fault. If you're in a situation where the PCs are floating through space in their mechs, assaulting a star destroyer, you're probably already flying by the seat of your pants as a GM. The worst I can say about these additional rules is that they only slightly mitigate that problem.

The worst thing I can say about the book as a whole is that some of the new technology is pretty bland. Buy your ship a Stellar Navigation System, which gives a +6 bonus to "Navigate checks to plot courses in a starship." Okay. 

But even that complaint would be misleading. There's also a lot of non-bland stuff here. You can fire a dart with a built-in speaker that will play suspicious noises to distract any nearby guards . . . and I can't say definitively why that wouldn't work in real life . . . so it must be plausible? 

Anyway, once you've distracted them, you can keep them occupied with a well-placed superlube grenade and start wrecking the place with your light anti-tank pistol. After all, you're on a mission to capture a gallon of Hydromolecular Medium ("data encoded onto water molecules") so that you can drink it and learn the enemy's plans ("hydromolecular medium has replaced the printed word").

Unfortunately, the technology is still grouped by "progress level" rather than more coherent narrative themes, so all the best stuff exists as isolated one-offs (and virtually no thought at all is given to the staggering social implications of a world where people drink books instead of reading them), but encouraging a la carte worldbuilding is probably d20 Modern's greatest strength as a gameline, so I'm not about to start getting mad at it now.

Overall, this book is 96 pages that could have been seamlessly added to d20 Future. Since I liked d20 Future, I liked this book as well, even if there is a dark corner of my heart that would have preferred "d20 Future Trash."

Ukss Contribution: There are about 8 pages in the middle of the book that do in fact attempt to do some real sci-fi worldbuilding. Mostly, these pages are spent being wrong about the trajectory of cell-phone technology and optimistic about the level of customer service we can expect from commercial space travel, but there's a part in the middle about advertising that takes some admirably big swings.

Some of it is astute observations - ubiquitous surveillance and advances in biometrics allows for tech companies to serve you with precisely tailored ads, which can call you out by name.

And some of it is just kind of sad. In the distant future, the Energy Age, when humanity has cracked zero-point energy and molecular-scale fabrication technology, they're still going to be serving ads into your holograms.

But there was one particular idea that stuck out - "A byproduct of the talking product is the walking product: a robot built to resemble a product, which wanders throughout the store extolling the virtues of the product to shoppers. Though considered amusing and whimsical by some consumers - mainly children and thier parents - many others find them annoying."

This is precisely my favorite kind of science fiction because it throws my brain out of gear just thinking about it. Like, I turn into the supermarket cereal aisle and right in front of me is a box of Cap'n Crunch, but it has arms and legs and it's doing a little jig, desperately trying to draw my attention to the real boxes of cereal behind it. Is this necessary? Is it even useful? Am I more likely to buy a box of Cap'n Crunch after seeing this display?

I guess, on an emotional level, I'd be one of the people who find it amusing and whimsical, but on a practical level, I'd probably be annoyed by this fucking robot blocking my shopping cart. And in this hypothetical universe, I'd probably reference it frequently on my blog whenever I needed an example of something I was ambivalent about.

However, as someone who is writing a fantasy rpg setting (or, alternatively, as a GM who might run a sci-fi setting), I'm absolutely cackling with glee at the thought of depicting this gizmo. This is some real Douglas Adams shit, and a good example of why you should read all the way through your rpg books, even if the first 50 pages or so are mostly dry lists of equipment.