Harry Potter+Narnia=Me Caring

[Voss]

And I'm really not sure why you'd even want to avoid it. If you really didn't want players to pack their bags on Earth and bring Earth stuff to magic land why the fuck have them be from Earth in the first fucking place? That's a question I have yet to get a straight answer to: if you don't want the experience of taking a suitcase full of Earth stuff into magic land, why have the player characters be Earth children at all? You could just have the setting be the Thayan Magic Academy or something. The characters are Earth Children entirely so that they can bring Earth knowledge and Earth stuff when they go to magic land. And that is kind of Avatarish feeling by definition.

In the stories, the characters are Earth children to connect to the reader. Kids reading it can think the characters could easily be them. They might find a mysterious wardrobe that transports them to Narnia, or they might discover that their parents were really wizards.

Stop. Back up and reread this bit. Particularly the stuff in bold. This is intended as an RPG, and not for tweens and under. That stuff does not apply. Tabletop games don't connect in the same fashion books do, and don't use the same kind of narrative tricks. And the audience is completely different, which also brings in its own bag of tricks.

[RadiantPhoenix]

The biggest argument against heavy muggle involvement is that you want the PCs, who are generally going to be children, to actually be important.

Why would the adults being wizards stop them from being important?

[codeGlaze]

Stop devolving back into Tech v Magic.

Unless you specifically go out of your fucking way to involve it, Technology involvement can be completely left up to each play group. Going out of your way to ban it or even shoehorn it in... does not meaningfully advance the concept. A lot can be accomplished with out explicitly supporting either 'side'.

[Mask_De_H]

I'm still a little hazy on Grekian magic. So there's one and done effects made up on the fly, and codified artifacts that are harvested from magical being parts. Can Grekian mages have their own repeatable effects, like in Unknown Armies, as long as they pony up the spell components or is everything single shot and non-repeatable without the specific magical reagent?

[sabs]

You can cast spells once. ever.
What you do is you cast Wingardiam Leviosa on your wand, enchanting it. Then, as long as you have your wand, you can activte the effect.

This btw, is a big departure from Harry Potter. But it is kind of cool.

[virgil]

Can you cast a spell whose effects are as per Final Fantasy's Mimic?

[Username17]

I'm still a little hazy on Grekian magic. So there's one and done effects made up on the fly, and codified artifacts that are harvested from magical being parts. Can Grekian mages have their own repeatable effects, like in Unknown Armies, as long as they pony up the spell components or is everything single shot and non-repeatable without the specific magical reagent?

The idea is that there are basically three kinds of magic:

• Invocation. This is magic that you do by calling for it while feeling strongly. It can only be used once, and is your spontaneous magic like in Ars Magica.
• Enchantment. This is where you create an artifact, which in the future can do something magical when someone feels strongly and pumps mana into it. Each enchantment is unique and can't be perfectly reproduced.
• Supernatural Powers. This is the magical powers that a biological lifeform has simply for being a supernatural creature or plant. They are at least mostly genetic and can be reproduced in the normal sexy way that lifeforms normally reproduce themselves.

And this last one opens the door for the fourth kind of magic:

• Alchemy. This is the magic that you do by making potions and powders and such out of parts of plants and animals that have supernatural powers, creating a repeatable and at least mostly predictable magical effect.

So if you keep putting together kraken ink, pixie dust, and moon thistle you can keep making potions of invisibility and turn invisible every time you drink one. I'm unclear as to whether you personally can get to count as a supernatural creature and have a single magic power that you can inherently use over and over again. It's not something Grek really went into, and I could see that going either way.

Tabletop games don't connect in the same fashion books do, and don't use the same kind of narrative tricks. And the audience is completely different, which also brings in its own bag of tricks.

Narrative tricks are indeed completely different for a book and for an RPG. The "outsider character" is a narrative trick for books to provide exposition to the reader in the form of dialog. That is wholly unnecessary and unhelpful in an RPG. An RPG character who is "from the modern world" is an entirely different narrative trick, which is there to allow the player to have their character act on "out of game" knowledge. So if you're making an RPG, and you're using the "character from the modern world" trick and aren't actually making use of what it does, you'd better have a fucking good explanation for why the fuck that is happening.

