OSSR: Redhurst Academy of Magic

[Prak]

Hogwarts charges a tuition--Harry worries about that, and is told not to worry because mum and dad were actually fucking filthy rich. However, they also have financial aid which Tom Riddle got, and possibly the Weasleys too? But it really comes off as "Oh, you have money? Yes, we'd like some, please." to some students and "Oh, you don't have money? Well, fuck it, all our shit is magically conjured anyway." to others.

The book never specifies, so it's theoretically possible Pettigrew happened to be wandering around in his human form at that precise moment. It's a nice head canon that doesn't involve the twins somehow forgetting who Pettigrew was, like the head canon that they assumed it was another student.

[GreatGreyShrike]

The whole thing with the Map, the rat=Pettigrew reveal, and the Sirius Black stuff was all in the third book. Rowling started trying to make her stories make more sense and be more internally consistent instead of being silly but harmless boarding school romps around books 4+. The fact that a huge amount of stuff that had been established in books 1-3 was internally inconsistent and frankly bizarre was working against her, and quite frankly her strengths as a writer aren't in the arena of having totally consistent and sensible worldbuilding background details. Most non-protagonist characters didn't have a strongly realized viewpoint and sensible goals that they advanced through reasonable methods basically ever.

I frankly liked the earlier books better. For some reason, a story which tries somewhat to make some sort of sense and fails hard in major, inextricable ways is harder on my suspension of disbelief than a story that just asks you to throw your sense to the wind almost 'Alice in Wonderland' style. It was pretty clear that in the Philosopher's Stone Rowling was not trying to make Dumbledore *or* Voldemort's plans or actions make a lot of sense when considered in the sober light of day, and so didn't really invite my criticism as much as their later plans did.

[Ancient History]

When you ladies and 30-year-old virgin wizards are done talking about the eldritch secrets of Harry fucking Potter...

Chapter 2: Campus Life


Two points for Gryffindor.

AncientH:

We've move from intro-pamphlet mode to student-handbook mode. This is bringing back very bad memories of my first college, where I was required to memorize large sections of the student handbook and have to recite them back on command on pain of push-ups. I did so many push-ups during my first semester in college that I once went down and I seriously couldn't get up again. I had to roll onto my side and crawl up to a standing position. I couldn't actually hold the door open. Thankfully, that was a Thursday and the next arms day wasn't until Tuesday, by which point I had regained enough upper body strength to not lie weeping on the ground.

This also reminds me of something this chapter lacks: an ROTC program for war-mages or bladesingers or something.


I did my pre-med as an Enchanter.

FrankT:

This is a short chapter. We're still in the “School Brochure” format where it's nominally the dean talking to you in vague generalities about how awesome the school is and how lucky you are to be going here. So none of the little sections get much more than half a page. We run through Your Life As A Student; The School Rules; Getting Around; Living Arrangements; Class Schedules; Counselors; Graduation Requirements; Tuition; Extra-Curricular Activities; Sports; Excursions; Games; Drama; Internships and Apprenticeships; Adventuring; Diplomacy; Research; Advanced Training; Redhurst Traditions; and Our Schedule. That's twenty headings, and it's all done in a dozen pages and there is art. So really none of this gets any sort of deep development, it's just a second chapter of overview and introduction.

The school rules get on the first page. There are only four of them and are all vague bullshit like “Respect the Staff.” This is the kind of crap that elementary schools pull. I remember when my elementary school started insisting that they only had four rules and they were open ended garbage like “Be Where You're Supposed To Be.” Even as a 3rd grader it was painfully obvious to me that that was actually all kinds of rules about where you were supposed to be when and where you were supposed to not go, and that knowledge of the big meta rules was absolutely useless for informing behavior of any kind.


I couldn't decide where to go with the “Respect the Staff” so I left the implied penis joke open ended.

Basically this comes down to the fact that I can't tell how old these kids are supposed to be. Apparently the drinking age here is 16 and people are expected to become that old at some point while at the school. But how that fits in to some of the students being Elves and Dwarves I do not know. The educational metaphors keep getting mixed up, going seamlessly from proclamations about research and shit that only make sense for university students, and simplified Mickey Mouse rules that appear to have been thought up to try to push elementary school students around with.

AncientH:

Honestly, it could be worse. There could be a demerit system.


As a student at Redhurst, the golem of Robert E. Lee did not earn a single demerit. He was known as "The Marble Model."

The major problem I have with this chapter is that Redhurst is not magical enough. I know that sound ridiculously weird, but if you look back at the first Harry Potter movie (look, I only made it through the first four and never read the books), or better yet T. H. White's The Once and Future King or Neil Gaiman's The Books of Magick, one of the fun and exciting things is how much magic there is to learn. Seriously, the whole fucking point of those books is that you're moving from muggle-ville to the Wizarding World, and stuff that's ridiculously expensive like self-serving spoons and animate brooms and continual torches and shit should be commonplace. Yes, I know this doesn't really work with D&D mechanics, even the Eberron pseudo-factory system, but that's the point. You want stuff to be different, and in a way you want magical elevators and moving stairs and golem-powered gristmills and skeletons doing the laundry.


I got lost looking for the picture of D&D's actual skeleton-powered washing machine and stopped when I found this.

FrankT:

The “Getting Around” subsection is pretty short, and it's a bit of pontificating about how a teleporting campus makes directions like “North” and “West” fairly meaningless so people just use the Grover directions of “Near” and “Far” relative to the main gate. This indicates that the author has put some thought into the difficulties that this teleporting campus creates. But so far there has been no attempt at all to sell me on why this is a good idea. It's really quite a bit of conceptual baggage and so far literally every single thing that could contribute to a story or a character background could be achieved easier by having a room with “a bunch of portals” in it on the 3rd floor of the Conjuration department. That would accomplish everything the book has so far introduced as an actual narrative element.


What do we actually gain by doing this instead of just having a hall of portals somewhere? As far (or near) as I can tell: nothing.

There are five dorms, and each student goes into one of them. This is of course a piece of Harry Potter fanservice that had to happen, but there's nothing here. In this chapter they just tell you that the dorms are named after where they are in the compound. So the “Left Dorm” is to the left when you enter by the main gate. Fuck this. The actual descriptions of these dorms aren't until chapter 4, but spoiler alert: there is nothing interesting about these things. The left dorm is the nicest building and gives you a view of the lawn. Also a couple of instructors have rooms in the dorm because that isn't creepy at all. We don't even get a thing where Ravenclaw students are more studious and Hufflepuff are more uninteresting. It's just a fucking dorm with like rooms and shit.


