Low Magic Campaign Help [PF/3.5]

[meemaas]

I'm looking to make a campaign based in the Four lands from the Shannara book series by Terry Brooks.

Like other well known series, the level of magic in the book world is much lower than that of the game system i plan to use for it. Because of that, i'm looking to restrict magic by a heavy degree, and come to the playground for advice in that manner.

To start, in the series world, real spellcasters are pretty uncommon, and i intend to enforce that, by limiting the availability of direct spellcasters, even to the point of removing some of them. Magic items are pretty rare in the series too, and i'm still in debate on how to work with that. I do not believe the campaign will be expected to go into high levels, for sake of keeping in with the expected power level of the world itself.

The ideas i currently have are restricting magic items to those that provide passive benefits, not visibly magic ones.

Or taking a refluffed and fixed up Vow of Poverty, and granting it to some or all of the players, without the "you cannot own items" limitation. I find reason to believe that this might be a better choice, but i come for opinions nonetheless.

Yes, this is gonna be a heavily houseruled setting, so i don't mind suggestions that are not RAW in the least.

[ZamielVanWeber]

Easy way to restrict magic is to ban any class that has spells go over a certain level (say, 7+?) and/or banning all tier ones and twos. As for magic items try putting on a money cap. If it is worth over 3k, it is banned.

The Charlatan Prestiege class from Dragon Magazine would work great here.

[meemaas]

See, i'm probably going a step further, because in series, outside of demons and druids (not D&D druids) there is little magic given to the world, and ultimately, i'd probably end up restricting anything that doesn't fit into it. The world is a very martial friendly world.

The problem with a simple limit, is that i'm worried that without the expected amount of wealth (in magic items), the party won't be able to keep up with expected challenges. I see a lot of flak given for Low magic games because of that very reason, and i want to be able to try it without running into major pitfalls.

[ZamielVanWeber]

You can just keep knocking down levels or tiers or just cherry pick permissible classes. As for items, you can just keep up a premium on higher grade items (moderate wonderous take an automatic 15% increase to cost, for example.) Also, as DM, you have the ability to scale challenges. Not every party MUST FIGHT demons, devils, dragons, etc. There is immense source material for fairly strong monsters that are mundane enough a non magical party to can handle them. There are also easily 50+ useful templates you can use to spice up monsters, not to mention class levels and advancement.

[Edenbeast]

One option would be to switch to the warhammer fantasy rules. I only have experience with the 2nd edition rules, but those were very low magic. Hardly any magic items, and yes there are spellcasters, but casting is risky, and it's easy to remove the spellcasting carreers *without* losing balance.

[Karnith]

I'm not really familiar with the setting that you're trying to emulate, so pardon me if any of my suggestions aren't relevant.

You're going to have to take a good, close look at what creatures you're going to use, because they were built with the assumption that players would have access to magic. Things like damage reduction, incorporeality, flight, regeneration, invisibility, or ability damage/level drain are all going to be very difficult to deal with if there is little or no magic.

If magic items are restricted, then attack bonuses are probably going to scale a lot faster/higher than armor class bonuses, so everyone is going to get hit. A lot. Most of the ways to get a lot of damage out of melee builds will still be around, though, so I'd expect combat to be pretty rocket tag-y.

Opponents using spells (which is what I assume would happen, if magic exists and players can't use it) are going to be very difficult for non-spellcasters, especially those without magic items, to deal with, not only because they have some of the best offensive options, but also because they have ways to get out of basically any situation.

As for actual recommendations, you should probably eliminate most monsters and stick to PC races with class levels for enemies. Classes with spells (and/or psionics, spell-like abilities, etc.) should be banned, or made to use alternate class features that trade away spellcasting.

And, honestly, D&D is a pretty high-magic system, so you might want to consider using some other system to replicate a low-magic world.

[lsfreak]

This (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?t=134805) would probably be of some use, simply remove some of the overly magical things.

Allow healing with basic actions and/or the heal check. A standard action heals a char's level+Con score, but never above half their heal; DC10 heals 1d6+1d6 per 5 you beat the check by, -5 to the roll if performing on yourself, +5DC every time it's attempted in 24 hours.

However, I think the big problem with low-magic is simply DMs who do it without expecting to tinker elsewhere - especially with Challenge Rating. You can't throw a CR8 dragon at a party with no magic items and expect them to walk away. It's one of those situations where simply knowing there's a problem means you'll probably avoid most of the problems.

[meemaas]

@lsfreak

That Low magic thing is by far one of the best ideas i've seen for low magic yet, with the right adjustments of course.

@karnith

I recongized that i was gonna have to go over every foe i was gonna use, but in most cases, the enemies that show up in the setting are humanoid or ordinary animals so high magic creatures like a dragon would be rare, and the kind of encounter that you wouldn't be fighting in the first place. I did plan on doing away with most of the magic, there's a few places where magic would be necessary, on NPC's or enemies, but even that is going to be restricted pretty heavily.

Finally, i do know that D&D is a very high magic system, and my reasons for trying it with this system nonetheless is that i am not comfortable enough as a DM to try learning and DM'ing a new system that i've never played before.

[Slipperychicken]

Figure out how you're going to deal with healing. This will be important, especially if you don't want everyone taking month-long breaks between fights.