The biggest argument against heavy muggle involvement is that you want the PCs, who are generally going to be children, to actually be important.

This isn't really an argument against muggle involvement at all. After all, whether there are muggle technologies or not, the school is going to have responsible adults, and every adventure is going to have to invoke one or more plot devices to get them out of the way. That's simply a necessity of child adventures across the board.

---

So here are some campuses that I think would work:

Ochy-bala(Очы-бала): The portal is at the top of a mountain in Altai Republic (that's in Russia), and the other end of the portal is next to a lake in the middle of a vast grassland. The buildings of Ochy-bala are forbidding grey concrete panel construction tenements (Panelaks) from the Soviet period. The entire place feels like Nightwatch. Western Russia sends magical students here, but Ochy-bala also recruits from Central Asia and even has some South Asian students.

Mardyamyesta (магияместо): The "Double M" is located on the Earth side in the middle of a glacier in the Sredinny mountains of Kamchatka. The magical world side is an enchanted ice palace. The ice never melts, and a great steam tunnel system has been put in place to keep the children from freezing. Originally set up to take students from eastern Russia, North Korea, and China, cooling relations between the Soviet Union and their eastern neighbors put a stop to that in the early eighties. Under the international magic academy plan, the campus now has students from South Korea, Japan, and even parts of Canada and the United States.

Bastinda: On Earth-side you have to pass through a rift in central Kansas called "the wind tunnel" to get there. In the magic world, it is a castle that used to belong to the Witch Queen of the Goblins before Principal Gale defeated her and became the region's first human queen. Contact was established with Earth in the 1960s, and the castle of Bastinda was converted to a campus in 1968. Goblins still live in the village surrounding the castle and are employed in some capacities by the school. NATO has been attempting to impress upon them the benefits of representative democracy, but many refer to the school's principal as "her majesty" to this day.

-Username17

[Grek]

I'm unclear as to whether you personally can get to count as a supernatural creature and have a single magic power that you can inherently use over and over again. It's not something Grek really went into, and I could see that going either way.

There's definitely support in the source material for it. Slytherin's family could talk to snakes, Tonks could do her shapechanging thing and neither of them learned to do that at any point. I don't recall offhand if any human characters in the Narnia books could do the same, but it's definitely something to consider.

[Mask_De_H]

There are also examples of half-supernatural hybrids and the Animagi who could turn into animals as points for some people getting a supernatural ability.

[RadiantPhoenix]

Harry is enchanted with anti-Voldemort powers.

[Omegonthesane]

Harry is enchanted with anti-Voldemort powers.

That would explain why no one else got Sacrificial Protection despite the high odds that a person sacrificed their life to protect another person from a Death Ray at any given moment in the First Wizarding War - it takes up your "innate supernatural power" slot, and most people had already filled theirs.

Clearly if soul jars can be living people then powers like Parsleytongue are granted to your phylacteries in addition to their actual innate power.

[Cyberzombie]

In the stories, the characters are Earth children to connect to the reader. Kids reading it can think the characters could easily be them. They might find a mysterious wardrobe that transports them to Narnia, or they might discover that their parents were really wizards.

Stop. Back up and reread this bit. Particularly the stuff in bold. This is intended as an RPG, and not for tweens and under. That stuff does not apply. Tabletop games don't connect in the same fashion books do, and don't use the same kind of narrative tricks. And the audience is completely different, which also brings in its own bag of tricks.

It's intended as an RPG based off a work of fiction. The reason that the heroes in the RPG are Earth kids is because they were the heroes in the source material. And I've already stated why the work of fiction makes them Earth kids. None of those have anything to do with introducing attack helicopters to a fantasy setting.

When you design an RPG around a specific world, like the Game of Thrones RPG or the Middle Earth RPG, they're designed to tell stories that are very similar to those told in the works of fiction they're based around. People come to those RPGs specifically to get an experience that's close to the novels. They will be very upset if you have machine gunners running around Middle Earth. If you're going to base the game on Stargate, then yes, technological clashes are appropriate. If you're fighting Nazis instead of evil witches/wizards, it no longer feels like a Narnia or Potter story. While that may well be a fun story to tell, it's a big deviation from the source material.

