What are good plot hooks for a Magical School game?
Also I need feasibly reasons for "why must kids solve something instead of the -more capable- teachers?" and for "how to make combat interesting without deaths everywhere, because the tone is for children?"
First off-white kind of magic school ate we talking?
Like Harry Potter? Like Midnight Horror School? There are a lot of ways to take the concept.
more like a harry potter rip-off, with the numbers filed to have a little plot freedom
The defense against dark arts teacher is the bad guy, and the rest of the teaching staff takes his word over yours.
Then have the problems be "below the teacher's notice" from the start, like in or phantasms, imps, and the kinds of things where the actual wizards can go "you're capable, do it yourself."
Amp it up a little as the years go by, woth some of the more hardcore stuff showing up as they near , since they'lthey'll be older and the teachers will trust them more.
>Combat
If combat is institutionalised, you could make a point system. Loose a fight, your grade goes down. Fail to hit your milestones, you gotta take extra classes.
Or, use transformation/transfiguration instead of injuries and have the players pay for the consequences from their in-character budget. Maybe Billy the bully found it funny to turn you into a girl because, haha, you were such a pussy anyways, but the player fucking hate having to get a set of girl's uniform on their own.
Other character got turned into an anthro bear, constant puns follow. The new centaur needs to sleep into the stables until the cure is ready because the doors in the dorms are just to small.
You can go wild with all the cruelty of kids without actually turning them into monsters because "It's just a prank bro" or "The spell just lasts for a week, chill out man".
Maybe the actual challenge is not getting caught by teachers so stealth is key.
>Kids handling everything
You loose magic powers when you grow up
Teachers are wizards, they don't give a shot about your mundane troubles
School's underfunded, everyone overworked, just happy as long as no one dies.
The teachers are the threat.
The BBEG inveterate a spell that makes adults unable to perceive his work.
>transformed by the bully
> What are good plot hooks for a Magical School game?
Someone is smuggling magical artifacts in and out of the school, giving kids things they shouldn't have access to and sneaking off with expensive magical equipment from the evocation labs. Access tot hose labs is restricted until the culprit is found, meaning that those forms of magic can't be learned by the PCs until the mystery is cleared up.
A student finds a book of forbidden magic and is trying to hide it from the teachers and learn from it. Many of these spells are just annoying, wasteful, unethical or pervy. But some of them are downright dangerous, even to the caster.
During the Invocation and Binding class, one of the students accidently agrees to a deal with a Fae, with consequences either hilarious or horrifying.
The students have to go to [X magical location] on a field trip to learn about magical fauna and phenomenon, and how to gather the materials and harness the energy for their own spellcrafting. Its dangerous to go alone, form a group!
On an outing in the non-magical world some punk-asses jumped one of your friends and stole his magic shit. Magic shit that you are explicitly not supposed to have on this outing.
Get the stuff back without the teacher finding out, hopefully before the punk-asses learn how to make it work, or their ass is expelled.
Storyhooks:
>On the last trip to the magic zoo, a student stole a dragon's egg. Now the mother is on the way and the egg has hatched, the baby dragon nowhere to be seen
>Two students switched bodies so that one could do another's test. But the spell's gone wrong and switched dozens of people randomly. Fix this before the teachers find out.
>Summoning gone horribly wrong: The students are transported to another dimension
>Finals are up and someone went around stealing memories. Can the players find the thief with some of their skills missing?
>A series of artifacts disappeared from the archives and student's rooms, including some from the players. They misteriously appear to students who want their power, but shouldn't have them
>All out clique war. The nerds built a fortress of dark arts in the library, the jogs hunt the nights on their motor brooms, the cheerleaders bring about eternal happines via mind control and the goths try to turn everyone into vampires, werewolves and other creatures of the night.
> Also I need feasibly reasons for "why must kids solve something instead of the -more capable- teachers?"
Its not that the teachers can't solve the problem, but its their policy not to interfere unless things get too dire. Lets take as an example.
> Maybe Billy the bully found it funny to turn you into a girl because, haha, you were such a pussy anyways
Is that bullying? Yes. Is it misuse of magic? Yes. But defending yourself against curses is your job. You need to learn your own defense spells, learn to recognized cursed items, and practice your own counterspells and reversal charms. In school, you get hit by a curse and you are a 34-C for a week. But you need to take that as a learning experience and practice vigilance, because out in the real world falling for an enemy curse can mean you lose your bank account info or your free will or your life instead of just your manhood.
On the other side of things, Billy the bully practicing curses on people isn't punished because at some level students need to know how to deal with people who have basic protection spells. If you don't know how to win against a basic counterspell, you are going to lose to someone who does. Practicing the cursing and attack magics is just as important for self defense as the protection spells.
So I would imagine that spells that actually cause physical harm or have non-temporary effects would be most likely to incur teacher wrath. Embarrassing hexes and changes are the ones to be encouraged, because they get the point across without actually causing harm. Spells that would prevent a student from attending class (like turning them into a bird) probably get a timely intervention though.
> "how to make combat interesting without deaths everywhere, because the tone is for children?"
