How do you make a magic school interesting without just making it a rip off of Harry Potter or My Little Witch Academia...

I like the second idea.
>”When I was learning magic, I’d have given my wand to learn out of a book! No, it was me and Elder Xaibauld, in a cave, in wind or rain, cold or heat!”
“But sir, I was talking about the mold.”
>”What? Mold? When it was me and Elder Yugurst in the middle of the forest, the mushrooms were six foot high and guarded by Red-caps who’d skin you as soon as they’d look at you! Now, Elder Yurgust said...”

At least make him well meaning, but underfunded. If the classrooms have leaks, his office will have three, it just doesn’t bother him.

Magic is taught by the Devil himself. He only accept 10 students and they can stay for only 3 years. After this period the Devil choose one of the 10 and eat his soul.

It's based on some other genres of school story.

Hell school delinquent stuff like Sukeban Deka, bitchy girls school stuff like Dear Brother or go oldschool like Tom Brown's Schooldays.

Read school fiction without magic. Add magic.

Have the school run by Catholic nuns.

Make sure the players know where they are in the boarding school hierarchy (spoiler: fucking low). Upper classmen will take kids out into the middle of the courtyard at midnight and beat them with pillowcases filled with bars of soap if they aren't treated with the respect they deserve.

Basically, read about what actually happens at British boarding schools and run that.

Alternatively: have students in direct tutelage of a singular caring teacher each, like Tamora Pearce's the circle opens quadrilogy.

Students are all trying to perform better than the others. School back them and academics today is cut-throat. you have no "friends" because the better you perform compared to your classmates, the better jobs you could get, and there are only so many prestigious assignments available. Teachers are harsh, egotistical, demanding. This also sets up why wizards sorta hate each other a lot of the time. The community is really insular amongst wizards, so your final rankings tend to spread. so your moderately ranked player will be known as being mediocre at best amongst other wizards.

Don't make it a high school like Hogwarts or Luna Nova, where the players are just starting out as wizards/witches/mages/whatever. Make it the magical equivalent of a PhD program where the players are already accomplished magicians, but are performing research or devising new, even stronger techniques. Yeah, there's the occasional examination and in the first couple or so sessions you can have what amount to graduate classes, but the meat of the campaign is unstructured (academically speaking).

It's a summer school! Because the government still hasn't developed proper standards for school level magical education, and normal schools only offer an introductory course, mostly theoretical, since only a few students have the abilities. Summer schools, however, thrive, they employ human wizards and magical races and creatures alike, and offer practical education.

Loose association of wizards in varying fields that take on students after a year or two of general instruction, picking promising candidates to have as essentially apprentices. They do the majority of the tedious work for their master's research, and some masters just use some students as cheap labor.

>How do you make a magic school interesting without just making it a rip off of Harry Potter or My Little Witch Academia?
Ripping off the setting is fine so long as the story is different.

Rip off The Worst Witch and A Wizard of Earthsea

This. The concept of a magic school wasn't what made Harry potter unique. It wad the story and way it wad told using the setting.

This. And use Ars Magica, as far as I know the only detailed wizard RPG where your character increases in power by hitting the books and every adventure is an unwelcome interruption to your enchantment project.

Harry Potter is normie-tier fantasy viewed through the British school system as it was when JK Rowling was in school in the 60s or 70s.

>The Worst Witch
Aha, someone else remembers there was magic school stuff before harry potter.

A Magic Academy where a witch hunter has infiltrated and it turns into a mystery of trying to figure out who's actually trying to kill everyone.

>Ripping off the setting

Why would you ever want to rip off Harry Potter, unless you want to bore your players to death? We are, after all, talking about one of the dullest franchises in the history of movie franchises. Seriously each episode following the boy wizard and his pals from Hogwarts Academy as they fight assorted villains has been indistinguishable from the others. Aside from the gloomy imagery, the series’ only consistency has been its lack of excitement and ineffective use of special effects, all to make magic unmagical, to make action seem inert.

Perhaps the die was cast when Rowling vetoed the idea of Spielberg directing the series; she made sure the series would never be mistaken for a work of art that meant anything to anybody, just ridiculously profitable cross-promotion for her books. The Harry Potter series might be anti-Christian (or not), but it’s certainly the anti-James Bond series in its refusal of wonder, beauty and excitement. No one wants to face that fact. Now, thankfully, they no longer have to.

