How to Create a Low Magic, Gritty Campaign in D&D 5e

While the high fantasy found in D&D can certainly take you on some wild adventures, the abundance of magic can remove some of the realism. Today, with the help of a D&D Beyond article on the subject, Sage provides resources, ideas, and steps to creating a low fantasy, gritty, Dungeons & Dragons game. Let's get into it!

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📜CHAPTERS📜
0:00 Low Fantasy Campaign
2:30 Picking a Setting
4:06 1) Gritty Realism
4:57 2) Travel and Exploration
5:21 3) Encumbrance and Inventory
6:19 4) Class Limits
7:57 Will You Try It?

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Artist: Quincas Moreira
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#dnd #dungeonsanddragons #5e #dms #dungeonmaster #worldbuilding #dndbeyond #lowmagic #lowfanta

[liamcage]

All I run are Low Magic, Grim / Dark, campaigns. In my sessions it is more of a world setting than hard restrictions on the players. Inspired partly on the Witcher 3 video game, magic is banned by the church and wizards, sorcerers, etc. are hunted and burnt at the stake and those who aid them are hung. So magic users exist underground in secret guilds. Wizards are few and far between, generally hidden (posing as academics or antique merchants, etc.), and more often than not they are the bad guys. PC's can still play the standard player classes but all Arcane spells must be found like treasure before a spell can be learned. That way any spell that will mess with the game world is withheld.
No raise dead spells, death is permeant. Resources like food, water, fire wood, where to rest are all things that have to be managed.
Game worlds where even the beggars perform "magic" for spare change are boring settings.

[EchteSauerkartoffel]

I think A Song Of Ice And Fire is a good example. There isnt always a wizard sitting next to you in a tavern but if you see magic you go wtf

[brau]

I love this. I would try and make combat more visceral. A lot of brutal descriptions. Grappling with enemies and crashing around. I would probably look at adding persistent injuries but i would make healing kits and bandages a thing.

[foxross]

I am already running a low magic game with a monk, paladin and a rogue who might end up multiclassing into wizard. I have introduced my own setup for ritual casting inspired by the instructions in Jonathan Strange and Mister Norrel and ask the player to describe the actions that they take as part of the spell. In order to cast a spell the character and player both need to be able to follow what is going on in the instructions. For example: the spell to know what mine enemy is doing presently requires a bundle of flowers (I added that they ought to have been picked during a time of strife) to be arranged around a mirror and for a symbol to be drawn on the mirror. Each aspect of the spell grounds the magic in the setting and emphasises the fact that it is alien. The spell requires time, understanding and ingredients which together mean that it isn’t practical to be casting spells all the time. It might be possible to stand behind a unit of soldiers with some travel worn implements to cast spells with but in the thick of battle you can’t have your instructions and equipment laid out in front of you.
It does mean that I need to write flavourful instructions for any spells that the party might come across.

[alanschaub]

I love this type of setting! It reminds me of Dark Sun, or Conan the Barbarian.

I have been wanting to run a low magic campaign with all variant humans that start at level 0 with 1d4 hit points. Only subclasses without spellcasting are allowed and feats are the only source of magic.

[MemphiStig]

You can *absolutely* do high-heroic world-ending low-magic campaigns. Example, LORD OF THE RINGS! There are 3 wizards in the whole series, tho only 2 really matter, and they're all NPCs. There are only a small handful of magic items, one of them broken for much of the story, and one of them cursed. And there's basically no healing available for 99% of the time. But STILL it doesn' t get more epic than LOTR! Can you do that in D&D? Good luck.

[VMSelvaggio]

I also think Low Magic settings become infinitely more difficult when your setting is Undead focused.

[markashford]

Just started my low magic sword and sorcery campaign. I’ve ripped apart the 5e rules to make it work and used a lot of the optional rules like gritty tests, sanity, lingering injuries…Most of my players have started as kids at level 0 and only one players rolled high enough to choose a non martial class. He chose to start as a cleric. One session in and I’m enjoying running this more than any 5e campaign I’ve run before.

[alarin]

Best system I've seen for running "low magic" that approximate DnD rules is d20 modern. Despite the name it can pretty easily recreate any time period. And, no one can get magic until at least level 4.