Turns out Hufflepuff parties are the best parties.

We aren't terribly far into the book, but the setting really has to get its sorting hat shit sorted. There are cliques and they have magic, because we're doing fantasy highschool. So this brochure shit needs to stop like last chapter so that we can get on to the important shit of figuring out which wizard students run the yearbook committee.

AncientH:

They don't actually tell you what the average term of study is, although they suggest a minimum of five years. They talk about your first year, which is generic shit, and how eventually you work your way up by taking electives in fields that interest you, like Gnomish Tantra or Dwarven Runeforging or Advanced Hit Point Generation or something, but there's no rules or mechanics given so I have no idea what that means in the context of how many spells you can have in your spellbook or which feats you take. They talk about how most students are specialists and of course there are exams in your fifth year, but they really haven't worked out the nuts and bolts.


Okay, so I sinned against nature. Is it too late to change my concentration to Biothaumaturgy?

They also talk about tuition again. Which, as I pointed out, seems excessive when the players realize they can quickly exit the game if they just spend their inheritance on hookers and wands.

FrankT:

Quidditch is a stupid game. It's probably the stupidest game. Even within the confines of young adult fiction, I can't think of a game that is as stupid as Quidditch. They weren't able to make it look not fucking terrible in any of the movies, which is amazing because they had the leisure to show pretty much just highlight reels of the fucking thing and there were like four different directors given chances to try to make it look “not shit” and they all failed bad. In Redhurst, they have a thing that is like Quidditch because it's Harry Potter fanfiction and of course you have to have something Quidditchesque. It's called Spellflag, and due to the fact that it isn't Quidditch, it is much much less stupid than Quidditch. I don't even know how you could make something that was dumber than Quidditch.



I couldn't even be fucked to show you Quidditch pics, fuck Quidditch. These are two much better fictional games for teenagers with magical powers to play from modern fantasy fiction. Fuck.

There are also school theatrical productions put on by the school of Illusion and the drama club. Because of course there are. I don't condemn this, in fact I think this pretty much had to happen. The thing is, there aren't nearly enough clubs. It's a highschool full of wizards, clubs is like the whole thing. This needs to be like a Highschool Anime, or like World of Darkness without pretending that any of these groups were bigger or more important than the school geology club.

This was the book's chance to really go crazy. Put up some wizardly versions of Debate Team, Mathletes, and Model UN. Go even crazier with wizardly versions of identity groups like the LGBTers or the Asian/Pacific Islander group. Go crazier still with wizardly versions of enthusiast groups like 4H and the anime club. This should have been the book's core right here – really let the freak flag fly with the Demon Fanciers Club and shit. Instead, we don't get that. There are jocks who play sports and drama nerds who put on plays. And... that's it. What the fuck? This isn't even the bare minimum on extra-curricular activities and weird ass clubs to join.


This is the Exorcism Club from Haunted Junction.

I wanted a set of World of Darkness style groups at a minimum. I didn't get it. I think that alone makes this chapter a failure.

AncientH:

Another Potter-rip is the concept of Dueling. This got my hopes up for a minute, because I was imagining teenaged dwarves tying their beards together and going at it with axes, or poncy elves popping each other's zits with rapiers, or something.


Sadly, not this kind of dueling. Which is sad. We need more hardcore wizards-in-training.

Instead, what we get is a kind of bloodless Defense Against the Dark Arts deal, except done in a place where none of the magic can actually hurt you (although being knocked unconscious isn't generally considered to be good for you either). I'm not entirely certain how this works, because if we assume - ha - that the majority of these students are 1st-level wizards, that means they have 3 cantrips and one 1st-level spell to their name. Now, if they really work the feats they can probably squeeze in another spell slot or some minor spell-like abilities, but at that level everybody has 1d4 + Con Bonus hit points and the best spell they can must is probably magic missile (which deals 1d4 + 1 damage). So that means that whoever has the initiative is probably going to win - but if their spell doesn't take, they're fuxxored. Half-Orcs and Dwarves (not to mention Half-Giants and shit) probably own at dueling.

I dunno, maybe I'm under-thinking it. It would be sort of interesting to do a double-elimination tournament kind of deal, where each player brings a 1st-level character to the table and they get to go at it, with the GM acting as arbitrator, dice-roller, and referee. Anybody interested in that?

Got off on a tangent there, but to underline Frank's point: there's not a lot there for extracurricular activities outside of sports, and that's sad. In the Miskatonic University sourcebook, it detailed about a half-dozen secret societies of different stripes, not to mention different clubs and campus activities. I do think Frank is right in that not having other magical schools to compete against sort of kills the competitive spirit.

FrankT:

A considerable amount of ink gets given over to the idea of students getting apprenticed off to archmages and adventuring parties. And by considerable, I mean two entire half-pages, back to back. That's like a whole page (about 800 words in this book's weird sideways format). The thing is: I don't buy it. This book is supposed to be about Harry Potter fanfiction, which means that we play wizards in school. So having characters run off to be attachment mages in D&D parties having regular D&D adventures is like 0% of the selling points of this book. Characters who are off having regular D&D adventures are not in and around Redhurst Academy, or really any Wizard School, so internships are pretty much completely incompatible with the rest of the book's setting.


The anime “Rune Soldier” actually is about a Fighter/Thief/Cleric team who hire a shitty student arcane caster from the mage academy so that they can continue adventuring. But almost none of that takes place in a school, so it's bad source material for this book to try to draw upon.

In the first year, every student takes the same classes, and as the years go on, this is gradually replaced with an individualized course of study. This is a pretty good setup, and about what you'd want. You can also be a graduate student here, which seems to be doing the University metaphor too hard. It's a High School, not a University. The author keeps forgetting that, and that is unfortunate.

