"low" magic campaign using D&D rules

[Professor Phobos]

Well, you could always say that the PCs are very special, but part of a small 'very special' minority.

So most towns and NPCs are on the low end of the scale, but there's still a single super-wizard in a tower somewhere, and the local Emperor has elite bodyguards and assassins to call on if there's a trouble with high powered PCs.

The "not as common but generally more powerful" magic items idea is a good one; it helps keep the feel of "magic as magical." Just adjust the spellcasting classes to either be able to cast weaker magic more often or stronger magic more rarely, and you're good to go.

 

[Baron Opal]

The main issue that just came up is how to deal with even low level PCs with magic exploiting npcs without magical defenses.

Bear with me, I'll get there.

One of the things that I decided after reading through the rules is that society would tend towards city-states. There is magic that can feed people and create water, boost crop yield, &c. Farming is a very dangerous profession. There are monsters in them thar hills. I figured that, assuming the average clodhopper was a third level whatever, there would be enough magic boosting the yield per acre that farming would be minimized. You couldn't keep your peasants alive working the fields, but when your fields are small and the yields huge, you don't have to.

There is healing and curative magic available. One thing that spans cultures is that children are precious. Societies have no problem putting them to work when things need doing, and they are often the first to starve when times are hard. But, most people love their kids and try to provide for them as much as possible. So, rather than in our world, child mortality is down. People are willing to keep their kids healthy if only so they can work the fields, and you don't need twelve births from three wives to get four kids to adulthood. Great! with more kids surviving to adulthood, we have more people!

Well, no. As I said before, there are monsters out there. And while farming may be a good and honorable life, when you see the manticore swoop down and carry off Uncle Ken and Billy Joe it will lose it's shine. So you might be tempted to get great-grandad's sword out and figure out a thing or two. 'Cause Sarah is the prettiest girl in the town, and her dad wants her to be taken care of, and that damn manticore has just got to have some great loot.

So, we have some excess population, clustered around a common area, in a dangerous world where, if you're really lucky, you can kill some monsters and take their loot. Of course, your chosen profession is probably the most dangerous job there is, and there is a pretty high attrition rate associated with it.

Hang on, almost there.

One thing that has struck me about the German and Italian city-states during the Renasance is their civic pride. They may detest the leadership of the city, but don't you dare disrespect their city. And, if you happen to have gone out there with some buddies, slain a manticore that was eating your neighbors and married a councilman's daughter, the people will think you're pretty darn spiffy too. If you figure that just 1% of the population are adventurers that's 10 people in a town with a 1000 population. 6 are third level, 3 are fourth and 1 is fifth, to use a mix of my and Sepulchrave's method. A rule of thumb that I have about classed characters is, below around 9th level, for one character to advance three levels five other characters die. Six 3rd level fighters leave, one 6th level character returns. It's a dangerous world, and there isn't any garuntee that you will come into an encounter of appropriate CR (if you're a NPC, anyway). They will have garnered some impressive wealth by farming standards and are likely to be a touch protective about their town.

So when the 5th level wizard comes into town to steal it blind, there are a passel of PC classed characters with similar abilities who aren't going to like it that he's are messing with their town. The miscreant is also potentially messing about with the survivability of the town, as we've said before, there are monsters out there. The populace is always going to be wary about strangers until they have proven themselves. The local adventurers may even keep an eye on them as well.

Once you get into larger cities, there is going to be an even bigger population, with more classed characters. These places will have an adventuring population that can support specialized industries. Libraries, guilds, societies. Areas that can trade goods (celestial feathers for a sapphire the size of a robin's egg that you need for your amulet of winter's might) or knowledge (a scroll of dispel magic for the song that activates the fey road to Wending's Red West to capture the last ray of twilight in your special crystal vial). These people get really cranky when someone starts making it even more difficult than it already is to achieve their goals.

So, when someone starts abusing their powers, there is someone of equivalent level nearby to stop them. Or, at least make the putz expend enough effort to make the acquisition of dubious value.

And if there aren't any, that's why we have PCs, now, isn't it...

 

[S'mon]

The main issue that just came up is how to deal with even low level PCs with magic exploiting npcs without magical defenses.

To some extent this is inevitable in D&D, and there's no real difference between the Wizard fireballing the NPCs and the Fighter hacking them to pieces. You can emphasise non-magical defences, such as lead preventing scry & teleport. There may be cheap wards/charms against the Evil Eye (charm person etc) - D&D RAW promotes offense over defense, but defensive magic could be a lot easier.

One possibility is to have variable magic levels by area, so spells work in high-magic areas like dungeons - the adventuring sites - but not in town.

 

[Najo]

That's because there isn't any.

Check AD& 1Ed PHB p 110: you had to have an unmodifiedmental stat of 16+, you got bonuses for having multiple stats in that range, and you either had Psionics or you didn't.

Then you randomly determined how powerful you were if you did.



Apologies.

