*sigh*

This comes up every month or two. And the answer is that if you go with the 3.5 RAW and create a setting that makes any semblance of sense in terms of said RAW then the world will be high magic.

If you want to be able to have regular D&D adventures in said world then you have to follow, at least generally, a single set up. Points of light in the dark. 4e finally got around to realizing the fact (a few decades late but thats neither here nor there).

What points of light in the dark means is as follows.

Cities are linked by Teleportation Circles. Trade routes do not exist. Shipping lines do not exist. You have very heavily secured cities that don't have to have any geographical relationship to any other cities or even their own settlements. Knowledge is shared between cities instantly. What does this mean? Cities have massive populations and have massive amounts of wealth in them.

Now outside the cities you have wilderness. Vast amounts of trackless wilderness where criminals and people not welcome in the cities live, or their descendants. This is where you have villages and the like. Magic is rare. Wizards are nigh unheard of and most divine casters are Druids not Clerics. People band together for survival. Eventually those individual bands will end up with the ability to create a Teleportation Circle and enough people to create their own city, or they are wiped out by monsters or other bands (much more likely).

The average guard in a City is a high level Warforged with fast response teams made up of wizards and Shade Steel Golems. The average guard in the wilderness is a barbarian or fighter.

That is the only setting the rules support that still allows regular D&D. Most adventuring happens outside the cities, at least until the players reach level 12+. At which point they have real challenges to face. If you attack a shop keeper then he uses his Telepathic Bond to the Guard Dispatch Officer to have them teleport in 5 Advanced Shade Steel Golems and a high level wizard. And when you are caught and convicted the city just Mind Rapes you and makes you a law abiding citizen.

Magic has existed for a very long time. How long depends on the game. But if it is not a new invention (last thousand years or so) then it has already altered the economy to such an extent that their is no baseline, at all.

Teleporation Circle makes it so that moving goods by ship never even comes up. There is no reason to ever even think of sending goods by ship. Create Food and Water traps means that farming (if it exists at all) is only a specialty used to grow delicacies. The effects of teleportation on warfare means that nations never form in the traditional sense (a traditional nation can't defend it's claimed territory). Fabrication traps mean that the need for raw materials or even work are eliminated.

If magic is a new invention (or at least teleportation magic) then it's a different story. But if it's been around for thousands of years (or from the beginning of time) then you have to throw out the entire non-magical economy and start with the effects of magic.

If a single cleric can feed a nation by creating a single magic item then why does farming ever exist? Once the magic exists there is no reason for them not to use it. You go straight from a hunter gatherer society to a post farming society.

If a single wizard can make an item that spits out a suit of clothes made of the finest silks and of the finest manufacture every second then why does a cloth making industry ever come to exist?

If a single wizard can construct an entire city in under a week on his own (and do so better than any non magical builders) then why do people not have houses?

---

Ultimately economics and economies rest on the idea of a certain amount of non trivial work and effort being needed to produce a product that someone else needs or wants. Magic in D&D removes that base need. It's free energy.

What is the “Tippyverse”?

At it’s most basic the Tippyverse is nothing more than a setting where the D&D 3.5 rules as written are largely taken at face value and as the basic rules for a world. More specifically, the existence of magic and magic items is integrated into the setting from the start and not tacked on.

Basic postulates:

1. Epic Magic does not exist, it’s way too game breaking to try to make any setting that can work with it.

2. The deities are mostly silent

3. Everything else is pretty much as RAW (excluding some of the truly screwy things like drowning resurrections)

History of the Tippyverse

The Tippyverse (TV henceforth) was created when I was looking at the impact of long distance teleportation magic on a setting; more precisely just how badly such magic mangles the traditional settings. Let’s look at the military and economic implications of such magic.

D&D is a setting where there are no large scale defenses against teleportation magic. It is impossible to prevent an enemy from dropping his entire military right into the middle of your nation with teleportation circles whenever he chooses to do so. The only viable way to defend yourself is to concentrate all of your vital military infrastructure in a relatively small area and concentrate your forces on that area; meaning that you will always have forces on hand to deal with a potential enemy attack. The traditional D&D towns and villages simply can’t be defended because your enemies can drop thousands of troops into them in under a minute and then evacuate back out the next minute.

The concentration of vital government and military infrastructure in a single location is going to naturally lead to trade and other economic activity being focused on that area (large population usually paid in cash, very high security). This concentration of people is going to open the City up to attacks on their food supply, fortunately this problem can be solved by Create Food and Water traps.

Teleporation Circles will be set up between the City and fellow Cities simply because they are the only remotely safe and cost effective way to rapidly move goods between the cities. Who is going to ship goods by boat when TC’s are faster, cheaper, and safer? Or by wagon train? The fact that TC’s are point to point and have fixed points is going to eliminate the various small villages and towns that tend to dot the path between Cities both in real life and in more traditional D&D settings. The high initial investment of a permanent teleportation circle is also going to ensure that they are only set up between locations that can make them profitable within a relatively short period of time, which eliminates most of the smaller cities and villages as well.

