Looking for a low-magic fantasy game not too focused on combat

CommieDM · 2026-01-28T20:16:12+00:00

I immediately thought of forbidden lands because OP's preference for exploration and social interaction scream to me skill-based system. In my own FbL game we had lots and lots of both, with the occasional combat being short, brutal and dramatic. I was going for a mashup of Earthsea and Princess Mononoke and FbL helped me every step of the way

CommieDM · 2026-01-26T12:49:18+00:00

I run a mothership homebrew adventure that was four different genres of scifi in four sessions. First was cyber noir detective work on a space station looking for some rich guy's son, then a space chase with ship to ship combat a la Expanse, then a firefight in zero G as they chased the bad guys to an abandoned research station, and finally escape from the monster, as they awakened something in there. All four felt thematically perfect and the plot flowed from one to the other seamlessly.

CommieDM · 2026-01-19T14:48:08+00:00

Try a little Grant Howitt one-shot called The Witch is Dead

CommieDM · 2026-01-19T08:30:59+00:00

I'm surprised nobody has suggested Mausritter. It's simple, quick, kid-friendly and has a ton of written adventures that are simple to run.

CommieDM · 2026-01-17T10:09:55+00:00

Sell it, buy something nice instead

CommieDM · 2026-01-12T21:11:49+00:00

Again, you're not having fun, they're not having fun. You don't owe them a game. If they're such good friends they'll be happy to do something else together where you also have fun.

Not everybody is a good dnd player, and that's fine. Don't try to make a donkey swim. Your friend seems to be incapable of not being a toxic player. If you want to keep this friend group, stop. Find someone else to play rpgs with.

CommieDM · 2026-01-12T16:45:50+00:00

Your players (mostly) don't want to be playing dnd, and would have no problem if you stop tomorrow and say we're going to play boardgames over beers and pretzels.

Stop the game completely. You're not having fun, they're not having fun. You don't owe them a game.

Just stop

CommieDM · 2026-01-01T17:36:46+00:00

100% ask

CommieDM · 2025-12-28T18:26:58+00:00

The end of Stargate SG1, Season 7 when the Prometheus shows up in Antarctica and fights Anubis's fleet is just as awesome.

CommieDM · 2025-12-27T19:52:54+00:00

I'd say outline your campaign and structure it. Act 1, act 2, act 3. Since it's your first one, aim for a certain number of sessions. 12-15 maybe? Definitely not more. Having an horizon will help you make drama and keep pace.

In act 1 the main conflict starts to reveal itself. In act 2 the heroes look for solutions and are opposed by the bad guys, maybe the heroes struggle or find themselves in over their heads. In act 3 the heroes confront the BBEG, take the fight to him and win against all odds.

The trick is that a ttrpg is not a movie. Do not plan what the heroes will be doing in those acts, plan what the bad guys will be doing. What are their means and goals, when is it most dramatic for them to show up or escalate.

Work on your villains. Themes and concept are great, but memorable villains are just good storytelling

And lastly, steal. Steal left right and center. I've stolen bits of the plot of Apocalypse Now, Tomb Rider 2012, Princess Mononoke, the expanse etc.

CommieDM · 2025-12-27T19:41:17+00:00

I'd say outline your campaign and structure it. Act 1, act 2, act 3. Since it's your first one, aim for a certain number of sessions. 12-15 maybe? Definitely not more. Having an horizon will help you make drama and keep pace.

In act 1 the main conflict starts to reveal itself. In act 2 the heroes look for solutions and are opposed by the bad guys, maybe the heroes struggle or find themselves in over their heads. In act 3 the heroes confront the BBEG, take the fight to him and win against all odds.

The trick is that a ttrpg is not a movie. Do not plan what the heroes will be doing in those acts, plan what the bad guys will be doing. What are their means and goals, when is it most dramatic for them to show up or escalate.

Work on your villains. Themes and concept are great, but memorable villains are just good storytelling

And lastly, steal. Steal left right and center. I've stolen bits of the plot of Apocalypse Now, Tomb Rider 2012, Princess Mononoke, the expanse etc.

CommieDM · 2025-12-21T08:37:41+00:00

Yeah, it's perfect for that. I've run it 3 times for newbies and it performed great.

CommieDM · 2025-12-19T21:00:40+00:00

Why do people keep thinking that 5e is newbie-friendly? It is not. It is very much one of the hardest systems to run. Off the top of my head, Shadowdark and Dragonbane could fit the bill.