[Username17]

There's definitely support in the source material for it. Slytherin's family could talk to snakes, Tonks could do her shapechanging thing and neither of them learned to do that at any point. I don't recall offhand if any human characters in the Narnia books could do the same, but it's definitely something to consider.

An issue of course, is that most variants of the X-Mutant power schemes (where many characters have their own unique power deal) are in no way balanced. The ability to talk to snakes just doesn't hold up to being able to transform yourself into living metal or being able to freeze things at will.

In a story about children, that might actually be OK. You could just go 13th Age about it and give everyone their "One Unique Thing" and make no attempt to balance it at all. The understanding would simply be there that the ability to transform into a guinea pig would be worked into the plot constantly even if that didn't make a lot of sense. You already have to spin the wheel of plot contrivance just to have adventures at all, because every adventure you have to get those pesky responsible adults out of the way before the main characters can be in any real danger. When you're already using plot contrivances to keep any of the teachers or school councilors or kitchen staff or house mothers or janitors or technicians or whatever from using their status as responsible adults to solve the problem and keep the main characters out of danger, is it really so much of an imposition to use plot contrivance to give the kid who can see what brassicas have seen some fucking cabbages in plot important locations? Powers that were clearly lame would nevertheless get day saving screen time, and the comedy factor would make them at least as memorable as the "good" powers.

Alternately of course, you could let people purchase supernatural powers with points or by grabbing individual powers off of lists. Certainly, Jadis in Narnia is explicitly still able to perform feats of super strength and enslave people of weak will even when her sorcery is explicitly turned off - which you could basically use After Sundown for almost as-is (unsurprising when you recall that the whole system was somewhat inspired by The Magician's Nephew). Or you could do the Ars Magica thing, where people can get X-Man powers with their advantage points instead of like having a good personal source of magical reagents or having a friend who works in logistics.

-Username17

[Prak]

"WISE FWOM YO GWAVES!!"

So, the Redhurst review has Magic School the RPG on peoples' minds again, including mine. AH talked about using CoC to run a magic university game, and I've mentioned a couple things I'd do if I were running the concept in d20 in the thread.

I don't know what system would actually work well for Magic School, but I could see cobbling something decent together in Mutants and Masterminds (not the greatest game, but damned flexible), and GURPS has Illuminati University, which is probably meant to parody Miskatonic University, and has mad science and magic and eldritch abominations in it. GURPS, I gather, is in a similar position as M&M, where it's not great, but it is super flexible.

I also think that what I'm doing for Midgard could work for Unnamed Magic School Game, at least with the skill-based magic and such, but the system is so rudimentary still that I can't actually say that with any certainty.

Anyway, as to the game-

I know that I'd gloss over the actual classes, as Dean suggests on page 2 of this thread, only rp'ing a few minutes of a class when it's plot-relevant or can deliver needed exposition. However, to make the classes actually feel relevant, I'd also have the classes give minor mechanical benefits to students currently taking them, as I mention in the Redhurst thread, and special abilities to students who have passed a given class. In contrast to the Harry Potter source material, I would probably make the classes more elective heavy and less standardized.

I would use Time Units to enforce the idea that you have to be in class for a certain amount of each day. TUs are used to buy more classes, with their attendant benefits, independent study, and give you actual screen time. I would probably have most actual RP/Adventuring take place on days the party doesn't have class at all, so likely Saturday/Sunday, but if it's more college-emulating, characters may have three or more days without class. Of course if you're doing something that requires more TUs, you take them from sleep/miss the occasional class with the usual in-world penalties.

The sandbox idea from Dean's page 2 post is also a good one, and I would include some npc students having their side gigs which can be of use to the PCs, like the Weasley twins selling magic candy, but not necessarily that. And the thing about Houses/Circles and the idea of class being less classroom oriented and more hands on fieldwork oriented would also be good for the actual play of the game.


The Redhurst Review gives some idea of what is needed- course catalogue, a decision as to whether Magic School is primary, secondary, or higher education, a campus map that makes sense, etc.

