World without magic items

[ewoods]

I'm starting a new campaign with my group and need a little DM advice/input for a low-magic world I'm creating. I've written out an entire "history of the world" but it's sort of long so the gist of it is that at one point the world was flooded with magic items. Think kids playing with ion stones, bums sleeping under cloaks of elemental protection, and pretty much everyone carrying around +5 weapons. And then recently (maybe 50-ish years ago) an event occurred and suddenly all magic items were immediately and permanently dispelled (with the exception of artifacts). The end result is that there are now two warring factions: those who see this as a chance to start over, and those who see it as punishment for "magical decadence." I'm thinking it can create interesting power struggles as well, as high-level magic users race to rebuild their supplies and gain power. New magic items can be created with no restrictions, per standard item-creation rules, and I'm considering using the crafting points variant from Unearthed Arcana. Also, to be clear, all magic items didn't "disappear," they just ceased to be magical.

I think I have the world pretty well created and mapped out, and the whole backstory worked up, and lots of story hooks and a good story arch ready, but I need help with brainstorming the kinds of things that might come up in such an environment. Some things I've thought of so far:

1. Some towns and cities might have been so dependent on magical items that they could no longer sustain themselves and collapsed.
2. Magic items are so rare that they're almost never found for sale (since the creators would probably be creating them for themselves), and when they are, they're likely to be VERY expensive.
3. Materials for creating magic items might be rare as well.
4. Con artists might try to sell people "fake" magic items. I've even thought that perhaps some magic users might imbue mundane items with a simple, low-level magic aura with no real power at all (to save them the time and costs of creating real magic items), so that a detect magic spell might not be useful for spotting fakes.
5. Some areas might encourage and even reward people for creating new magic items, while other areas might outlaw magic items and their creation altogether.
6. There are likely to be people who actively seek out magic items and attempt to take them.

Other considerations:

1. Players will probably want to create their own items, so I'll need to give them time and a location to do so.
2. What sort of balance issues among classes should I watch out for and how might I avoid such issues?
3. In an attempt to keep things as balanced as possible, I've restricted their character creation options to only the three core rulebooks.
4. Should I somehow speed up the process/lower the cost of item creation?
5. What are good alternative rewards for PC's (since magic items will rarely be found, and large amounts of gold would be required to purchase even a single magic item)?
6. Does this sound like an interesting concept for a campaign world?

Any and all input is greatly appreciated.

For reference, no Vow of Poverty or any other such feats are allowed.

 

[Ragmon]

Hi.

So if this happened 50 years ago or so, then the population of your world probably got used to the idea of not having magic items. IMO your world just changed itself to your average Medieval setting.

If you are don't mind me saying but you should read David Eddings's - The Belgariad series. The stories are based in a wold where magic exists but an average man can live his life without ever even hearing about magic, let alone seeing some one cast magic. Give it a try IMO it will be good inspiration.

Maybe even thin the magic user population, it should really give your world that gritty feeling.

 

[Greenfield]

We ran a campaign like this, though we approached it from another angle.

In our campaign the secrets of crafting permanent magic items had been lost over the years. So had many Prestige classes and a number of spells.

These things had become trade secrets of various guilds and trade halls. And as with all secrets, one of two things happened: They ceased to be secrets after a while, or they ceased to be.

You didn't just take a level in a Prestige Class, you had to apply (or be invited) to their order to receive the training, and over time many of these elite groups simply became too elite and weren't accepting enough new members to maintain their ranks. They died out.

The drive of the campaign was that the various deities had seen the dark times coming, when mortals would need these lost arts once more. So they commissioned, through their churches, a collection of people whose job it was to rediscover these lost arts and spread the knowledge throughout the lands.

PCs came from many countries, many of them rivals, banding together not out of trust or friendship, but out of distrust and rivalry. What if someone discovers how to craft magic weapons, and only one kingdom gets the benefits? No, the only way to keep the other guy honest was to watch his every move.

Now magic weapons and items existed in this world, though they were rare. Things like magic carpets and clothing were wearing out and/or simply falling apart with age, and every permanent magic weapon in the world was owned by one noble house or another. Each had a name and a history, a tale of how it was earned, and all the battles it helped decide. They were definitely not for sale.

For game color, we determined that the process of making a permanent magic weapon included giving it a name. The process wasn't complete until it had a name.

In this campaign the gods would send clues via visions and dreams, telling PCs where to go and look. And the player characters had their marching orders: Any and all of the lost arts recovered had to be shared equally among the various kingdoms.