>a-at least the books were good though
"No!"
The writing is dreadful; the book was terrible. As I read, I noticed that every time a character went for a walk, the author wrote instead that the character "stretched his legs."

I began marking on the back of an envelope every time that phrase was repeated. I stopped only after I had marked the envelope several dozen times. I was incredulous. Rowling's mind is so governed by cliches and dead metaphors that she has no other style of writing. Later I read a lavish, loving review of Harry Potter by the same Stephen King. He wrote something to the effect of, "If these kids are reading Harry Potter at 11 or 12, then when they get older they will go on to read Stephen King." And he was quite right. He was not being ironic. When you read "Harry Potter" you are, in fact, trained to read Stephen King.

My Friend is writing a novel that he has no intention of publishing that takes place where a magic school was created on the site of a vault containing ancient machine abominations and the sole reason the school was built was to make sure nothing got out. Fun fact, stuff got out.

Yeah, cause you always make a school in such places, it's the most reasonable decision.

Certainly safer than Detroit.

>How do you make a magic school interesting without just making it a rip off of Harry Potter

Make it good, the world of HP is a really fucking shitty setting and Hogwarts is poorly conceived

Make it a school with an ulterior purpose.

Hogwarts is a utopian institution, where the leadership basically wants what's good for the children. Real schools, even at their best, are complicated institutions with lots of competing interests and factions

>much of the academy is converged by an order of wizards who intentionally hobble the talents of young wizards to make sure their power goes unchallenged
>students are unwittingly used as fodder for rituals to research spells useful to the academy's patrons
>key posts and accolades are obtained through political maneuvering. Much of the most important magical knowledge can only be found outside the academy walls.

Pick up Ars Magica and the Apprentice book.

You can rip off The Magicians instead.

But honestly, I'd settle for some of the insanity that is Hogwarts properly explored. They do a lot of dangerous shit, but almost nobody ever dies or get hurt, but what if we really re-envision this troll-filled hellhole as a live-fire training course.

>Hypersphere
kek

Harry Potter is terrible and has aged even worse.

Rip off the school from Magi that was more than a little antisemitic.

Rip off some other YA novel (you know it's out thre somewhere) and make the students tribute to the powers that be. 90% of them become sacrifices and the very best get offered a spot perpetuating the cycle.

>Have the school run by Catholic nuns.

That's honestly pretty horrifying already

HP and Lil Witch both feel like a magical prep school or one of those fancy pre-college schools in Japan or Britain (not a Bong, don’t know the tiers exactly).

So pick a different sort of school to emulate. Treat it like a credential or certificated school and you’ll get wizards showing up for night classes, taught by burned out sorcerers only held together with drugs and caffeine. Or make it a typical American school and have half the class not know what a Dragon is a week before finals.

>Not liking Catch-22
Low quality bait

Thanks user.

Oh man. Desperate cramming and students brown-nosing for marks in an attempts to get `up' to a better school? Could be pretty great.

You're describing the monastery from dr strange

I'm doing this and it's amazing.

Hey look it's this guy again. Hi guy.

Apprenticeship used to be the way magic study was assumed to be (The Sorcerer's Apprentice and all), but I'd say a bit of this, a bit of , and a bit of , combined with UU-level manoeuvring and lack of care from the upper faculty for a "senior" level of wizarding education that's both engaging and challenging as fuck.

For a more junior level of education, make like suggests and have all the bad, bad bits of the British-style boarding school - read a bit of Roald Dahl (or something like Spud for a bit more modern take) - initiations, pranks, merciless bullying, essentially being made to be servants, etc., all condoned by teachers.

I don't know if one followed by the other would work, but you'd probably get some pretty nasty wizards out by the end of it

The Magicians is kind of interesting, at least the show, as it's a graduate school.

Ars Magica is one of my favourite systems, partially because it's the only magical RPG that does proper learning and secondly because it's basically the anti-adventure game. In any other system hearing about a basilisk terrorising the village would be a Call to Adventure, in Ars Magica it results in a load of angry groaning and players digging through the grog pile before reluctantly conceding that, yes, they probably ought to take care of this shit and lose the seasons study rather than let their covenant's local baker get eaten.