I merely brought it up to illustrate how another game dealt with the problem of scarce but powerful magic and its practitioners.

No worries, just wanted to keep things focused and minimize tangents and potential arguments. I appreciate your apology and advice.

 

[Najo]

So, when someone starts abusing their powers, there is someone of equivalent level nearby to stop them. Or, at least make the putz expend enough effort to make the acquisition of dubious value.

And if there aren't any, that's why we have PCs, now, isn't it...

This is a very good point you make in your post. All of it is spot on for what I need. Thank you.

also...

The other posts since my own above are all very helpful too, so keep it coming. I can mush alot of this advice into a whole picture of how I want to handle the npc demographics and socities. Thank you every one

 

[Celebrim]

So, when someone starts abusing their powers, there is someone of equivalent level nearby to stop them. Or, at least make the putz expend enough effort to make the acquisition of dubious value.

I generally agree, but take that logic one step farther.

In D&D it has always been the assumption that at mid-levels, no one encounter represents the possibility of death for the players. Third edition has even formalized this, albiet in a somewhat vague way. A encounter with a CR equal to player level has the expectation of only using 20% of the player 'resources'. D&D's other assumption is that the PC's are heroes, and as such are much more powerful by mid-levels than ordinary folks. So, in D&D mid-level PC's - the so called 'sweet spot' - can always push around most everything in thier environment without any significant risk.

Attempts to fix this with magic are likely to make the problem worse. For example, probably the single worst design decision in early Gygaxian modules was to try to increase the defenses of the local good guys by giving them lots of magical loot. The 'Keep on the Borderlands' is more worthy of looting than the Caves of Chaos. (This was pointed out to me by the DM that first taught me my craft as an example of what not to do.) In 'Temple of Elemental Evil', its far easier to buff yourself up with tons of magical items by slaughtering the relatively defenseless villagers who possess ludicrous amounts of treasure for being peasants, than it is to get loot from the very dangerous Temple. And if you actually did put enough ubiquitous high level magic into the world to put a stop to rogue PC shennigans, then the PC's would loose thier uniqueness and sense of being heroes (or villains) that they are entitled to as the stories protagonists.

Whether we are speaking of PC's beating up the settings bad guys or rogue PC's beating up the good guys (where here I only mean by 'bad guys' the creatures that the DM intended for the PC's to beat up, and conversely by 'good guys' I mean the creatures that the DM didn't so intend), the only way to reasonably threaten PCs is for the PC's opponents to be proactive. No intelligent group is just going to sit there and take it while someone kills them and takes thier stuff. They are going to do something. If the PC's adopt hit and run tactics, the opponents will do something in the break - even if it is just take thier stuff and run away so that when the PC's come back the next time the monsters (and the stuff) is gone.

In the case of PC's beating up villagers, shop owners, and local militias using high magic in a low magic campaign, the PC's are making enemies of three very intelligent, very resourceful, very proactive groups simultaneously and they are pretty much guaranteeing a TPK in the medium to long term. The first of those groups is the leaders of the nation in which the PC's dwell. Whether its an alliance of city states (like the Greek Confederacy) or a true unified nation state (like the Roman Empire), rumor of one of thier members getting trounced by powerful magicians in a low magic world is going to be percieved as a significant threat to the entire group and all the force that can be spared to meet the threat will be mobilized. If it could happen there, then it could happen here. In the D&D setting, this most likely means the equivalent of other adventuring parties - patriotic ones loyal to that nation. Within weeks of the PCs robbing shop keepers, fireballing the militia, or whatever, as many as dozens of NPC parties could be out searching for the PC's. Eventually, the PC's could find themselves facing a veritable army of classed individuals near thier own level, or depending on when they decided to start pushing thier weight around, much higher. In fact, if things get really serious, they could end up facing mid to high level NPC's backed by the actual army - that campaigns equivalent to Spartans or Roman Legions or rows of Welsh longbowmen or whatever is appropriate to the setting.

The other group that is going to go nuts is the religious authorities. If magic is low level in the setting, there is probably some cosmological reason for it and simply the emergence of a group of mortals using magic against villagers is likely to carry a significant religious component. In short, the PC's are very likely to be facing the campaign's equivalent of an auto-de-fe/fatwa or whatever either because of the improper use of magic specifically or simply because of the injustice perpetrated. In D&D terms, what this means is Paladins and adventuring Clerics, and these two groups are not going to be defenseless against magic and its likely in a low-magic world that the various religious groups maintain special anti-magic rapid reaction forces for just these contingencies who know what arcane magic can do even if the average person in the campaign world doesn't.

