Everything you think about Game Mastering is probably wrong: Part XIII - Crapsack Worlds and Fairy Tales
I spoke earlier about the biomagnification of magic and how any low fantasy game will eventually escalate into high magic. The amount of magic you start a game with is really the slope and therefore the time it takes to achieve high fantasy hijinks. Thus games seeking a long run before then usually start in a crapsack world, where magic is but a myth, fighting bandits and thieves until you start finding vaguely supernatural things and begin to interact with actual magic. This works well enough.
People will usually want to take a tour of various fantasy tropes, if not in one game than in several. Barbarians in frosty mountains, mummies in sand covered pyramids, knights and dragons, genies and evil viziers in an Arabian nights knock-off. There are a lot of clichés to run with. There is one common one that always runs into problems though. Fairy Tales.
Fairy Tales are full of high magic and powerful creatures, so using the biomagnification of magic logic then fairy tales games should appear in the late game. Fairy tales are not just full of enemy beings though, many of them are actively benign. Add in high powered characters with benign potential allies and it becomes a cakewalk. The solution is usually to make them a dark reflection of fairy tales. The tales of benign creatures become just tales and instead of a mix of benign and hostile you get at best a mix of utterly alien and hostile beings of great power. This is fully gameable, but a bit hollow. It's not really a fairy tale setting at that point, it just uses the same paint set. This isn’t to say don’t do this (the Witcher does wonderful things with this concept and its a very useful tool in your GM toolbox), but eventually it dawned on me there is a better place for a proper fairy tale setting.
Fairy tale regions need to be the first adventure. Before you fight rats in a tavern basement, you should have been dealing with a fairy tale quest. An adventure with fairy tale logic, full of powerful beings who are usually benign (or at least neutral) is a perfect tutorial quest. This makes sense, as fairy tales were written as tutorials for moral behaviour. Rather than going into a goblin warren to fight four goblins as a first adventure, consider going into an enchanted forest to rescue a senile old woman who got lost. Negotiate with a pixie, wrestle Mr. Tumnas and sit on him until he tells you where he got her scarf, answer the riddles of a troll, and fight a redcap who has got her locked in a cage. If things get too bad, ask for the help of a Unicorn. Find piles of magic weapons and armour that are just toys and rags outside of the forest. It's a tutorial mode where people can play with high powered toys to learn the ropes and justify their call to adventure. Then they can get tetanus from a rusty lock and get their head bashed in by goblins in an abandoned watermill.
This also creates a good place for adventurers to get things like magic patrons, quest givers, and sources for info dumps without creating the problem of why low level adventurers are needed. If the patron is the Royal Wizard and the Knights of the Realm then why don’t they ever solve the problems? If the patron is a unicorn or faery then there are multiple answers why they don’t save the kingdom. A simple one is they can’t leave the magic forest.
As a final benefit it allows for the campaign equivalent of a Jaquays Loop, and returning to the magic forest later when high powered. There can be ways to access more dangerous and powerful magical areas from the fairy tale land, in essence the first level adventure site becomes the “safe starting town” for high level play. You could even have a mid-level quest where evil befalls the fairy tale land (turning it sinister) as part of that loop. When high level play is looming word comes back that the starting area is in danger and the party needs to save it and restore it to how it was. The party restores the area, turning it into a new “starting town” to follow the dark forces retreat back into even more dangerous magical wilds in what is now a high level planeswalker setting. That the area is the place of the first adventure not only creates an early attachment to it which adds to its importance in the end game, but also allows you to foreshadow future events with “locked content” as it were.
Of course the worst thing about this whole concept is it isn’t new, it just doesn’t seem to be discussed or picked up on. After pondering on this it dawned on me that this is literally the beginning of the Lord of the Rings. It is cut in the movies, but this is in essence all the adventures featuring Tom Bombadil. Like the movie, it's also the easiest part to cut if you don't want to bring in fairy tale logic to your games.