>instead of saying Hail Mary's or writing lines you're chanting incantations for the Abbess's ritual
>if she's running low on "acolytes" you better watch your ass because the smallest infraction will have you in detention
>they still move silently and do the ruler thing

>Harry Potter is normie-tier fantasy viewed through a romanticised vision of the British grammar school system as it was when JK Rowling was in school in the 60s or 70s

You're not wrong. But Harry Potter is not without merrit. The first 3 are definitly children's books though, so if you decide to read them keep that in mind

Ironically, one of the few occasions in Harry Potter where the dangers of wizarding school do have any sort of repercussions is the one where in a real life analogue there wouldn't be.

In Prisoner of Azkaban, when Draco gets injured by Buckbeak it's because he specifically ignores Hagrid's instructions and spooks the beast. For which Buckbeak is sentenced to being beheaded.

In real life, if a school class went on a field trip to a horse riding stable, and one of the pupils got kicked because he disregarded the warnings about approaching one from behind, they wouldn't kill the horse. There might be an investigation into what happens, but at worst, the school might have to pay out an insurance claim and the teacher might get a slap on the wrist.

I think the difference there is that Lucius Malfoy is on the schools board of governors and is fantastically wealthy for a wizard, what he's done is basically the equivalent of maliciously pressing for a dog that bit his son to be put down.

She went to a comprehensive (which is why the bad bits of british boarding schools aren't really there at all), but yeah.

As I actually was at (british) school and like a year or two younger than the HP kids it felt exactly normal, but looking back it's amusing just how close it matches to the regular british school system.

Hagrid has a record already (recall he was even sent to Azkaban during the second book), and the Malfoys are both rich and well-connected with the school, it's not hard to see how it happened

The "school" is not actually a school. It's a small town, tucked away somewhere quiet and out of the way, where masters of the magical arts and those semi-supernatural professions like alchemists, enchanters and fortune tellers have congregated and settled down. There are no "teachers" and no "classes," per se, but the residents of the town often take pupils and apprentices, educating them by whatever means and methods they see fit. The closest thug the town has to the traditional depiction of a magic school is the large library and magic market in the town square that many choose to use in their lessons.

How many magic schools AREN'T a massive rambling pile of mysterious corridors and towers?

Have the players run the school.
They have to attract students and try and get more funding.
Have them go on adventures each summer to find good teachers.

My players just set up an academy that not only teaches the younger generations, but also allows them to do some adventuring when they really need to do so.
I'm huh, a bit worried about having an orc in charge of the school cafeteria..especially considering most students are elves..

The college board of directorsbis also the country's ruling class.

The college is incredibly restrictive on all forms of magic and essentially runs a police state.

Why the fuck would you build a school on top of a vault containing machine abominations?

To make sure nothing gets out.

Cheap land.

Maybe magic users are the only ones strong enough to beat said abominations should they ever actually get out.

It's a rouge all female school. They have to teach in secret because
>Women's simple minds can't safely fathom the arcane.
>It's dangerous to let them even practice less they harm themselves and others.

Alternatively, you're playing a bunch of wizard school drop outs. You either couldn't afford tuition, or were denied in favor of affirmative action for women and races of color. Together you form a coven and teach each other from the scraps of arcana you manage to scrounge for the darkest corners of the internet.

>antisemitic
>Literally spoke about killing all the goy
I think you'll find it was exactly the opposite

Set it during the Spanish Inquisition so they have to do everything in secret.

>one of the 10
Make it 9 and you've got a deal.

I did engineering in college and I had a professor who taught us electronic filters and control software who was definitely a case of the second.

He was essentially the real world version of a mad, if good natured, wizard. He didn't like how expensive books were, so he gave us his notes-- except they were written by someone with decades of experience in the field, almost zero background or base material, and largely wandered between topic to topic without any real sense of progression.

His lectures would almost always go the same way, he would start by following his notes and writing on the board, but he would invariably hit a tangent that he found interesting and thought important, and begin doing something different the rest of the class.

