Monsters in a Low Fantasy Setting

 It seems every other fantasy world that was published after J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings has a variation on his orcs as armies of marauding monsters. And while Tolkien did not invent the "orc" per-se, his use of it a a horde monster was fairly novel. Whether they are called Trollocs, Gargoyles, Draconians, etc... fantasy worlds tend to feature swarms of monsters that raze villages and lay siege to castles.

Lord Dunsany does some interesting things with his Gibbelins and Gnoles, but rather than send raiding parties out into The Fields We Know, they lie in wait in their own remote lairs for the foolish and greedy to seek out their treasures.

Yet our world is filled with stories about creatures beyond those categorized by naturalists that dwell in our forests, mountains, swamps, tombs, and other places off the beaten path. Giants and Dragons, Trolls and Hags, Goblins and Ghouls, and Vampires and Werewolves are just some of the threats that can populate a low fantasy setting while still preserving the feeling that locked doors, lit hearths, and warm beds remain places of comfort and safety.

Heraldic devices of Wyverns, Griffons, and Unicorns suggest that these creatures also, rare though they may be, also reside in The Fields We Know. Localized "cryptids" like The Jersey Devil, The Goatman, Mothman, Bigfoot, and Nessie are known in nearly every region on earth and are also ripe for inspiration for low fantasy settings.

Even the Devil himself can make an appearance. Whether he makes a dramatic Faustian entry, gets outsmarted by a blacksmith, meets you at the crossroads, or walks with you down a lane at night, Old Nick is a reliable standby for mingling with mortals in The Fields We Know. Even stranger things might be summoned into the world by those mad enough to perform such rituals.

There is ample room to populate your world with monstrous things, yet keep them at arms length from a quiet village on a sunny spring day where the birds are chirping, children are playing, and brewers and bakers go about their business with a whistle on their lips. 

Arthur Rackham

"The Church" and Low Fantasy Settings

Fantasy is rooted in archetype. And there is arguably no greater historical archetype than The Church. Priests, monks, and friars fill the pages of folktales and fairytales. They are heroes, villains, and comic foils. They embody the Seven Virtues and the Seven Sins. And in any milieu vaguely approaching a medieval setting, The Church as a political entity can hardly be ignored without sensing the vacuum of its absence.

The Cleric class of D&D has never been one that felt to me like it fit within this archetypal structure. The D&D Cleric is more like an Old Testament character than a medieval one, with the ability to part water, turn sticks to snakes, and summon plagues of locusts. Supernatural abilities within The Church archetype are more appropriately assigned to "Saints", who's rare works are seen as miracles.

Artifacts of The Church, such as holy water, holy symbols, incense, and church bells are in themselves imbued with power outside the scope of "magic". With apologies to Gandalf, the priest is no mere conjurer but someone who participates in the transformation of the mundane into the holy through direct intervention of the gods. The priest is both somethings less yet something more than a "magic user".

The hallmarks of The Church as a political entity are power and orthodoxy. Bishops can rival kings, and internal conflict and corruption can make for meaty material for for a campaign background. The Church can have its own formalized rituals on the "proper" way to honor the gods, treating an entire pantheon with a single theological approach.

From a fairytale perspective, The Church as an instigator of war (against individuals or groups) is seldom seen. Neither crusades nor witch hunts figure significantly in such tales. In fact, if judgement is cast in these tales it is most likely to be on a clergyman:

"They have whetted their teeth against the stones,

And now they pick the bishop's bones;

They gnawed the flesh from every limb,

For they were sent to do judgment on him!"

-Robert Southey

Using creative adaptations of the archetype of The Church in your TTRPG can allow you to expand your use of classic folktale motifs, bringing a sense of groundedness to your world and make it feel a bit closer to The Fields We Know.

Friar detail from The Cantebury Tales

 

Heroism in Your Low Fantasy Setting

 Some may argue that Low Fantasy settings are not defined by heroism, but by gritty realism. And while this can certainly be the case, it leaves little room between self-serving mercenaries and epic heroes of saga. In his Quick Primer for Old School Gaming, Matthew Finch (co-creator of OSRIC) writes "Old school gaming is about the triumph of the little guy into an epic hero". And again, while this can be true, Old School gaming is more accurately about the evolution of the little guy into a powerful guy.

Heroism is not a function of power, but rather a function of action. Even the little guy can be a hero, as evidenced in the tale The Brave Little Tailor. The question at hand is how do you communicate to your players that you are running a heroic campaign, rather than a merely gritty one. Moreover, how do you incentivize heroic play style?

Incentives can be incorporated into the meta-game aspect of the system. Experience points, leveling, scaling up in power. But I find it much easier to deal with incentives within the framework of the campaign world itself. If your world treats your players as heroes, they will tend to act as heroes.

To create this framework, I make the NPCs of my world generally kind-hearted, appreciative, but not in the least brave. They are always looking for someone else to solve their problems. They are a superstitious lot, more-or-less afraid of their own shadows, to say nothing of things that go bump-in-the-night.