Beyond that, it kind of depends on what kind of game you want, I guess.

[Dean]

I've continued working on this project over the last year and would be interested in another round of what would make a good magical school game work. Remember that because the demographic will be the people who liked Harry Potter that means that the game should cater to late teens and early 20-something's who are primarily female. The world should be fun and fantastical like Avatar TLA or Pokemon and not gritty or overly realistic like Conan or Shadowrun.

Kids in the school should be 11-18 or so which lets us have 8 years of schooling which is nice. I think tracking the individual years should be a flavor concern, the actual tiers of the game should be-
Underclassmen: Kids 11-14. They're learning magic and going through classes. Their adventures should largely take place within and around the walls of the school.
Upperclassmen: Kids 14-18. The school programs should fade into the background for these kids as they spend more time in the world. Dealing with school should be just like in Buffy or Sabrina or late Harry Potter, it's a thing you have to juggle with the magical adventures you're involved in but it's not center stage anymore.
Adventurer: 19+ Adults having D&D style adventures in the world of your magical school. Here you can actually try to take on the White Witch and just end her reign if you succeed or you can spend your days tomb delving for fame and fortune.

School: The school should be full of minigames and shit to do, there should be secret areas you discover and mysteries you can piece together. It might even be sensible to have a bunch of random adventure seeds that you write up a list for and every game you play you roll up a few of them and those clues or mysteries are the ones that your players will see this game. That's the sort of thing that fans or forums in the modern day could churn out an endless supply of so every game you played could be a little different and all still feel like the same canonical school.

World: The world should be fantasy with a Y-7 rating. Frank may be happy to watch me eat crow on my anti-technology rants. Allowing ipods and guns and whatever into the setting is fine and even beneficial to worldbuilding at large. Effort should be maintained to keep the rating consistent in your settings bad guys and plots. That means that while it should be totally possible to have your baddie walk around with gun toting bodyguards they probably shouldn't unless guns are mechanically ineffective enough to not have young wizards being shot dead by them on screen on a regular basis.

Races: I've been thinking about what races would be most wanted in a Magical School game targeted largely at girls. It's possible that the only race should be "Human Child" and I wouldn't disagree with someone making that statement. But a school that had spent several generations in a magical land full of elves and satyrs would have no real reason to maintain a pure human population. If other races were allowed the ones that have repeatedly been brought up as being highly desirable to nerd girls appear to be the following (based on questions asked to a sample size of perhaps two dozen gamer girls, nerd girls, fantasy loving girls, etc)
-Human
-Elf/Pixie
-Vampire
-Horse/Winged Horse/Unicorn
-Mermaid
-Devil Girl/Angel Girl

Horse isn't even remotely a joke btw. In over a year of presenting writeups to the gamer girls I game with the ability to play as Horses has gotten such enormous reactions that I would consider going to print without a playable equine race an insane misstep.

[Prak]

I think you're being a bit limited in your demographic, Dean. The first Harry Potter book was published in '97, and scholastic puts the grade level interest at 3-7, and the reading level at grade 5.3, so original readers could have been as young as 8 or as old as 12, meaning that the people who read HP when it first came out are 25-29 now, and the New Yorker cites the primary demographic of HP to be 18-34 in a 2010 article about the movies. I'm not disputing that a Magic School game would appeal to late teens, I just think you're hugely constricting the demographic, and if we keep in mind that there are plenty of kids who come to RPGs in the early teens or even younger, I think a game like this actually has a range of player age closer to 10-34.

As to sex of player, HP's sex demographic is partially skewed by the fact that readers tend to read books written by authors of the same sex, and also skewed by the fact that women generally read more than men, and girls definitely more than boys as reading is seen as something nerds and girls do (look at the entire character of Hermione, for example). When we take into account the fact that males make up a greater proportion of the RPG market, and the fact that Magic School as a genre potentially draws in fans of X-Men, Naruto, Kill la Kill, Negima and Psychic Academy, not just fans of HP, I think this actually appeals roughly equally to both sexes (with a possible skew towards males just because of RPG market demographics).

