The Gaming Den

First of all, welcome to TGD, karpik777.

Second of all: are you serious? Is that totally a thing that happened with this book, that they have a DM and PC version? You know what? I don't believe you. That's just too stupid to believe on the face of it.

I like that karpik777 registered just to explain and call out how fucking stupid that is. You are in good company, karpik777.

That seems to be a recurring pattern for OSSRs. See: L5R3E. I wouldn't have it any other way.

Koumei wrote:I like that karpik777 registered just to explain and call out how fucking stupid that is. You are in good company, karpik777.

+1

Ancient History wrote:

Koumei wrote:I like that karpik777 registered just to explain and call out how fucking stupid that is. You are in good company, karpik777.

+1

karpik777 didn't register just to point out how dumb that is, they came out of hiding to say so. Different thing.

I mean, the registration date on that post is in 2008...

Omegonthesane wrote:

Ancient History wrote:

Koumei wrote:I like that karpik777 registered just to explain and call out how fucking stupid that is. You are in good company, karpik777.

+1

karpik777 didn't register just to point out how dumb that is, they came out of hiding to say so. Different thing.

I mean, the registration date on that post is in 2008...

Chapter 5: The Schools of Magic


Basically this.


This too. In the sense that it is still a shallow Harry Potter knock-off cash-in. That hasn't changed.

We've talked before about how we have no idea what the levels are for this school, and that mechanics as a whole are generally lacking. We don't know how players are supposed to level up, or how the school system interacts with XP and feats and skills and all the other things that we would normally file under the heading of "character development." At this point it's just a thinly-veiled Hogwarts clone for your D&D game that only pays lip service to the fact that it's supposed to be an OGL product.

...and that basically continues. We'll get into a bit of detail, but by basically every measure this chapter, and thus this book is a failure.

Clocking in at 51 pages, the Schools of Magic section is basically a third of the book. Considering that it is about the way magic works in the setting and about the arbitrary groups that wizard students are divided into, that is if anything rather light. Conceptually, this chapter could have been the whole book, and considering how underwhelming the other chapters were it probably should have been. D&D traditionally has eight schools of magic. Actually, that is a lie. D&D traditionally has a metric ass tonne of magic schools based on elements and sins and robe colors and whatever the fuck else met the fancy of whatever DM or hack writer was writing up the latest sourcebook or Dragon Magazine article. But the Player's Handbook divides wizardry into eight schools and has done so since 2nd edition AD&D (the Magic User / Illusionist divide of 1st edition AD&D is more complicated than I feel like going into at the moment).


In Margaret Weis land, the sorting hat decides what color robe you will be wearing when you become a Wizard of High Sorcery.

Eight groups is right on the edge of being altogether too many groups. People with degrees in D&Dology can probably tell you what the eight schools of magic in the 3rd edition D&D rules are, but chances are pretty good that they can't reproduce the opposition chart (the mandatory banned schools you had to take if you specialized in one of them). There isn't any good clumping, and 8 is a bit on the long side for an unordered list. Probably what should have happened is putting two of the schools into each department and then having 4 houses exactly like it was Hogwarts. Or put some kind of clumping in so you had the three schools of the Upper Campus and the five schools of the Lower Campus. Or whatever. Something. Anything. Because 8 entries in an unordered list is too many.

It does not help that the list entries themselves are uninteresting and dumb. Each of the school buildings is named after a dude. This is not terribly weird, as both my undergraduate institution and the hospital I work at insist on naming buildings after dudes. The issue here is that I think in this case the dudes are shoutouts to characters from the author's home games, because some of them have really dumb names, and that's the kind of shit that happens when you let teenagers name characters, and to come up with a Wizard of every specialty from his home games, the author probably had to go back pretty deep into his pimple faced 2nd edition days. So the famous Abjurer is named “Aegis” and the famous Necromancer is named “Mordant.” Because of course they are.



It's not out of genre for Wizards to have dumb names, but I don't think they should have superhero names based on their powers.

