D&D 4E Ideas for my "4e No-Magic Sandbox Campaign"

[holyground]

I ended up doing something like this myself. The start of my DMing career began after I finished the last of Joe Abercrombie's First law Trilogy. The world is large and the story threads are just begging for adaptation for a campaign. If you haven't read it, I recommend it heartily. As for why this is germain to the discussion, I feel that it's relatively little use of magic and humancentric storyline is a perfect fit.

Magic:
there are stories of magic in older times, that of the great Juvens and his twleve apprentices. The only character in the book that can really do magic is Bayaz, first of the magi, and when he does magic, it's world-changing. No magic missle stuff here; he makes people explode from the inside, makes things spontaneously combust, but all of this happens very, very rarely. Most of the characters are martial.

Races as subraces:
The easiest fit Goliaths, who could be the Northmen from the story. but since there are different races of man from different continents in the story, it would be easy to "convert" them to a campaign setting.

Conflict:
What's not to love? You have two wars brewing and a quest to find an artifact of great power that may not be anything. If you haven't read the story, I won't spoil it for you much, but the quest to find the Seed is an amazing heroic journey.

 

[Garthanos]

Given you're humanistic this might be of some use to you for ideas -

Key Our Cars » Blog Archive » Humanocentric World?

Somebody suggested a dwarf hammer wielder as the basis for a lame staff using monk, and budda bing... after that it was no going home.
The ceiling is not nailed down Horatio go ahead and dive.

I consider the games races archetypes. In the game world if you wanted to be a reincarnating character... you might pick deva, or human... or tiefling
Add in more flavor adaptability devas pick which pair of yin yang resistances... then make the character look however you like... or even have a life span or other flavor and fluff bits mixed in.

If you want to be one of the cat-folk with uncanny luck (build him with halfling) and if you wanted to build one of those same cat-folk but emphasize the nine lifes build him with deva.

A lizardman might use the warforged archetype and treat there incredibly hard to kill nature as being tissue regeneration...

 

[Kzach]

I've run into a few problems though that I hope you guys could possibly help me with. Based on the (unfortunately) brief info above, what kind of dungeons do you imagine? There are no longer goblins, or gnolls to simply infest ruins. Every sentient beings are human, aside from that there are the natural beasts that also exist here on earth that would survive during a prolonged winter, wolves, deer, beavers, etc...

Empty and boring ones.

Honestly, what do you expect when you take away all that is fun about D&D? You're surprised there's nothing interesting to fill your dungeons with?

And 4e just isn't a good fit for this type of game. On the one hand you're saying that everything fantastic and magical in the world has gone, and yet you're using a system that inherently relies on the PC's being fantastical and magical.

I'd recommend not only another rules system, but that you look at similarly sparse settings for inspiration.

 

[invokethehojo]

With resources being scarce or nonexistant I'm sure cannibals would have become a problems of some degree.

I think it would help us if you gave us a little more information about your world and it's themes.

 

[Kunimatyu]

What did you spend the 3.5 years desigining?

(tell me it wasn't a detailed history...)