The third group likely to be very offended is the campaigns NPC wizards. Here they are trying thier best to keep thier heads down and not have angry mobs coming to burn them at the stake, and some upstart wizard out thier with the wisdom score of a hamster is rousing the society against wizards and threatening to bring about the bad old days when a wizard wasn't safe in his tower unless he had 500 yard wide moat of lava and a half dozen tame djinni. Now they've got angry soldiers and inquisitors beating on thier doors right when they are in the midst of some crucial research, adventuring parties are begging for divinition spells, blah blah blah. Together this is a crisis or at least a major annoyance for wizards of any alignment. The good ones are going to be upset at the injustice being perpetrated and the bad ones are afraid the PC's shenigans are going to threaten thier secret plans to take over the world. My world may be 'low magic', but that doesn't mean its 'no magic' and that there aren't at least some NPC wizards which represent a threat to PC's of almost any level.

In short, even a small amount of world building will take into account this sort of behavior by PC's. The inherent assumption by PC terrorists that start using magic to abuse the commoners and store keepers is that no one has ever tried to do this before. That's simply an unwarranted assumption in a world with any sort of history.

 

[Baron Opal]

Another thought for a house rule.

XP are required to make magic items. As xp are (arguably) part of the soul they maintain a resonance with the person that sacrificed them. For permanent magic items, as long as you have the item you have no net loss of xp. This coupled with the rule that others can sacrifice their own xp to make items could be a good fit. It provides incentive to keep what you make and gives even more reason why the sale of magic items would be discouraged.

And, if they're dead, they don't need their items or their xp...

 

[Korgoth]

To agree with what others have said:

- change the demographics such that high level NPCs are more rare, and high level spellcasters are rarer still

- require a bunch of batty, even nearly impossible material components for magic item creation. And not just chunks of dead critter (although those are important): you can have stuff that requires creativity to even obtain, like the laughter of a dead man, the permission of five elders of the [insert vanished race here] or the tail of a comet.

- give every magic item personality. That +1 sword has a name and a history. It also has some unique property: it sounds like cracking ice when drawn (and maybe does 1 bonus cold damage per hit), it attracts cats, the ghostly visage of a woman shimmers on the blade, it repels vampires like a holy symbol, etc.

I think limiting Wizard spell acquisition also improves the flavor of the game, but it does constitute a slight nerf to the class. On the other hand, the fact that enemy wizards will be few and most humanoids surprised and terrified by magic use probably makes up for that. If you do decide to limit spell acquisition, you could either require the use (or purchase) of a special library, the purchase of grimoire fragments at cities, or even limit them to spells acquired from scrolls. Again, if the realm's king is only a mid-level fighter and his court wizard, if he has one, is not higher than 5th-7th level, a PC magic user of accomplishment will not find it hard to bully even a king (he could "go too far", but if he is reasonable he could probably make certain demands of the king and have them granted)... something not true many other classes.

 

[Baron Opal]

I think limiting Wizard spell acquisition also improves the flavor of the game, but it does constitute a slight nerf to the class.

One of the things to remember is that those two spells per level are the research the wizard is doing on their own time. Pin down what spells the character is working on at or before the halfway point to their next level. Even potentially grant partchment scraps or poorly drawn glyphs that count towards spell research.

[R]equire a bunch of batty, even nearly impossible material components for magic item creation. And not just chunks of dead critter (although those are important): you can have stuff that requires creativity to even obtain, like the laughter of a dead man, the permission of five elders of the [insert vanished race here] or the tail of a comet.

A big change could be to redefine magic shops. They don't sell magic items but rather power components, research aids for spells, the more common item components for potions, charms and scrolls, &c. How hard should it really be to acquire a clear crystal for a charm that give you +1 to a roll once?

Another thing that came to mind was a theme of a game that I used to play in back in the day. In this game there were very powerful characters but practically no permanent items. Instead there were many charged items, some had multiple powers and some rather potent ones. My character had a gem that had 60 charges. For 10 charges I could do something pretty heavy duty, like draw a symbol of insanity. For 5 I could cast confusion and 1-2 charges was a first level spell of some sort. the item was not rechargeable. The DM guessed that I would use the major power at least twice, minor powers at least 5-10 times and the rest would depend on the situation and how many charges I wanted to spend.

Never, ever give out a plain +1 item unless it is explicity a masterwork item. (Said before, but I'll repeat myself.)

 

[S'mon]

Never, ever give out a plain +1 item unless it is explicity a masterwork item. (Said before, but I'll repeat myself.)

I think that really depends on whether you want low magic or rare magic. I'd say Runequest's magic power level was much lower than 3e, but magic items are ubiquitous. IMC +1 items are common enough, but are usually the result of eg a fine masterwork blade being blessed by a priest, or dwarven craftsmanship, or other non-wizard-based creation. C&C supports this in that it has a class of super-expert (super-masterwork) +1 items that cost 25 times normal, separate from standard spell-created +1 items, which cost a flat +1,000 gp. I just rule that if an item is +1, it's magic. I think that fits a pre-modern worldview much better than seeing magic as some kind of template.

I came to this approach from my experience with Finnish Shamanism; my wife is part Finnish. In a Shamanistic world-view, everything is 'magic', but some things are 'more magic' than others.