There’s a section in chapter 1 of the DMG regarding low-magic settings. Blessings & miracles are basically covered by divine magic already as spells & channel divinity features. Magic in league with the wee folk or demons is covered by some of the Warlock subclasses. Druids could fit too. It might work if you restrict the races, classes and subclasses enough.
Your blessings and miracles could be represented using Supernatural Gifts (DMG, Chapter 7) and Piety (Mythic Odysseys of Theros, Chapter 2), but you'll need buy-in from your players to only play nonmagical subclasses of barbarian, fighter, rogue, and maybe ranger (if you reflavor their spells as hunting tricks).
I wouldn't restrict magic too much, but instead encourage your players to think about how else they might be achieving the same effect.
I once played a Ranger who, though they were using spells mechanically, I tried to justify as operating non-magically. So for example, conjure volley was a special type of ammunition for a customised crossbow that enabled it to split apart in the air and hit multiple targets, alarm was an actual tripwire with a bell, snare was just a trap that could be put down quickly and so-on.
Cure wounds was a bit more awkward, but I never used it in combat, instead I assumed it was more like first aid (requiring bandages and the like); this was mainly just to keep the mechanic simple under the assumption that most "wounds" in D&D are actually minor (i.e- HP represents you losing the ability to keep avoiding fatal blows and fighting on). In theory the game already supports out of combat treating of wounds using the Medicine skill, but it's not super well defined (you'd have to decide as DM how much is healed, whether a wound can be patched up non-magically at all and so-on) which is why I preferred to avoid that.
If you encourage that thinking it should get the players to decide for themselves not to use some of the more outlandish or unusual spells, and to think about how spells that are fine mechanically could be explained in a non-magical way. This way you avoid getting rid of all of the magic-capable classes?
Former D&D Beyond Customer of six years: With the axing of piecemeal purchasing, lack of meaningful development, and toxic moderation the site isn't worth paying for anymore. I remain a free user only until my groups are done migrating from DDB, and if necessary D&D, after which I'm done. There are better systems owned by better companies out there.
I have unsubscribed from all topics and will not reply to messages. My homebrew is now 100% unsupported.
I have had this issue before myself, have a setting idea outgrow the system that I think will work with it and then changing the system I pick to run the setting.
But if you want to use 5e I would do the following, using your strong setting ideas ask yourself can I do this with 5e? What do I have to change to get my ideas to work with 5e? How much work will it take to make it work? Do I have the time, experience and or the dedication to make it work.
In general it sounds to me like you need to design new classes to match your setting ideas and new rules for how you handle specific types of magic.( Note there was another question recently that asked the same question on making magic have costs but I do not remember the thread title, but I mention it to let you know you are not alone in trying to enact your idea. Also note that having played various RPGs since 78 your idea about magic is one that frequently has come up on message boards and in discussions and from my experience it is hard to get right in a RPG vs fiction or an movie as PC's often just stay away from magic or accept that their PC will implode every 3-4 games when they use magic.
The last point I bring up is one I have seen quite a bit, the GM has an idea he likes and the players think they would like to play and then the players realize they like the thing the setting takes away or limits. So in your custom setting players would say I like magic and how it functions before the change or they decide I like playing low to no magic for 3-4 games and then go back to normal.
D&D adapts to pretty much any fantasy setting, but it thrives on variety. To run this setting, you need to decide what to restrict, and then find players who are up for playing a more "realistic" version of the game (which could potentially rule out more veteran players, but I'm sure you'd find some people who'd be up for it). You would need to hope that the thought you've put into the setting is going to make it more fun than having all of the game's tools - spells, monsters, races, classes - available to the players. So you need your game to be more fun because you've limited things. Honestly, given that D&D is a game of creativity, I don't really get how lessening the creativity is going to make it more fun for your players, so this system seems like the wrong choice. You need a system that gives the same variety that D&D does without incorporating a lot of what D&D is about.
Your monsters are going to be pretty limited in this setting and will be mostly humans I'm imagining? They kind of have to be, because even if you tell the players "monsters are really rare!" and then they meet a Gorgon, well, in their experience there are gorgons. Fighting human after human will get boring quickly. D&D combat can get repetitive; what keeps it feeling fresh is the diverse array of enemies the players can face. Fighting "Enemy soldiers, Group 9" isn't going to feel very exciting.