He would ask questions of himself and respond to himself, he would occassionally lose his track of thought and ask a person in the first row what he was talking about (that person could generally say anything and he would follow that tangent too), he could do triple integrals, integration by parts, and lots of other calculus perfectly in his head, but simple addition would sometimes cause class to come to grinding halt for minutes as he agonized over it, before finally asking someone with a calculator to do it for him.

He was very friendly and always encouraged questions. However, he would often base the answer off of his past experience. So, if you asked a question he might start talking about a project he had had in Russia decades ago, which would include detailed descriptions on how control programming is very different across the world, and how the Russians were generally more rigorous and well trained in their math calculations (they put higher emphasis in solving calculations by hand), etc. Usually resulting him losing the question, finding a new one, and answering it instead.

The TAs did their best to help us, but made it clear even they didn't understand him usually. But he was real generous with grades.

Magic St Trininan's

That´s not how the myth worked.

Yeah, but I need my Battle Royal fix.

If I kill the 9 other students, does that count for him?

Sounds like a great teacher to be honest.

>Why the fuck would you build a school on top of a vault containing machine abominations?
>a magic school was created on the site of a vault containing ancient machine abominations and the sole reason the school was built was to make sure nothing got out
>and the sole reason the school was built was to make sure nothing got out
>the sole reason
>to make sure nothing got out

The whole school is a money making scheme. The tuition is absurdly high and almost all the money goes to fund the projects of high ranking members of the staff.

All of the teaching, except for a handful of high level classes, is done my unpaid teacher's aids.

The classes seem custom tailored to hand out magical secrets at just the right pace to keep student's on the hook.

If you're willing to jump through all the hoops, stick around for a few decades and are particularly talented, you can make it into the the teaching staff. Most wash out after a few years with a low level diploma and the system equivalent of 1st level wizard powers.

I would hope so, if not there's only one soul left in the class.

>Painfully generic story about a chosen one facing the dark one
>Unique
The only thing unique about Harry Potter is the setting, and its criminally under used and its implications are barely thought out.

Harry Potter is good as far as YA fiction goes, but its barely passable for an adult

I think the question is, if the sole reason is to make sure nothing gets out, why would you put a school there and not say, a castle, military base or particularly large rock?

He was definitely entertaining, but it could be frustrating. He was so high up on the pillar of knowledge I don't think he really know how to talk to beginners any more. Every homework and lab was basically a research project for us and we nver really knew if we were doing it right/or the way he wanted.

It was definitely frustrating for the teachers after im too, since they never really knew what he was going to cover i the intro course. So, they had to grill us the first couple weeks to find where their class could actually start.

Classes year to eyar would vary quite different in the material that was actually taught, but he had a number of sayings and mannerisms which had clearly been unaltered for decades.

For instance, he would many times generate a profile of sin wave profile and then add layers of noise. He would then invariable ask "Can you see the frequencies?" Then, he would quickly type away and make a filter (which may or may not have been the type of the day) which would clear the noise and reveal the signal. He would always ask us to guess what he was trying to do in the preocess. He would sometimes forget he had done the example already though, so he'd sometimes repeat this multiple times in one class or over the course of days. At first it seemed he was just making sure we could do it, but he always seemed to express a genuine sens of surprise when we would be able to guess what he was doing.

He also went to great lengths to avoid saying certain words like "filter" even though that's precisely what we were learning. The reason for this was unknown, but he seemed to avoid it all costs, even skipping it completely or changing it to something else when he wrote his notes. One TA had suggested it was probably because he didn't want the class to know what the application of what we were doing was, even though it was obvious from the first day. This led to a general belief he had long ago forgotten what he was supposed to be teaching.

The abomination draws off the natural winds and magic that surround the area.

There are complex and very difficult arcane spells and charms which can naturally keep them from the abomination, or you can just cast a lot of really low level spells over and over and use up the wind in the area.

It's thus cheaper to have hundreds of novices practicing basic light and fire spells (which they would have to be doing elsewhere anyway) than it is taxing two or three grandmasters who would literally have to send all their time warding.

that's a neat concept, actually.

>ancient machine abominations
>That also feed on magic somehow
>and the most efficient way to keep them sealed is to use up all the magic in the area
>But if you don't all of your low level newbies and possibly the teachers get murdered
Seems both contrived and silly

That sounds pretty epic to be honest.
The weirdest teacher I had was an Asian guy who taught my Calc class.