AncientH:

I can sort of see a campaign where you're all apprentices and squires and shit to a party of grizzled adventurers, and you end up doing chores and then going off on your own sort of Teen Titans/Young Justice style, but the whole second-fiddle thing is not for every campaign, and it's really not even for this campaign. I mean, I guess it would help during solstice break to go out, kill some orcs, and get enough XP to level up for next semester. Would put you at least a little bit ahead of some of the other students. Kindof like an internship, which is exactly what they call them. And let me tell you, nothing takes you out of a quasi-medieval fantasy setting like reading the fucking phrase "internship coordinator" in a gods-be-damned sourcebook.

FrankT:

There's a half page list of “Redhurst Traditions.” These are like spitballed ideas. Some of these look like they are supposed to be superstitions that students pass down to each other. Some of them look like cultural customs that people are supposed to emulate. Some of them look like hazing rituals that students put each other through. Still others are just things that someone does periodically. They aren't in the same “voice” and it's hard to figure out how any of this is supposed to work. Something like this is absolutely essential to a book like this. But I have to say I'm not impressed with the list they have. It looks like someone wrote up some list items in the bathtub and then never developed or edited any of it.


It didn't have to be amazing or deep, it just had to have the sort of Harry Potter / Mean Girls “New School, New Rules” sort of feel.

In chapter 2 they correctly identify equinoxes as being vernal and autumnal, while solstices are summer and winter. This makes the bit about summer equinoxes in chapter 1 more weird. The book specifically doesn't commit to a travel schedule for the school, and I am reminded again of the fact that year lengths in these different worlds are not the same and probably not in sync with each other. So this whole thing is still dumb and I don't know why it's happening.

AncientH:

There's a comic I really enjoyed called PS238. It's a semi-public middle school for superpowered kids, both the ones that seem destined to grow up as heroes and as villains, so there are different cliques all set up. It's fun in a way that the X-Men aren't. Every now and again people remember that the X-Men started out as Xavier's School of Gifted Youngsters and try to bring X-Men back to their roots by revisiting the school schtick - and it is always, always a fucking disaster, because every single kid in the X-Men is a unique snowflake and none of their courses actually address basic shit, much less how they're supposed to learn to use their powers when everyone else has different ones, more or less. The X-Men aren't a school, they're a big dysfunctional family where in some timeline somebody has fucked everybody.



And these are important things to address in wizarding school - what the fuck do you actually learn? Miskatonic University went through the effort of coming up with a whole point system for education, and while I don't particularly like their implementation (because Chaosium rules are made of unicorn pubic hair and cancer), but I can totally grok why they have them. If you are going to have something resembling a five-year campaign, you really need to buckle down and devote...something to that, because fuck it, there are stats involved, and why the fuck am I taking Alchemy when I'm a Steam Gnome Mechamage anyway?

FrankT:

Really, this chapter had one job: to present me with hooks upon which to design a character, a team of teenage sleuths, and an adventure. So that's maybe like three jobs. But it didn't give me those things. This is a bad chapter, and I hope the author feels bad about having written it. I suspect he doesn't.


Why don't we have a sword fight in order to take control over the future club?

Next up: The Faculty.


Stabbing John Stewart in the eye is optional.

AncientH:

I misread Frank's second-to-last comment and was reminded of Ghostwalk, where an inanimate carbon magic rod was head of the mage's guild. Why isn't there a Young Mage's Guild on campus? Why aren't there more talking intelligent magic items? And where do the corpses for the zombies for the Necromancy classes come from? Do they repurpose students that fail "the exam of life"? I mean seriously, with any amount of magic and high towers and walls and alcohol and shit flowing about, they have to average at least 2-3 student deaths per semester. It's wizarding school, after all. There's not a lot of healing in arcane magic, at least not until you get to the higher levels of things, where flesh to stone is the same as saying "prep for surgery."

[name_here]

The main setting benefit I can see for a teleporting campus is that it allows you to rotate what town you can go into and lock out going to the same town you did before so you can have wacky episodic adventures. Plus the occasional "Oh shit we really shouldn't have teleported here and it's going to be a couple weeks before we can teleport away." That of course presupposes that you want to do that.

[Whipstitch]

I'm pretty sure the author is the only one who thought finding a benefit was impossible.

[Koumei]

Even the actor who played Harry thinks Quidditch is a dumb sport from a "sport with an actual fucking point" sense, given the scoring methods and the whole "yeah you can just fuck off to Bengal for a week and the game is still going because nobody won yet."

Anyway, people might think this is where I'd plug the Revised Bakuhatsu Gakuen, but that'd be self-aggrandi- oh snap, I just did it! Anyway, back in 3.5, someone did make Sigil Prep as an online setting, and it's basically exactly what it sounds like. But different campuses existed for basically every major character archetype as defined by the Complete series or whatever. So there was the Arcane campus, the Divine campus (includes nature), the Martial campus, the Adventuring campus (for Rogues and crap), the Psionic campus, the Monstrous campus (for Savage Species characters) and I think they later added an Incarnum campus.

And yes, if you're a Hexblade, you're sort of expected to have to do the Uni student thing where you go "Shit, my Two-Handed SwordingAstrophysics lecture in the MartialWheately Campus just finished, now I have half an hour to get all the way to the ArcaneJohnson Campus for TransmutationViking Studies." Likewise multiclassing characters who are continuing to alternate classes or whatever. If you're just taking 2 Fighter levels before leaping off into Rogue forever, then you'd be "changing majors" and probably never go back to Martial Campus.

They at least addressed what might be taught to the various character classes, and examples of clubs. So you know, apparently more than this one does.

[AndreiChekov]

Revised Bakuhatsu Gakuen,

you have just earned my undying love

[Whipstitch]

I didn't know you kept working on that. As opposed to expressing appreciation I'm going to call you a butthole for not telling me.

[DrPraetor]

Ooh, I have a new signature.

[Prak]

Chaosium rules are made of unicorn pubic hair and cancer. --AncientH

Wouldn't the unicorn pubic hair counteract the cancer?

[Longes]

Chaosium rules are made of unicorn pubic hair and cancer. --AncientH

Wouldn't the unicorn pubic hair counteract the cancer?

It only counteracts horn cancern.

[RobbyPants]

It's been a few years since I was in school, and I still have nightmares about failing, the king where I wake up and for rather longer than I like to admit I worry that I've signed up for an online course and have somehow forgotten about it and oh shit.

Oh good, I'm relieved that other people have this one.

Yeah, that's by far my most common occurring nightmare.