[YamadaJisho]

I run a lower magic (not low magic the way you described it) game using the gritty realism rest variant (DMG pg 267 for anyone who wants to look it up). I haven't banned any official spells or classes (except artificer and stuff from later books like Strixhaven), but I HAVE made a lot of the spell components much harder to find, especially gems, as it's also a low gold setting. The setting also doesn't allow for magic item creation (hence no artificer) as the secrets of magic item creation have been lost to time. I've found that even the wizard is WAY less willing to just sling spells when it's very difficult for him to get those spell slots back, and often the cleric doesn't have the gems needed for those raise dead spells. When my party gets those gems they treasure them. When their gem bag was stolen by a thief in a city, they went on a mad dash to infiltrate the guild to get it back.

[jonmacbuff]

I love these types of settings because it makes acts of heroism feel more heroic! My DM slashed up the spell lists available to classes, re-flavored them to be less “magical” and placed a limit so that everyone had to be a half-caster or less in terms of spell slots (even via multiclassing).

[larsespeland]

HAZAA!! I'm currently running a coal punk gritty horror dnd game which uses all of the things you just described and it's working wonderfully with only very few issues. I love it however and so do several of the players. The gritty nature of knowing you aren't getting healed has changed the way they deal with every encounter. They almost always fight from range, with cover, they avoid fights in populated areas. They actually think and role play the entire time. I'm thrilled with them. There is mostly suspense, world building, mystery, Lots of horror. It's not your standard dnd I'll tell you that much.

Only issue I have is, when running it, I tend to take story rather seriously, so I'd rather have other serious players. I'm looking for 1 or 2 more on roll20 with a game called deep ventor if you specifically, or anyone who read this far (good job) I have also found getting 5 adults to all put aside 3-6 hours of their nights on any day is quite a bit much. The same day is near impossible, hence the looking for more people. Anyway, no experience needed. Just the want to be scared, cause I have gotten a player to hold their breath for over a minute without realizing they were. It can be intense. Oh and players will die.

[VMSelvaggio]

Regarding level limits, rather than hard-banning certain full-casting classes, limit the sub-class choices carefully, and hard cap the Level Maximum (for everyone) at 10. I've only played in 2 campaigns in nearly 30 years that had characters that reached above 13th level. Most of the games I've been a player in seems to end the campaign around 6th level. (Starting at 1st Level)

[foxross]

I use the gritty realism resting times even for high magic settings and it really helps there as well.

[Grymreefer]

you could use only cantrips for magic spell slots, they're not powerful but do help . or components with a gp value have to be quested for limiting the use of spells drastically . or make it post-apocalyptic, where there was a high magic world and you have to find the magic to put the world back together over several campaigns

[VMSelvaggio]

Hello!

Good advice here, and excellent suggestions about the "Frequency" of Magic and availability. Personally, as a DM, I went back to playing either OSRIC or a mixture of 1st Edition/2nd Edition AD&D to get the atmosphere I was looking for. -- This wasn't to remove the magic that was already there, but to better implement things that I enjoyed from older editions of Dungeons & Dragons, such as the construction of Keeps or Monasteries, the downtime training and scroll research, and allowing the players to craft their own magical items and scribe their own scrolls during off-time.

[D-ne]

I must point out that they had seen beavers. They just killed pretty much all of them in Europe and were bewildered by their abundance in North America.

[peterreuben]

There are a couple of ways to do this without restricting any classes. You can use the old rules where if there are no followers of a god then they cannot grant spells in those areas which would mean that clerics would have to build temples and shrines and work at attracting followers or just end up with very limited spells There would be no schools for wizards to run two to buy spells so they would have to research and develo. Druids would find there's a different nature Deity representing those lands and so they would not have the same spell access and similar problems to the cleric. Sorcerers might need to be under a great deal of pressure or require a great time of meditation to bring forth a new spell, Or combination of both. All these things would add to the difficulty and the role playing.

[laszlosimo]

Cool. And I add for this a six level cap.

[ericg]

One of the players at my table just stated that he was going to leave the group, and 5e completely, because it seemed too easy. I took the time to write up a document to address his concerns just yesterday. While I didn't put on there that I would ban certain classes, it was definitely in the forefront of my thoughts. I told him that nothing could be interjected into the current campaign, but he has seemed to rethink his position some. I was thinking of making the next campaign more gritty and difficult anyways. This is my first foray into 5e at all, and first time playing and being a DM in close to 20 years. I wanted to get the hang of things before jumping into the deep end.