He didn't speak English very well. Over the course of the semester he had a bunch of dental surgery.

I'm glad I had calc in high school, because most of the class was done in pantomime.

That's a much better explanation than "Just cus"

ARS MAGICA
READ ARS MAGICA

>The faculties collective faces during summer break

...

>the school constantly brings in wizards from far away and exotic places
>their own magic traditions are vastly diffrent then the local ones and even that being taught
>as such, they are either teach high level students challenging and eye opening courses
>or are relegated to basic intro courses like identifying roots and basic wand drills

What event would cause said abominations to actually awaken and escape?

I suppose a long enough period of exposure to high amounts of wind. Say, a week or even a few weeks in unobstructed wind would barely cause it to stir, but over months and years it slowly rebuilds its strength. There could always be outliers, storms of magic which cause unnaturally high amounts of wind that require direct counters.

An interesting mix would be that the abomination could also be awakened by having enough magic being cast AT it. In such case, a society based on magic would have great difficulty subduing it by an other means than depriving it of the source.

Arse Magic? Keep your magical realm to yourself, ya creep.

He sounds like a seething mass of ingrained habits, OCD, weapons-grade autism, and flat-out trolling the rest of the faculty.

Got any more stories about him?

>Lucius Malfoy is on the schools board of governors
Booted off the year before actually. Rather, he has his hand so far up the minister's ass you can see his family ring every time Fudge talks.

He reminds me of my Design Technology teachers, actually.
> They could do really complex stuff basically with their eyes closed
> Knew the ins and outs of every tool
> One spent his free time making acoustic guitars in the workshop
> The more times a student had to choose to remain in the subject, the more they got treated as an equal, and the less supervision they got
> Taught all the theory from memory
> Ancient computer equipment maintained (at great protest) by the IT department because it did stuff newer ones couldn't.
> Such as laser-printing onto transparent plastic for making circuitboards
> Also did their own first aid due to the nature of the subject
> One summer, their department was renovated to keep them separated from the science labs, meaning the only entrance for pupils was through the fire exits
> Secret metalworking room for the advanced students to get taught important stuff in
> They absolutely lived for the moments when a class collectively realised they'd learned something interesting

He has approxiamately two outfits at any time. As an old man, his sense of style is entrenched and unchanging. Giant white sneakers, jeans, and a long-sleeve button-up shirt with vents.

When he went outside, he'd wear what seemed to be a cowboy duster and stetson with a feather. This made him rather prminent and well known even amongst students he didn't have in class. He would often be spotted wandering around different parts of campus, despite not having any classes or appreciable reason for being there.

Some said he just liked getting out for exercise and seeing the parts he hadn't been to a while. A sadder theory was that he was going to talk to a colleague or friend in a different department, though they had either died or stopped working there years ago.

He was basically a guy that you felt would teach a class the same way for one student or three hundred, because he might not have really realizd the difference.

I got into the habit of sitting front and center because it helped me hear him (never used a microphone) and I noticed that he would often lock eyes with me for extendd periods or use me as a spatial refernce when he was refocusing.

It was cool when he'd engage me with questions and thoughts, but I definitely felt it might have left the other students a bit out of the loop.

Read the Magician. Do it like that.

Maybe a Ghostbusters scenario where the Government comes in and suspends all magical activity temporarily

>a world slowly being overrun by an eldritch forest

Or even christian monasteries

Considering the inevitability that someone will fuck up a spell and nuke the school or release an army of demons, it might be worhtwhile not to have centralized education. That way, you don't lose an entire generation of magic users in one go.

Small groups, dedicated to a particular mage teacher might provide a better base. Think Jedi and their learners, or old-timey or rural one room schools where different ages/levels of skill learn together, as opposed to a massive boarding school a la Hogwarts

>the inevitability that someone will fuck up a spell and nuke the school or release an army of demons
Stop using a shit system/setting if this is a possibility.

Came here to post this.
I love this concept so much, comfy as fuck.

>a school where I don't need to wait for lunchbreak to frag cyberdemons and spiderdemons
Where do I sign in ?

>universe where magic exists
>magic can be used to cause vast destruction
>novices are trying to learn magic
>nothing can possibly go wrong
?