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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 8517645" data-attributes="member: 6790260">This is entirely fair, but quite often the mundane-world aspect of the hero's journey is quite brief and minimal. Consider The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, where Lucy gets  into Narnia on page three. Or how The Lord of the Rings suggests something magical is going on by the middle of the second paragraph, what with people saying Bilbo was "well-preserved, but unchanged would have been closer to the mark" (emphasis in original), and we're already hearing about Gandalf the Wizard and "Elves and dragons!" (emphasis in original) by the fifth page.Now, obviously, the truly epic adventure begins substantially later in Fellowship, and the real adventures in Narnia don't begin until all four children are present there. But you can start having truly fantastical stuff happen literally almost immediately even in (in)famously slow-burn works, and you can have surprising amounts of mundanity show up a fair ways into openly fantastical works (e.g., when characters finally get to the Abhorsen's House in Garth Nix's Old Kingdom books). That just...isn't far off from establishing a status quo at (say) level 3, and then revealing cracks in it over the next couple of levels, before the deeper mysteries start to appear.As a result, it's quite possible to provide those feelings of mundanity, domesticity, solid groundedness, etc. even when openly fantastical elements are present early. Plus...if we're viewing this from the lens of the hero's journey, having the hero be extremely susceptible to permanent death during the portion where we're supposed to be getting the ground underneath our feet is significantly more disruptive than having some fantastical elements present!To give an example: You start off with a minor colony out on a recently-discovered landmass that, strangely, appears to have zero sapient residents, but some ruins. Characters there might be military officers, academics sent to do archaeological expeditions, convicts sent there as a substitute for exile or execution (since many who go don't come back, it might as well be!), bored nobles wanting a taste of the adventuring life, etc. Play up the mundanity of the place for a session or two--dealing with issues of food or potable water, beast attacks, ditch-digging, fortification-building, KP duty, etc. Stuff that can earn XP, but which is nowhere near the glamorous adventure lifestyle. But that can be just as easily implemented at 3rd level as it can at 1st; you're a newcomer, newcomers get the crappy duties nobody else wants....until an opportunity arises, either one snapped up by the players or one dropped in by the DM.</blockquote>

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