Low Magic Campaigns

[carrdrivesyou]

I had the pleasure of playing in a low magic campaign last year and it left me feeling a bit odd. On the one hand, the party consisted of My Elven javelin throwing rogue, a Fighter6/Bard 1/Dragon Disciple 2, and a Dwarf Fighter. On the other hand, none of us were very good at what we did. The dwarf couldn't hit the broad side of a barn, my rogue was 9th level with 32 hit points, and the fighter/bard had become our resident mage/healer and stayed in the fray, making him a bit less than ideal.

How do any of you balance low magic campaigns?
Has anyone been in a game where magic had been banned almost entirely?

I must say, I am curious because I am thinking about running a low magic campaign of my own.

[VoxRationis]

The simplest thing to do is not to throw too many actual monsters into play, and to make sure that the ones you do throw into play don't have a ton of peculiar resistances or qualities which demand a magical response or workaround.

The second thing (and arguably less important) is for you to come up with ways that players can meaningfully spend their hard-earned gold if they don't have the ability to purchase inexplicably pricey magical items from local shopkeepers. Mercenaries and castles are old standbys for this purpose; if you use them, make sure they mean something, at least once in a while. Have that mercenary army or castle come in handy.

[Selween]

*please, forgive my mystakes : i'm french, and i'm still not really used to write in english*

I had the chance to GM a campaign where magic was awfully rare.
First, i warned the players about one thing : Magic could be used properly only in rare places. (holy sites for clerics and alikes, and specifics for arcane caster.). If they weren't in one of this place, they's have to succeed to a concentration check, with a variable DC (depending on how far they were from a power site).

It appeared that one of my player still wanted to play a duskblade.


I didn't put any monster : every single ennemy was actually a human, (at least, a humanoid).
The whole scenario was about magic being discovered around the world by everyone, one month after a second sun appeared in the sky.
Because of the ack of official content when i did this campaign, i had to create every PNJ that might be a threat for the party, but the whole thing was frankly fun and interesting !

As a balance tool, i used magic, paradoxally.
Whenever the party seemed to be a little too confident, and maybe too powerful for "standards" ennemies, that was the moment when surnatural came in game.

First, i inserted tome of battle elements, whith the manoeuvers and stances explained by magic flowing threw their users.
After that, they meet paladins and alike.

Note that until almost the end, they never saw pure caster, given the fact that almost noone in this world had the time to really train themselves to use magic properly.

But at the end, around lv 14, they finally had to face a pure sorcerer, the one who brought the power of magic in the world. He was powerful, and none of the player had any idea of what the hell he was capable of (given the fact it was their first d&d game, and that they had no reason to learn a spell list).

Except for the duskblade. The player, that studied magic in game as much as IRL, could developp a really good strategy, and he allowed the party to defeat the villain and his fellows.

[edwin1993]

Im currently writing up a setting for no magic in d&d 3.5 its going to be more médiéval than anything else im personally making it a e6 game to have the party enemies limited as much as they are. Also there are a few arms and equipment guides that have useful weapon items or armor like a dwarvencraft armor adds +2 to thier ac. Only thing im allowing is cure light wounds potions as more of a alchemical experiment than anything. It cpuld be done without potions such as the rapid metabolism for faster hit point recovery.

[NapazTrix]

How do any of you balance low magic campaigns?
Has anyone been in a game where magic had been banned almost entirely?

Allow more mundane actions or preparations. In a world with little to no magic the people will find ways to improve themselves, through technology, nature or techniques. Magic normally stunts growth because "Magic solves everything".

Allow the players to use Chitin, Scales and hide from monsters to craft better equipment, or grafted onto their existing equipment for bonuses. If you actually have dragons in the game, much harder without magic, then allow their scales to be made into dragon armour, giving resistance to their breath weapon element, Full-Plate like AC buff at Medium weight. You can add in DR/SR as well if you like depending on the age/type of dragon.

Artefacts are from deities, bypassing the "low magic" ruling. If you have some religious characters, maybe throw in a quest for their deity to gain the blessing of their deity and receive their weapon or magical item.

Depending on setting, if there are Magical monsters then allow the players to hunt those and bring their magical parts to an alchemist or professor. Unicorns get their horns cut off and handed to the party for a "healing item", poisonous monsters get their glands out and applied to weapons etc.


NO-Magic games can be extremely hard, since the game is designed for 1 melee, 1 ranged, 1 caster, 1 healer. I'd say limit the magical monsters, or those with spell-like abilities. Dragons are almost a no-no since resistance to elements will be rather hard

[Mutazoia]

Check out "Iron Heroes". It's a no magic setting (there is an optional mage class if you want low magic) that handles the lack of magic quite nicely.

[BowStreetRunner]

Another option to consider is the PC Exception low-magic campaign. Basically, the world the PCs live in is low magic - no magic shop on the corner and you can't just waltz into any church and ask to have your dead comrade raised. But while it is rare and mysterious to the population at large, the PCs still end up with access to the normal amount of magic.

