Taking 20 Podcast - Ep 63 - High vs Low Magic Campaigns

Episode Date: March 7, 2021

You may have heard the terms "High Magic" and "Low Magic" when describing adventure settings but what does that even mean?  Is LSD involved?  Where would I even score any at 8:33 a.m. on a Sunday? ��Good news is that it's just a way of thinking about the prevalence of magic in your campaign.  Just come on in and have a listen.

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for tuning in to episode 63 of the Taking 20 podcast. This week, all about high magic versus low magic adventures. This week's sponsor, the Martian Environmental Protection Agency. Our planet is cold, dry, and desolate, and we aim to keep it that way. I promised a big announcement, and desolate, and we aim to keep it that way. I promise I'm going to give you plenty of time to sign up and be eligible for the giveaway. By the way, I will at least let you know that the giveaway is going to be for a $50 Amazon gift card. Of all the things I've said on this podcast, my joke last week about the Pirates of the Caribbean 3 not being good has garnered probably the most response of any throwaway line in any episode I've ever recorded. To that end, I have some concessions to make. Yes, the opening with the hangings and everyone at the gallows singing Hoist the Colors was a bold opening.

Everyone, let's sing together. Oh, look, we're hanging a kid. Disney logo. Yes, the battle at the end around the maelstrom was beautiful, but why have all the other ships there if they're just going to sit around and do nothing? All they were missing was like a popcorn ship so they could have refreshments while they watch. In between those two scenes, though, I stand by my statement. The movie is hot garbage.

It's not as bad as 4 and 5, but still bad. 4 and 5 were... Well, there aren't words in the tongue of man or dragon to describe how bad those movies are. I mean, I'd say Johnny Depp should be ashamed of himself, but I'm reminded of one of my favorite quotes by the inimitable actor Michael Caine. He made a dreadful movie called Jaws the Revenge. It was the fourth Jaws movie, and that's all you need to know about it. When asked if he'd seen the film, he said, I've never seen it, and by all accounts, it's terrible.

However, I have seen the house that it built, and it is terrific. I had some idea about this episode before I ever did some research on it, put some notes down, and I thought it would be a fairly simple topic, but wow, once I started digging, this was a much more complex topic than I expected. Some game systems, campaigns, and adventures treat magic like this special thing, with magic items like swords being scarce or not very powerful, while others hand out plus one weapons and magic spells like they're pine pollen. You leave work and there's three plus one arrows sitting on top of your car. This crap again? I got 70 of them at home.

You throw them in the trash as you head into the house. So let's talk about the difference between low magic and high magic. In low magic settings, they're akin to low fantasy, which is where magical events or magical items almost intrude upon an otherwise normal world. Magic is rare, hard to come by. Spells, magical items, magical healing, hard to get. For those who have seen the show, Game of Thrones was low magic. Vast majority of the rules of that world were regular boring old physics that we're used to on earth. Very rare is the teen girl with three dragons, or a sorceress who can use blood magic, people who can take control of wild animals, or someone

who can change their appearance at will. Book series and movie series, Conan was low magic. People who could manipulate magic were present, but they were rare. Conan didn't understand magic at all. The Big Bad was a sorcerer, but it didn't seem like magic was common from the movies. The story The Hobbit is low magic. A magic sword is this rare thing, and Gandalf was one of the very few mages that were in the entire world. In contrast, high magic or high fantasy is where magic is common. Magic can be purchased. It's readily available. Every town may have access to it. Every other tomb may have a body buried with a magic thingamabob. Both high magic and low magic campaigns can be fun. Really,

it just has to do with the frequency of the magic being available, the power of the magic that's available, or both. And honestly, I wish we had different terms. When we talk about high versus low magic, are we talking about how rare the magic is, the efficacy or strength of the magic, or both? I do wish we were using different terms for those. But as you're designing your adventure or game world, you need to decide where you will be on both scales. Is magic rare and powerful? Is magic common and weak?

Is magic common and powerful? Or is magic rare and weak? That might make for a boring story unless your campaign is about bringing strength back to magic items. Magic has begun to leak from the world and the players are tasked with stopping it and reversing it if they can. God, that sounds fun. I'm going to throw that on the pile of stuff I'll never write,

so if one of you puts a campaign like that together, reach out to me because I'd love to see where you take it. Gaming systems like D&D, Pathfinder, and GURPS can be run high magic, low magic, easily and successfully. But other game systems may be shoehorned into one or the other. Starfinder tends to almost have to be high magic, because it's in a far future where technology and magic work together. It's hard to run that as low magic when magic is so ubiquitous in the game setting. Other game systems like Dark Heresy, Warhammer Roleplay, Conan RPG are all low magic built into the system, and it may be hard to run them as high magic campaigns.

