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Making Magic Magical — 1 Comment

  1. Hi, I really enjoyed reading your post. I don’t agree with you completely, but I do agree with a lot that you say. The parts I agree with utterly have to do with using narrative descriptions to fill in the visualization of magic (and everything else, actually) in your world. Great GMs are like authors who can take a mundane scene, yet through their narrative ability make them fascinating to the players. Instead of just “you get to the bridge”, it becomes “after a long hard run down the cobblestones you turn the corner. Ahead of you looming in the fog you can see the dark sillouette of the old stone bridge that spans a wide river of swirling black waters. The smell of brine fills the air.” etc.

    The part I don’t agree with is that you are forced as DM to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous game inflation just because that’s what your players want. Nope. Not so. Not in my opinion anyway. I play a low level, low magic campaign. In the last adventure my players tried to sneak into a tower, but due to their low level one of them fell into the dark swirling waters below. He was attacked by strange ghostly fish, and they used slings from the shore to fend them off, and a rope attached to a crowbar to fish him out. It was an embarassing failure so far as getting into the tower was concerned. But everyone was enormously amused, and enjoyed the game tremendously. No magic. In fact, none of the players have a magic item at all. I don’t expect them to for some time as magic in my world actually *is* rare. When they do manage to get a +1 anything, I’m pretty sure they will consider that a “Big Deal” and be overjoyed. At this point if they manage to get 50 Iron pieces they’re cheering. So, I just wanted to mention that low-level, low-magic campaigns can still be a lot of fun.

    Anyway, thanks a lot for the post! I will cross post this to my friends.

    🙂

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