From their very first adventure - the very first problem your party solves - the world should respond accordingly. Rather than (or in addition to) rewards for heroism being experience points or other game mechanic oriented incentives, have the characters of your world appreciate the help the party has provided. Have them respond with hospitality, friendship, and gratitude.

By allowing your players to build trusted alliances as they adventure and gain in levels, they will reap benefits of safe harbor, reliable informants, gifts, and more. In the meantime, it gives you the DM a host of friendly recurring NPCs that can be used to leverage storylines that the players care about.

Heroism is not antithetical to an Old School style of gaming. But it is a play style that needs to be communicated and cultivated.

N.C. Wyteth

Healing and Death in your Low Fantasy Setting

 In Old School TTRPGs, natural healing can be excruciatingly slow. Death lurks close by, especially at low levels where the single swing of a sword can reduce a character to zero hit points or less. In order to get your character back in the saddle (or dungeon), reliance on magical healing is almost guaranteed. Raising the dead is an ability assumed to be available (if expensive) at your local church.

Yet in a low fantasy setting, one might want to reserve magical healing for rare occasions, and the use of such magic might seem like nothing less than a miracle. Rather than making it a simple commodity, it can be reserved for the stuff of legend.

I've chosen to work around this by thinking about hit points in a different way. From the beginning, hit points were intended to be an abstraction of fatigue, luck, and physical wounds. I've chosen to put my emphasis on the first two, and limit physical wounds to the last remaining hit points a character has. In this way, regaining hit points is more a matter of recovering than healing. Lets begin with thinking about how many hit points a character might have.

In most TTRPG systems, Player Characters begin at 1st level. These characters typically get a range of 1d4 to 1d10 worth of hit points per level. An average character might have 4 or 5 hit points at 1st level. An average sword swing happens to do about the same amount of damage. This means the average character will be reduced to zero hit points from one successful attack at 1st level. In some systems, death occurs at zero hit points. This does not bode well for groups that like to have story development in their campaigns unless healing magic is easily accessible. Most of the inhabitants of the world in these systems are "zero level". They tend to have 1d4 hit points for an average of 2 or 3. They are likely to lose all their hit points in any successful attack upon them.

I decided I wanted to give the people of my world more hit points, without radically changing the mechanical structure of the system I was using. (The system I have created, The Shewstone Saga, is playable with most OSR Player Characters, and I freely use AD&D, OSRIC, Labyrinth Lord, and Basic Fantasy Roleplaying Game as references at my table).

I began with the "Zero Level" NPCs in my world. First, I thought doubling their hit points felt right. It occurred to me that if their average ability score was 10.5 (on a random spread of 3 to 18), that halving their constitution would give me the number I was looking for. This would allow for residents of a typical village to have hit points ranging from 1 to 9, with the outliers being rare. Only about 1 in 200 residents would have a Con of 18. So your average village might have one or two farm boys that could hold their own with a 1st level character.

Next I wondered why 1st level characters could likely have fewer hit points than zero level characters. That is, 1st level magic-users fared no better at hit points than zero level commoners, and thieves only had a 1 point average advantage with their 1d6 hit die. So I decided that "zero level" was in itself a level, and now give all my PCs hit points at zero level equal to half their Constitution (rounded down). I have a liberal method of rolling PC stats, with an average score of 13 on the 3-18 spread, so the average PC would have 6 hit points at zero level. In addition, I give them max on their 1st level hit die, so a 1st level fighter with a 16 Con would get 8 points at zero level, plus 10 +Con modifier at 1st level for a total of 20 HP starting out. The rest of their levels proceed as normal.

Next, I decided that most hit points lost represent luck and fatigue, and that one day's rest should restore all lost hit points, barring serious wounds. I wanted this restoration to be easy not only to thematically minimize reliance on magical healing, but to allow spellcasters more freedom in using their spells creatively without the party depending on their healing spells. So for each hour of true rest, PCs recover one half their missing hit points. That first level fighter with 20 HP, if reduced to 2 HP, would be missing 18 HP. In his first hour of rest, he would recover 9 HP. The next hour 4, then 2, then 2, then 1.

Next comes the question of when serious wounds happen. I consider everything above Zero Level to be luck and fatigue. Yet even at Zero Level, commoners might have a few points of luck and fatigue. I've decided such wounds don't occur until the character reaches 0 HP. Death occurs at negative constitution. So characters are incapacitated at 0 to -Con. They are not bleeding (losing hit points), and they are assumed to be unconscious.

While death occurs at -Con, it need not be an instantaneous death. Game Masters may choose to use a "mortal wounds" ruling in which the character will die in a pre-determined amount of time (from minutes to days) barring magical healing, allowing for one last epic action or a dramatic journey to try to save the character.

Ultimately, if you want to make magical healing uncommon in your TTRPG as well as add drama, you can make natural healing easier and faster, and death much more rare. It is just a matter of shifting perspective.

James Archer

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