Misty Mountain Hop: Unleash Epic Adventures and Elevate Your Game with Middle-Earth's Magic

3 Wise DMs

Low Magic. We’ve discussed it before and, in last weeks article, DM Chris delved into ideas of how to make magic rare and special in your D&D campaigns. In our discussion online regarding the article, there was a debate over what low magic means. The issue seemed to revolve around confusing Low Magic with Low Fantasy. Middle-Earth, while being a High Fantasy setting, is, in terms of D&D, a Low Magic setting for the simple fact that there are no spellcasting classes.

In this episode, Tony, Chris, and Dave discuss the preparations for the upcoming LOTR campaign; how magic will work, the lack of spellcasters as a class, the types of characters that we’re thinking of developing, among many other topics. For anyone that is hoping to really approach magic differently in their home games, this is the episode for you.

1:50 Our continuing discussion about our upcoming Lord of the Rings campaign and how we’re approaching a setting with low access to magic.

4:01 What are you going to do now? Trying to top your previous campaigns.

7:15 DM Chris delves into his thoughts surrounding how to lessen access to magic as he began preparing and planning his Lord of the Rings campaign.

11:55 Middle-Earth as a world is highly magical, but how that plays at the table changes it significantly from all other D&D settings – Bilbo and the Dwarves didn’t have a Boss Battle with Smaug.

17:35 How much Meteor Swarm would change the Arthurian Tales.

19:05 How rare magic will turn everything into significant encounters: healing, journeys, rests, etc.

22:52 A rare Rock and Roll DM story about short rests and long rests.

24:55 DM Chris explains the idea of the “Fellowship Phase” and “Shadow Points” in LOTR, like Call of Cthulhu Sanity points in Middle-Earth.

32:05 What’s the economy of Middle-Earth?

37:50 How to build characters that will hook into the setting of Middle-Earth.

40:30 Final Thoughts.