All of this combines to create a self reinforcing cycle that concentrates the vast majority of the worlds population in cities that are linked to each other by teleportation circles, fed by create food and water traps (as farms can’t be defended effectively), and require large standing armies for defense.

You are quickly left with the large cities (most on par with the likes of Sharn, or even larger, in terms of population) that hold upwards of 99% of the worlds non monstrous population and cover (maybe) one percent of the worlds surface and the Wilds between the cities that are filled with the denizens of the various Monster Manuals. The Wilds are also where you will find the small villages and thorps of more traditional D&D, where the population is constantly threatened by monsters, rarely exceeds level 5, rarely sees magic, and is basically subsistence level.

The Cities

The massive concentration of population and trade in the various cities (I recommend between a dozen and a hundred cities in the average Tippyverse world) is naturally going to lead to a concentration of wealth and knowledge. Securing that wealth requires a military force that can stand off the strongest of attacks and deal with even high level adventurers. The traditional Tippyverse tends to make use of armies of Shadesteel Golems and Warforged for defense, usually with Wizard officers. This kind of military force becomes necessary to defend a City from other Cities and the various powerful denizens of the Wilds, but it also has the side effect of making the initial investment required to defend a city quite high.

Depending on the DM’s decision a City can be everything from a post-scarcity world populated by various spell traps where even Death is a rarity to a relatively normal D&D city. What the cities are is a location for high level political intrigue, high level adventuring, and of high magic. When the cities Guards are Shadesteel Golems led by level 10-15 casters with invisible Warforged scouts linked with Permanent Telepathic bonds flying overhead and hanging out on every street corner, adventurers will not get away with all of the various shenanigans that they can in more traditional D&D (where the PC’s can regularly solo the city guard after tenth level or so).

Cities are usually ruled by a council made up of the strongest casters in the city. After all, might does make right in D&D and wars between high level casters tend to end badly for everyone involved making the co-opting of new individuals on this power level a necessity (and those that won‘t play ball get ganged up on by every other high level caster in the City).

Over time cities will fall (be it from the attack of an enemy city, a flight of dragons, a civil war between it’s leadership, natural disaster, or whatever else the cause) and others will rise to replace them. New cities are rarities but they do occur (about as often as cities fall).

The Wilds

The Wilds are the area between cities. Here is where you will find everything from dungeons to Orc armies to small farming towns. The Wilds are a Death World by most standards and most individuals will have a hard time eking out an existence. Magic is rare and largely limited to Sorcerers, Warlocks, Druids, and similar classes. Most individuals are low level and it’s rare to find a PC class.

The Wilds are where you will find most of the more traditional D&D quests occurring (dungeon crawling in the ruins of fallen cities, clearing out various monsters, rescuing the mayors daughter, etc.). You will also find a few “barbarian” kingdoms out here (more traditional D&D kingdoms) where the very lack of high level magic (as those capable of casting it migrate to the cities) keeps the kingdom from reaching that singularity point.

What the Tippyverse isn’t:

1. It’s not a world ruled by a single all powerful wizard who mind rapes the opposition (at least not traditionally).

2. It’s not a 1984/Parinoia/Big Brother world where freedom does not exist and the government controls every facet of life

_PRE TIPPYVERSE_

[Idea Sharing] Super High Magic World! :D

http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?t=83395

What do you think of this... (3.5e)

http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?t=86963

Magic/Tech Galactic Empire

http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?t=69907

Death in 4th Edition

http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?t=72809&page=3

Wizards are not Strikers

http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?t=81697&page=3

_TIPPYLAND_

Complete Arcane and Tippyland

http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?t=97512

Economics in D&D

http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?t=97897&page=3

What's Wrong With 4e?

http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?t=82775&page=38

The Introduction of magic into a D&D Economy

http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?t=98188

Magically Armed Military

http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?t=49389&page=6

_TIPPYVERSE_

The Definitive Guide to the Tippyverse, By Emperor Tippy

http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?t=222007

A Theory Why The Tippyverse Doesn't Happen

http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?t=137380

Create Food Trap?

http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?t=109791

The Tippyverse

http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?t=125538

True, actual, real, literal, immortality + invincibility

http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?t=191143

Create Food Trap + worlds biggest farm = what could possibly go wrong?

http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?t=129730

Tippyverse question

http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?t=247468

If you could cast each spell ONCE in real life...

http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?t=169690

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheMagocracy

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MisappliedPhlebotinum

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MookMaker

_ECONOMICS_

Build Me An Economy! (General Challenge)

http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?t=36788

Build me an army!

http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?t=36527

The Economicon: Making Sense of the Gold Standard