One thing players tend to hate is having their choices limited. In order to create your setting, you need to majorly limit the PC choices that are available to make it more historical than fantasy, because the key part of your setting seems to be that it's not really much of a fantasy setting. Therefore I'd look at other RPGs set in the medieval period where there are likely to be character classes more designed for that kind of setting.
D&D adapts to pretty much any fantasy setting, but it thrives on variety. To run this setting, you need to decide what to restrict, and then find players who are up for playing a more "realistic" version of the game (which could potentially rule out more veteran players, but I'm sure you'd find some people who'd be up for it). You would need to hope that the thought you've put into the setting is going to make it more fun than having all of the game's tools - spells, monsters, races, classes - available to the players. So you need your game to be more fun because you've limited things. Honestly, given that D&D is a game of creativity, I don't really get how lessening the creativity is going to make it more fun for your players, so this system seems like the wrong choice. You need a system that gives the same variety that D&D does without incorporating a lot of what D&D is about.
Your monsters are going to be pretty limited in this setting and will be mostly humans I'm imagining? They kind of have to be, because even if you tell the players "monsters are really rare!" and then they meet a Gorgon, well, in their experience there are gorgons. Fighting human after human will get boring quickly. D&D combat can get repetitive; what keeps it feeling fresh is the diverse array of enemies the players can face. Fighting "Enemy soldiers, Group 9" isn't going to feel very exciting.
One thing players tend to hate is having their choices limited. In order to create your setting, you need to majorly limit the PC choices that are available to make it more historical than fantasy, because the key part of your setting seems to be that it's not really much of a fantasy setting. Therefore I'd look at other RPGs set in the medieval period where there are likely to be character classes more designed for that kind of setting.
I mean, I understand where you're coming from. However, it's not my intention to make it more historical than fantasy. My intention is essentially to construct a fantasy based largely on how the people of medieval France thought the world worked, which includes magic and monsters. They just may not necessarily include all the normal Monster Manual inhabitants (and I think this is pretty normal, as you won't see orcs in Krynn, etc). The point isn't to limit players so much as to give them a different world to play in with different rules. I don't think giving players fewer apparent options limits creativity.
The medieval mind could be delightfully weird. There are dozens of different types of demons, fairies, ogres, giant snails, rabbits that walk on their hind legs, not to mention werewolves, vampires, many different kinds of monsters, as well as human sorcerers. I picture a lot of this as the setting being strongly flavored in a particular way, rather than just being generic standard fantasy all the way through.
You did say in your second post, among other things:
"I don't think elves in the traditional sense would fit the setting, nor do Dragonborn, Gnomes, Orcs, or the like."
This is totally fine, and there's no reason that you can't tailor the world to be whatever you want. But if a good player said to you "I really want to play the one dragonborn in the realm" then wouldn't that accentuate the fact that he's rare - he'd have to hide his features all the time, and would make the setting more of what you've described rather than less.
I barely use any monsters from sourcebooks, I homebrew basically everything.
What you're aiming for, as far as I understand it is that you want the world to feel like magic is rare, feared, powerful, maybe even dangerous which is achievable in the early game, before the characters have seen much of the world. I started off my current campaign by telling the players that their characters have never met anyone who would be above level 5, and maybe like 1-2 level 5 NPCs live in their homeland. This is great for making them feel that their growing powers are super-powers early on in the game.
This cannot last, however, once the PCs reach a certain level of power. By the time the PCs reach level 7, not only can they probably fly without spending too much of their resources, they have probably used revivify, and that paladin has been casting Divine Smite for attack after attack. It gets harder to maintain a feeling that magic is very rare when the PCs are the ones doing it. The PCs also have to be taking on enemies with powerful spell effects to keep things challenging. NPC spellcasters will be of higher level, and they can't be rare in D&D or your encounters become very limited in scope (or they just never get to finish off the spellcasters, and meet them repeatedly, which is fine for the BBEG and unsatisfying elsewise). But I think what you're trying to accomplish with flavour is entirely possible.