Also.... I think people underestimate the amount of grit kids can take. I'm not saying we should put in WH40K or Judge Dredd levels of grit, but Adventure Time, or, fuck, HP itself, can get pretty dark.

[Username17]

I think that putting Unicorns and Vampires into Magic School is a mistake on the order of Poochy the Dog. Ponies are popular with the target demographic, Vampires are popular with the target demographic, but Harry Potter / Equestria crossover fic is never going to be more than a tiny niche. Basically, you have correctly identified the fact that people who like to order Strawberry Milkshakes are very likely to like to order Chillidogs, and your solution to this fact is to offer a Chillidog dipped into a glass half full of Strawberry Milkshake. While your potential audience is very likely to approve of all the ingredients, the combination is going to make them barf.

Women really like playing short people. Short sneaky people, short tough people, whatever you got. I know a lot of women gamers who play a Halfling or a Dwarf whenever they can. And House Elves and Banker Goblins are of course an established part of Harry Potter. So bringing in Goblins/Munchkins/Elves/Whatever and having them be short people with or without green skin is something popular you could slip in without that feeling like bizarre genre mashup. But Edward Cullen or Twilight Sparkle are always going to feel like they are forced in sideways from another media property because they are.

Harry Potter MLP crossovers Are A Real Thing. It's just that crossovers with something that is nominally the same genre like Percy Jackson or Naruto are almost twenty times more popular. And that's what you're doing by plugging in a fandom that doesn't fit: alienating 95% of your audience.

I genuinely know at least two people that want to play ponies in Hogwarts. Were I in the Bay Area right now, I could easily put together a game of that. But I could put together many more games that were MLP or Hogwarts. If people want to play school kids exploring fantasy land, they probably don't want one of the other characters to be Twilight Sparkle. Some do, but most do not.

-Username17

[Username17]

By the way, disregard that, I suck cocks.

I had just assumed that Twilight / Potter crossovers would go over like MLP / Potter crossovers. They apparently do not. While I stand by my Chillidogs and Milkshake analogy for mixing Ponies and Potter, a better analogy for Sparkle Vampires and Boy Wizards would be like Chocolate and Peanut Butter or something. It's crazy popular. Like, where MLP rates up there with shit like Batman that is individually popular but only crossed over with Harry Potter by fringe weirdos, Twilight / Potter crossovers are literally the most popular thing. By a lot.

So... I guess if I'm to retain any mustache of wisdom style credibility, I should pontificate about why the supernatural creatures of Twilight are so acceptable in Potterverse while the special creatures in My Little Pony and Transformers are not. I think it falls into three basic things:

• Characters in Twilight are already in Highschool, so they can fit with the school milieu.
• Vampires and Werewolves canonically exist in the Potterverse, so there is room for Edward Cullen and Jacob Whatshisface (of the Oregon Whatshisfaces).
• Vampires and Werewolves can look like teenage humans, which means that they don't spoil the visual aesthetic of the school.

So yeah. Bottom line is that you can ignore every single thing I said against sparkle vampires because I was wrong. They aren't remotely in the same category as killer robots or magic horses. They are extremely genre appropriate and you should absolutely have Werewolves and Vampires as things students can be. Either instead of or in addition to wizards, I dunno.

-Username17

[GreatGreyShrike]

For what it's worth... Vampires showed up extremely briefly in canon HP. Unicorns turned up mostly as corpses after Quirrell drank their blood in the first book. Having either show up as PCs seems a little weird. That said, even in HP we had the canon half-giants (Hagrid + that one French educator), the Werewolves, and the part-goblin teacher Flitwick, and that centaur divination guy, and that ghost history teacher; not sure if the Veela (spelling?) count as not fully human. Lev Grossman's The Magicians has at least one Faerie teacher. It looks like mostly teachers and adults are 'allowed' to be not human, and mostly all students are either human or so close to human (Veela, Werewolves, slightly larger humans) that they might as well be humans for all practical purposes.

However, there's certainly other source material about magic school that has these sorts of students being a core part of the story. I think the one that springs to mind first and foremost is Diana Wynne Jones' Year of the Griffin, where a Griffin and a Dwarf student form core parts of the story about going to a magic school in a magic land.