Runner up: falling dreams.
Honorable mention: fucked up things happening to my teeth.

[erik]

It's been a few years since I was in school, and I still have nightmares about failing, the king where I wake up and for rather longer than I like to admit I worry that I've signed up for an online course and have somehow forgotten about it and oh shit.

Oh good, I'm relieved that other people have this one.

Yeah, that's by far my most common occurring nightmare.

Runner up: falling dreams.
Honorable mention: fucked up things happening to my teeth.

It had been a while now But during and at least a couple years after college I would have the dream that I had some English or social class with copious reading and papers that I had signed up for and totally forgotten about.

More current anxiety fare of getting screwed out of my job 3 years ago has totally supplanted that nightmare though. So there's one way to cure it, I guess just needed a real traumatic event instead.

[Maxus]

Oh good, I'm relieved that other people have this one.

Yeah, that's by far my most common occurring nightmare.

Runner up: falling dreams.
Honorable mention: fucked up things happening to my teeth.

It had been a while now But during and at least a couple years after college I would have the dream that I had some English or social class with copious reading and papers that I had signed up for and totally forgotten about.

More current anxiety fare of getting screwed out of my job 3 years ago has totally supplanted that nightmare though. So there's one way to cure it, I guess just needed a real traumatic event instead.

It sounds hokey, but realizing I'm naked in public and trying to hide is my main one.

[AndreiChekov]

Really, this chapter had one job: to present me with hooks upon which to design a character, a team of teenage sleuths, and an adventure.

when I first read that I thought it said a teem of teenage sluts.
the picture below it confirmed this belief
then I read it again.

[Whipstitch]

I never have typical bad dreams. My last dream that looked like it was about to take a dark turn didn't even end up so bad; I dreamt my chihuahua had died, but it was OK because she came back as a non-repeating phantasm. Too much Ghostbusters, I guess.

[souran]

If you were going to do the "we are attend a magic school" thing using d20 why would you try and force the whole game into the non-existant space at level 1/level 0? Why wouldn't you just assume that level 1 is 14 year olds showing up?

That way at least you can have a campaign.

Anyway, I have a hard time thinking that people playing d20 would be able to keep the game looking anything like hogwars. The closest you could probably get get would be brakebills/the magicians including the unbelievable amount of complaining

[Ancient History]

Chapter 3: The Faculty


Did we already make a “The Faculty” joke? Oh dear... we may be out of Jokes, Harry.

FrankT:

This is the first chapter where you see a difference between the paper version and the pdf. The physical book has minimalistic d20 statlines for all these characters and the pdf has those stripped out and replaced with white space. Well, mottled gray space, but you know what I mean. You don't actually care, because the statlines aren't quite usable anyway. I don't mean that they are terrible (although they are), I mean that Wizards in 3rd edition are actually very complicated characters and the pertinent information does not fit into these little text boxes.

A Wizard in 3rd edition D&D rules is probably pretty close to being the most complicated a character can be and still get played in a tabletop game. Wizards have access to a list of spells, and then each day they prepare a sublist of those spells that can be used once each during the day, and then they cast some of those spells prophylactically and leave the rest to be cast at need. So to really know what a Wizard is about, you need to see what they look like without their spells, what spells they prepare on a typical day, what they look like after they've cast their personal grooming spells to get ready for work, and what spells are in their spellbook that they could prepare instead if they decided that things required a different approach today for whatever reason.

These statblocks give you base stats and typical daily spell layout, which neatly threads the needle of not actually presenting them in the form they would be encountered if you kicked their office door in on a random Thursday (when their morning spell routine would presumably already be cast) and not telling you what their options would be if they were told that the academy was going to be attacked by Deatheaters the next day and it was time to stop preparing locate object and start getting real.


When shit like this is going down, Wizards tend to open up the “back pages” of their spellbooks. We are not told what those pages contain for these Wizards.

So while we could certainly poke fun at some of the choices (the Dean is an 18th level character with an AC of 16 because literally his only source of defense is a +4 Ring of Protection, which is totally ridiculous when you remember that he's high enough level for his mage armor to last all frickin day), it doesn't really warrant that sort of examination. It's not terribly important that these statlines are bad, because they are not complete. Also, they seem to not necessarily be for the characters on the page they are on. The aforementioned dean is described as being a stern but affable dwarf, the art shows him as a superhero in Gryffindor colors, but his statline tells us he is a necromancer wearing a Cloak of the Bat (meaning that he should be Slytherin at the very least). Except for the part where all three depict a Dwarf, there's really no indication that the text, the statblock, and the art go with the same character.

AncientH:

There's also a lot of these fucking things. You ever walk into an old-school college - not like, a state university that calls itself a college or a community college or something, but an actual college of a larger university, where the staff is all tucked away into the same building, and there's a lobby and secretary and everything? Well, if you have, you'll know there's a big glass case or board hovering around the lobby which lists pretty much everyone in the building and where their office is (whether or not they actually occupy said office, or wander around or fucking hide or sneak out the back window like Indiana Jones to avoid all contact with students is another subject entirely.) This chapter is a lot like that list.


I have to admit, the window looks tempting.

There's also the problem that none of these characters are very interesting. When Ed Greenwood throws out a shitload of mage levels/stats in abbreviated format, he usually gives them fuck-you signature-and-or-unique magic items or powers or something and quirky themes or some shit. But this book wants to be this:



and ends up looking like this:

FrankT:

This chapter manages to be 30 fucking pages long and writes up 28 characters. Because there are two pages of introduction and each character gets a full page even if they are just like a stablemaster or something. There's two faculty members for each school of magic, and as you'll recall there are 8 different schools of magic in D&D. So for each one you get a rant about the head of the department (called the “dean” rather than “vice dean” or “department head” in order to make shit more confusing) and then one other person in the department. This is at once too many to meaningfully give in-depth information on what they want to do (and despite having stat blocks it's still being given from a “not omniscient” perspective so anything in here could be wrong or whatever); and way too little to actually fill out the roster. Honestly, I don't know how many people are required to run an Enchantment/Charm department, and reading this book I still don't. I would think there would need to be various madames and jizz moppers in addition to secretaries and accountants and shit alongside the instructors and researchers and shit. I could see it going as low as 8, but I know damn well it's more than two. And yet, all we get is a department head who is a hot elf chick that teaches introduction to enchantment and a shirtless supplementary instructor who teaches weird shit in electives. Who the fuck teaches advanced enchantment? If you want to sign up for an enchantment elective, who do you talk to?


