LOW FANTASY settings/adventures: WHERE? WHEN?

[Erik Mona]

>>>
Erik--

PLEASE tell me this is a broad hint toward something you have planned;
>>>

Ok, sure. Sort of.

>>>
either for a future Polyhedron
>>>

No.

>>>
or as a WotC
>>>

No.

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(or 3rd party) release.
>>>

Most likely.

>>>
That would just make my frickin' YEAR.
>>>

Wow. I'm flattered. What if it doesn't come out this year? Might it make your 2003?

--Erik

 

[Crothian]

Just dug out my old copies of the Thieves' World anthologies and started rereading them. Good stuff!

How good was the Chaosium RPG version of Thieves' World? It's friggin' expensive to get a used copy, like $40 on one site. I hate to buy things sight unseen.

You get the map of the city and of the sewers/tunnels. There is a book for the players describing many things they should know. There's the book for the DM descriping many places and NPCs. It is a good product, but because of the no game mechanics, it does leave a lot up to the DM. If you like I can fish mine out and give you a more complete overview of everything that is in it as well as answer specific questions.

 

[Kaptain_Kantrip]

Crothian:

Are most buildings and NPCs are detailed?

 

[Crothian]

Crothian:

Are most buildings and NPCs are detailed?

I forgot there is a book in the box set called Personalitieds of Sanctuary. It has a leittle less then 40 NPCs written up for various games (AD&D, Adventures in Fantasy, Chivalry and Sorcery, Dragonquest, Dungeons and Dragons, Fantasy TRip, Rune Quest, Traveller, Tunnels and Trolls).

The game master's guide has places and random encounters in it. It has tables to fill the non dexscribed buildings. There are over 2 dozen places described and fully mapped out.

 

[kenjib]

Regarding Kalamar:

Didn't like it. Nope. Didn't like it at all. Boring.

and then:

Adventures: political intrigue, murder mysteries, doomed romance, espionage, "three days to kill" type plots, basically stuff where the bad guys are all humans and members of rival guilds, noble houses, countries, religions, etc. I want the conflict to be more personal and about matters of honor, pride, selfishness, prejudice, greed, etc. Not all this "save the world/save the princess/save the kingdom type" stuff we see all too often. Little victories that mean a lot to the people involved but don't necessarily have an impact on the rest of the world.

The kinds of adventures that the Kalamar Setting book encourages are exactly the kinds of things you are describing here. No other 3e setting comes close to Kalamar for gritty politics and intrigue and attention given to the motives and machinations of the people that live in the world. I consider all other D&D/d20 settings so far to be primarily location driven (most text and plot hooks revolve around locations) whereas Kalamar is primarily people driven (most text and plot hooks revolve around people).

In addition, the footprint of demi-humans is so minimal that you could very easily just replace them with humans for an all-human world. Perhaps it was partially the presentation of the material that bothered you? I don't know. I'm not trying to convince you since I know your mind is already firmly set against Kalamar, but I just wanted to point out what I thought was odd here. Also, as Sayburr pointed out, it's not quite as low magic as what you're looking for (no rules alterations for example). However, I think doing something like using Kalamar with the CoC, Wheel of Time, or Sovereign Stone classes or somesuch would be a pretty good start toward a great grim and gritty low magic world.

The city of Bet Kalamar would make for excellent poverty ridden massive and dangerous city adventures. The waters and ports from Reanaaria Bay to East Svimhozia are great for swashbuckling ocean adventures and piracy. Brandobia is great for court politics and political intrigue with old money snobbery. There is an area where people fight a desperate guerilla war to free their homeland (dwarves but very easily converted to humans) and another ridden with devastating civil war/anarchy. There is also a vassal state with a collapsing economy sent to war as a pawn for expansion by an empire bloated with opulence. There are frontier border kingdoms. There are even issues with settlers encroaching on the lands of indigenous people who are being slowly pushed out of their land. There is a also a kingdom that specializes in espionage, intrigues, and an economy of information. It remains neutral in all conflicts and is not attacked because all sides find their services invaluable. Tons and tons of politics and hundreds and hundreds of great plot hooks for political low magic campaigns.

Just in the little bits I've summarized above there is already enough fodder for many unique and interesting gritty extended campaigns all with completely different focuses.

Yes, the writing style and presentation are boring to some people (although this wasn't the case for me). I'll agree to that, but the actual material is fantastic, highly detailed, and very cohesive. It didn't strike a chord with you I understand, but I just wanted to point out some of the merits of the setting for this kind of campaign for others that might be looking at this thread for ideas.

 

[Bavix]

Kalamar is about the closest setting I can think of to what you want. It's low magic, very human oriented, and the monsters are much more sparce. It's basically a realistic and "gritty" setting.

The Player's Guide should be out any day now, check it out.

 

[Troll Lord]

Hey all,

You should check out some of TLG's material. Davis' Death on the Treklant series is VERT low fantasy (at the end of Dzeebagd, we had to make him raise the gained treasure from 10sp! LOL).

Though Gaxmoor and Malady of Kings won't fit your bill, they are high fantasy, check out Lion in the Ropes for a solid murder mystery and Heart of Glass for a grisly city background where theives war with theives.

And of course our Codex of Erde creates a world that is left up to the DM to raise to a high fantasy setting or not. Though the history is definately high fantasy, epic, most of the young kingdoms are human and the realms grounded in a political reality, not necarrily on magic and what not. Of course the framework for high fantasy is there, elements sprinkled throughout. Give it a look see at your local game store. There is nothing cute about Erde. Even the halflings are battle hardened figthers!

Steve

 

[Nightfall]

Hey Steve! So what's on this summer's agenda/schedule? I loved Codex but I am curious what all you have upcoming from June til August.

 

[Voadam]

Most fantasy stories do NOT include elves, dwarves, gnomes and halflings. It's mainly the ones everybody's heard of or read (Tolkien, Shannara, the crappy WoTC novels, etc.) that feature these races. Most serious fantasy novels or short stories deal with humans only (Thieve's World, Lankhmar, Conan, etc.).

Didn't Lankhmar have a ghoul race with invisible flesh, and a warrior woman of that race who dated Fafhrd? Also in Mount Stardock weren' there invisible gnomes (I may be remembering the module with Stardock on this one). Lankhmar aslo had the rat/people. Also, I consider the Elric series serious fantasy and the Melniboneans were not human. In a campaign I played in they were called the drowesti elves and it worked very well. But Moorcock is definitely high magic milieu so less relevant.

 

[Erik Mona]

I think Kantrip's point is that the "standard" d20 races are not, in fact, the "standard" races of most fantasy fiction. They fit within Tolkien and the very derivative folks who have been hacking out similar stories for the past 50 years, but I can't remember the last "fresh" story or novel I read that had anything to do with dwarves, for example.

The fantasy I read as a kid was mostly Thieves World and Lankhmar and Dune and other stories that centered on humans and used other races as needed for the story. I certainly wasn't interested in cookie-cutter "quest" fiction that stuck to a standard outline every bit as much as a Harlequin romance novel.

The fantasy I read now is Vance and Mieville and others who structure their worlds based upon the stories they want to tell, not the other way around.

I know that the derivative stuff (Brooks, Fiest, Jordan, etc.) is enormously popular. But it's not really "my" fantasy, and so long as I'm designing something for a home campaign, I'd rather build a world around the stories I'm interested in telling.

Elves, as it happens, don't have any part in those stories.

--Erik