A little background before we get started. My wife and I wanted to start a RPG club at a local youth center, but the leadership said that there could be no magic and no pantheons of gods. Our thing is D&D and we have been playing 5e, so after a little research, we found Adventures in Middle-Earth. The system is based on 5e in J.R.R. Tolkien’s world which is low to no magic and stays out of religion. We thought we had a winner on our hands, but Middle-Earth is too serious and the lack of the fantastical makes for a very dry gaming experience. So, we decided to homebrew our own version of D&D.

Welcome to Steampunk D&D

We simplified some aspects of the game due to the audience we are working with. Most of our players have never played D&D and this is their first sojourn into the realm or roll playing games. We also had to strip away all of the magic from the game which required changes to the races, classes, and sub-classes. All full-casters had to be removed and half-casters had to be restructured to fit within the guidelines we were provided.

We learned by playing a quick one-off in the Adventures in Middle-Earth system that we missed some of the aspects of magic and what it did in combat. Gone were the area effect spells that changed combat. We developed the Alchemist class to take the place of the spellcasters. This allowed us to access some of the abilities that we lost by removing the spellcasters but we tried to keep the alchemist abilities within the scope of the possible.

The skill of Arcana has been removed and replaced with the Alchemy skill.