I hope nobody mistakes my GM style... I'm not going to throw arbitrary monsters at you. If everyone in the party made horribly unoptimized characters who couldn't adequately defeat vanilla encounters, well then I'd make my encounters easier to compensate while still having it be challenging. But if everyone min/maxed the crap out of their PCs- my encounters would be sufficiently tougher.<br/><br/>The problem is when you get a combination of the two... :P<br/><br/><span class="bbc_size" style="font-size: 18pt;"><strong>But!</strong></span><strong>Most importantly...</strong><br/><br/>None of these variants were chosen with 'the game' in mind. They were chosen with the story in mind, and to serve as an appropriate reflection of the setting.<br/><br/>One of the reasons 3.5 and Pathfinder were chosen was because the absence and alteration of game mechanics (like barbarians with fireball necklaces) helps illustrate just how much things<em>used</em>to be versus how things are now.<br/><br/>It was my hope that everyone who signed up for this game thought 'Huh. Weird setting/rules, I wonder how I could create my character in such an environment?' rather than 'Huh. Weird setting/rules, I wonder how I can try to create my character<em>despite</em>such an environment?'<br/><br/>As Deathwheel said... my first inclination was NO magic items of any kind, a flat halving of caster levels and even non-magic variants for classes like rangers.<br/><br/>As you said, most of the party members have some measure of spellcasting or supernatural ability. If this was strictly a representation of the setting, no group of 14 would have so many people capable of doing magicky stuff. But that's a compromise I made because I dislike trying to enforce too many constraints upon character creation...