This isn't specifically related to this bit, I just wanted to use it.

Now my high school has like 80 faculty members in it, and that doesn't count administrators or counselors. And that is a highschool that, not to put too fine a point on it, does not have to protect itself from demon attack and whose students never transform themselves into dragons. We could have gotten like one page that just listed all the fucking faculty members including custodians and secretaries. But we didn't. We get a meandering survey of staff that is just a page per character until the author got bored of writing these fucking things.

AncientH:

One of the things I love about Unseen University in Terry Pratchett's Discworld was the early concept of "dead wizard's pointy shoes." The idea being that to explain having wizards denoted by "level," that the whole thing was organized something like a masonic society, with the guys higher up having more access to magic (as magic is a finite resource). Moving upwards in power was generally accomplished by Klingon promotion - i.e. you kill off a higher-level wizard and take their place. It got even better because wizards were pretty good at defending themselves from magic, so the most common means of bumping each other off involved subtle poisons, ground glass in the food, and mysterious accidents - basic assassination stuff. It was all in jolly good fun.



I say this because according to this, the headmaster of the school ruled it with an iron fist for 500 years, and the school secretary has been there for 100 years. They're both fucking elves, but you get the drift: this place needs some fucking turnover. Even fucking Hogwarts acknowledged that Dumbledore was only the latest in a long line of head wizards. Fucking fuck, even the half-elf head chef has been there over 100 years.

FrankT:

This book is using 3rd edition specialization rules. That means that as a specialist mage, you can't learn or cast any spells from your barred school. That's kind of weird with the whole “everyone gets the same classes first year” thing, because it means that when you specialize it is by which classes you got a big fat red zero in. This is very weird. It means that failing, not just regular failing but ultra failing a quarter of your classes in the first year is extremely normal. You'd think the book would make something of that, or provide some sort of alternate explanation like people are really just learning spellcraft, and you have to select a number of A-levels to take exams in actually casting spells from at the end of the year. But we don't. We just get sub-minimal staff assignments for each of the eight departments.



There is a lot of fail to go around is what I'm saying.

It's not that there aren't any plot hooks in here, there totally are. The Conjuration department recently had a restructuring after a werewolf rampage. Which is odd, because I think werewolves are one of the only monsters in all of D&D that conjurers don't have an easy means of losing control over in the middle of their department. But whatever. You could, if you wanted, have your student wizards investigate the mysterious case of Sirius Black or whatever the fuck you wanted to call it. But these plot hooks are thin on the ground. Maybe all of these dude writeups are supposed to have a plot hook, but to my eyes they don't all. For one thing, some of them are just reiterating that an event that took place in a different writeup is still totally on. For example, like half of the page for the second Conjuration school dude is him writing a letter to students that he's sad that the werewolf attack described in the Conjuration department head page happened.

It really seems like they could have done more with the space they had. The pictures aren't stellar, and the amount of wordcount given to any of these assholes is enough that you'd think they had far more to say. This chapter needed hierarchical presentation. A page telling us how many staff there were and what they were all called (and presumably what species they were). Then alternate between full page descriptions for characters whose stories contain actual plot hooks, and then do the “suspect #2” type characters at the rate of four per page. Instead what we got is someone putting in the half assed minimum effort on each page, and then having the entire chapter be less than the sum of its parts. This chapter needed to be designed. Instead someone just sat down and wrote it until it was full of text.

AncientH:

Some of these plot hooks don't even make any fucking sense. Let's look at this one:

Additionally, Lady Christopha has posted a new school security policy outside her office. Everyone should spend some time reading it. As part of this, she has instituted a zero-tolerance policy on unauthorized casting in the school. Ignorance of this new policy is no excuse.

What the fuck is this shit? It is a wizard school where you do magic and buried on page 29 is a little-known bylaw that you're not allowed to actually use what little fucking spellcasting ability you have on pain of getting a spanking by Lady Christopha? Whose sorry fucking idea was that? The Potter kid would have been out on his ass faster than you can mumble some fake fucking Latin.

We also get a couple references to gods here, and these are extremely generic. We've got a Mother Goddess (which, oddly enough, is one of the few archetypes often missing from D&D pantheons) and a God of Magic. Frankly, I'd just as soon the Mother Goddess turned out to be Shub-Niggurath, because so many of these character descriptions are sickly-sweet I think I'm getting diabetes.

They also mention a "board of regents," I think for the first time. They don't tell you anything about it or who is on it or what the university endowment is (probably somewhere in the millions of gp), but obviously whoever wrote this particular chapter knew that many universities have such things and decided that this magical highschool needed one as well. I'm amazed we don't have a Parent-Teacher Organization that the school has to contend with, or a Booster Club.

FrankT:

I still can't actually tell what the staff can do. I mean, I don't even know if the faculty has the right to brutally beat recalcitrant students. It's D&D land, so I assume they can. But it doesn't really say.



But that's basically the whole chapter. Next up, we do Chapter 4, which we teasered a bit in Chapter 2. Because 28 pages of that is the extended key to the map presented in Chapter 2, without which the whole map is just circles and rectangles drawn with MS Paint.

AncientH:

To expand on something Frank mentioned, we have no idea what the colleges actually teach besides their specific spell specializations, but some of the non-College staff teach stuff too, apparently. That sounds okay...it's a bit like Hagrid almost getting kids killed each semester dealing with wild animals, which I approve of.


Anybody else remember when this lady was dragged off by centaurs to presumably be raped to death by horse cocks?

So we've got the Stablemaster, Faragrim that does that kind of shit. Sortof. They have a list of seminars he gives, from the good (First Aid for Familiars) to the wtf (Dung Sculpting). Which about sums up this chapter in two words.

[Prak]

If you were going to do the "we are attend a magic school" thing using d20 why would you try and force the whole game into the non-existant space at level 1/level 0? Why wouldn't you just assume that level 1 is 14 year olds showing up?

Yeah, if someone forced me to run Schoolgirls and Sorcery with d20, I would just say that adults are level 5 or so. Hell, I might make adults "epic" if I wanted a full 20 level game.

