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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Quickleaf" data-source="post: 6277974" data-attributes="member: 20323">You're welcome! You do have plenty of ideas that make your setting unique, you just needed a bit of encouragement and some guiding questions to go a bit deeper with your ideas is all.You can make the whole witch hunt thing work for PC magic-users if you really want to. You would need to think thru how much you want "the need for subtle casting" to permeate your campaign though. It is a massive change in feel, one that I have run before. But the way you're presenting it is almost Mage: the Ascension like. Magic sounds like it is tied to belief (or perhaps other worlds?) in your setting, as you're describing it here. I would almost imagine pockets of banality/reason where it would be harder for a magic-user to cast spells, or at least a very rationale person to have a bonus to resist magic.It seems like you're setting up Magic ("The Old Ways") vs. Reason ("Civilization") as a theme.This makes a little more sense with your further example about the Empire persecuting magic-users. Maybe you could answer the "why"? Why did the empire crack down on magic-users? What was it a reaction to? Or was it some sort of misguided nationalist ideology? If so, what was the ideology that condemned magic? To happen on such a mass scale it should be frighteningly more than "magic is evil".That's a perfectly good way to present it to the players. However, you as DM have to answer that question if for no other reason that eventually your players are going to be asking it!Ok, if you're differentiating monsters by plane of origin, then that would indicate more ecological inches for "natural monsters" like orcs, hobgoblins, manticores, pegasi and the like. This creates further questions:Which monsters are "natural"? For example, what about dragons?What was the relationship between these natural monsters and the Empire?With fey, shadow, demons, devils, and angels mostly absent, that has implications for characters which allude to such things (e.g. warlocks, tieflings, eladrin)...how will you handle that?Sense of wonder. That's tricky because if you are gaming with players who know D&D there is a certain amount of jadedness and joking that comes with the territory. Your answer seems to be story-based: IOW how the NPCs react the magic, and the prevalence of magic the PCs encounter being restricted. If you've got players who really go in for immersion that can work. OTOH players who know trolls are hurt by acid/fire and skeletons by bludgeoning...it's hard to instill a sense of wonder in them unless you start hacking the monster stats (or other rules) to throw a curve ball at them.I think if you want a sense of wonder, you've got to do two things:(1) Make it wondrous, both in how you describe it, and in what it *actually* is in terms of rules and monster/setting ecology. For example: Skeletons. You can describe them with as much flowery prose as you like, and it can be very evocative, but on the Player's end one or more of them is going to think or say "OK, so basically skeletons." You've also got to follow thru on the promise of wonder. What is different about these skeletons? (2) Give the players a reasons care or to explore. For example: Skeletons in most games are there to be killed and not much thought is given to them. What if they all had runes on their bones that had messages which could be deciphered, or even spells? But destroying the skeletons risks destroying parts of the spell? What if a simple Mending Cantrip would put it back together...and reanimate the skeleton? What if skeletons only activate on specific triggers which smart play can circumvent?</blockquote>

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