There are plenty of fantasy story-lines that use this technique, but my favorite is actually from science fiction. The Stargate SG-1 series had the heroes zipping around the galaxy through wormholes, encountering aliens and starships and even had several of them raised from the dead on a few occasions. At the end of each episode they returned to 20th century Earth and were surrounded by people who were oblivious to what was really going on.

Another good one is the Merlin series aired by the BBC a while back. Merlin was a capable sorcerer but lived in a town where magic was rare, feared and outright banned.

Whenever your PCs want to buy/sell magic items, instead of dealing with some corner magic store they need to track down the same sort of exotic NPCs you would see in many TV shows. Someone would put them in touch with a specialist with an occult or arcane background who would arrange the transaction for them. No Walmart for Wizards - everything would involve dealing with a sort of magical underworld - kept well out of sight of the general populace.

In this way, you don't hamper the PCs ability to keep up with the expected power curve to handle the CR of level-appropriate monsters, but still can have a world with that low-magic flavor.

[carrdrivesyou]

So:

1. Limit enemies with Spell-like or supernatural abilities.

2. Focus on more of a medieval theme, with humanoid baddies.

3. Be aware of very little healing resources, perhaps allow for "alchemical" potions to be made.

4. Have magic only work in certain areas, otherwise force a related skill check.

5. Focus more on world and plot development that most other things.

That about right?

[Sagetim]

That sounds about right. To answer your question about playing in a game that was low magic, I was in one that was kind of low magic. It was more 'none of you are allowed to play full casters' than low magi or no magic as a setting though. The DM in question had a hate on for magi above level 4 or so, so in addition to none of the players being allowed to run a full caster class, there was the additional house rule that any spell of level 4 or higher was a specific thing usually researched by that particular caster, as opposed to something that could be learned or trade for usually.

In the end, there were many dead levels of 'we didn't get any loot because the DM didn't roll any' and at the start there was enough 'we nearly died every fight because we have no healers and no real buffing going on' that he finally acquiesed to allowing an new player to come in as a full divine caster. But most of our magic or supernatural capabilities basically had to come from classes and feats, and the tome of battle was outright banned for being '(censored*) fightin' magic'.

I had managed to get the DM to consent to allow me to play a soulknife if only because he was a fan of psylocke and was willing to allow a base class whose power set is being psylocke. We were told going into the campaign that yes it would be undead heavy, but that no we were not allowed to build at the start for being extra capable of confronting undead. Thankfully, by the time we got to a level where prestige classing was possible, we had established that the world was being invaded by undead and that learning skills to specifically combat them was something we were allowed to do. So my Soulknife eventually became a Soulknife/Illumine Soul/Soulbow, and jokes went from 'hes the kuwabara of the group' to 'he's the yusuke of the group'.

In the end of the campaign, one party member was a duskblade/abjurant champion, one was mine, one was a pure fighter, and one was a pure archivist and sometimes we had a rogue of some kind. And when it came to the final fight of the campaign, taking on an atropal, the person who did the most damage to it was the party fighter. Because he charged in in round one and did some okay damage, then in round two used momentum swing and retributive and his high crit rate and sweet greatsword to finish the boss off from about 1/3rd of it's health total.

By comparison the duskblade got a few hits in with, I think it was shocking grasp stabs or something, the archivist dropped two maximized bolts of glory, and my character did consistent damage with his 'cannon' of mind arrow + greater psionic weapon + psychic strike.

We were also decked out in a variety of very nice magic items by the end, some of which were custom made by the dm for our characters and obtained as loot. But that was at the end of the campaign. There were many dry times in that campaign where we got no loot for levels at a time, and part way through we went from tracking xp to 'you level up when I say so' because we were earning 'too much xp' by winning fights.

I would suggest going with a 'level up at milestones' instead of assigning xp per enemy or xp per encounter. If done right, it can be very thematically appropriate and make the game feel more like a game and less like tracking numbers on a graph. And while I did complain at first when our DM swapped to that style, eventually he adjusted to giving us levels at reasonable intervals and I adjusted to enjoying the fact that I didn't have to update an xp chart every game or wait for him to calculate the xp value of enemies/challenges after each encounter.

Level up by milestones also allows you the option of implementing a ceiling to character competence (though you should forewarn players if that's the case). It would also make it more apparent if the players find a way to break through that ceiling when it happens, because after being told 'level 6 is the cap' for a while and having that established being told at the end of a session where they did something suitably amazing 'level up to 7' could be great moment. "Against all odds you have prevent the outbreak of war between dwarves and elves, end scene. Good game this week, level to 7."

Edit: also, the Medieval Player's Manual from Green Ronin can help with setting up a low magic 'more hisorical' flavor of dnd game. It generally has the idea of running a real world style medieval fantasy game in mind though, so some of the classes might not be what you're looking for (you don't necessarily need anything with class levels in catholic bureaucrat if there's no Catholicism in the game). The Astral Chaams are a fun mechanic in my mind though, since they can be very beneficial for someone who uses their prep time wisely. While the folk charms get a boo from me because they all cost xp to use. That said, if someone can't go above level 6 but keeps gaining xp even past the required amount for higher levels, having something to spend it on might be nice.



*The last time I used this word to describe it I got a warning, even if it's a direct quote.