You can certainly limit magic items for the players, that's easy to do but I question whether finding a Longsword +1 at level 8 as the only magic item in the party will feel terribly special to a veteran player. I'd still hand out a few good ones, but you can steer clear of items like carpet of flying which are flashy and showy.
This setting sounds like it would work really well for a low level campaign. My campaign is just reaching level 11, and teleportation, airships, dragons and such are all starting to feel commonplace. The challenges in a higher level campaign tend to involve planar travel, so perhaps you could have the PCs head into Hell or similar.
Reading Sacvael's post above game me the idea that you probably should edit the spell lists available to each class and vastly limit the spells you include in each class. Since you are doing this you probably are going to have to rewrite/adapt all class abilities to try and keep some balance if you are using the base 5e rules and not some version of them.
I wish you good luck and it reminds me of another poster from 10+ years ago that was trying to do the same thing and adopting parts for other systems into the game on that companies forum.
But if a good player said to you "I really want to play the one dragonborn in the realm" then wouldn't that accentuate the fact that he's rare - he'd have to hide his features all the time, and would make the setting more of what you've described rather than less.
I think this is kind of the way 5e expects to handle these kinds of settings. Magic is rare yet a big part of the story. Monsters are rare and yet a big part of the story. So why do the PCs need to be medieval schmucks who must fit the general population of the setting? Why can't they also be fragments of myth brought to life? If a PC wizard is literally the only wizard in existence... that sounds like a really interesting character to me. The default framework of the game assumes that the PCs are exceptional. If they weren't, their services would not be required.
The medieval mind could be delightfully weird. There are dozens of different types of demons, fairies, ogres, giant snails, rabbits that walk on their hind legs, not to mention werewolves, vampires, many different kinds of monsters, as well as human sorcerers.
I had to laugh at this bit given where this discussion is taking place. There are certainly cultural differences between modern and medieval society, but our shared capacity to imagine weird things is not one of them.
Wild magic Barbarian (you could reflavour goliath as just being like Scandinavians, since they were renowned as being taller)
rogue/battlemaster
bloodhunter/wizard
Tempest cleric
Glamours Bard
Circle of Stars Druid
At level 10, a pretty regular opening turn might look like this:
Barbarian rages, generating an exploding flumph and attacks
Battlemaster/Rogue goes in and makes a sneak attack (pretty normal seeming)
Bloodhunter/Wizard puts a Hex on the enemy then attacks with a crossbow
The cleric uses Call Lightning to start throwing lightning bolts
The Bad uses animate objects to turn a huge boulder into a hovering smash machine
The druid casts maelstrom creating a huge whirlpool
This is just a single turn but the spell effects are big, flashy and lighting up the world. I'm not sure that there's anything you can do to reduce this without just removing casters as character options, but you might find that by this stage in the game that it feels different.
As someone running a Call of Chuthulu era game with 5th Ed DND I can relate.
I will say this to make life a little easier: Make HP represent "vitality" rather than "wounds". Losing HP doesn't mean you're injured, it means you're closer to making a fatal mistake. It COULD mean an injury mid combat (which characters in movies do) but it doesn't mean "if this isn't treated they're going to bleed out". That means that healing spells go from "closing your wounds with magic" to inspiring words and reassurances that restore the will to fight to an ally.
There’s a section in chapter 1 of the DMG regarding low-magic settings. Blessings & miracles are basically covered by divine magic already as spells & channel divinity features. Magic in league with the wee folk or demons is covered by some of the Warlock subclasses. Druids could fit too. It might work if you restrict the races, classes and subclasses enough.
Creating Epic Boons on DDB
DDB Buyers' Guide
Hardcovers, DDB & You
Content Troubleshooting
Your blessings and miracles could be represented using Supernatural Gifts (DMG, Chapter 7) and Piety (Mythic Odysseys of Theros, Chapter 2), but you'll need buy-in from your players to only play nonmagical subclasses of barbarian, fighter, rogue, and maybe ranger (if you reflavor their spells as hunting tricks).
I wouldn't restrict magic too much, but instead encourage your players to think about how else they might be achieving the same effect.