There's a conceptual problem with the 8-schools approach which has nothing to do with Redhurst, and that is that D&D itself makes almost no practical differentiation between schools of magic. They're arbitrary categories where like groups of spells are clumped, no different in their way from Shadowrun's grouping of Combat, Health, Detection, Illusion, and Manipulation. When Earthdawn went in for specialization, they at least made the different types of magic completely fucking incompatible and each discipline was distinct with its own powers, traditions, and advancement. The same goes for the Imperial Colleges of Magic in Warhammer Fantasy (where at least different types of magic are color-coded for your convenience). D&D specializations aren't like that. They're very meta, and they have little to no cultural baggage. Yes, if you get into some of the advanced products there are special powers that specialist wizards can get, but those are very late-comer exceptions and don't matter much. So the point is, most of the student body is going to be taking classes in Necromancy at some point, and writing necromancy spells in their spellbook, and casting said necromancy spells. Necromancers, at the end of the day, are just not that special in D&D.


And did you try to find work in your field of study?

This book makes the claim that students often do not specialize until their 3rd or 4th year. That's very much like declaring a major at university, but not really at all like spell specialization works in D&D. As we mentioned earlier, a D&D Specialist Mage can never learn or cast a spell from his banned schools. Not even cantrips. So a student mage who is going to become a specialist can never have learned any spells from a couple of schools. So specialist mages should be identifiable from the very beginning by their complete lack of aptitude. I'm not saying this was a great system, and indeed it's not good in kind of a lot of ways – but it is what it is. And this book does not pattern its world building on the rules it is using, and that's bad.

Each of the schools list a bunch of first year classes. And by a bunch, I mean like four or five (Necromancy and Evocation have six). There are 40 fucking first year classes, and we've been told that everyone has to take all of them. And several of them teach the core cantrips that Wizards start with – except that Wizards don't fucking start with the cantrips in their banned schools, so it's logically impossible for everyone to pass all these classes.



The ironic thing is that this is a place where just following the Harry Potter script would make things make more sense. If you're going to be an Illusionist, you really can't prepare or cast an Evocation spell. It's not that you're too lazy to figure out how it's done, you just can't do it. This is a permanent magical facet of your being, and something which can presumably be figured out early and effectively. So you really could have a sorting hat with some basic divination ability that tells you what kind of specialist each child is going to be. This book is throwing down “choosing a major” metaphors, but really being an Abjurer should just be like being in House Hufflepuff – it's chosen when you arrive and you spend the next prime number of years surrounded by boring people and then no one takes you seriously.

Because seriously: Abjurer? The entire Incantatrix thing happened because even Ed Greenwood noticed that Abjurers were lame and needed more love. The only way anyone becomes an Abjurer is if it turns out the sorting hat says they will never be able to cast cool spells.

"Advanced Classes" are even more bullshit, because we're seriously looking at stuff that 1) isn't school-based, and 2) requires some high-level prerequisite feats to actually work. Craft Magic Arms and Armor is a feat that requires you to be 5th level; Forge Ring is a feat that requires you to be 12th level - and using them all requires spending beaucoup XP. So I have no fucking clue how even "advanced" students are supposed to take these classes.

We also get a listing of "signature spells" - the stats for these are actually included in the book, but not the free PDF - they're not great. One of the big ones is mass alarm clock, which has been cast throughout the campus to make sure everybody wakes the fuck up at the same time, even though a) that makes no sense, b) that's going to fuck over the necromancers who stay up late and need 8 hours of sleep to regain their spells, and c) why not just use a big fucking bell? Campus isn't that big, shit.


Rise and shine, motherfuckers. Time to be a fucking wizard.

Each school gets an overview, a piece on the building, a rant about the teachers, some first year classes, some advanced classes, and some signature spells. Not a bad framework for doing this sort of thing, and I'd probably stamp an approval if someone wanted to keep that format for the chapter. As we mentioned before, there are way too many first year classes (even if they are only one semester each, that's still 20 courses at
a time). And conversely there aren't nearly enough advanced classes to fill the remaining four years of study. There are only three advanced courses listed for the school of transmutation, and two of them only apply to higher level characters (one is about potion making, which under these rules is a feat you can't have before 3rd level, and another is about polymorph, a spell that graces a Wizard's spell list at 7th level). As a 4th year Transmuter there are apparently no classes to take. So while the format is acceptable, the contents are not.


