Low Magic Campaigns?

[William drake]

After my current campaign is over i wanted to start running a much less magic based campaign than normal D&D. Because I'm relativly new to the hobby i don't know what would be the best system to use for this, I've heard that Iron Heroes can be good for this sort of campaign, if it is what books do you need to run it? if not then what system would you suggest?

Thanks

If you want, its a little bit of a hard find, try the Wheel of Time. Its very low magic, no spell or spell like abilites, no supernatural abilities...or w/e. Some creatures both friend and foe have such things, but they are monsters; or back ground fantasy. The only people who have magic, are the casters, and they arn't just walking around using it. There are alot of social applications built into the game, so that a caster, wouldn't be casting all the time. And, there are very very very few magical items. And they are rare, locked away within the Tower for only those who have the given permission to use. Its a skill and feat based game, everyone is human, and the only other race, which isn't quite magical, lives outside of humanity, so, unless you wanted to really throw them in, they are just there for filler.

Check it out.

Game On

 

[Aus_Snow]

Something else I often recommend as an alternative (and with good reason, IMO) is Legends of Sorcery, by RPGObjects. It provides an excellent means of scaling spellcasting in d20 fantasy, using almost any base ruleset (e.g., D&D 3e).

Compensating for fewer magic items is often the biggest stumbling block, however, when people try to house rule D&D to be a "lower magic" kind of game. There are numerous opinions on how achievable that really is, and on one side of that 'debate', exactly how it can - sometimes erroneously spelled "should" - be done.

My own house rules document for D&D is a bit uh, well. . . ridiculous, in terms of page count and sheer number of rules. It may as well be its own system, some would say. Hey, it probably is just that! I don't care, either. But as I more or less said before, it can be a long, arduous journey. There are still bits and pieces I'd like to add/remove/tweak, for example.

FWIW, I'm not actually running D&D currently (but True20 instead, for a while), but I will be getting back to it, and - Housonomicon and all - that is something I'm looking forward to (again).

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

All of the above suggestions have merit.

However, you don't need anything besides a little self-control and whatever D&D books you already own to run a low magic campaign.

The last campaign I ran, the players had access to my entire fantasy D20 library- WotC & 3rd party publishers- and yet the acquisition of a Flame Tongue sword was a big deal.

To illustrate, let me tell you a bit about it: the campaign started with the PCs (all 1st level) going to a great festival, then getting waylaid at sea by interplanar felinoid raiders (based on Kzinti). Once they were overwhelmed (after a fight they almost won), they were taken to the private hunting preserve of the Emperor, and set free.

Naked & unarmed.

And then told that in honor of their fighting prowess, they were being given a 24 hour head start before a hunting party would be released. (The cabin boys were roasting over an open fire.) Some of their gear had been strewn about the island to give them a slightly better chance- the hunt requires challenging prey, after all!

The PCs had to improvise weapons, evade and/or kill off their hunters. Oh yeah, the local fauna and flora weren't too nice, either. And of course, all the while, they were searching for their gear. Sometimes, they even found gear from previous prey...

With teamwork, they survived, eventually gathering most of their stuff. The wizard had it toughest, not being able to rememorize spells without his spellbook. As he gained XP, he took Ftr levels.

The party's first magic item was a +2 Flame Tongue sword, found when the party had reached 5th level.

Eventually, they found allies who got them off of the island and started to make their way in the world. However, there was little magic and few magic items to be had- this world had suffered some kind of arcane apocalypse, wiping out the original rulers of this world and their culture. The new races that rose up to fill the gap were intelligent, but hadn't cracked many secrets of magic. Learning spells was difficult because there were few scrolls or tomes to find, and teachers were just as rare.

To balance this out, though, there were also few creatures that required magic to defeat- no lycanthropes, for instance. In fact, the only critters that did need magic to put down were the ultimate scourge of the world that the higher level PCs had to face down at the end of the campaign.

And so forth...

You don't have to go that route- that's just a particular path to running a low-magic campaign without magic flying around everywhere. Some people have used class level limits to get a low magic campaign- a level cap on spellcasting classes, or an overall limit on number or % of levels in spellcasting classes a PC can have can be just as effective.

Essentially, you just have to know when to say "No." "No, that spell isn't appropriate for this campaign, choose another." No, I won't be able to use that creature as written because the PCs can't hurt it with their level of magic.

 

[Mighty Veil]

Using 3e books

Could just use your current 3e books and limit magic to a certain level (for mortals), like 5th, for example. So classes that are magic using might only go to "x" level, or you could say, first "x" levels have to be of another class first. Or go a full 20 lvls but the higher levels which get no more new higher level spells, get feats or room for meta-magics. This would instantly effect magic items since mortal made ones could not have a CL over 5th lvl spells.

The classes are balanced. So a monster which casts 9th lvl spells isn't getting an advantage over a group that can face that EL (well maybe its getting a (+1 EL to it).

 

[Arkhandus]

Uh, no. You have to leave out a lot of monsters and stuff if you're going to run D&D itself with simply less magic available to the Player Characters.

A lot of D&D critters have DR or Regeneration or other 'you can't really stop me without certain magic' abilities that are going to be pretty drastically bad for the PCs to face if they don't have normal amounts/potency of magical armaments and spells available.