At one point we discovered some dark arts, things like ritual sacrifice to harvest EXP for item creation. It was kind of sobering when a warrior looked at the magic weapon he'd acquired from an enemy, and had to ask, "Who did this used to be? Who gave their life so this could be made?" Kind of hard to be happy about your new toy when you know that somebody's little kid got tossed onto an altar to make it possible.

Arts like that were added to our "codex" in pages bordered in black, and while we did ensure that copies were provided to each kingdom, they were frequently "provided" in writing, with the treatise carefully mis-filed in the back room of a library somewhere. And then never spoken of again.

We also traded info. When we encountered an order of Red Mages who knew how to craft magical clothing, we traded instruction on the crafting of magical jewelry.

There was a delightful scene towards the end of the campaign when emisaries of this order came to support one of the PC's (a Paladin) claim for the throne of his kingdom. They said that they finally understood that we weren't foolish for giving or trading away such power, because the process ultimately involved our group being the recipients of every magical craft in the known world. The Paladin was embarassed and unhappy to have the support and admiration of an order of evil Wizards.

As a campaign, it worked very well.

 

[Kinak]

6. Does this sound like an interesting concept for a campaign world?

Yeah, sounds fun, as long as the players have been in enough D&D campaigns to see how you're playing against the traditional way things work.

My natural inclination is to be a bit more drastic, though. I'd probably have the rules of magic just drastically changed, wiping the slate clean, then start the campaign immediately after that. So the old magical items have failed and the old casters have lost their powers. A new generation rises, including the 1st level PCs.

With the ubiquitous magic even other classes might be in bad shape. Old generals who relied on magical war machines suddenly find themselves thrown back into the warfare of thousands of years ago.

For flavor points, I'd pin the old magic as a rules system you're not using. So maybe the old magic was psionics or incarnum or name magic or something.

Of course, a lot of people will believe it's an attack, even if that's not true. So the chaos at the beginning would be absurd. Wars flare up between old rivals, new casters are suspected of causing the problems or hailed as saviors, rumors of cures spread like wildfire, etc. etc.

1. Players will probably want to create their own items, so I'll need to give them time and a location to do so.

5. What are good alternative rewards for PC's (since magic items will rarely be found, and large amounts of gold would be required to purchase even a single magic item)?

You have a world that's been thrown into turmoil, filled with civilizations either collapsed or on the brink. My natural inclination would be to reward players with the kernel of a kingdom.

Let them carve out what area of calm they can and, as they succeed, have refugees flock to the area. Their growing kingdom can both serve as a reward and give them a place to spend their downtime.

It also has the hidden benefit of giving the non-casters something to do in their downtime. Because, well, they need something to do during crafting time.

2. What sort of balance issues among classes should I watch out for and how might I avoid such issues?

I didn't see you mention which edition you're using but, traditionally, spellcasters don't have much need for magical items. Cutting out items will actually slant the game further away from the martial classes.

As for fixing it, it depends a lot on your party's composition. If your party's all casters or no casters, you're golden. If you end up with one martial character, a surviving legacy weapon might keep them up to par.

If you want to fix it before the players come in, I'd include some sort of inherent bonus system (ironically, sort of like Vow of Poverty) to keep martial characters up to speed. Then either don't include items with the basic pluses or don't have them stack with the inherent bonuses.

4. Should I somehow speed up the process/lower the cost of item creation?

At the very least, I'd substitute out the XP for something else. To go along with the kingdom-building I was talking about, maybe you channel essence from sites of power and use that in place of XP? So the Dragon's Heart Caldera produces 100 points of "Essence" (XP) a month that can be harvested and made into items.

From a less rulesy standpoint, you could go the old-school path of requiring special components for stuff. Why do they call it a flametongue sword? Well, turns out it needs a red dragon's tongue. Good luck.

Components can also play into kingdom-building. If your recipe for potions of cure light wounds requires mushrooms from a specific patch of forest, that patch of forest just became a point of strategic interest.

Cheers!
Kinak

 

[Shaghayegh]

1. Players will probably want to create their own items, so I'll need to give them time and a location to do so.
2. What sort of balance issues among classes should I watch out for and how might I avoid such issues?
3. In an attempt to keep things as balanced as possible, I've restricted their character creation options to only the three core rulebooks.
4. Should I somehow speed up the process/lower the cost of item creation?
5. What are good alternative rewards for PC's (since magic items will rarely be found, and large amounts of gold would be required to purchase even a single magic item)?
6. Does this sound like an interesting concept for a campaign world?