So suppose you're designing a campaign and you're not sure whether you want it to be high or low magic. What's the difference? In low magic campaigns, magic is rare, coveted, fought over. Magic is a status symbol. Kings wear glowy cloaks to show how powerful they are and they have access to these rare and amazing things even if the cloak wouldn't protect you from anything and the only magic is is that it glows if the pc start walking around town showing off their magic items all over the place they may start garnering unwanted attention by never do well's who want to collect those items for themselves. It's kind of like going to Las Vegas and having your cash hanging out of your pocket or purse.

In a low magic campaign, buying magic items would be almost unheard of, maybe even not possible for single-use things like potions and scrolls. Leaders, kings, empresses would hoard these items to keep their family alive. Magic items in a low magic campaign world can swing the tide of a battle, or hell, maybe even a war. Magic might elevate someone from a nobody, the peasant who finds the magic sword, to suddenly now he's the talk of society. Just by possessing a magic item or understanding how to use it may elevate your caste in society.

Magical healing would be rare, prohibitively expensive, if it's even available at all. Low magic doesn't have to mean no magic. You just have to have a reason why magic is present but rare. Is magic difficult to harness? Does it require special training? Only the chosen can wield it. Only people of a certain bloodline and so forth. Some ancient civilization was more powerful and they could create and wield magic to amazing effect, but all that knowledge has been lost. Some artifacts are still around that were manufactured during this golden age, but the process just can't be duplicated in the modern world. Is there someone or something that's hoarding the magic from the other groups?

Maybe there's so few magic items in the world because dragons believe that humans and elves and the other ancestries can't be trusted with its power. So, so much of the world's magic is secreted away in dragon hordes around the globe. Is magic use or creation inherently dangerous? Is it prone to mishap or accident which would kill the creator? Maybe it has a chance to hurt the wielder just as much as the target. I was in a low magic campaign a long time ago, and to make up for the fact that magic was so rare,

the DM allowed the party to undertake quests for rare components that we could use to upgrade our equipment in ways that was equivalent to giving them magical enhancements. could use to upgrade our equipment in ways that was equivalent to giving them magical enhancements. I remember I needed silk from something called a sword spider to stitch my leather armor and make it more durable and resilient. It gave it the equivalent of an additional plus one armor bonus. In a low magic campaign, that's always an option. You can give your players a non-magical way to gain the equivalent effects to what magic gives you. In a low magic campaign, magic is going to garner notice, so something to think about is what magic looks like in your world.

When you say magic sword, does it have to mean a glowy blue blade? Magic could be a term for better manufacturing or infused with power while it was being manufactured or tiny little runes in the hilt that can easily be hidden. Check the rules for your game system, but not every magic sword glows and talks and can cook you a fine beef wellington with no help. It could look like a plain old sword until the right combination of criteria happened. Think Lord of the Rings when they threw the one ring into the fire and the script glowed on the ring. Or when the sword's sting glowed, but only around orcs.

But I digress. Low magic campaigns are by their nature more lethal than high magic campaigns. Healing isn't as prevalent. It's harder for PCs to get the numerical advantages over the huge number of baddies they're going to have to wade through in a campaign of any length.

Resurrection, should a character die, may be difficult or even impossible. Think about your game system and creatures with damage resistance. A lot of times that damage resistance is overcome by, you guessed it, magic weapons. And if magic is rare, any creature with that type of damage resistance

is going to become a lot more powerful. If magic weapons are rare, you may have to adjust the DR rules to fit this campaign. You may need to scale creatures back, modify some statistics down so you don't wipe the party with the first shadow they run into. Okay, so we've talked about low magic campaigns. How are high magic campaigns different?

In high magic campaigns, magic often serves as a stand-in for technology in our modern world. I mean, imagine a fantasy city where there are continual flame torches lining the city streets. There are teleport stations that allow you to instantly travel to one part of the city or another. Magic potions, scrolls, items, spells are readily available for purchase. If you have a ye olde magic shop in towns within your campaign, it's a high magic campaign. As an aside, I think I'm going to have magic shops in my next campaign be like a chain store, like a Costco or Big Lots. I'm thinking right now the name Bottles

and Blades, but if you got a better name for me, please send it to me at feedback at taking20podcast.com. I will give you all the credit in the world. I'll make sure I give you a little something for the effort. Whatever I name this chain of magic shops, the proprietor is going to be the same person, whether the party comes in day or night, any city across the globe. It's always open, and even multiple locations have the same blue-skinned, extra-dimensional proprietor of a race called the Mercane. My idea, by the way, in my head is that the whole shop is an extradimensional space that's connected to all of the other shops.

