Its a Small World: Travel in your Low Fantasy Setting

Low fantasy TTRPG settings have their own considerations when it comes to players frequently joining and leaving your game. As their Player Characters enter and leave the story, the question of travel arises, and how long it takes to get from some safe starting base to where the party is. The larger the world, the longer this will take without adding in some means of fantastic travel such as teleportation or flying.

If the party is traveling through endless tracks of dead marshes 1000 miles from their home, introducing the PC of a player who has just heard about your game can be jarring without ret-conning the idea that their character had been there all along or justifying why they would have access to a powerful mode of near instantaneous transportation.

By keeping your world not only relatively small but fairly densely developed, you can have safe harbors spread throughout the world, with the party never more than a few day's travel by foot or horseback from a logical launching point for new PCs.

In my own setting, the central region of Calumbria is only around 300 miles across. This is about the size of Germany. It takes about two weeks to travel from one end to the other traveling by road and avoiding rugged terrain. Villages are only a few miles from cities, and farms and homesteads are spread across the fertile land. Castles - both ruins and occupied strongholds - dot the landscape and are seldom more than a day's distant from one another.

It is what I call a Points of Darkness setting, where the world is generally safe and life peaceful on a day to day basis, but dark and dangerous things dwell in the remote wilds of the deep forests and mountain heights. Even a dark house on a lonely lane might prove to be a place where evil lurks in the shadows.

Your fantasy world need not sprawl for thousands or tens of thousands of miles in order to have enough interesting places to explore. You don't have to mimic impressive published fantasy worlds, and certainly don't have to use real geography as your model. You just have to set your stage, frame your shot, and concentrate on revealing to your players a world that feels complete enough that they can enjoy engaging in the adventure at hand.

The Land of Calumbria

 

Light and the Low Fantasy Setting

 There seem to be two extremes in the TTRPG world on how to handle the need for Player Characters to be able to see in the dark. The first is for nearly every character and monster in the world to be able to preternaturally see in the dark via some type of special vision. The other is to count down game minutes as the party's precious few torches burn out one by one. A third approach that I use is to eliminate by default the ability to see in the dark from every living creature. Treat dark vision as a supernatural ability that only the undead and very special creatures have.

Approaching light this way creates an interesting dynamic. It means that most things that live underground need light. As such, it creates the default assumption that light sources will be almost everywhere. Sconces for holding torches will line most walls of inhabited areas of dungeons, giving players a clue as to how long it has been since an area was last occupied. Whether the torches are still burning, partially used, or the sconces sit empty can all suggest different scenarios. And by scattering partially used torches throughout a dungeon, you can eliminate the need for resource tracking by assuming there is always a torch to be grabbed nearby.

Braziers are another common device used in film and fantasy art. Typically crafted from bronze or brass, these flat bowls can hold flaming fuel such as wood, coal, or something more exotic. They can hang from chains, sit on pedestals, or like the famous cover of the player's handbook, be held by a giant statue of a demon. Like torches, your braziers can be burning when first encountered, be fueled but unlit, or the fuel can have been long consumed. When describing a storage area of barrels and crates, you can include fuel for the braziers in this area.

Other forms of illumination can include molten lava, bio-luminescence of fungi, shafts of light from above, as well as elaborate arrangements of mirrors to direct light from above. Whatever your light source, if you think cinematically, you can envision anything from claustrophobic corridors to expansive chambers lit with dramatic light to help you create the evocative mood you are trying to convey to your players and to communicate important information about the dungeon.

By making almost all creatures need light, you can actually create advantage for your PCs. Rather than they being the ones that are always spotted because they are the only ones that are carrying a light source, they might be able to see illuminated areas ahead, letting them know they are approaching an area that is occupied. This can give your players agency in strategizing how to approach the area, and create some tension in advance of an encounter.

Of course, there will be creatures that do not need light. But this does not mean they can necessarily see in the dark. They may use echo-location (such as the amazing monsters in the movie The Descent), detect by smell, or use vibrations. A spider could weave webs throughout an area - not enough to hinder a party but enough to detect their presence and location.

