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