Of course, it occurs to me that this gives us high schoolers with the ability to shape mountains... which is a bit harder to hand wave than just scrapping the MM and writing even iconic monsters as needed.

various madames and jizz moppers

Obviously both are provided on spec by the conjuring department.

[schpeelah]

Yeah, if someone forced me to run Schoolgirls and Sorcery with d20, I would just say that adults are level 5 or so. Hell, I might make adults "epic" if I wanted a full 20 level game.

Of course, it occurs to me that this gives us high schoolers with the ability to shape mountains... which is a bit harder to hand wave than just scrapping the MM and writing even iconic monsters as needed.

If we're doing Hogwarts in a level system, I demand at least one level-up per year.

[Prak]

And a twenty level scale that said used epic for graduates would actually allow three level ups per year, with leveling up to 21st level happening when you graduate.

[Seerow]

Yeah, if someone forced me to run Schoolgirls and Sorcery with d20, I would just say that adults are level 5 or so. Hell, I might make adults "epic" if I wanted a full 20 level game.

Of course, it occurs to me that this gives us high schoolers with the ability to shape mountains... which is a bit harder to hand wave than just scrapping the MM and writing even iconic monsters as needed.

If we're doing Hogwarts in a level system, I demand at least one level-up per year.

Honestly I'd almost go with a full spell level per year. I mean in Potterland there was all sorts of spells that were written off as "You can't really learn that for another year or two", and the only exception I can think of is Harry's patronus, which could be written off as him having gained some extra levels beyond schooling on the side by virtue of actually doing stupid shit and risking his life on a semi-regular basis.

[Koumei]

Bringing up Sigil Prep again, because it was at least funny, I just ruled that the school assumed everyone would level up once per 10-week term, leading to four levels per year, and the final exams every year would be manufactured under those expectations. And as a five-year thing, that meant every character would graduate at the start of their Epic career (or more if they crammed a lot of adventuring in).

Mostly because I wanted to convince other MCs that if we're proper adventurers that anyone even wants to hire for quests, we've already graduated and thus should be Epic level characters, not bumbling around at levels one and two.

There wasn't much success there, just the compromise of starting at level 5-10. Actually, that's the ideal result, so pretty successful.

I still can't actually tell what the staff can do. I mean, I don't even know if the faculty has the right to brutally beat recalcitrant students. It's D&D land, so I assume they can. But it doesn't really say.

Given they're poorly-made Wizards, I doubt it matters whether they have the right, they probably don't have the ability. I mean, from the sound of it, a Denner could make a first level character who could beat the faculty in a fist-fight.

I would be disappointed if the faculty didn't have the right to cast disruptive spells on students though. The whole point of getting the job would be polymorphing brats. Or casting Hide From Undead on the goth kid who only has undead for friends. They really should have specified that doing so is allowed, because that kind of stupid fun appeals to me, and in a "Screw the rules, we're PCs!" game where it will come to that, I imagine makes everyone a lot less uncomfortable than needing to utter the words "Assume the position in my study".

[Ancient History]

Chapter 4: The Campus


Redhurst is significantly smaller and less cool than this.

FrankT:

Chapter 4 begins with a “Welcome to your new home” and, well, this is chapter four. There are only five chapters, and the time for introductions is past long before you get to the second to last chapter. It just is. You could do a thing where every chapter begins with an introduction because they are all written in different voices and the concept is that different characters are showing you the school from different perspectives. That would be significantly cooler and more literary than this book is capable of being. This book can't keep a consistent voice paragraph to paragraph and I have no idea who is supposed to be reading or writing any of this shit. For fuck's sake, Margaret Weis is in-character as Margaret Weis. I don't even know what that is supposed to mean. Anyway, this chapter is 46 pages, nearly a third of the entire book. And as I mentioned earlier, 28 of those pages are taken up with the map key.

In abstract, I don't have a problem with this. If you're going to write a magic school game, you are presenting the magic and the school. The main characters are presumably going to be provided by the players, so all they need to know is what is in or out of bounds for that and they'll do the rest of the work themselves. So filling up a third of the book with descriptions of the campus is not at all out of line. It's very much in the lines.

But in the first page it starts ranting about security and it makes me want to kill myself. It goes off on how the outer walls are “several feet thick.” I... don't know what to say to that. Several feet isn't a castle, several feet is a fortified manor. Dover Castle has walls that are 20 feet thick. The Citadel in Cairo has curtain walls that are 10 feet thick. And it's all surrounded by an invisible barrier of arbitrarium and shit. It's just dumb. If you're going to brag about your invisible magic walls, don't put up tiny bullshit stone walls and pretend they are independently thick and meaningful. If you're going to have actually tough stone walls, have them actually be tough and then don't fall back on magic bullshitium to prop them up.


For this book, certainly.

AncientH:

Schools, generally speaking, are not fortified. Yes, they often have security, but that's because: a) they do not want anyone to walk away with their expensive shit, and b) to protect the faculty, staff, and students. More or less in that order. Some really insane college presidents might like to add a "c" where they use campus police as their own personal force for fucking with people, but that's a minority. Parents and teachers may be concerned for the safety of the students, but those threats usually stop short of any sort of organized military force.

So there's a mystery here: why is Redhurst a fortress with curtain-walls? If this was Oxford and it was built in the Middle Ages on what used to be a fortified monastery or something, that's fair enough, but you can obviously see from the layout that somebody was playing with castle builder - there's a whole inner courtyard with portcullises and murder holes and shit. And it's not built on Hogwarts, which might look like a sprawling medieval castle.

Now, parts of Hogwarts look like it started life as a keep, but the main mass of the thing is a sprawling compound of unwalled buildings. Old schools are like that; wings get renovated, tacked on, torn down, rebuilt, etc. You end up with doors to nowhere and furniture you can't move because the stairs have been relocated and now are too fucking narrow to get the piano out of the basement, and nuclear piles in the squash courts and weird little walled-off sections which slowly go back to nature where the magical radiation hyper-evolves the local ants to build pyramids and stuff.


Unseen University is a better model of a magical school than Hogwarts.

