In last month's blog post, I talked about the challenges in designing a magic school system. You can read about it there, but to summarize, the core challenges are:

1. Making magic lessons fun is hard
2. Keeping track of a large ensemble cast is cumbersome
3. The influx of magic abilities makes challenges hard to prepare
4. The amount of preparation work feels overwhelming

In this article, we will go through each of these points and try to solve them, finding solutions that will make the process of creating your own magic school a little easier.

Making magic lessons fun is hard

In last month's article, we determined a few core challenges when preparing for magic lessons. While these lessons are a fun an essential part of the magic school experience, there is no preexisting framework that they fit into. They are relatively safe and thus often lack any significant stakes, which runs the risk of them feeling boring. At the same time, they can feel disconnected from the rest of the contents of any given session. So how do we solve this?

We need to connect the lesson to the contents of the session at hand, and establish stakes relating to the players performance in said lesson. Let us have a look at some tools that can check one or both of these boxes.

Providing tools. A clearcut way to do this is for the lesson to relate directly to a preestablished challenge in the adventure, like a dangerous monster or an unreachable location. For example, the lesson could be about a spell that coincidentally would help in defeating that specific monster or reaching that specific location. The spell needs to be obviously helpful to entice the players, but not so necessary that failure to obtain it would end the adventure. Now that the players are interested in getting this tool to solve the adventure, the lesson can provide a challenge. Success and failure decide if the players obtain the tool and therefore the difficulty of the rest of the adventure.

The players have learned about a dangerous artefact hidden in a bank vault, but the corridor is guarded by a security camera. The lesson is about the invisibility spell and the question if all of them are able to learn it before their heist, to make this challenge easier.

Foreshadow. You can also use a lesson at the start of an adventure, to establish concepts and information necessary to understand the rest of the upcoming session. Since there are no real stakes to be found here, since the threat is not yet established, it is best to keep these lessons short.

The session is about werewolves, so you use the lesson to establish the concepts of lycanthropy, like the full moon and silver bullets.

Adventure hooks. In the same vein, you can also throw out adventure hooks during a lesson. As when foreshadowing, you will want to keep these lessons short, since there are not stakes involved yet.

The lesson is just about picking mushrooms, but the teacher explicitly warns to players not to go into the forbidden graveyard in the forest, since it is haunted.

The lesson is the adventure. The lesson itself is dangerous and long-winding, like a field trip to retrieve some ingredients from an active volcano. Another variant of this is an otherwise harmless lesson that accidentally becomes an adventure, like a miscast summoning spell letting a demon loose in the school.

The lesson is about cleaning all parts of the archive, the giant library of the school. Many parts of the archive are infested by spiders and other dangerous creatures.

Minigame. The lesson contains a minigame that differs from the usual resolution mechanic used in your system, like a hidden object riddle or a cross word puzzle. This does not necessarily connect to the stakes or narrative of the session, but provides some fun variation on the usual gameplay and keeps the players engaged.

The teacher is not present for the lesson, but has left a cryptic note on how to find the ingredients that need to be collected for the session. The notes need to be used to determine the correct ingredients in a hidden object picture full of potion flasks. Artwork licensed for my upcoming quickstart for "A Witches Guide to Grimm's Keep Academy"

Keeping track of a large ensemble cast

In last month's article, we also talked about the struggles of running a large ensemble cast in a magic school. Here is a summary of the core issues we found:

• Each NPC must be ready to run at any time, since they are all living in the same confined space
• You must remember the history and mannerisms of each NPC and recall them quickly
• Once players gain close and useful allies (like teachers), it is hard to keep them from over relying on their help

We must therefore find a solution that helps game masters with recalling each NPC to their memory quickly, while striving a balance between letting the players gain allies and limiting their support network. Here are the tools I used to achieve just that.

Clichés. In order to retain a baseline on how to play each characters, it is wise to incorporate easy-to-remember and easy-to-play clichés within your NPCs. This way, you can easily keep track of 20+ characters and recall how to play them at an instant.

