Dark Matter is the ultimate sci-fi expansion for 5th Edition D&D not just because it gives you a vast sandbox of blasters, ships, and adventure. It’s also because it plugs seamlessly into 5th Edition D&D mechanics. This means that you can take the Blasters and throw them into an otherwise medieval game or take a hapless party of adventurers and launch them into space!
“Launching them into space” has actually become a time-tested way to swap settings mid-campaign. Maybe the characters stumble into a dungeon that’s secretly a buried space ship? Maybe they’re abducted while traveling the kingdom’s loneliest backroads?
To get your next campaign from Faerûn to the stars, we’ll explore the best ways to hijack your fantasy campaign.
Time Jump!
At the height of a strange, metallic mountain temple, a chronomantic portal with a metallic gate. Within, the characters spy a swirl of historical events—their own pasts, cities rising and falling, rivers carving away hillsides, and more. Whether they dive into the portal or are sucked in by narrative convenience, they find themselves in the same sport in the far future! Their medieval world has developed to a high-tech future of hoverboards and spacecraft, and there’s no going back.
This gimmick also works with Cryo Pods (as in Futurama!) but savvy players will probably avoid getting inside the metallic tube that freezes you solid.
Techno-Dungeon
An expedition brings the players to a strange dungeon buried in the slopes of a remote mountain range. Inside, the floors and ceilings are made of metal, and the whole structure surges with strange magical energies—especially lightning. Constructs roam the halls and various fixtures within the structure can produce effects like Wall of Force and Disintegrate.
If you’re familiar with your D&D history, congratulations: you’ve spotted an Expedition to Barrier Peaks! In this classic module, the players soon realize what their characters have no way to contextualize: that the dungeon is actually a crashed spaceship. Sci-fi staples like forcefields are explained with in-universe spells and classic pulp sci-fi staples like robots make appearances as wandering Constructs. Though the original adventure is a colossal dungeon crawl by modern standards, it’s not hard to brew up your own with a small ship and a few enemies from Dark Matter. You can even give out some Blasters and explain them as weird metal wands with a trigger!
Once the characters reach the final room, the bridge, a careless press of a button launches the ship into space! The dungeon becomes the characters’ home base as they wander aimlessly among the stars, trying to orient themselves and find their way back home.
Little Green Men
The quest-giver, a farmer from a nearby village, details a bizarre curse he blames on a witch: odd patterns appearing in their fields, slain cattle, and haunting lights that appear in the sky. Sure enough, when the party investigates, a beam of light fixes on each of them in turn and pulls them high into the night sky!
Flexible oozelike creatures (the Amoeboids from Dark Matter) interrogate the characters — strapped to metal tables—about why they’re interfering in a routine biological survey. As it dawns on the characters that they’re trapped within a flying spacecraft, the saucer undergoes some sort of disaster and takes off to seek refuge with the mothership! The characters might cause the havoc at hand, a classic monster (such as an owlbear) might break loose from its examination cell, or a faction of space pirates might attack!
When the ship-hopping is finally over, the party is stranded on a space station and must find work and purpose in the larger universe if they want to get home!
This particular hook also works in modern settings! Earth exists in Dark Matter too, off in the corner of a Dead Magic Zone, far from the bustle of galactic factions.
Check out what’s inside
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Dark Matter (PDF)
$30.00 -
Dark Matter Hardcover
$50.00 -
Dark Matter Slipcase Bundle
Original price was: $85.00.$65.00Current price is: $65.00.
Halflings and Hearthstations
After a long trek, the weary party stumbles across an apparently new tavern far off the main road run by a small family of halflings. Their rates are reasonable and the tavern is tidy, but few clues might strike the party as odd: chairs made with metal bars where one might usually use wood, a music-machine in the corner, and exactingly perfect clothes on the halfling owners, as if stitched by magic.
Little does the party know that the tavern is actually a Hearthstation, a flying space station that resembles a cozy tavern within and without. This particular Hearthstation sells a rustic vacation package, spending a few days on an authentic Low World—one without high technology—for the amusement of guests. However, when the owner comes down with a medical emergency, nobody thinks to kick the party out of their rooms before taking off to the stars! The entire tavern careens into space, docking at a sprawling space station in which the owner is rushed to a hospital and characters stumble into a sci-fi universe.
Perhaps, the characters run afoul of the local law enforcement, or perhaps they’re swept up in a tale of criminal intrigue. Regardless, it’ll be weeks before they can make it back home — maybe they should look for adventure among the stars!
Once you’ve made it to sci-fi D&D, you can click here for a d100 table of continuing adventures in the ‘Verse. And you can follow the Dark Matter Megabox Kickstarter to catch the revised edition for the 2024 ruleset!
