Many people are in love with magic schools. Regardless of if we are talking about the Netflix show Wednesday, Little Witch Academia, Harry Potter, The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina or the Dropout.tv actual play of Misfits and Magic, magic schools are as popular as ever.

In stark contrast to the influx of fantasy TTRPGs, there is a surprising drought in regards to magic school TTRPG systems. We mostly have Strixhaven for 5e, Wands & Wizardry for 5e and Kids on Brooms in our collective memory. Compared to the popularity of the genre, this is not a lot of systems. But why is that? Let's delve into the problem with magic schools in TTRPGs!

Making magic lessons fun is hard

One thing that anyone running a magic school will notice is, how hard it is to find a place for magic lessons in the story. Since your pupils should be attending hundreds of them, it is impossible to play them all out. But this leads to a certain feeling of arbitrariness for the lessons you do highlight in your gameplay. A lessons is at its core the most mundane part about being at a magic academy and can easily feel like a chore instead of a fun moment.

There is also the question of the goal of a lesson. Should you actually attempt to teach your players something? Do you instead try to gamify the experience by creating more outrageous session concepts involving duels or elaborate challenges? How much session time should a session take? There is no real consensus on this topic, making it hard to fall back on tried and true methods, like you can when designing a dungeon.

Despite (or most likely because) these struggles, neither Wands & Wizardry nor Kids on Brooms even attempt to solve this struggle, despite magic lessons being an essential part of the core fantasy of magic schools. Kids on Brooms does acknowledge classes existing and even has a system for class schedules, but does not elaborate on how to run a class if you so desire. Strixhaven does occasionally touch on classes and has an abstract exam system, but again, classes do not seem to be a core gameplay element.

Keeping track of a large ensemble cast

While running a typical fantasy campaign, there is usually a lot of traveling involved. One often overlooked benefit of this is that you do not have to keep track of a lot of NPCs at the same time. While character might get to know dozens of NPCs during their adventures, there are hardly more then ten NPCs that may become relevant in a given session.

In comparison, a magic school has their whole cast gathered in a confined space, where each NPC can be reached at any time. This means that you need to be able to roleplay any of them at any given moment. Recalling previous interactions with the player, their speech pattern and habits as well as to provide interesting roleplaying opportunities is hard in this environment. You can quickly feel overwhelmed by players wanting to talk to an NPC out of left field. 

At the same time, NPCs can be befriended by the group, and might even be quite useful. While that is hardly a problem if the NPC is usually half the country away, in a magic school, players will have access to any NPC at most times. Therefore, the players might over rely on useful NPCs, especially for information.

Unique character designs can help to keep track of a larger cast. This drawing was made by Rischens for my upcoming book "A Witches' Guide to Grimm's Keep Academy".

The influx of magic makes challenges hard to balance

A good magic school should give access to a large amount of spells. The issue that quickly arises is that it becomes very hard to predict how your players might approach challenges. Your wolves will be befriended with a spell for speaking with animals, your pit trap will be overcome by hopping on a broom, and any murder mystery will be solved by summoning and questioning the ghost of the deceased. If they have 100+ spells at their disposal, you cannot rely on any one obstacle being a threat to them. While D&D has a similar problem with its spellcasters, they usually are less then half of the player group. In a magic school, everyone is a wizard.

Learning and casting spells is half the fun, so cutting this option down really is not an option. Believe me, I have tried. During the beginning of the development of my own system, "A Witches Guide to Grimm's Keep Academy", I created a very limited pool of spells. I did this to reduce the amount of player options, making designing challenges more predictable. The problem was that the players did not like these limitations. They wanted a large number of options available to them, just for the feeling of having a large spell list. A comment that stuck with me was: "We are in a magic school, I thought we were doing spells."

Even a little imp familiar could easily scout for dangers ahead. This artwork was made by Roselysium and will feature in my upcoming project "A Witches Guide to Grimm's Keep Academy"

Overwhelming preparation work

In a usual campaign, you do not have to prepare much more then one session in advance. If your group is traveling to another village, you can usually stall them with one or two goblin ambushes along the road until the end of the session. After that, you can prepare that village (or any other new location) between session.

In a magic school, most locations are within walking distance. Traveling from one location to the others might not take much longer then a player saying "we go to the green house". This means that you need to prepare most locations in advance. While you do not necessarily need to prepare all secrets or hidden areas, all of the obvious spots need at least a rough outline from the start.

The same goes for teachers, pupils, classes, spells and all the other things that are expected of a magic school. The only real distance you can bring between you and your players exploration are time and secrets. Since you can more or less control the passage of time, you do not need to know how the winter holidays are celebrated at your school in advance (since you decide when it is winter). At the same time, you can also procrastinate on your secret tunnels and other easter eggs, since they usually require very specific triggers that explain why they have not been part of the game before.

Besides these exceptions, the amount of preparations requires can be demotivating. It is a testament to this challenge that out of my three example games, only one even tries to give you material to run your school (Strixhaven). To be fair, Wands and Wizardry 5e would definitely get sued if they tried and Hogwarts is rather well documented in the internet.

Conclusion & Solution

Summarizing, magic schools are hard to run. There is little in the way of supporting materials, preparing your own school requires a ton of work and actually running a school can feel overwhelming. The speed in which you have to be able to describe a large ensemble of locations and NPCs will test your GMing expertise. But is there a solution to solve these issues? Can running a magic school be easy and fun? First, I want to hear it from you! What solutions can you think of? What are your best practices when running a magic school?

If you are interested in the solutions, I have just written a follow-up article containing all of the tools and solutions I have developed after running around 100 sessions of magic school content!