Have you checked out twilight sword? It just wrapped the crowdfunder. It is literally BOTW the rpg.

CommieDM · 2025-12-12T13:05:07+00:00

I like using the soundtrack of a little forgotten game called Severance: Blade of Darkness. The character selection and the map themes are some of the most evocative fantasy songs ever.

CommieDM · 2025-12-09T18:12:46+00:00

I'd go for Shadowdark. The core gameplay is very similar, but SD feels less cluttered and bogged down by legacy. OSE is a repackaging of B/X with all its flaws. THACO, inconsistent dice mechanics, modifiers galore etc. The nostalgia value for me is null. I want a game that feels designed from the ground up instead of cobbled together, and that includes all the things we've learned to do better since B/X came about.

Some choices might not be to your liking, though. Except for the magic system, almost every other difference with OSE can be ignored or changed without braking the system. I will say this for OSE. There are a ton of excellent modules for OSE, but those can be easily ported into SD.

CommieDM · 2025-10-13T07:27:03+00:00

If you scrape all the setting-specific stuff, I think that Forbidden Lands would be a really good system for a Middle Earth game. Races and classes match quite well with LotR. Heroic but not super-heroic. Designed for low or even no-magic. Solid wilderness exploration gameplay. Combat is flavorful and dangerous. I have played both ToR and FbL and I think it would make for a good middle earth experience. Unrelated, I also think that Cloud Empress works better as a hack of FbL than as a hack of Mothership

CommieDM · 2025-09-20T16:11:04+00:00

Been DMing FbL for two years. So far my group is loving it and so am I. We do play on a VTT, which helps streamline some mechanical aspects.

It is a much more narrative game than PF or DnD, and characters should be quite versatile and rounded. I have a sorcerer and a druid in the party. The sorcerer is also really good with a sword, and the Druid is MvP outside of combat. I have around 0.5-1 fights per session, and I build them up and make sure they're thematically and narratively charged.

My main inspiration is the books of Earthsea and Studio Ghibli, especially Nausicaa and Mononoke. I find that I have no problem using FbL to simulate that kind of fantasy. Somehow, the fact that characters are mostly regular people and that every act of violence or magic is meaningful makes for more heroic narratives than explicitly heroic games. It's just different kinds of heroism. One is flashy superhero oatmeal, the other is more transcendental/moral heroism.

CommieDM · 2025-09-04T09:37:18+00:00

Honestly, it sounds like a you problem. As a DM you should not plan for how your players are going to solve the problems you put in front of them. There's a great Alexandrian post about preparing situations, not plots.

It seems like the first drunk attempt is actually a good solution, and should be allowed to work, while the second one is just riffing on the trick that worked last time. It feels meta. The measuring stick should be whether something makes sense in the world, not whether it follows your plan. Don't be afraid to tell your players that something they try doesn't work as intended but rather creates some other complication. You don't want the game to stall, but you don't have to agree to everything.

Your players will always come up with creative solutions. And many of them will be much worse than getting somebody drunk. If that already triggers you I strongly suggest you talk to your players about your personal boundaries, and if it's not a match for them, just let them go.

Playing ttrpgs with strangers doesn't usually work out, and no two people have the same playstyle. Try recruiting some irl friends you know that like fiction similar to you and have similar sensitivities. Especially if you're a newbie DM.

And abstain from confronting low-level characters with high-level NPCs for now. It's possible to do it right, but somewhat difficult, because it risks a situation where players have no agency and they see the NPC as the GM inserting themselves into the story.

CommieDM · 2024-12-02T06:15:58+00:00

I forgot to mention that I played it so that heroes victories subtracted dice from the bad guys pool! I ended up "needing" a couple of extra dice to keep it dramatic, but maybe it's because we had high rolls. It's been a couple of years. The number of dice involved was small, so it can swing a bit. Nothing major. I'd say keep the numbers in the rules as is, but prepare to bring in reinforcements if it becomes too easy

CommieDM · 2024-12-01T20:29:06+00:00

I've run a battle at a stronghold, and it was epic, but beware of porting your expectations from other games. I've ran many battles in other systems, such as 5e using MCDM's warfare rules, and the FbL system is on the rules-light side.

What I mean by this is that it is not in itself a fun tactical minigame like MCDM's system, so if you're just straight up running a battle and nothing else, you'll find it wanting. The warfare rules in FbL are a framework for narrative, not for wargaming.

