My gaming group had taken a break from Pathfinder and moved to a few other games, but recently the call of our favorite system has beckoned us back. Now we're looking to play a campaign with dark elements and a very gritty playstyle, similar to Darksun and Ravenloft. Here's what we have so far.
The gods of the world have withdrawn, leaving few people with access to divine magic. Meanwhile, the unseen forces that allow arcane magic to function have become unstable and led to a culture that fears and hates this form of magic. The loss of these forces has caused civilization to falter, as monsters grew more numerous by the year and the magical aid that many cities received faded away. Wars are constantly fought over natural resources, and banditry has become a common problem.
As far as actual game mechanics go, no player is restricted in what class they can play, although a lot of roleplay may be required. We're using the piecemeal armor rules, and looking into various ways to have a Durability system where armor and weapons wear out. In addition, we're using the slow level progression, and the game's level cap is 10. After tenth level, players will gain feats at every uneven level, and a bonus at even levels that is yet to be determined.
Any input helps, and all discussion is appreciated.
One of the grittiest things I've experienced in a game is in my buddy's current game. All healing magic just converts the lethal damage into half its nonlethal damage. Healing 10hp turns it into 5 nonlethal. It makes every fight terrifying. Healing is still useful, but it is not a nice reset like it is in the standard rules.
Also, look into sanity rules. They can be fun.
In a world like that sundering will be a nasty thing. Also, depending on how long magic has been unstable and shunned, you'd tend to run into situations where people were hoarding magic items, weapons, scrolls, potions, etc. This could lead to some real wackiness as far as WBL goes, because the PCs might run into a situation where they just uncovered an NPC boss's magical treasure hoard, and the WBL table just went bye-bye.
It also will lead those people that play magic users to work on hiding that fact from the general populous, so they'll need some disguise and sleight of hand skill ranks.
Sounds interesting. I hope it works out to be as fun as it sounds.
The general idea is that magic items aren't actually that available, as around Half of the magic items in the world have become inert. we're still working on details about magical item crafting, but we're definitely making it harder.
If you have any ideas about sanity rules I would love to hear them, as we already talked about insanity as a potential threat.
As of right now (Just had a sit down with a few players, looks like i'm definitely the GM this time) the consensus is to make spells a lot more rare by reducing all casting classes by 1 spell per spell level, and remove casting from Rangers and Paladins.
One of my players also brought up a really god idea. As the world slowly begins to die, many druids would try their best to save it. But there would have to be at least a few that see the world dying as part of the natural order, and try to help it towards its final rest. These "Death Druids" could potentially be some of the most dangerous beings on the planet.
So, any ideas for more difficult crafting?
I'm sure it's too specific a genre for you, but Rite Publishing offers a dark fantasy, gritty setting of Japanese horror, called Kaidan. There's a free one-shot called Frozen Wind that's heavy on survival horror with frozen zombies, oni, and a yuki-onna. You could adapt this for non-Japanese flavor.
For more dark and gritty, we have a haunts book, called #30 Haunts for Kaidan divided in nine creepy storylines with associated haunts and included undead variants.
You might find some ideas for your game from these and other Kaidan supplements. They are very 'Japanese' though, so it might be too much work to adapt for you.
I'd suggest a misfire table, where magic items go wrong, or are hard to control.
There's a good system in Dungeon Crawl Classics, or the wild magic tables from 3.5, or the potion miscibility table from 1e.
Something useful could come from my memories of the days of Spelljammer. They had these furnaces that you fed magic items to and allowed the ships to fly.
You might do something like that. Create machines, like automatons, that have furnaces that magic items, and even magic users are fed to. The machine burns out the magic item and burns the magic ability from a mage. Creatures that have the magic burned out of them could become magic eaters, insane creatures that absorb the magic of the remaining wizards, sort of like vampires.
It could have other side effects, weather fluctuations, gravity fluctuations.
You might also consider magic dead areas where no magic works and other areas where magic goes awry, similar to wild magic.
It sounds like a fascinating world.
rkraus2: Thanks for the idea of the potion miscibility table. Thankfully i still have the 1st and 2nd edition books laying around.
blackbloodtroll: I should clarify that i meant Magical Item Crafting, not just crafting in general. It doesn't make much sense in a low magic world to have the PCs just create magic items like candy.