Any and all input is greatly appreciated.

For reference, no Vow of Poverty or any other such feats are allowed.

Sure, you can have a campaign based around trying to restore magical items and maybe finding out the whole reason this crisis happened. Maybe there is some artifact that will restore all the magic in the world at once or some other deus ex machina to put things the way they were.

In the mean time players will look for masterwork items, which will now be much more expensive, and they will look to develop non-magical solutions to technical problems. You can expect wealthier areas to have a technological boom like the Renaissance while poor areas may even revert to barbarism.

Spellcasters will be the only ones with magic, so they will have a huge advantage. No more magic swords for warriors and rings of invisibility for rogues, just pure skill. But even spellcasters will suffer without wands, scrolls, and other gear...

 

[Lwaxy]

I'd make magic item creation so that there is a bigger failure chance, or partial successes. Like, an item comes out with only 1 charge instead of 10, or it does not do quite what you want it to do. Much to the annoyance of the creator, of course.

Otherwise, I'd play in it, sounds cool.

 

[Greenfield]

As he said, magic items can still be produced, and consumable items such as scrolls, wands, potions, staves etc will still be available. Production of such things probably never stopped.

If anything, their production would have increased, since permanent items that grant certain bonuses wouldn't be there any more.

Right after the big event there would have been shock and a scramble to recover. Think of the TV show Jerico adapting to a world without electricity, food or fuel delivery, or modern communications.

Many a crafter would have worked to replace crucial items as quickly as possible, while others would have been afraid to invest their life energies into such things, lest they get nullified again.

Then there's the "torch and pitchfork" factor as a relatively desperate populace goes looking for *someone* to blame. Expect conspiracy theories and mob violence as they struggle to adapt to a world that is suddenly cold, dark and painfully mundane.

Farmers would have to up food production as magical sources were now gone, and magical methods for preserving perishable foods universally failed.

I could see it as the beginning of a dark age. As I mentioned in another thread, the cost of creating magic items isn't simply a matter of gold and EXP. That gold has to be spent on unusual materials that get infused into the item or consumed as part of the enchantment process, and the supply of such materials is far from endless. Supplies would run short as artificers' demand would skyrocket, and some exotic herbs or creatures might be literally driven to extinction. In any case, prices would shoot up as supply and demand took effect (and yes, the rules actually do mention such things), screwing up the entire economy even more.

Imagine Gilligan's Island, populated by nothing but the Howells and one incredibly overworked Professor. They want everything, he's working as fast as he can, and there's almost nobody around who knows how to climb a palm tree and get a coconut or a banana. Now multiply that scene by a million, and lose the laugh-track.

Yeah, primitive as can be.

I'd expect an evolution in society. Yeah, the Gnomish works would be come more prevalent. But artificers would assume one of two roles, depending on how things worked out.

Either they'd be the lords of the earth, running things as they chose because only they could provide the magic items needed to maintain and restore civilization, or...

...they'd be kept as slaves or "pets" by the rich and powerful, precious resources to be carefully managed by the elite.

Note that different areas might have coped in different ways, with some realms heading into a pseudo-industrial revolution, while others shifted towards magocracies, and yet others headed towards the "artificer as property" model. And probably a few hundred other versions that we haven't talked about.

 

[Shaghayegh]

For game color, we determined that the process of making a permanent magic weapon included giving it a name. The process wasn't complete until it had a name.

This is an interesting idea, personalising each magic item so it has an identity. Every item would be special, with a history and lore of its own...

 

[ewoods]

Thanks so much for all the feedback! That's exactly what I was looking for, just different perspectives on how the world might function. I'm not considering shortening the time from the "event" to present day to make things a little more chaotic to start with. I had definitely planned in power grabs by various rulers and other powerful individuals as people try to restore order as quickly as possible.

I really like the idea of them acquiring some abandoned town or city as using it as a base of operations, perhaps even drawing in refuges from surrounding areas.

I also LOVE the idea of keeping gnomish artificers as slaves in some areas! I hadn't considered that, though I did think that perhaps alchemists might be in higher demand as a substitute for potions and other minor items.

I'm not sure what the party is made up of yet, so I haven't quite decided how to balance magic users against non-magic users. So far they have one cleric and one rogue (who wants to work towards shadow dancer).

Thanks for the great ideas! Any other opinions are most welcome!

 

[Shaghayegh]

Have some gnomes dedicated to freeing their tinker brethren... (Steam) Power to the people!