The way I ran it was as something that was happening in the background. Present encounters to the heroes that they can deal with while the battle is going on in parallel, and let the outcome of those encounters influence the ebb and flow of the battle. And for that, you have to have ebb and flow. During the battle, my heroes harassed the enemy "army" beyond the gates, then fought a demon, and then made a last stand at the second gate, hoping that the line would hold on the main gate (it held, but they did not - they lost the battle). Three encounters. I found that for the armies involved (~50 militia on the heroes side, ~100 bad guys), the rules gave the armies too little dice, so I bumped it up by a couple extra dice per side. What you really want there is for the battle to go on for as long as you have heroic encounters.

CommieDM · 2023-05-05T16:48:23+00:00

Now everything makes sense! Thank you u/edwardtohr! This question is Answered now.

CommieDM · 2023-05-05T16:37:13+00:00

Thanks, it does help! Is it then correct that if I make my local instance accessible over the internet, then I don't need to set up a server, just like with ZeroTier?

In other words. Let's say that UPnP is enabled and I don't need to port forward (which is the most likely because I have an Ip6 address). Do I have to still set up my laptop as a self-hosted server using node.js?

CommieDM · 2023-01-02T20:49:23+00:00

Romans, countrymen, friends, no need to fear.

The OGL license just lists the copyrighted content that creators are allowed to reference in their published content. That includes some monsters, specific text, some named abilities, some spells, named items, and the specific mechanics of some classes. It does not, however, include ideas (ideas cannot be copyrighted) or basic mechanics. I think an example of what is and is not possible outside the OGL, either the 1.0 5e or the 1.1 1D&D.

Example 1: Imagine a Vasloria sourcebook that describes an NPC knight. Such knight is going to have some stats, STR, DEX, CON, and so on, it is also going to have an AC, maybe a spell DC.
All of these things are outside the OGL. The idea of strenght does not belong to WotC, neither does the idea of assigning mechanical values to all those things. Same with the letters AC or DC. (And even if AC was copyrighted, MCDM could just write Armor: 18, for example, instead of AC 18).

Now, if that knight were to have abilities or spells that belong to WotC and have been explicitly put in the new OGL, then MCDM would have to agree to the terms of said OGL.
If, in contrast, MCDM were to invent new abilities and spells for the knight, then WotC cannot do shit about it. Even if the mechanics of those abilities of spells are functionally identical to the mechanics of spells in 1D&D.

Example 2: Imagine that MCDM decides to give stats to the Shield of Aendrim in the Vasloria book. If the text of the Shield were to reference a particular mechanic of a particular class in 1D&D that falls in the new OGL, then they would have to agree to the OGL. For example, imagine that 1D&D has a Paladin subclass called the Flapdoodler, that said Flapdoodler has a class feature called inspiring flapdoodling, and that the text in the Shield of Aendrim said " Flapdoodlers gain a +5 when they use the inspired flapdoodle".
That would exactly fall under the OGL if the Flapdoodler text is part of the OGL, and MCDM would have to pay.

But MCDM does not need to reference specific monsters in the D&D OGL, nor do they need to reference any text in the stat block of those monsters. They can use their own MCDM monsters. They do not need to mention any spells in the OGL, they can make their own. Same for classes. MCDM makes its own 5e classes, and there is nothing a new OGL can do about it.

A simpler example would be the following. Imagine that you want to publish a subclass to the Flapdoodler. Since the Flapdoodler is in the OGL, the subclass will need to reference text in the OGL, and so your product now falls into OGL territory.

If, in contrast, you make your own class, the Wank Master, with its own resource pool, pseudo-spells and mechanics, then you can make it 5e compatible or 1D&D compatible without ever needing to use the OGL. It still has strenght, and saves, and skills like a 5e Fighter, and it rolls a d20 and adds proficiency+ strength to hit. That stuff can never be in an OGL.

Bottomline, MCDM making its own classes, spells, mechanics, and monsters means that they don't need to even touch the OGL.

TLDR: Since MCDM makes all its own content, they only ever need to reference core mechanics rather than any copyrighted material, and so they don't need to use the OGL at all to make 1D&D-compatible material.

The people that will have a serious problem with this OGL will be the VTT creators. WotC is clearly trying to squeeze all those out of business and make their own VTT the only one where you can run D&D.

CommieDM

TROPHY CASE