Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Irda Ranger" data-source="post: 7299574" data-attributes="member: 1003">Going back to Greyhawk, and this is from E Gary Gygax himself, pretty much all the official D&D settings have strong currents of "Gygaxian Naturalism". Monsters exist, but they also follow the basic rules of non-magical biology. They lay eggs or have babies, get sick, are born and die like humans, etc. Dragon Magazine built a regular "The Ecology of the X" series of articles around this.Also most of the OD&D and 1E settings were basically just Earth 2 settings with magic tacked on, but nothing really different about the world because of it once you got past the random encounter tables.I've thrown all that out.My campaign setting replaces “Gygaxian Naturalism” with “Magical Realism”. Most monsters arise from magical processes, not biological ones. Or they’re quasi-biological at best. Things like love and having children is what mortal (PC) races do. Orcs are created by boiling human or elf prisoners alive in Black Cauldrons. Goblins, hags, and trolls are Fey spirits who have taken over a mortal’s flesh and corrupted it (basically the same as Undead are spirits from the Shadowfell that have inhabited a human body). Kobolds are minor Earth elemental spirits that arise from mines; they are the dark mirror of gnomes. Dragons do lay eggs, but only after swallowing a requisite number of gems and then producing eggs asexually; and the color of the parent has no relation to the color of the offspring (dragons also teleport regularly between worlds, so they’re essentially a migratory species across the whole of the Prime Material Plane). Etc. Etc.There are a lot of ways to do magical things without being a spellcaster. Getting to the Feywild or Shadowfell is fairly easy if you know where the walls between realities are thinnest. You don’t need to be a spellcaster to go get your beloved back from a Lord of the Shadowfell. Many poor souls even end up there by accident just walking through the wrong part of the forest under the wrong astrological sign.I also try to think about how spellcasting does work, and how that would affect society. Regular Charm effects mean that most rulers have rings of Mind Shielding as standard equipment. But at the level of society, what about Teleport? My current campaign is centered on a third-tier city in a borderland province of a loosely coupled Empire. But there is only one Teleport Circle allowed near the city, and it’s buried under a hill with a long tunnel that can be collapsed. A city-sized Private Sanctum over the city prevents enemy armies from Teleporting forces into the city itself. Yes, it’s an expensive endeavor, but so are tall curtain walls. (Also, stone walls and tall embankments aren’t as expensive as you’d think. The Stone-Magic Guild uses Mold Earth, Stone Shape, Wall of Stone, and Move Earth to great effect. There are, uh, a lot of Guilds)The Magic Initiate feat means that Cantrip-level magic is really common. Every army worth the name has sappers with the Mold Earth cantrip. (This in turn means that the Stone-Magic Guild suggests Walls of Stone should go as deep as necessary to fuse with the bedrock beneath the city if as all possible, and at least twice the height of the wall if not so that sapping cannot cause the wall to collapse) There’s a gnome-only Cantrip that allows them to smell the purity and alloy mix of any metallic object, and all gnomish money changers have it. Aqueducts are enchanted with Move Water to get the water over hills.Animated Object magic isn’t just for suits of armor guarding the King’s Treasury. Animated Looms mass produce fabric. Animated Plows don’t need horses to pull them, and can plow a dozen rows of crops at a time. The level of development feels about the same as the Age of Exploration, mid-19th century.</blockquote>

Verification