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Any D&D/D20

Shadowrun

World of Darkness

Palladium

Other (feel free to post about it)

[Aseaheru]

"And then a singing crab attacks you with a very lame musical number"

And then complains that if they where Jamaican they wouldn't still be on their back after everything else is over.

[Neonivek]

May sound silly...

But I TOTALLY want to do a highschool (Or Highschool-esk... I don't care if it is adults... like a university) setting!

But the issue is... I kind of have no freeken idea how to pull it off...

Dungeons and dragons is flat out... out...

Shadowrun... could work... Call of Cthulhu 7th ed oddly enough works pretty well O_O...

But I kind of want the school to be special in some way... not like a typical school.

[Egan_BW]

In the near future, evil corps have captured the elder gods, and use them to generate cheap power. Our heroes are students attending a university to get a degree in Eldritch Engineering... if they can keep their sanity intact in the process!

[Rolan7]

World of Darkness is pretty great for making mundane humans, and for emphasizing social stats/skills as much as intellectual and physical ones.  People are generally humanly vulnerable even after many sessions (unless they're supernatural, and often even then).

[BlackFlyme]

My work printed some merch for a Shadowrun rip-off that took place in a school. Involved a bunch of pre-teens trying to take on evil tobacco corporations or something like that. Except the corp also owned the school.

Kind of hard to imagine a non-collegiate/university tier school in Shadowrun that could include a wide-enough variety of teachings for a typical party composition though.

[MrWiggles]

I'm going to throw out Teenagers from Outspace. It can even work with early Uni students. Its bent toward comedy. So I suppose it really matter what theme and atmosphere you want.

There is a Gurps setting, though maybe dont use the Gurps for an inter-dimensional Uni setting.  Illuminati University. Go go IOU.

[Jimmy]

Buffy the Vampire Slayer would also work for highschool, provided you've got, y'know, vampires and slaying in it.

[Tawa]

I've mostly finished writing up the setting for that Pathfinder game I want to run on the forum, but I need input on something: I don't know how to deal with a low-magic Pathfinder game.

To sum things up, the setting is more or less Europe with things merged, switched around, new backstories written up, and the names and details changed for the sake of brevity, clarity, and not offending anyone. (In short, there's a huge Anglo-Saxon/Frankish/German empire in the west, a Russian/Wendish republic in the east, a Celtic kingdom in the northwest, an Italian kingdom I'm not entirely satisfied with yet in the southeast, Viking tribes in the north, and Finno-Ugric tribes in the northeast, with basic outlines written out for another continent with Arabian-, Iranian-, and Turkish-themed nations.) The setting exclusively contains humans, but I intend to allow (modified) dwarves and half-elves, albeit as characters whose bloodlines go back to dwarves and elves back in the age of myth rather than as outright dwarves and half-elves. There's three major belief systems: a modified version of Celtic polytheism, followed by everywhere but Not!Scandinavia and Not!Finland, and straight-up Norse and Finnish paganism, followed by their respective derivative ethnic groups.

I want a relatively gritty game where magic is the territory of gods and beings that have long since disappeared from mortal view. I intend for the players to someday fight these strange and terrible beasts and perhaps obtain items and weapons of divine origin, but I want the game to be by and large low fantasy; I want a game where the players are morally ambiguous people who fight morally ambiguous or outright villainous people, whether for honor, for gold, for justice, or for power, and all of this with steel and cunning rather than magic and sparkles. I have no clue how to make this work in the context of Pathfinder--perhaps five or six classes in the SRD use no magic at all, and probably seven or eight if I'm being generous or restrictive with archetypes. I could allow the half-magic classes like bard or ranger, but for some reason "magical realism' doesn't really feel right in the same sentence as "gritty", so to speak.

Ideas? I was thinking of a middle ground where players can play as partial casters who've had their spell lists excised of the spells that can't be explained as extraordinary luck or skill (e.g., the ranger's 1st-level spell list would have things like "alarm", "entangle", and "summon nature's ally" removed, but stuff like "longstrider" and "magic fang" can stay), but I don't know if that's worth it.

[SOLDIER First]

_{what about the one you were already gonna run on the forum}

[GiglameshDespair]

Just restrict people to nonmagic classes. 5-6 classes is probably fine, as I don't imagine you'll be taking more than 5.

Nerfing gish classes just feels like the wrong way to go about it. It just makes them bad.

[Jimmy]

Are you excluding all monsters that include magic (essentially anything except animals and humanoids)?

How high a level do you expect to run this game? Anywhere past level 3 and you're gonna be in trouble.

The balance of Pathfinder expects players to own a certain amount of wealth in magical items. If you're restricting players to masterwork only, you're going to be heavily increasing the odds against them.

Any time I see a DM use the words "low magic" I assume it's because they aren't confident enough with the rules to run a high level campaign. I'd suggest looking into E6 rules for Pathfinder as an alternative so you can cap the limit of magic in the world without adversely affecting the players. By capping level advancement to 6th level, you're allowing access to 3rd level spellcasting at most.

[Harry Baldman]

The simple solution is to not try and keep magic out of player hands. Our DM runs a 3.5 game set in the Bronze Age roughly a thousand years after the gods stepped off the world, and how that works is that, for instance, a copper weapon is the regular version, a bronze weapon is masterwork, a masterwork bronze weapon is +1, a masterwork bronze weapon reinforced with a bit of mithril is +2 and so forth, and actual magic items are very rare and we pretty much have to make our own if he have something particular in mind. Similarly, the place we're in has the highest-level spellcasters be capable of something like 6th-level spells, and there's no such thing as a store where you buy magic items or, more often than not, even healing potions or anything like that. And many of the players are not so much following a magical tradition (our sorcerer and I bargain with spirits for new circles of spells and invocations respectively, our paladin of tyranny follows the tenets of his clan as they were laid out by his grand uncle) as establishing one (our cleric is overseeing the resurgence of his fire deity, I'm stealing and grafting souls to myself to get a backdoor to obtaining ur-priest powers). We're actually a bit behind on what you'd expect in terms of magic items, but we tend to acquire innate and unusual abilities to make up the difference.

To help with this you could have magic work like it does in Game of Thrones - a color spray, for instance, is not you actually generating a spray of color as it is you giving someone the evil eye and sending them into a seizure. Not flashy, still silly in a medieval witchery kind of way, does the job and is entirely inexplicable. Plus, you know, why the hell would you play Pathfinder if not to be some form of magical badass? Combine this with the E6 rules and you have reasonable fragility, reasonably consistent style and not too much magic to mess with your attempts at realism.

Now the other simple solution would be to play Burning Wheel, Symbaroum, Dungeon World or some other system that's easily compatible with more explicitly low-magic adventures. But those can be hard to get a hold of at the best of times.

[Kadzar]

Now the other simple solution would be to play Burning Wheel, Symbaroum, Dungeon World or some other system that's easily compatible with more explicitly low-magic adventures. But those can be hard to get a hold of at the best of times.

Well, at least Dungeon World, like Pathfinder, has a free online SRD (at one point I also picked up a free no art version PDF of the rules, but I can't find it anywhere online anymore). Also, all the rules the players need are in the playbooks(pdf link), which can be downloaded from their website.

[Tawa]

E6 rules

Oh man, this is absolutely perfect. Thanks for bringing it to my attention.

[Sirus]

This low-magic game you're talking about, is it the same one you mentioned a few months ago? About being Vikings?