True ability to see in dark can be reserved for the undead and supernatural beings. Making lit areas a default assumption in your dungeon can help you create a sense of dread and unease in your players for special encounters.

Sidney Sime

Capturing the Vibe of Fairy-tales in your TTRPG

"Once upon a time." This well known opening phrase does something instantly. It casually establishes that the story you are about to hear really happened. Within a single breath, it implies that the wonderful and strange things that are about to unfold were once not entirely unusual. This "historical" aspect of fairy-tales is emphasized with the German ending "and if they haven't died, they're still alive today". 

It is a simplified version of our world. One with simple motives. Simple people. Simple politics. And while it can be exceedingly and graphically violent, it is a strangely moral version of our world where kindness and wisdom tend to ultimately prevail. It is this simplicity that draws me to this genre of fantasy. The idea of an unhurried world where the air is clean, travel is slow, the land is fertile, and unexpected adventure awaits for those brave enough to seize opportunity. Tolkien masterfully captured this feeling in his description of The Shire, even establishing that Hobbits themselves once walked among us.

Magical creatures are course an essential component of these stories. But these creatures tend to be unique and appear rarely unless they are encountered in a realm separated from ours by some strange border. Magic itself is understood to be real. Folk magic such as fortune telling, charms, and protections is ubiquitous, while rare magic can be overwhelmingly powerful. Curses can transform people, animals, and entire castles, and these curses can be broken by equally powerful but unique magic.

The magic systems of tabletop role playing games tend to fall between these two extremes, making it challenging for a Game Master to capture the fairy-tale feeling. Spectral hands, levitation, teleportation, and elemental spells all exceed the simple folk magic dynamic, making even some first level spells violate the general aesthetic. These challenges can be overcome by eliminating some of these spells entirely, while re-imagining the mechanics of how others work. A spell with the same range, area of effect, and damage does not have to be a projectile that flies from the magic user's hands to the target. Rather, it could be an energy that manifests inside the target, causing pain and damage but being externally invisible. Perhaps short range teleportation as such doesn't work while the magic user is being observed, making their disappearance feel more like a stage illusion, and being more of a mystery than a miracle (and thus justifying the need for the puff of smoke!)

Healing of hit points need not be the miraculous closing of wounds. Rather, hit points can be interpreted to be more of an abstraction of fatigue and luck, with only the last remaining (or even negative) hit points resulting in actual visible wounds. In this case, even safely resting can perform the same mechanical function of a Cure Light Wounds. Rather than magic potions, holy wells or rivers can be common and perform a similar function.

The need for magical travel can be reduced by keeping the world (or at least the campaign portion of it) small. In a country that is hundreds rather than thousands of miles across, Player Characters can drop in and out of the story as needed without the use of a Deus ex Machina method of flying or teleportation.

Creating a campaign world and adapting your TTRPG system to feel like a fairy-tale setting can be challenging. It can be particularly difficult communicating the aesthetic to your players if they are not versed in the source material. It is on the whole a world without Witch Hunts, Crusaders, or many of our worst cultural atrocities, yet full of individual extremes of both horror and love. A world that we can imagine had existed Once Upon a Time.

Gustave Doré

What are The Fields We Know?

The phrase "The Fields We Know" comes from Lord Dunsany's The King of Elfland's Daughter. He uses it over and over to describe a world much like our own - yet one where "Elfland" exists just beyond the Twilight Border. A world that might be visited occasionally by Elf Princes, Trolls, or other denizens from the place that some call "Faery", and Tolkien called "The Perilous Realm."

While much of contemporary fantasy takes place within the lands beyond The Fields We Know - chock full of dragons and dwarves, giants and goblins -  the focus of this blog will be on a more grounded "human-centric" low fantasy setting. Here you'll find no magic shops brimming with enchanted swords and wizard wands. No marauding hordes of humanoids. No hives of scum and villainy filled with every non-human race imaginable.

Rather, you'll find a relatively quiet world of millers and merchants, brewers and bakers. Yet a world where the occasional giant or dragon might appear, and ghosts and ghouls might haunt the night. A world of perfectly ordinary people who on occasion, call out for Adventurers to save the day!

Eduard von Grutzner