Lasers & Liches is a series of sourcebooks for Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition created by Chris Lock. It introduces the Retroverse, a retro-futuristic setting inspired greatly by pop culture of the 80s, 90s and early 2000s, where bright purple neon defines the landscape and everything is somehow going to be cybered up and ready to do battle in cyberspace. To understand the Retroverse, you must first rid yourself of the limiters of your imagination. This world does not follow the traditional rules for fantasy settings, and is meant to be bombastic, humorous and more than a little silly. The Rule of Cool is written into the spirit of the world and is the only one that should be adhered to strictly.
The Retroverse is an unstable plane, constantly expanding and contracting. Once simply an empty spinning reality, it soon began to intersect other realities. With every rotation, it picks up new bits of one reality while dropping off a piece in another reality. This is how seemingly disparate parts can come together to form a cohesive narrative. It also explains why some parts of the Retroverse may be heavily influenced by Norse Mythology while others more closely resemble 16-bit games. Every universe is intersected eventually and the Retroverse treats all equally, without any concern for which ones may be real. This means that you can take anything, from any setting, and mash it together—official 5th Edition content, mixed with Retroverse classes and species, fighting other 3rd party creatures.
The official website can be found here
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This game contains examples of:
- Alien Geometries: Areas under the Code's influence are often highly susceptible to corruption. When corruption seeps in, impossible glitches appear: inhabitants begin gliding in t-poses, geometry becomes broken, and things start fusing inside of other things.
- The Alternet: Within the Retroverse exists an invisible tangle of ethereal threads that cobble together what is known as the Arcane Eye Network.
- Bizarro Elements: The Retroverse is comprised of six Flair elements (Beat, Blood, Code, Cosmic, Dazzle, Scire), which exist in equal proportions. They often intermingle and can literally shape the nature of the area where they're dominant.
- Dire Beast: Dire creatures in the Retroverse are not always the same as other realities; they are typically stronger and often have strange mutations. They also lose themselves to the alteration, their minds overcome with hostile intent and losing any connections they had to their previous life. The bonds of a familiar, animal companion or the likes are lost in this transformation and, while not impossible to recover, are almost never reestablished.
- Fantasy Kitchen Sink: Since the Retroverse picks up bits from every reality it intersects, there are no limiters to time, technology, magic, creatures, societies, physics, or any other set of rules that would dictate the separation of elements in your story. Medieval knights can joust with fluorescent lights while riding mechanical chickens. Dwarves can mine out asteroids looking for magic rocks to craft into alien smiting blaster shells. An army of cybernetically enhanced orcs can fight against a squadron of neon-armoured samurai, wielding swords made from dubstep. The true magic of the Retroverse lies in your imagination.
- Leaking Can of Evil: The Cube serves a dual purpose as a planet and as a prison for a powerful force of corruption, called Seed. Despite the planet's presence, the deep corruption sometimes seeps to the surface and beyond.
- Magitek: Areas under the influence of Scire, the power of unbridled creativity and invention, are science fiction brought to life, where magic and technology meld together in an indistinguishable way.
- Man of the City: Neon Dragons spend a lot of their wealth on improving whatever city they live in, becoming quite protective of it. Usually, this is not pure altruism but another way of winning the friendship and adoration of the city's inhabitants.
- Mickey Mousing: This is a common element in lands where the Beat is dominant. Everything seems to move to a musical rythym. In extreme cases, people may burst into a well choreographed song and dance.
- Mordor: Lands where Blood is the dominant force are places of fierce battle and terrifying frights. The days are darker, and the moons only show when werecreatures prowl. Large cities are filled with dense smog that hides the actions of mob families. Death battles are commonplace and only the strongest survive.
- Our Dragons Are Different: There are six known types of dragons native to the Retroverse, roughly organized into two groups: Source (Code, Beat, and Tesla) dragons draw their power from the building blocks of creation. Dazzle (Laser, Neon, and Xenon) dragons draw power from luminescence and the life-giving nature of light.
- Beat Dragons have a deep connection to the Beat of the World allowing them to harness the power of music. They often attune themselves to a specific genre, often causing them to change into appearance more suited to it.
- Code Dragons are the most mysterious type, they seem to be living avatars of Code granting them the ability to rewrite reality around. They are often pursing inscrutable goals, and are susceptible to Corruption.
- Laser Dragons are highly intelligent, enjoying mental problems and riddles. They also love collecting trinkets and knowledge of the past. There habit of constantly rattling off dated references and trivia make them come across as haughty know-it alls, which they often are.
- Neon Dragons are probably the most sociable type of dragon in D&D. They crave a life of constant partying and the adoration of other creatures. Thus, they prefer to lair in the highest building of a city and dominate it's social scene.
- Tesla Dragons are probably the strangest type and appear to be a biological representation of mechanical idea: Take your standard fantasy dragon and combine it with a modern jet (they don't have wings but a magical turbine engine in their chest). They are dedicated to studying magic and machinery, searching for ways to combine them living creatures.
- Xenon Dragons see themselves as champions against darkness (as in the literal absence of light). While most see them as a force for good, Xenon Dragons actually have little interest in the conflict between good and evil. They claim their crusade to spread light everywhere is part of a higher battle to fend off the heat death of the universe.
- Reality Is Out to Lunch: In a Cosmic-dominant area, the laws of physics are no longer agreed upon and may change in an instant. It can behave much like a corrupted Code area does, with impossible mountains and incomprehensible spaces, but instead of simply being broken, it follows rules you couldn't possibly understand. All things are possible when the rules of the cosmos begin bending, reversing, or simply breaking. Life inside Cosmic lands are like art and books of mind-bending horror and cosmic insignificance.
- Schizo Tech: Lock describes the Retroverse as 'Dyson rings, imagine a bunch of flowing rings around a of light whatever you wanted it to be, that are constantly expanding and contracting, one ring may be purely fantasy but as it intersects another ring that suddenly in the middle of town square you've got an arcade cabinet for no apparent reason'—technology and high magic are mixed in a way never really explained because it doesn't need to be.