I once played a Ranger who, though they were using spells mechanically, I tried to justify as operating non-magically. So for example, conjure volley was a special type of ammunition for a customised crossbow that enabled it to split apart in the air and hit multiple targets, alarm was an actual tripwire with a bell, snare was just a trap that could be put down quickly and so-on.
Cure wounds was a bit more awkward, but I never used it in combat, instead I assumed it was more like first aid (requiring bandages and the like); this was mainly just to keep the mechanic simple under the assumption that most "wounds" in D&D are actually minor (i.e- HP represents you losing the ability to keep avoiding fatal blows and fighting on). In theory the game already supports out of combat treating of wounds using the Medicine skill, but it's not super well defined (you'd have to decide as DM how much is healed, whether a wound can be patched up non-magically at all and so-on) which is why I preferred to avoid that.
If you encourage that thinking it should get the players to decide for themselves not to use some of the more outlandish or unusual spells, and to think about how spells that are fine mechanically could be explained in a non-magical way. This way you avoid getting rid of all of the magic-capable classes?
Former D&D Beyond Customer of six years: With the axing of piecemeal purchasing, lack of meaningful development, and toxic moderation the site isn't worth paying for anymore. I remain a free user only until my groups are done migrating from DDB, and if necessary D&D, after which I'm done. There are better systems owned by better companies out there.
I have unsubscribed from all topics and will not reply to messages. My homebrew is now 100% unsupported.
I have had this issue before myself, have a setting idea outgrow the system that I think will work with it and then changing the system I pick to run the setting.
But if you want to use 5e I would do the following, using your strong setting ideas ask yourself can I do this with 5e? What do I have to change to get my ideas to work with 5e? How much work will it take to make it work? Do I have the time, experience and or the dedication to make it work.
In general it sounds to me like you need to design new classes to match your setting ideas and new rules for how you handle specific types of magic.( Note there was another question recently that asked the same question on making magic have costs but I do not remember the thread title, but I mention it to let you know you are not alone in trying to enact your idea. Also note that having played various RPGs since 78 your idea about magic is one that frequently has come up on message boards and in discussions and from my experience it is hard to get right in a RPG vs fiction or an movie as PC's often just stay away from magic or accept that their PC will implode every 3-4 games when they use magic.
The last point I bring up is one I have seen quite a bit, the GM has an idea he likes and the players think they would like to play and then the players realize they like the thing the setting takes away or limits. So in your custom setting players would say I like magic and how it functions before the change or they decide I like playing low to no magic for 3-4 games and then go back to normal.
Good luck no matter what you decide.
I would say it is square peg, round hole.
D&D adapts to pretty much any fantasy setting, but it thrives on variety. To run this setting, you need to decide what to restrict, and then find players who are up for playing a more "realistic" version of the game (which could potentially rule out more veteran players, but I'm sure you'd find some people who'd be up for it). You would need to hope that the thought you've put into the setting is going to make it more fun than having all of the game's tools - spells, monsters, races, classes - available to the players. So you need your game to be more fun because you've limited things. Honestly, given that D&D is a game of creativity, I don't really get how lessening the creativity is going to make it more fun for your players, so this system seems like the wrong choice. You need a system that gives the same variety that D&D does without incorporating a lot of what D&D is about.
Your monsters are going to be pretty limited in this setting and will be mostly humans I'm imagining? They kind of have to be, because even if you tell the players "monsters are really rare!" and then they meet a Gorgon, well, in their experience there are gorgons. Fighting human after human will get boring quickly. D&D combat can get repetitive; what keeps it feeling fresh is the diverse array of enemies the players can face. Fighting "Enemy soldiers, Group 9" isn't going to feel very exciting.
One thing players tend to hate is having their choices limited. In order to create your setting, you need to majorly limit the PC choices that are available to make it more historical than fantasy, because the key part of your setting seems to be that it's not really much of a fantasy setting. Therefore I'd look at other RPGs set in the medieval period where there are likely to be character classes more designed for that kind of setting.
You did say in your second post, among other things:
"I don't think elves in the traditional sense would fit the setting, nor do Dragonborn, Gnomes, Orcs, or the like."