Some students want to go to more classes, but 40 is a bit much.

Frankly, this book needed a real course catalog and a way to plot out a course of study that would go all the way through five years. It's OK if some of them seem a little repetitious – it wouldn't seem at all weird for the third class on summoning monsters to be called “Summon Monster III” or whatever. But it needs to be there. Like the faculty list that is inexplicably missing from the faculty chapter, this chapter needed a fucking course list. Just a few pages with the names and instructors of enough classes to fill a 5 year program for all 9 flavors of supported wizard.

I keep coming back to comparing this book to Miskatonic University for Call of Cthulhu, because that's the only really equivalent book that I have on hand. And as all of you know, trying to get CoC subsystems to work together is the equivalent of trolling yourself. But at least fucking Chaosium sat down and worked out an education roll and said that students should plot out a course of study and lists of classes and shit. Yeah, it's math, but...

...well, honestly, who the fuck is this book's audience? It's gotta be D&D players that want to play going to Hogwarts even though they are categorically too old to go to Hogwarts. It's like space camp.


Okay, bad example.

So if you're old enough to be interested in this book, you've got enough functional math skills to know how XP works, right? So why doesn't this book ever talk to that? At all?

I can't be fucked to do these in order, so I'm gonna rant about the Necromancy school now. The first thing that jumps out at me is that the department founder Mordant was a Dwarf, which makes me think that the overall Dean's statline might have originally been this character and then repurposed to a different Dwarf. Also, the description of the school makes claim that the Hall of Healing is well stocked with resurrection scrolls.


Thanks Morbo.

Wizards in D&D can't cast that spell or use scrolls of it. Their mother goddess Cleric can cast it her own damn self and doesn't need scrolls. This casual indifference to the way the system being used actually works is pretty grating.

I'm going to take a moment to mention something I didn't before: the resident cleric Father whateverthefuckhisnameisIdon'tcare (of the Waterdeep Idon'tcares) says mass in the chapel. That's...a level of blind idiocy I can scarcely fathom. Look, I know that polytheism is a hard concept for some people, but mass is strictly a Christian ritual, and while this is blatantly trying to be a British public school with Magic! That does not work. God, dammit. Put a little bit of effort into these things, you fucking fucks.

Okay, end of rant. Most of these schools have all the warmth and flavor of three-day old oatmeal. Again, it's largely the setting/system discontinuity - you can try as you might to come up with trationalizations for what the spells of [insert school here] do and how they do it, but this isn't Shadowrun - the finer details just don't exist. You can have interesting discussions of metaphysics in Shadowrun, because they try to explain the whys and wherefores of how things happen, like running into a ward in astral space when you're going 800 miles/hour. D&D...largely doesn't. And that's because D&D largely recognizes little to no boundaries on what magic can and cannot do. People like to say "oh, it's magic, it can do anything" and that is lazy and badthink. It encourages bullshit and arbitrary breaking of physical laws and expectations and stifles creativity. Your six year old would not stand for this shit and neither should you.

For the teachers section of each school, the general format is to talk a bit about the Dean, the Vice Dean, and possibly one other person, then to do three other teachers “in no particular order.” Now as I've complained about earlier, the entirety of Redhurst has a Dean, so all these assholes are already Vice Deans, making their Vice Deans be like Vicer Deans or something. This school is very admin heavy is what I'm saying. That's literally three levels of “Dean” riding herd on three teachers. That's more than a bit bullshit when it comes down to it.



