Aus_Snow said:
No, low-magic and lethality (in comparison with D&D, RAW, which is very high-magic, and very low-lethality by default) have nothing to do with low-level.
I'm sorry, I was looking at the bit where you said "So too then is miraculous healing, easily dealing with undead, resurrection, outright annihilating entire sections of foes and/or the surrounding countryside (without so much as a flick of the hand, sometimes)" and responding to that.
Those situations seem pretty dependent upon adventuring at high levels, to me. Oh, PCs generally have access to miraculous healing at 1st level (albeit not much of it), but I don't think dealing with undead is ever
necessarily easy, resurrection is most definitely a high-level schtick, and I don't think I need to explain why annihilating large numbers of enemies and/or the countryside is generally associated with powerful characters.
Then you go on to talk about wounds and scars and injuries . . . and this is what prompted my comment: You're talking about types of horror stories which relies upon things which only work at low levels. Splatterpunk, survival horror,
et cetera.
Psychological horror, apocalyptic horror, characters rendered powerless because the evil threatens their loved ones in a way they can't protect against . . .
Just because you have to tailor a horror story to the capabilities of the PCs doesn't mean that you can't do horror even with standard D&D. Hell, turn your average isolated village into Zombietown while the PCs sleep and there's going to be more flesh-eating walking dead than your cleric can turn. When they're higher-level, ghosts. And so on.
You just have to
think. I honestly believe depowering the PCs and the setting is the easy way out.