You need to either excise those critters or compensate/empower/equip the PCs adequately for the dangers they'll face. The D&D rules are only balanced on certain core assumptions (some or most of which are mentioned in the DMG's chapter on encounters, adventures, and whatnot). For instance, they assume the party will have a cleric or paladin to deal with undead; they assume the party will have access to level-appropriate healing magic; they assume the party will eventually have access to resurrection-style and death-warding magic; they assume the party will have access to offensive blasting spells; and they assume the party will have access to some utility magic in one form or another (even if only a Rogue loaded up with scrolls and the Use Magic Device skill).

Similarly, enemy spellcasters will be more difficult to defeat, unless they suffer the same restrictions as PC spellcasters.

That said, yes, it is possible to run low-magic D&D without different rulebooks, it's just tougher sometimes and tricky.


Ex: Early in my Rhunaria campaign, before I devised and added my Gifts of the Warrior's Spirit houserule, the PCs had to face two chuuls, in separate encounters. One they caught in a spiked pit trap, but it wasn't terribly deep and the chuul crawled out in 1 or 2 rounds, just as the PCs were moving in to shoot at it. So they ended up having to engage it in melee once it climbed out of the pit.

The chuul did horrific damage to a few PCs, nearly killed 3 or 4 of them (out of a 5 or 6 person party), and was only narrowly defeated after an intense battle. The paladin or two in the group (I forget if we had 1 or 2 pallies at the time) only managed to barely keep themselves and one other PC alive (the others that nearly died only escaped through the grace of last-ditch miraculous grapple checks that somehow beat the chuul's grapple checks, followed by running away a short distance before getting up the nerve to try re-engaging). The group had no spellcasters (besides the 1 or 2 Cure Light Wounds the paladins may have had), and no magic weapons (except for one of the paladins I think, who may've had a +1 longsword). However, Rhunaria has normal spellcasting classes, the players just didn't choose to play any at the time (magic items, and training in spellcasting classes, are just harder to come by in Rhunaria; especially magic items that have more than just minor power/utility).

Since I hadn't anticipated so much difficulty with the chuul, the PCs barely survived what would normally have been a slightly-tough but decent encounter. This was my first time trying a slightly lower-magic D&D campaign and I forgot that the chuul's great strength, special attacks, and special defenses would be so tough for a 5th-level party to handle without the standard array of spellcasters and magic items. I learned from that experience and other, less significant ones, which eventually led to me adding my Gifts of the Warrior's Spirit to help mostly-mundane PCs get by alright (before that I was just more careful about my choices of encounters); I had never played in or DMed a game before that session in which the party had no balanced party composition and suffered for it (my friends and I usually make a balanced party of PCs; 1 mage/blaster, 1 warrior, and when possible, 1 rogue and 1 priest/healer, at minimum).

 

[GlassJaw]

Could just use your current 3e books and limit magic to a certain level (for mortals), like 5th, for example.

You can, but tweaking 3ed to make it something it's not will require a lot of attention because a lot of things will have to be addressed. There have been a few threads on this topic if you can find them. Look for the "sweet spot" thread and you can also take a look at the per encounter thread in the Bad Axe hosted forum to get you started.

 

[GlassJaw]

As far as which low-magic system to use, you first have to determine how you are defining "low-magic".

Do you just want to remove certain "troublesome" spells like Raise Dead and Teleport? You can do that without changing much at all.

Do you want to remove very high-level magic? You could probably stick with standard D&D and just limit spells to 5th level.

Do you want spellcasters to be rare? Do you want magic to be dangerous to the user? Do you want combat to be brutal and the chance of death to be greater?

You really need to answer a lot of these questions to narrow-down what you want.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

1) One way to make spellcasters rare is to make it "cost" something. A ritual + gold + whatever you deem neccessary. Perhaps the ritual causes permanent HP or ability damage.

2) In Stormbringer, being a spellcaster depended on some random dice rolls to determine whether a PC had any innate ability. In that ruleset, you had to have innate ability and THEN you had to study. Mere ability or mere study was insufficient- you had to have both.

In D20 you could emulate that by making any would-be arcane caster take a HR feat (or tweek an extant one, like Magical Aptitude, PHB p 97) at first level- No PC or NPC who didn't take that at 1st level could cast arcane spells.

Stormbringer didn't distinguish between arcane & divine magic, but D&D does. So if you feel that divine casters need a similar limitation, make would-be divine casters take a HR feat called Divine Calling (though I wouldn't make it a 1st Lvl only feat- gods have the ability to break the rules)

 

[Darklone]

You can run low magic games with the typical D&D treasure values and nearly no houserules at all.

A few things I like to do in my games to get this feeling:
- Hand out very few magic items with a background. These items can be more expensive than usual and will thus make up for the low loot factor.
- Spellcasters have to be multiclassed and the main spellcasterclass shouldn't be higher than half the level. Only exception: Two spellcasterclasses.
- Monsters... use them scarcely. Turn every monster into an event and don't use the ones the players know too well already. Read Beowulf, Siegfried, Dietrich von Bern and other old epic tales. One monster per adventure, at max.

 

[howandwhy99]

Use D&D 3e. It's a matter of perspective. Just play with levels 1-10 as the majority of what a typical D&D fantasy game includes. By level 15 characters would be world conquerers and at level 20 quasi-deities. Just stick to the levels you desire and slow advancement as needed. I'm pretty sure this is what was intended for 3E anyhow. I find it hard to believe anyone would think dozens of tenth+ level NPCs living in a single kingdom was sane. But they did do that Epic-level city as if it were plausible, so who am I to judge?