A World Without Monsters

[Tonguez]

I have done this in the past and enjoyed the process for instance I used a Thoqua and had it cast as a 'Sand Worm' which excretes (and when threatened spits) a sodiun based slime which on contact with the air heats up and burns flesh. Destrachans were giant bats, the sealion was a vicisous speoices of sealion (seal-like)

 

[Whisper72]

For most of my campaigns, the basic premise is that humans and humanoids are the norm. So other humans, (dark)elves, dwarves, orcs, goblins etc. are the most common enemies. The main fantastic enemies comprose of several 'types' of monsters with a human(oid) basis:

were creatures (the cursed, these are humanoids living under some curse which is passed on from generation to generation)
mindless undead (the lost, usually the result of necromancers, sometimes other magical or divine effects)
intelligent undead (the corrupted, usually from some pact or ritual made by the humanoid (vampires, liches etc.) or revenant behaviour from humanoids who do not want to give in to death and refuse to pass on)
half demons/devils (the damned, which are VERY rare, the result of willful breeding programs with summoned demons or devils by certain cults)
shapechangers (the hidden, dragons who live in human form, dopplegangers etc., strange beings who survive by fitting in as much as possible)

other 'common' adversaries are constructs of all types (from golems (magical) to mechanical constructs) and summoned monsters (mainly elementals and devils, demons, daemons etc.)

Other 'common' adversaries are the offsrping of (magical) breeding programmes resulting in creatures such as bulette and other strange nasties

In the vast wilderness strange and fantastic beasts can exist, but these are special and rare.

So in essence, only dragons are relatively 'common' fantastic creatures, but this is usually the remnants of the age of dragons who learned to survive against the tide of human(oids) by 'joining' them, and living among them in shapechanged form. At lower levels, the PC's will not even know they exist at all, they existance is generally a myth and the truth is known only to a handful.

 

[Woem]

This reminds me of Primeval, a tv series where portals appeared all over the world bringing dinosaurs to the present day. The players could investigate where the dinosaurs come from all of a sudden, then investigate why those portals are appearing. Did a wizard create them? Are they an omen of something worse to come? Perhaps the people in your world are advancing in technology and a god is punishing them for it, sending them back to the past. The players might step into a portal, trying to figure out how to shut them down...

 

[talien]

Interesting. So for those of you with campaigns like this...how do you handle published adventures? Do you have to do a lot of conversions?

And what adventures best fit this kind of setting without major conversion?

 

[Whisper72]

Well, I don't really run published adventures. I buy plenty of them, but 'mine' them for ideas only. The actual adventures the players will be running through have little resemblance to any published adventures.

Also, I tend to run 'sandbox' style campaigns, so I like to have tons of ready made locations, maps and ideas on hand. In the end, most of the stuff I run is based om some general ideas I have of where the overall campaign is going, where the adventure in particular is going, a lot of 'ready made' basic plots, bad guys, organizations, machinations, locations and legends etc. and then add a ton of fly by the seams of your pants figuring stuff out as play goes along. I do a lot of reacting to what the PC's do, making them the driving force of the 'story'.

The upswing is that there is never a railroad, the PC's have tons of influence on where the game is going through their actions, as their actions form input for my own though processes for how to proceed. The downswing is that there is rarely one big end-all be-all bad guy and sometimes the figuring stuff out as you go along means that planning far ahead is difficult for the PC's as well as myself (although it never stops them from doing so....).