Miss Rubus is a messy and anxious trainee teacher, always in a hurry and always late. Art by Rischens for my upcoming quickstart for "A Witches Guide to Grimm's Keep Academy"

Excuses. There are a multitude of reasons why you would want your NPCs to not be present for an adventure. Maybe you have forgotten how to play them, or their abilities would trivialize the current adventure. Therefore it is important to have a small number of default excuses on why each NPC cannot participate in a given adventure.

Professor Falkner has gone bird watching with the first graders and is thus unavailable. Art by Rischens for my upcoming quickstart for "A Witches Guide to Grimm's Keep Academy"

The influx of magic makes challenges hard to balance

As discussed in last month's article, everyone having access to a large spell list does make it harder to design problems, since it is nearly impossible to account for all the different spells the players could use to overcome the challenge in unexpected ways. Here are some ideas to design challenges with large spell lists in mind.

Design problems, not solutions. Taking some notes out of the old-school playbook, you can just design challenges without really thinking about possible solutions. The toolbox at the disposal of the players can get so large that they are almost guaranteed to come up with something helpful each time.

The towns bully badmouths the players behind their backs.

Design multifaceted problems. Try to create most problems with at least two or three components to complicate things. This way, the player will have to think about the interconnection of each component and how their abilities might influence them.

A characters dad cannot know about magic, but he also knows a crucial piece of information to solve the plot and is hunted by the big, bad wolf.

Hold on gently. For this one we are taking a look into the game master advice of the newly released Daggerheart. Be prepared to run an adventure as planned, but keep calm if things go south.

Flexible challenges. Keep note of some challenges without a specific location or time attached. This way, you can deploy them whenever you run out of plot or things to do for the group. This can be a good mix of dangerous enemies, whimsical lessons and strange mysteries.

A mysterious grim reaper appears in the hall way and starts to chase you.

Overwhelming preparation work

As discussed in last month's post, as well as above, there is a lot of preparation that goes into running a magic school. The most impactful difference to a classical fantasy campaign lies in the distances - each location and NPC is close by and reachable within minutes. This makes it necessary to prepare many things in advance, since a lot of the content can be reached without issue.

Therefore, you need an easy way to keep the illusion of a complete magic school intact, without overburdening yourself with a ton of prep work. Here are some ways I used to achieve just that.

Limit your scope. Strip the academy down to the barest of essentials needed to run it. You need a list of subjects taught, a list of teachers, a small ensemble of fellow pupils, class rooms as well as some locations to hang out in. Anything else can be added after the fact.

Rely on clichés until players show interest. Keep most NPCs as walking clichés, until the players show a deeper interested in them. Then you can create a backstory, deeper connections and goals for that character. This way, you only do the work that will come into play at the table.

Use secret tunnels. Since most magic schools take place in some kind of old castle, it is easy to explain the appearance of new locations with secret entrances. The players only learn of a secret entrance once the content behind it is ready to go. This way, you do not have to prepare a lot of locations in advance.

Adding things after the fact. Get comfortable with adding locations, pupils and even teachers after the campaign has already started. This way you do not have to prepare everything in advance, but gradually expand the scope as your campaign moves along.

• New locations: Newly built location, old location that was never mentioned before, the location is only reachable by a secret entrance that has never been found before
• New pupils: The pupil was always there and just never mentioned, they joined late, they are part of the new arrivals for the school year, exchange student
• New teachers: An old teacher has been fired/retired/is sick for a while and this is their replacement, the school needed more staff for some subjects, the school wants to offer new programs, there is a teacher exchange program

Ask the players. Whenever you feel stuck, feel free to ask the players to fill in the blanks for you, even during a session. They will feel empowered being able to contribute to building the academy together with you.

Professor Barn catches you snooping around. What do you think his reaction would be?

Conclusion

It is no easy task to run a magic school, but there are many tools and solutions you can apply to make things easier. Narrow the scope of your academy the essentials, work with clichés and don't be afraid to add things after the fact. Asking your players is a great way to share the burden of running and taking weight off your shoulders. 

If you are interested in reading more about this topic, I am actually developing a magic school of my own! The project is called A Witches Guide to Grimm's Keep Academy, a fairytale magic school set in the black forest of modern day Germany. It will contain all the character options, spells, teachers, locations and fairytales you need for a wonderful time at a magic school! If you are interested in this project or any other posts on this blog, hop on to the newsletter to stay informed!