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Enchanted Trinkets Complete--a hardcover book containing over 500 magic items for your D&D games!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Garnfellow" data-source="post: 2924235" data-attributes="member: 1223">I just finished up a long-running low-magic campaign that spanned both 2nd and 3rd edition. As a lot of people have written, it's a lot of fricken work, but not impossible to pull off. And there are more tools to do it now than ever before.At the start, we limited PC races to human only, and classes to bard, cleric, fighter, rogue, and wizard. I was extremely stingy about magic items, and they only fought fantastical monsters occasionally. The biggest house rule was that I made it very hard to find or research new arcane spells.More or less, things ran pretty well with just these house rules until the PCs hit about 12th level or so. There is a crazy inflection point somewhere around there and the wheels starting coming off game balance. The wizards and clerics really began outshining their companions.By the very end, I finally had amassed the house rules I needed to run the game at higher levels. As many people have noted, AC and saving throws are a huge problem in low magic, high level D&D games. Spell DCs, sans stat-boosters are also weaker. This roughly balances out if the PCs are just fighting NPCs with similar limitations, but most high level monsters are built around much higher magic assumptions.You can go a long way to running a successful low-magic game using just Unearthed Arcana. Many of the best parts of that book were drawn from d20 Modern, which presumes a lower magic baseline. At a minimum, I would use AU's class-based AC bonuses, and let it stack with armor (like it does in d20 Modern). Use Action Points to give the players a few more options and pop. Use the reserve points system, which lets PCs fight longer without clerics, potions, and wands of cure light wounds.Consider implementing something like the "higher minimum hp" from Iron Heroes. Substitute the following for hp:1d4 - 1d2+21d6 - 1d4+21d8 - 1d4+41d10 - 1d4+61d12 - 1d4+8Consider adopting d20 Modern's abstract wealth system to get away from all the treasure balance problems in a low-magic D&D. The Grim Tales book has a good chapter on integrating   this wealth system with more conventional coin-based systems.Further afield, you could use the masterwork properties from the Black Company Campaign setting and the combat stunts and maneuver systems from The Book of Iron Might to give fighters and rogues some more interesting options at high levels.</blockquote>

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