Gamer-Printer: thanks for the materials, i'll look at the adventure and see if i can use anything. The "survival horror" genre actually fits really well with this campaign idea.
Dyvant L'Stranj: Thanks for the idea about wild magic. If you know what books i could find info about that i would appreciate it.
With regards to weapon durability, off the top of my head you could always go with having a weapon deal 1% (or some other number) of its damage to itself, after adjusting for hardness. So, on a longsword with 10 hardness and 5 hp, if you deal 20 damage on an attack, the sword takes (20-10) * 1% = 0.1 damage.
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The general idea is that magic items aren't actually that available, as around Half of the magic items in the world have become inert. we're still working on details about magical item crafting, but we're definitely making it harder.
If you have any ideas about sanity rules I would love to hear them, as we already talked about insanity as a potential threat.
As of right now (Just had a sit down with a few players, looks like i'm definitely the GM this time) the consensus is to make spells a lot more rare by reducing all casting classes by 1 spell per spell level, and remove casting from Rangers and Paladins.
One of my players also brought up a really god idea. As the world slowly begins to die, many druids would try their best to save it. But there would have to be at least a few that see the world dying as part of the natural order, and try to help it towards its final rest. These "Death Druids" could potentially be some of the most dangerous beings on the planet.
Sounds like a fun game, to me. I like dark, low mana stuff.
Here's Pathfinder's madness rules...you might want to expand them a bit:
http://www.d20pfsrd.com/gamemastering/afflictions/madness
This is how we're looking at handling weapon and armor degradation so far, but any input is welcome.
Whenever you score a critical hit OR deal maximum weapon damage, your weapon takes 1 point of damage. If both occur, it takes 2 points of damage.
Whenever you take damage greater than the AC bonus of your armor or shield, it takes 1 point of damage. Damage is assigned from shield to armor, so if your shield gives 2 AC and your armor gives 4, if you take 5 damage it only damages your shield.
This system is meant to be difficult for players, but it also is meant to give some level of realism.
This is how we're looking at handling weapon and armor degradation so far, but any input is welcome.
Whenever you score a critical hit OR deal maximum weapon damage, your weapon takes 1 point of damage. If both occur, it takes 2 points of damage.
Whenever you take damage greater than the AC bonus of your armor or shield, it takes 1 point of damage. Damage is assigned from shield to armor, so if your shield gives 2 AC and your armor gives 4, if you take 5 damage it only damages your shield.
This system is meant to be difficult for players, but it also is meant to give some level of realism.
I'm not convinced the second point is sound.
Damage scales much faster than armour class bonuses. For example with those rule a shield or buckkler will pretty much always take damage every time its wielder takes damage...
This applies to armour too. This last session I played today the paladin took, over two encounters, about 5 or 6 hits. The weakest hit was something like 8 damage.
I think it's going to be pretty much a guarantee that every time the character takes damage, his armour will be damaged.
This is how we're looking at handling weapon and armor degradation so far, but any input is welcome.
Whenever you score a critical hit OR deal maximum weapon damage, your weapon takes 1 point of damage. If both occur, it takes 2 points of damage.
Whenever you take damage greater than the AC bonus of your armor or shield, it takes 1 point of damage. Damage is assigned from shield to armor, so if your shield gives 2 AC and your armor gives 4, if you take 5 damage it only damages your shield.
This system is meant to be difficult for players, but it also is meant to give some level of realism.
I'm not convinced the second point is sound.
Damage scales much faster than armour class bonuses. For example with those rule a shield or buckkler will pretty much always take damage every time its wielder takes damage...
This applies to armour too. This last session I played today the paladin took, over two encounters, about 5 or 6 hits. The weakest hit was something like 8 damage.
I think it's going to be pretty much a guarantee that every time the character takes damage, his armour will be damaged.
That's actually the idea. Characters are told ahead of time that field repairs will be necessary, and there are plenty of ways to repair armor and weapons. Thankfully, armor has a lot of Hp, and most shields can take a hit. Even a buckler has 5 Hp, so it can take 5 hits before breaking. While a buckler isn't very sturdy and can be easily broken, a Heavy Steel Shield has 20 Hp and can take a better beating. It just makes sense.
And yes, they will usually get the option to reforge a shield or piece of armor for significantly less than its cost to create. It mostly just takes time.