This is totally fine, and there's no reason that you can't tailor the world to be whatever you want. But if a good player said to you "I really want to play the one dragonborn in the realm" then wouldn't that accentuate the fact that he's rare - he'd have to hide his features all the time, and would make the setting more of what you've described rather than less.
I barely use any monsters from sourcebooks, I homebrew basically everything.
What you're aiming for, as far as I understand it is that you want the world to feel like magic is rare, feared, powerful, maybe even dangerous which is achievable in the early game, before the characters have seen much of the world. I started off my current campaign by telling the players that their characters have never met anyone who would be above level 5, and maybe like 1-2 level 5 NPCs live in their homeland. This is great for making them feel that their growing powers are super-powers early on in the game.
This cannot last, however, once the PCs reach a certain level of power. By the time the PCs reach level 7, not only can they probably fly without spending too much of their resources, they have probably used revivify, and that paladin has been casting Divine Smite for attack after attack. It gets harder to maintain a feeling that magic is very rare when the PCs are the ones doing it. The PCs also have to be taking on enemies with powerful spell effects to keep things challenging. NPC spellcasters will be of higher level, and they can't be rare in D&D or your encounters become very limited in scope (or they just never get to finish off the spellcasters, and meet them repeatedly, which is fine for the BBEG and unsatisfying elsewise). But I think what you're trying to accomplish with flavour is entirely possible.
You can certainly limit magic items for the players, that's easy to do but I question whether finding a Longsword +1 at level 8 as the only magic item in the party will feel terribly special to a veteran player. I'd still hand out a few good ones, but you can steer clear of items like carpet of flying which are flashy and showy.
This setting sounds like it would work really well for a low level campaign. My campaign is just reaching level 11, and teleportation, airships, dragons and such are all starting to feel commonplace. The challenges in a higher level campaign tend to involve planar travel, so perhaps you could have the PCs head into Hell or similar.
Reading Sacvael's post above game me the idea that you probably should edit the spell lists available to each class and vastly limit the spells you include in each class. Since you are doing this you probably are going to have to rewrite/adapt all class abilities to try and keep some balance if you are using the base 5e rules and not some version of them.
I wish you good luck and it reminds me of another poster from 10+ years ago that was trying to do the same thing and adopting parts for other systems into the game on that companies forum.
I think this is kind of the way 5e expects to handle these kinds of settings. Magic is rare yet a big part of the story. Monsters are rare and yet a big part of the story. So why do the PCs need to be medieval schmucks who must fit the general population of the setting? Why can't they also be fragments of myth brought to life? If a PC wizard is literally the only wizard in existence... that sounds like a really interesting character to me. The default framework of the game assumes that the PCs are exceptional. If they weren't, their services would not be required.
I had to laugh at this bit given where this discussion is taking place. There are certainly cultural differences between modern and medieval society, but our shared capacity to imagine weird things is not one of them.
My homebrew subclasses (full list here)
(Artificer) Swordmage | Glasswright | (Barbarian) Path of the Savage Embrace
(Bard) College of Dance | (Fighter) Warlord | Cannoneer
(Monk) Way of the Elements | (Ranger) Blade Dancer
(Rogue) DaggerMaster | Inquisitor | (Sorcerer) Riftwalker | Spellfist
(Warlock) The Swarm
Yeah, so my players are playing:
At level 10, a pretty regular opening turn might look like this:
This is just a single turn but the spell effects are big, flashy and lighting up the world. I'm not sure that there's anything you can do to reduce this without just removing casters as character options, but you might find that by this stage in the game that it feels different.
As someone running a Call of Chuthulu era game with 5th Ed DND I can relate.
I will say this to make life a little easier: Make HP represent "vitality" rather than "wounds". Losing HP doesn't mean you're injured, it means you're closer to making a fatal mistake. It COULD mean an injury mid combat (which characters in movies do) but it doesn't mean "if this isn't treated they're going to bleed out". That means that healing spells go from "closing your wounds with magic" to inspiring words and reassurances that restore the will to fight to an ally.
"Teller of tales, dreamer of dreams"
Tips, Tricks, Maps: Lantern Noir Presents
**Streams hosted at at twitch.tv/LaternNoir