There are enough teachers to cover the classes listed, but as previously mentioned there aren't enough classes by like, a lot. There needed to be like nearly two hundred classes, and there are instead a bit less than 70. So I don't think this is enough teachers either. The book tries to defray this particular attack by claiming that classes change year to year and that the listed ones are just the ones that don't go away. That is however total bullshit and doesn't fly at all. This is simple laziness, this book isn't done.

And that's missing the fact that some of the (Vice) Deans don't actually teach classes themselves. The Diviners go out of the way to point out that Dean Jecture hasn't taught a class in five years.


Class will be held in classroom 2B.

I'm going to also take a moment and explain that of all the schools, Divination may make the least sense as they explain it, because they seriously expect you to have Second Sight or something before taking any advanced courses. And I don't think they mean the feat, although you could be forgiven for thinking that.


Fey only?

Multi-dimensional crossroads stuff is kind of hard to write effectively. Essentially you've given up tying in to a persistent world, and that means that a lot of hooks that you might want to use are off the table. We complained long and mightily about The Factol's Manifesto for Planescape and I don't think we were wrong to do so, but that book didn't fall into this particular trap the way Redhurst Academy does. In Planescape it felt like there was real world building going on, or at least being investigated as a possibility, and in this book it doesn't. Everything being discussed is like “The Known Realms” and shit – stuff that you're expected to scrap and replace with copyrighted source material that they dare not name in so many words.


This book is all generic and simplified.

The thing is, there's so much D&D setting materials and so much of it is highly derivative that I genuinely can't even tell what I'm supposed to be replacing this shit with. One of the Evoker instructors is a Wood Elf from Greenswathe. One of the Transmuters was raised by Orcs from the Burning Plain until he was captured by Dark Elves of the Ebon Artery. These are placeholder names, and they don't even imply that I'm supposed to care about any of this shit. With all of the setting elements being shallow placeholders, I don't really get why any of the rest of the backstories are supposed to matter.

It's not just that the writing of the characters is uninspired and mostly doesn't have plot hooks in it, it's that I'm structurally inclined to ignore all of this crap. So all the characters, and I do mean every single one of them, feel like wasted space in this book.

I'm going to call out that the very shallowness of these placeholder names says a lot about the state of...I dunno, call it "D&D think." These are considered acceptable placenames because in D&D and derived settings, this is the kind of crap you get. It's the random fantasy novel bullshit that's been pulled out of a thousand asses, and which somehow people think is still acceptable to be called worldbuilding. You know how it goes, you've probably done it. It's easy, it's almost a game. The Racetribe of Colornoun lived in peace and prosperity until the coming of TypewriterSeizure, the Propernoun.

And it takes some serious effort to break those bad habits. It's why so many settings don't actually get rich until their second iteration, when people sit down and go "now hold on, how the fuck is that supposed to work?" and then backtrack and rework and elaborate on the stuff that has come before. Genesis, redefinition, then moving forward (then, apparently, moving backwards according to today's logic.) That's how you build a setting, traditionally. Now, you could buck the trend and just try to build a competent and sensible setting from the word go...but, obviously they did not do that with Redhurst.

In Closing

The final three pages of this book are another welcoming letter from the dean, five dumb facts about the school history that inexplicably take up an entire page, and a Student Record Sheet. The student sheet tells us all kinds of helpful information like that you have an advisor like you were in fucking university, or that there is a Merits and Demerits system, that students get Honors and Awards for... something, and that there are Clubs and Societies to join. Well, that's great. But it's also the last fucking page of the book, and it is too fucking late to introduce these elements. They should have been in the book, but they fucking aren't. Someone needed to design this book with the student sheet in mind. Everything on this sheet needs to be explained, and almost none of it is. Fuck this book.


Really, if you want to make this actually complete or usable or go anywhere, you need to write it yourself.


This seriously shows more thought than this book.

Okay, so maybe picking this book for an OSSR was aiming at low-hanging fruit. But in the context of the d20 boom & bust, this kind of book is symptomatic of the utter crap that filled shelves to bursting and led to the demise of countless favorite local game shops. It's not a great looking product, unless you compare it to RPG books from the 90s - and that shows just how far general publishing quality has come, that you can have hardback, glossy color paper with 3D render art and maps and shit for what amounts to default quality. It's a far cry from the crap in early D&D books. But it's also obviously a product that could be - and was - pushed out rather quickly and easily just to aim at getting a few bucks form a specific niche. It's the very definition of shovelware.