Anyway, I've wandered off a bit. Most of this chapter is basically an extended Dungeon Magazine article, with little numbered bits on each room and you can follow that number to a couple-paragraph description. This suggests to me what might be the single best use of this product as a roleplaying game: Dwarf Fortress Adventure mode. Your adventurers happen upon the teleporting, zombie-infested ruins Redhurst in the aftermath of a necromantic singularity, and you brave the waves of spell-slinging undead to steal their treasures, magical and mundane. It's a good starting point because you can ignore all the crappy stats and replace them with various undead from different d20 books, you have an actual reason to go there, and the information about invisible walls and crap actually makes sense because you're breaking in.

FrankT:

We are given the first hard number in this book in the Guards section. It tells us that there are 40 guards. Guards apparently have their own rooms in the barracks, and there are quite conspicuously not 40 rooms. So it's too many guards to fit into the area assigned for them to live in, but less guards on shift at any one time than this place has towers. I dunno. As to whether it's an appropriate number of guards for the number of people living here, I have absolutely no idea. We don't know how many students or faculty there are, let alone how many auxiliary staff there are to like do laundry and shit.


Or dump soiled linens into the skeleton laundry, or whatever.

But really this just gets down to the basic unimaginativeness of the setting. Why are the guards 40 fighter/wizards dressed like Superman (yes, really)? This is a fucking mad wizard's guild with necromancers and conjurers and shit. Shouldn't we at least be seeing Skeletons and Golems and bound Demons pacing the walls? Better yet, why don't we have Perytons and Otyughs and crap? There are all those monsters sewn together by mad wizards, where the fuck else are they going to be from?

AncientH:

To say that this book suffers from a severe lack of imagination is an understatement. It's not that it tries to come up with half-assed solutions to things that shouldn't be problems in the first place, like sending messages when you're a teleporting castle...actually, yes, it does that. I mean, fucking Rowling just said "Magic god-damned owls and British Mail" sort shit out, but she was making shit up on the fly. We're looking at a nomadic castle that visits countries that might not even have a functioning bureaucracy. What the fuck is Redhurst going to do for the two weeks it shows up at the pseudo-Mongol Yurt City? If you're going to use the gods-be-damned OGL, then grow a pair of ovaries and use the fucking rules We've got fucking archmages at this school, you can knock together a crystal ball network faster than you can say palantir.


Fucker put me on hold.

Again, this comes back to the "this school should be a magical post-economy" bitching. We should be seeing otyugh and gelatinous cubes keeping the sewers clean and gates to the Elemental Plane of Water powering the indoor plumbing, and Salamnders stoking the furnaces in the basement so students don't freeze to death when they visit the Ice-City of Unknown Kadath in the Wastes. Hell, any asshole with a sheaf of graphing paper and a stack of Dungeon magazines could write a more realistic fortress/school/settlement/ANYTHING than this.

Because, aside from the possibility of adventuring, that was one of the great creative funs to be had of writing dungeon-settlements, was playing around with the economies and realities of living in a fantasy world, where alt-tech and magic and psionics and shit could lead to some very different ways of living. Fuck, it was a big thing in Earthdawn. So it's not just that this is pages of detail, it's boring, uncreative detail.

FrankT:

For some reason, the Cistern description really bothers me. They get most of their water from Decanters of Endless Water, but they also have a cistern which they fill with rain water for when they need a big draw all at once. And when the cistern runs low, they teleport the entire fucking castle to a rainy climate and wait for it to fill up again. That is the dumbest fucking thing. They have decanters of endless water and a cistern. Why do they not just leave the decanters on all the time pointed into the fucking cistern? They are literally moving their entire house to try to catch falling water droplets like in a Looney Tunes fire department gag, when instead they could just leave their automatic water collection system running overnight. What the fuck? Every fucking time this book presents a thing that the campus teleportation does, either from a story design or in-world utility standpoint, they immediately undermine it completely. Not only have they failed to convince me as a storyteller that this property of the school is worth the conceptual space, they've failed to convince me that the wizards who own this device have a reason to turn it on.

AncientH:

Item 12 is The Vault.

Sadly, not this one.

It's supposed to be where Redhurst sticks all the cursed items and artifacts that are either too powerful or dangerous to be played with, or which people are banned from playing with. Which begs the question of why the fuck you would stick them on a campus full of kids. I mean, in Harry Potter at least the Vault of Fucking Secrets is fucking hidden and locked away, because Dumbledore would have magicked that fucking shit away - I mean, look at the fucking lengths he went to to hide the Philosopher's Stone.


Okay, bad example.

The point is, all we're told about the Vault is that it's impossible to break into it and it's full of magical goodies. It doesn't tell you why it's impossible or what the goodies are, so this is just a big fucking blank space that says "Game Masters Fill This Shit In Here."

FrankT:

The eight magic schools get their description in chapter 5. All you really get here is that most of the people who specialize in a school of magic live in the dorm which is physically closest to it. This is way too simplistic a model to justify the amount of page space this takes up. Each of the five dorm descriptions are like half a page, and it all boils down to “The Transmutation department is closest to the Far Dorm, so prospective Transmuters mostly live in the Far Dorm.” Ugh. Whatever happened to second order selections like “Necromancers keep shit hours, so they take the rooms next to the wall where the sun shines in late?” It's just not very interesting is what I'm saying. You could probably come up with ten cooler reasons for people to sort out into the dorms they do while taking a bath.


The Enchanters probably would like to be assigned to the dorm with all the hot witches in it, I should think.

The library gets some wordcount, but it's all filler text. They are collecting books, and would like to have more. They have more books than they used to. Students can use the library freely, and non-students need to fuck
right off pay a fee and still have limited use restrictions. But um... what is the library actually like? Is everything all dry to keep books from going bad? Is it like a big stone mausoleum? What? I don't know. This fucking book doesn't say.

AncientH:

I'm going to take a moment to point out that there are no bathrooms in this entire school.


Do not confuse with the storage pot for your bat guano. That shit's expensive.

FrankT:

There are fifty five little thingies on the map, and they all get some text lavished on them. It's not good text. I've harped on this before, but it keeps coming up because it's so much of this fucking chapter. Write some god damn descriptions. Paint a picture for me. Tell me why I should care. A few of these things have some historical tie-ins, probably the best is the “Dead Walk” which is a row of statues of dead wizards near the Necromancy department. That's a nice bit of flavor. You could see why people would call it that and why people would use it as a landmark. Sure. But most of this shit is much more pedestrian than that and uses up way too much page space for how interesting it is.