Looking at it, a lot of source material has some sort of inhuman teachers/adults, but it's relatively rare for the magic school to teach extremely nonhuman people. I don't know why, but it just seems to be - the student bodies tend to be 100% human or very close to human in everything I've read with magic schools other than the aforementioned Year of the Griffin, but in pretty much everything they include one or more teachers who are part-nonhuman or fully nonhuman. I think that the Doylist reason is largely because when authors need to flesh out one-note side characters who aren't important to the plot like the teachers generally are, one of the easiest things to do is make them nonhuman. The Watsonian explanation is far less clear.

I think that it sort of depends how close you want to cleave to source material, and if you want to run with more of a 'magic school accepting students from magic land' feel (as in Year of the Griffon) or a 'magic school accepting students from the other side of the Masquerade' feel (as in Harry Potter, The Magicians, etc). Regardless, you are apparently allowed to have teachers/adults who are anything at all in either sort of 'feel' for a game - centaurs, ghosts, giants, go nuts!

[hyzmarca]

In fact. vampire boarding school stories are a sub-genre of their own.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1686821/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vampire_High



Though, Vampire Academy was apparently a terrible flop.

[schpeelah]

Twilight and Harry Potter are both about teenagers from Earth discovering and participating in a secret world of people with powers hidden from normals while going to high school, and their target audiences both include teenage girls and young women. The fact that there is very little about vampires in Harry Potter makes things even easier, because there are no contradictions, and with werewolves you can declare D&D-like split between "natural" and afflicted werewolves.

MLP is aimed at elementary age girls with a secondary audience that is mainly male 20- and 30-somethings, and is so deep into literary high fantasy it does not have remotely humanlike races and has the characters confidently informing you that the weather is not a natural phenomenon around these parts.

[Prak]

There is a way you can include magic candy-coloured ponies in your playable races, but that's to embrace Equestria Girls and say they're a breed of shapechangers, who change between pony and human form. You could say they're fae, and their natural form in Notnia is pony and their natural form on Earth is human(ish), and in a treshhold realm like the school, they have full control over which they are at any given moment, possibly even able to combine features, so Uniquestrians can manifest their forn for a magic boost, Terraquestrians can increase their muscle mass, and Pegaquestrians can manifest their wings and not have to fuck with the moving stairs when they're already late for class.

[schpeelah]

Sure, but why would you want to do that?

[Prak]

It's no weirder than having general hengeyokai/kitsune japanese school girls popping up, and it's a way you could do it if you wanted to, as Dean does.

[Username17]

I think the fact that Equestria Girls are a thing already and MLP of any type is still apparently considered roughly as acceptable to fold into the Potterverse as Batman or Optimus Prime (which is to say: absolutely fucking not) shows that that particular excuse does not fly. People who turn into a bat or a wolf get the thumbs up from Potter fans, people who turn into a talking horse get the thumbs down. I worry about this turning into "World of Darkness Highschool," but Dean's target demographic appears totally OK with that. Crossovers with Dr. Who and Supernatural are very popular, as are crossovers with the Buffyverse.

But I want to talk about two properties that would show up in crossovers a shit tonne more if they weren't hella old: Labyrinth and Wizard of Oz. Those seem extremely ripe for inspiration, and one of the things I notice they have is wizardly nobility who are full sized for human adults ruling it over little people who are basically the size of kids. It's a powerful metaphor and a reason those movies are still able to impress children even though the special effects are decades old. But it also sets up a lot of potential stories if the Goblins/Munchkins of Notnia are like D&D Dark Ones and a small fraction of them are big and normally given leadership roles. It means that they would naturally assume that full sized humans were important and had leadership potential, which in turn means that you'd have a built in excuse for Earth expatriots to set themselves up as sorcerer queens and shit.

Glinda is a Munchkin. The Goblin King and the Witch of the West are Goblins. They are just human sized and full of sorcerous power. So when humans show up like Dorothy, the Munchkins and Goblins bow to her because they are pretty sure she's a witch queen too.

-Username17