Someone suggested that that that thread about Harry Potter and Narnia would better prepare you for a game where you do wizard school shenanigans than this book. And I basically agree. That thread is just a discussion thread, but it brings up a bunch of issues that you'd have to grapple with when writing your own damn game. This book is just not complete, and the material missing from it isn't really pointed at or discussed, it's just not finished.

Basically, for the whole Welcome to Hogwarts type deal, you can either do things as modern school children going to a fantasy world to learn magic or you can do it all magic children from the fantasy world learning to be better mages. So like, Harry Potter or Thayan Academy. This book tries to do the second, but never really wraps its head around what that's supposed to mean. But surely one of the main things it means is that you need to work with the magic system you're using. And while this book makes a few superficial attempts to do that, they are all very half assed.



And it's important to remember that there is a market for this sort of thing, because stuff like Harry Potter continues to be popular - I'm sure they're set to reboot the series already - but it goes back to one of my favorite rants, the system and the setting have to reinforce each other. It's not enough to have a cool concept and then not have any rules that work to support that system, or you're just in magical tea party territory like with Call of Cthulhu. This book is a lazy, almost cynical cashgrab written by at least one person that should have known better. End of OSSR.

That cistern bullshit might even be more amazing in its lack of imagination than the utter pointlessness of the teleportation angle.

I thought that furry pic was an emo male until I read "her" in the student expectations thing.

Thinking on it a bit more, if someone force me to run Scholastics and Spellbooks in d20, for the classes I would probably do something like create sphere or domain like groups of spells, but instead of gaining innate usage or access to the spells, it's more of "this class focuses on these spells, as a student of the class you gain a +(x) Scholastic Bonus to (damage/DC/whatever). Upon passing the class, this becomes (higher bonus/special ability/something)." And then probably allow for Independent Study if you can convince an NPC to mentor you for special mixes of spells.

I'd also probably do the two-spellscholl house model, with things like "House Diabolist" (Necromancy and Conjuration), "House Creep" (Enchantment and Illusion), "House Battlemage" (Abjuration and Transmutation) and "House TheOtherGuys" (Evocation and Divination). But I think scrapping the whole spell school thing in favour of descriptors or themes would be a defensible choice too.

Honestly, no. You want to have the eight spell schools be your spell classes, and for each class there's two sections open to each house: Applied and Theoretical. Both are held in the same room, and the only difference is that in Applied classes you're expected to personally learn to cast the spells in question, while in Theoretical you're just expected to identify them by appearance, components and effects. In this scheme, an average class period for the 1st year Conjuration class would involve the Applied Conjuration students taking turns casting Summon Giant Celestial Fire Beetle while the rest of the Conjuration Theory students watch and take notes on the gestures and words. Then the Conjuration Professor wheels out a cage containing a Called Giant Celestial Fire Beetle for the class to examine. Then you get assigned an essay on the native habitat and feeding habits of Giant Celestial Fire Beetles in the wild, due Friday.

That's totally a good way to fluff the classes. I was just talking about the mechanical effect I would give the classes, and realized I'd truncated my thoughts due to the fact I was also eating at the time.

So, if I were forced to run Scholars and Spellbooks in d20, yes, that's a good way to fluff the classes, and then the mechanical benefit of your classes would be gaining a small bonus on a set of spells/skill rolls based on the topic of the class. So students of 1st year Conjuration would have +1 CL on Conjuration spells they cast, and +2 to Spellcraft checks made in regards to Conjuration spells.