That's why they have so much inventory available in the back where the PCs aren't allowed to go. Anyway, high magic campaigns, magic is relatively common. It's every day, ho-hum, yawn. Non-adventuring commoners have experience with magic in some way. Imagine that city I talked about before. Magic lights are common. Maybe golems deliver the mail. Murders are solved with speak with dead spells. Hmm, we have this mystery.

Yes, dead person, who killed you? Bob. Okay, thanks, appreciate it. Let's go arrest Bob. Unseen servants are present in every tavern and shop to clean and keep everything running smoothly. High magic rolls when I think about this. It reminds me of an old joke. A magician's working on a cruise ship and he does the same act every night.

Every night the captain comes to see him and brings his pet parrot with him. Well, after a few nights, the parrot starts catching on to the magician's act. In the middle of the tricks, the parrot would squawk. It's in his sleeve. It's behind his hand. There's act. In the middle of the tricks, the parrot would squawk. It's in his sleeve. It's behind his hand. There's another lady in the box. The magician's annoyed with the parrot, but since it belongs to the captain, he says nothing.

That night, the ship hits an underwater rock and the entire cruise ship sinks. The only survivors are the magician and the parrot floating together on a door. Two days pass, and neither one of them says a thing to the other one. They're just glaring until finally the parrot says, okay, I give, where's the boat? In high magic campaigns, not only are magic items common and magic is well understood, but almost it loses its wonder in a

way, like the parrot. It may be really, really rare for relatively low characters not to have a permanent magic armor or cloak or weapon or other device. Magic items in a high magic campaign become just another type of treasure, something to be exchanged for cash whenever they return to town. If magic items or spells are readily available for players, they're also readily available for baddies, though. So make sure you buff up your bad guys with appropriate magic items. baddies though. So make sure you buff up your bad guys with appropriate magic items. If powerful magic is common, then you may run into scenarios where death is a mild inconvenience because you can just go get resurrected in the next small town. Traditional transportation methods are only used when magical means cut too deeply into profit margins.

Let's do a thought experiment. Suppose a continent has nine major cities, all connected via magic teleportation hubs. They transport entire wagons at a time with no air. Each city maintains a fleet of airships to get resources to nearby towns who don't have these hubs. Operation of these hubs is cost-effective, so no one travels over land anymore. If that's true, then what happens to the roads that aren't being used? Is the kingdom going to pay for roads that nobody wants to use anymore? Why would they? What about the inns and taverns and small stopover towns along the way? They're going to close and shrink because no one uses them anymore. Areas outside

the city may become more wild since there aren't people traveling along the roads. And since areas outside the city are dangerous, more people use the teleportation devices and it becomes this self-sustaining system. Cities build large walls to keep out the ever more numerous threats from the wild, and ancestries that aren't part of a quote-unquote civilized society may try more and more desperate methods to gain access to some of this technology they've been cut off from. There may be bigger and stronger monsters that evolve out in these wilds to hunt ever bigger prey. The teleportation devices could be run by the state or they could be privately owned.

Supply and demand maybe drives the cost up and down as market dictates, or maybe it's a fixed price set by the state. Same thing could be true for the airships to take resources out to these smaller towns. At any rate, just something to think about if you're in a high magic world and magic is common and almost boring and rote, start thinking about how that magic would be applied to affect everybody's day-to-day lives. Regardless of whether you want to set your campaign in a high magic fantasy world or a low magic grim and gritty one, set your player expectations early. In session zero,

make sure you let them know how rare or common magic is. Ladies and gentlemen, magic is rare in this area of the world, so magic items aren't easy to come by. That way they won't just discard a plus one sword because, oh, it's just a plus one sword. I'll get another one down the road, I'm sure. It's a rare and powerful item in this world that may even merit changing your character's build to take advantage of this powerful gift. Thank you so much for listening to episode 63

all about high magic and low magic adventures. I once again want to thank our sponsor, the Martian Environmental Protection Agency. Hey Earth, stop dumping your fucking robots on our planet. We just buried the last one. My name is Jeremy Shelley, and I hope that your next game is your best game.