AncientH:

You can't see it in the free PDF, but the actual hardcopy book has filled the sidebars with little red text that's supposed to look like commentary from an outsider or visitor trying to give you the rumors and dope on the secret shit in school, but they do a bad job of it. There's also a "Mass Animate Dead" spell stuck here for some reason. It isn't actually referred to anywhere in the text, so...I have no idea what it's doing here. More than the piano has been drinking.

FrankT:

There's more ranting about the traveling campus. You know what I haven't noticed? Anything about people getting left behind. There are a lot of people, and sometimes they apparently turn on the teleporter on pretty short notice. So the people who were still in town or out in the woods gathering newt eyeballs or whatever are stuck on planet that likely isn't their own in nothing but their street clothes with no real way to get back to their room. That's pretty heavy shit, and you'd think the book would mention it, but if it did it was so quick that I blinked through it.

There are one page rants about going to various other settings: Arcanis, Seven Cities, Dungeon World, Freeport, Kingdoms of Kalamar, Nyambe, Sovereign Stone, and Hollowfaust (which only gets half a page). That's seven and a half pages shilling this book to people who play with various weird 3rd party d20 settings. Why? I don't know. There's another page and a half that talks about other stops, that I believe are shoutouts to the author's personal setting or something. Some of them get mentioned in other Human Head Studios projects, but mostly they are just lost in the wind.

Magic in some of these settings has a lot of special rules appended to it. Mostly nerfs, but they often go into some pretty strange territory. Sovereign Stone probably has the most extensive magic quirk bullshit going on, but few 3rd party settings can entirely resist the siren call of adding magic rules shenanigans. Whether the book addresses this in any way depends again on whether you have the pdf or the physical copy. The physical copy has these little notes scribbled in the margins by a bad guy. They look like the incredulous notes on the pictures from the old Universal Brotherhood adventure for Shadowrun, and I'm not sure that wasn't the inspiration. Anyway, most of them are just chuckling about how good is bad and bad is good or whatever, and they are in a not-terribly legible font. So we haven't called them out specifically before now – no real point. But in the margins specifically here, the scribble-text talks about how Sovereign Stone Void Magic is banned at Redhurst (and the bad guy is researching into it anyway, because he's bad). If you have the free pdf version, the special magic rules of these settings aren't referenced at all. We just have to talk about the scribble text here because our default plan here would be to say that the extensive magic rules of the settings this campus nominally travels through are not referenced at all, but for fairness we should say that it is not mentioned in a way that makes any sense or difference. And if you're reading the free pdf, then it of course is not referenced at all, so there's that.

There's a bit on the economy, in the form of rambling rants about the Academy Store, the Inn, and the Tavern. None of these make a fucking lick of sense. Where the fuck do the supply chains for these things come from? The Redhurst Academy Store has a “deep stock” of spell components. But... how? The place moves around, who the fuck is supplying bat guano and adder bladders? At least Diagon Alley was in physically the same place every day, and you could plausibly maintain a supply chain for unicorn pubic hair and cancer if you wanted. But this place cuts its own supply chain, and often can't tell you where it's going to be more than a few weeks in advance. I don't understand how the store can stock the “textbooks” it mentions – where the fuck do those get printed/copied? At the assumed tech level of most D&D worlds, the amount of time it would take to do up a new textbook is longer than the castle appears to stay in one place. So the Redhurst store orders these things made, and then fucking what?

I have much the same misgivings about the food and drink served in the inn and tavern. The book claims there is a field for growing grain in the castle, which is so absurd that it doesn't merit a coherent response or even a dismissive meme. The entire place is 1600 feet on a side, so the whole place is less than 60 acres and most of it is taken up with buildings. Obviously if the school doesn't have external farmland it has to get a supply chain from outside. How it does this when it's constantly moving around is anyone's guess. It's not like they can put in orders at the start of growing seasons – they need to be sprinting to farmer's markets the very instant they make landfall anywhere.

AncientH:

Frank and I had a sort of a discussion once - well, I say it as a discussion, it was mostly me saying stupid shit and Frank wondering what I was on - but the thing is that people know that official Dungeons & Dragons d20, in any edition, is not balanced within itself. Neither is Pathfinder, or any other d20-variant. Some games come closer than others, but the most you can usually say about Kingdoms of Kalamar or Scarred Lands or whatever is that they introduce their own problems - so each game is sort of fucked up in the general ways that the OGL is fucked up, and fucked up in its own unique ways. But when you mash them together - when you try to make OGL work like GURPS, and you let feats and spells and classes and races from one off-brand start to interact with another - well, things just get completely fucked. It's not just that the number of options explodes, it's that the combination of those options aren't even designed to work together, so you can get some results which are totally I have no fucking clue. It's not just synergy or dissonance, it's just...madness. Dragon Magazine was a good example of that. I'll tell you about the Mind Mage sometime.

Anyway, my idea was just to say "fuck it" and imagine a kitchensink setting where any and every d20 sourcebook applied. Like Crypts of Chaos, but moreso. The idea was that if you had everything mixed together, it sort of evened out the inconsistencies - yes, there were some options that were mechanically better than others, but what would you expect? It's a massive multiverse, and the possibilities are endless. You could have demigods that are less well-put-together than 20th-level min-maxxers, and that's okay because they're backwater deities from some dimension that leveled up before they came into phase with DragonMech or something.

Frank said I was insane and I think brought up the Will and the Word, or maybe Pun-Pun, I don't remember. And he's probably right, because it would be an insane setting and insanely difficult to GM. But that's basically the same thing that this game pretty much wants to be in some respects, it just can't get it's head out of its ass about being a quasi-medieval setting that'll fit into a stereotypical D&D game, where wizards cast fireballs and cannons are forbidden by the divine decree of ineffable grognards.

FrankT:

And that's the chapter. Longer than the others and more on topic, but not very interesting. Something could have been done here, but nothing was. Why should I join House Slytherin and not House Gryffindor? This book doesn't establish any sort of plot pieces or conflicts that I would care about.

Next up: Chapter Five: The Schools of Magic.

[karpik777]

As for the red text on the sidebars/rules - the version which had it was supposed to be for the DM, while the one without any of that was intended for the players. IIRC, both were called the "Student's Handbook" so knowing which is which was impossible without opening the book/pdf.