I would also not worry at all about roleplaying every class and club meeting out. I would break out the time units idea from RPGA, and every character has X time units--lets say 1 TU is 1 hour, to keep things simple. It's assumed that students spend 8 TUs sleeping, and they are highly encouraged to do so, both for health reasons and spell casting reasons, but it's not like they're necessarily monitored every hour. Then they spend something like six-ish TUs in classes, maybe give or take a TU, with the assumption that classes are 1 hour each. And each class has a certain number of TUs of homework they give, though those may well be fractional (someone more involved with academics could probably quote the actual class:homework time relationship used in real life schools). Lets assume that taking six classes has a TU investment of 9 TUs because each class gives your half an hour of homework each night, or stwo and a half hours each week assuming, in-world, that you spend ~half an hour on it each night. This gives students 7 TUs for their own investment in studying, fucking around, whatever. This seems harsh, but the point of the game is that you're a student, so it's about right, or even kind of light. You could rework the number:duration of classes relationship a bit though.

...on the other hand, a HP wiki tells me that Hogwarts first years take seven subjects and have to add two on to that after their second year. They probably don't have all seven classes every weekday, though (my American Public School bias is showing), so that could still be workable. In fact, someone actually puzzled out a schedule using a split schedule layout based on the books:


So with something like that, you'd look at your TUs for each weekday, rather than my assumption of just looking at TUs for weekdays in general based on my HS not using a split schedule. The person who wrote that schedule up assumes hour long periods, 15 minutes between classes and an hour for lunch, so the overall school day is five hours, plus broom practice at 330 (which should actually be four, because they figured fourth period let out at 345). So your classes would eat up about five TUs a day (because Lunch is really a free period, nothing bars you from grabbing a bite to eat but spending most of that hour in the library).

But, so you'd have something like-

Potions
TUs
Griffindor/Slytherin: 1 MWF Period 1
Hufflepuff/Ravenclaw: 1 MF Period 3, W Period 4
Benefit
Currently taking: +2 Spellcraft checks related to potions, +2 to Alchemy checks made to brew potions*
Passed Year 1: Checks related to potions with a DC of less than 20 require no roll.

*Rowlingverse pretty clearly uses Alchemy for potion brewing, not a Brew Potions Feat.

And then there's some amount of homework that also takes TUs. Again, I'm used to the assumption that you have HW every night due the next day, and then bigger projects due a couple months into and at the end of the class, but I'm not certain Hogwarts teachers don't primarily assign single larger assignments due at the end of the week. In fact, I think that is the case, with more essays than bullshit worksheets.

Grek wrote:You want to have the eight spell schools be your spell classes, and for each class there's two sections open to each house: Applied and Theoretical.

Yeah, it hit me as pretty weird that the OSSR didn't seem to include any mention of Applied/Theoretical labels or something similar being used as an easy way to inflate the count of classes available for students, particularly since opposition schools exist. One would assume there'd be crash courses available for people who wish to know more about various effects they may encounter in the wild even if they personally have no aptitude in that area. When it comes to designing the curriculum I can't help but think the real question isn't "how do we pad out a full term?" but "What do we exclude?" given that the wizard-as-learned-advisor is a full on cliche.

Hoggies probably does it with no consistency, where Snape gives you a massive assignment every day because he's a dick, and Hagrid never bothers giving homework because that's effort for him to mark (and besides, apparently you're not allowed to encourage students to go pat dragons on their own time unsupervised). Or the Divinations teacher expects you to "try seeing your future in tealeaves!" and that's something you either don't do and just bullshit, or it's something that takes two minutes tops after you drink your ninth tea for the day*.

*I assume all people drink around this much tea.

Good point. It would be difficult to balance, but very flavourful for different teachers to give different amounts of study*. That way you can pad the course catalogue a bit with different sessions of classes, and the more demanding the teacher, the more TUs you have to invest, the better the benefit, and that's fine because the person who decides to take Herbology from Falmer the aging stoner has TUs to invest in independent study for other benefits while the person who takes Herbology from Mendel the herbalism maniac has fewer TUs and attendant benefits, but the benefit they get is bigger.