Having a specific dueling circle on the school grounds, where students can sign up to fight each other.
The circle is designed to bot provide extra mana for the students to draw on to fuel their spells, and in doing so prevents the spells fueled by that mana from going beyond certain limits. So you can cast a fireball in the dueling circle, but that fire ball (while painful and fairly destructive) can't actually kill people.
As an extra level of protection, signing up for the dueling circle constitutes a magical contract, which also prevents those involved from casting certain kinda of harmful magics or genuinely attempting to kill each other.
This also provides a chance for upping the stakes of the circle. Since there is already a magical contract in place, the duelists can add stipulations to the agreement such as 'If I win, you have to give me your magic ring' or 'If I win, you automatically get hit with this curse'. That way each fight has actual consequences of some kind or another, without having to include death.
Potential plot hook: someone attacks the players during a duel without actually being a part of it, meaning that the PC has all of the restrictions of the dueling circle but the attacker doesn't.
I dont see why you cant have death for children.
I like this idea
Its a matter of game tone. If you want whimsical magical adventures, that doesn't work if a goblin ripped off Craig's arm and then ate it while he fucked the corpse of your friend.
Not everything goes together. Death might still happen, but it doesn't have to be the default outcome of fights.
Some sort of conspiracy the teachers are in on and the kids weren't supposed to find out about. Doesn't have to be anything truly horrific, but, you know, Harry Potter style.
I once ran a Harry Potter game whose plot revolved around a secret pact made between the school's founders and local fairies that allowed the latter to kidnap kids under very specific circumstances. It was kinda like that.
The school is mechanically arranged to avoid factional arguments. The world outside the school is terribly divided. The school is filled with bound ghosts who can only educate and inform, but cannot do anything to intervene other than directly enforcing the school's rules, which are woefully insufficient to avoid all troubles and dangers. The teachers thus can only be a tool, not a method of solution. The kids are on their own.
Id say combine these two answer and .
The first explains why the teachers don't solve smaller scale local problems like imps. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if the school occasionally introduced such problems on purpose as a sort of extra credit assignment, rewarding whoever solves the problem.
The second explains why student on student conflict doesn't immediately get shut down by the authority figures.
All in all, the school is starting to sound very sink or swim. There are a couple of safety nets, but anyone who can't solve their own problems is not going to do well in this culture.
I suspect that, in the magical world outside the school, there is no ministry of magic-esq organization that keeps the rest of the wizarding world in line. Everyone has to look out for themselves. The school is designed to prepare wizards for that world.
To be clear, do just just intend for this game to have a more lighthearted tone because the characters are kids? Or are you actually running this game for children?
Because those are two very different circumstances.
the first one. But it would be awesome to run it for children someday, if only I had children/nephews etc
How old are the characters expected to be? The younger they are, the less we can realistically ask them to do.
like in harry potter, ten to seventeen. Maybe I can do like a level per year, or something; where they learn new spells and +1 hp per year.
Go all "Tower Prep" and make it so the teachers can't entirely be trusted for some reason.
>players witnessed creepy teacher leaving room where dead janitor was found the next day
One plotline should be the students having to find familiars, which help them focus their magic. Summoning their familiar is only one option, and not always reliable. For your first familiar, its tradition to go out and find a weak magical creature or spirit and bind it. Which will require subduing it first, so it doesn't run off during the binding.
Magical pokemon, essentially.
just leaving this here
>Plot hooks
Typical high school shenanigans, but wizard-style.
>Your hustler-kid buddy wants your help sneaking (shitty) beer, (cheap) smokes, and (softcore) pornography into the school to sell to your classmates. You're going to have to avoid the disciplinary committee, security elementals and any teachers if you want to make the big score.
>Someone's having a wild party in their dorm and just getting over there without getting caught might be a challenge. Plot twist: something goes awry, the place is a mess, there are demons everywhere! Worst of all: there's plenty of evidence that you were here! Get this place cleaned up or everyone's getting in trouble!
>Your friend has been lured into a cult of unpopular girls trying to invoke the fey and make themselves gorgeous. Are you really going to let elves have a foothold in your school?
>The play-offs in wizard-sports are coming up and various team-related vandalism is happening. Help defend your school from criminal activity.
>generate six attribute scores
>divide them among seven attributes
This needs another editing pass or four.
I'm running an Elder Scrolls game with the players currently at a magical school. I would start by making a faculty and student list and fill that with your interesting and weird NPC ideas. There you can build quest ideas.
OP here, im working on a list of possible attacks that don't involve death:
Wasp Sting spell
Sleep
Petrify (reversible)
Confusion
Entangle (ropes, vines, etc)
Propel backwards
Blind
Summon cage
Gloom spell (takes away target's happiness and initiative)
Slug-vomiting charm (makes your target vomit slugs. It takes him away from the fight)
Shrinking
Baleful polymorph
Mind blank/stupify (DURR HURR the spell)
Superpain (excruciating, but nonlethal)
Banish (target vanishes, but after the spell wears off they pop back where they were)