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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Stormborn" data-source="post: 1695681" data-attributes="member: 14041">I would call my campaign "alternate magic."  The PCs, as heroes, tend to come across low levels of magic frequesntly, or powerful magics on occasion.  The average person, however, has neither seen nor believes in magic.I have done the following to game mechancis to deal with this (if I can remmebr them all):1. No magic using classes, Bard and Ranger have been given alternate class abilites/feats to compensate.  Monk and Paladin weren't available as a starting classes due to setting.  No Wiz, Sorcerer, Druid, Cleric, etc.  A beefed up version of Expert was available.2. Parry rules.  This was for setting flavor, but it also helps to compensate for lower levels of armor due to a lack of magic items.3. Magic once existed in abundance in the world, but no reliable records of the time exist.  A few artifacts do.  The most powerful of these are currently coming into play and affecting the political and social landscape.4.Anyone can learn 0 or 1st level spells.  It requires a source (book or teacher), time, and a succesful Know(occultism) check.  It recently took the bard 3 days of study to learn Light. To learn higher level spells requires Feats.5. Casting spells requires a succesful check as well.  Casting a spell does ability damage to the caster depending on the type as well as producing an effect called Taint.  Taint is a corruption in body and soul that will eventually cause a spell caster to degenerate into mishappen insanity.  Evil spells produce more taint, and even cause taint when they are learned. A Feat allows a character to perform a ritual to roll a die and reduce taint by that amount.6. As a general rule I am using only 0-5th level divine spells and spells from Call of Cthulhu.  But since I choose what spells the characters have access to  thats only a guide line.  Higher level spells are possibly, but only through the use of Ritual.7.The PCs, through adventuring, have recieved items or abilities that will increase in power with time.  They don't know how they will increase, nor did they know they were choosing them at the time.  This is to compensate for the shortage of magical items.8. Alchemy is nonmagical, and thus some potions are available, although we haven't used these very much.9. I try to limit or modify the monsters they encounter.  Mostly they face monsterous humaniods or human opponents.  Undead have been promenent in early adventures and dire animals have also shown up.  The biggest single creature they have faced was a somewhat modifed  Juvinile Black Dragon. 10.  I try to show the indirect effects of magic.  The horror in the commoners when they see a spell cast, the brutality of the Inquistion in supressing magic, the elaborate lengths that some people go to just to aquire simple magic items or spell books.</blockquote>

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