What would really be better for Magic School the Rpg? Magic Primary? Magic Secondary? Magic University? I suppose it depends on your target audience and the themes you want to invoke, but Magic Primary/Secondary gets to draw on HP, while Magic University lets the aging Potter fans pretend to be magic students who happen to be above the age of consent and close to their real age if they want to be.

*I just realized that calling it homework makes no sense with a boarding school...

You probably want the British system where the kids start off as tweens and graduate late teens (although they can leave earlier). The 5-6 year plan means that you can have a core of classes that every kid has to take, and then you have tracks for different areas of focus and independent study - that allows both for slackers who spend their free time on other interests, and complete nerds that want to prepare for college. More to the point, university course catalogues can potentially run into the hundreds of pages, and nobody wants to cover all of that.

Alternately, you can pretend that all mages are homeschooled as apprentices and then have to attend a 2-year community college to prepare for the real world/archmage university, which allows an older crowd while keeping to a narrower curriculum.

Ancient History wrote:There's no support for playable swashbucklers who wear tight pants and blouses and have thin swords and pencil mustaches.

I must point out that the Savage Coast had support for playable swashbucklers who wear tight pants and blouses and have thing swords and pencil mustaches. That support may not be any good, but it's certainly there. Along with very terrible support with support for X-Men style super-powered mutants.

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.

Sailors solved this problem a long time ago by defining their own set of cardinal directions relative to the ship. It's easy enough just to borrow their nomenclature, or invent your own if bow, stern, port, and starboard sound too nauticle for your teleporting castle.

Magic Uni allows for drinking, marijuana* and fucking. This appeals to a lot of people either as something to actively do in game or to just be the kind of thing their characters are pursuing. The other options are better for a more structured "Everyone HAS to do these classes, oh look, the PCs are all in the same classes all the time" environment and for exerting more control/having more options for them to rebel and row, row, fight the power.

So if you want beer-pong and bisexual experiences, it's the Unseen University. If you want to spend time on actual class activities or explore the "FIGHT THE MAN" themes**, it's Hogwarts.

If the PCs don't share the same classes, then basically, no actual game time gets devoted to class time - that's skipped over with a quick montage and then all game time is about their free time where they investigate the sound of dickwolves from the Transmutation Lab, or find out why the Abjuration lecturer constantly slathers lotion onto his skin.

If they DO share the same classes, then sometimes you can dedicate actual time to practical activities in classes ("I'm releasing a swarm of Hellwasps, this is pass-fail in the sense of survival!") or going out on excursions to the Plane of Fire.

*Technically not, because it's theoretically illegal, but seriously, tell me with a straight face that this has ever been an issue or barrier at fucking university/college.

**Not including cases where THE MAN is actually the police force who douse peaceful student protesters with pepper spray.

I feel like the teleporting hook they soundly ignored is a better fit for a hybrid military academy/Wizard NASA game than a straight Hogwart's game. Imagine if the titular Redhurst building was basically the Planar Sphere from Baldur's Gate II and the stationary satellite campuses were depots, training centers and research bases.

hyzmarca wrote:

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.

Sailors solved this problem a long time ago by defining their own set of cardinal directions relative to the ship. It's easy enough just to borrow their nomenclature, or invent your own if bow, stern, port, and starboard sound too nauticle for your teleporting castle.

Also Discworld with Hubward, Rimward, Widdershins and Turnwise. Turnwise doesn't really work for a non-rotating thing, but there's no real reason a roughly circular site couldn't use clockwise and counter-clockwise/widdershins. So, like, if you're giving someone directions to the Necromanse tower you say "Ok, go Rimwards until you hit the statue of Albertus Magnus, then Widdershins about thirty feet, and you'll see the big skull-gate."

Thanks for the review so far, this is one product I totally wasn't aware of before. I haven't read huge amounts of 3rd party d20 products, but from what I've seen so far this is really disappointing in a way I find surprising... normally you find at least a couple of good ideas you can salvage if you ignore/correct 90% of all 3rd party d20 rules, but from this review it sounds like the people involved weren't motivated at all to think about this shit for like 5 minutes. Weird.