Wizard's Academy (PFRPG) PDF

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NOTE: This volume includes FANTASTIC CREATURES AND HOW TO SURVIVE THEM, which is necessary for running this adventure.

Windfell Academy is an enigmatic place. Alongside their traditional studies, students can gain personalized summoning advice from a reformed succubus, delve the library’s many tomes with the aid of the library troll, or simply pass the time visiting with the school’s goblin groundskeeper as he explains the finer points of goblin holidays. But the school is also in jeopardy; the headmaster is missing, students are disappearing, and if the PCs can’t uncover the culprit in time, no one will survive until graduation!

In Wizard’s Academy, the PCs are tasked to join and explore an enigmatic academy of magic, delving the secret dungeons underneath the school while retaining their cover as innocent students. Alongside classic dungeon-crawling adventures, the PCs will also have the chance to attend classes, encounter school-related events such as a divination contest and a dueling club, all while searching for clues related to the missing headmaster and students.

With 8 possible villains and an adaptable encounter system, Wizard’s Academy is an adventure module that can easily be adapted for any party of PCs be they level 1 or 20, and can also be adapted in length, taking either a few gaming sessions to complete or becoming a small campaign unto itself!

Delve the school’s secrets and protect its students, but beware: Windfell Academy is a dangerous place, and death is not considered an acceptible excuse for missing detention.

Wizard’s Academy is an adventure module designed for the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game and the Sphere of Power magic system.

This volume also comes complete with Fantastical Creatures and How to Survive Them, a Spheres of Power bestiary with over 100 monsters, including both original creatures and classic fantasy monsters adapted to the Spheres of Power magic system.

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An Endzeitgeist.com review of the revised version

5/5

All right, this massive module & bestiary clock in at 214 pages, 1 page front cover, 1 page editorial, 1 page ToC, 1 page SRD, 1 page back cover, leaving us with a whopping219 pages of content, so let's take a look!

Wait, before we dive into the module: If you are only interested in the bestiary section, which takes up 124 pages of the pdf, you should know that it is available as a stand-alone file, as "Fantastical Creatures and How to Survive Them - A Student's Guide for Adventure & Study." If you want to know about these creatures and what I think about them, please consult my review of that tome - the combined reviews should provide the information you need for an informed decision.

The next thing you need to know before we get into the nit and grit of this module would be that this is very much a highly modular book: This is reflected in the villain choice, who is randomly determined for massive replay value. Adding further to that would be the tiers: The book features color-coded boxes for 5 tiers and different objectives for players, depending on the raw power-level:

Tier encompasses levels 1-4; tier 2covers levels 5 - 8; tier 3 levels 9 - 12, tier 4 levels 12 - 16 and tier 5 levels 17 - 20. So yeah, you may run this module in a wildly different way, multiple times, if you're so inclined. It should also be noted, in case you're not aware of that, that this module makes ample use of the Spheres of Power system.

All right, and this is as far as I can go without diving into SPOILER-territory. Potential players should jump to the conclusion.

...

..

.

All right, only GMs around? Great! Windfell Academy is situated on the world of Skybourne and can relatively easily be used in any world that has a sufficiently prominent and organized magic tradition - as such, it fits best with high fantasy worlds. But the academy is different from regular schools: One look at the stats for the professors should make clear that this is quite probably THE wizard's academy of the world. They pretty much almost all clock in at epic CR 20s, with the headmaster transcending even their mighty powers. The academy circles the planet atop a massive, floating island...and it specializes in secondary education, which, yes, means that this place is for the pros. As such student disappearances are not really uncommon - but lately, they have been happening more often...and a month ago, none other than the headmaster has vanished!!

The deputy headmaster, the tiny gnome archmage Tocs has vowed to keep the school open...but the headmaster needs to be found...and it is quite likely that the PCs, enrolled as students, will have all of their hands full with the rigorous studying required - here, the module is somewhat reminiscent of Persona, in that tiredness, end of the week tests, classes and adventuring have to be managed by the party. A teacher will be designated ally, one villain, and this constellation influences directly the read-aloud text and respective interaction that the various events that are interspersed throughout the module's day-to-day-routine. These events also include tests of various types of prowess and may yield information, magical items, etc.

The module also allows for the gathering of rumors, provided your time-management skills are up to par, and a small cadre of supporting cast characters, no less colorful than the amazing Profs, makes for a nice help. Speaking of them: Beyond the stat-information provided in the bestiary section, the respective professor entries sport the villain clues...and in e.g. the tier 5 scenarios, they have the Great Ally - a vastly powerful wildcard that makes their threat even more potent. Better yet, the colorful and intriguing Professors, amazing characters one and all, feature valid justifications for being both allies, villains or neutral parties - the module manages to retain its internal logic in all of the characters. Impressive indeed!

The academy, just fyi, covers no less than 4 floors and 2 dungeon levels (all featured on player-friendly maps denoting the respective areas - for they ARE the regular spaces of the academy) - and now that the basic set-up of the plotline has been customized, the adventuring can begin...though it should be noted that the surrounding landscape is also properly mapped...and that is not even the primary adventuring locale, for there are levels of secret dungeons under the academy - abandoned, at least seemingly, and teeming with dangerous threats, powerful foes and highly modular challenges. the dungeon-levels are massive, their effects are creative and diverse...and with rooms like vampire kitchens, abomination fighting arenas and the like, are certain to remain with the players long after the module is done.

Now here is the truly amazing aspect of the respective modularity: Each of the professors has his/her own lair - a final mini-dungeon, if you will - and these are fully mapped in gorgeous full-color as well - and yes, they are befitting of the respective personality! From caverns with underground rivers to floating castles, mighty workshops and the like, the respective boss lair-mini-dungeons are highly hackable and easy to use as stand-alone, smaller dungeons.

Conclusion:

Editing and formatting are top-notch, I noticed no serious accumulation of hiccups. Layout adheres to a nice 2-column full-color standard and the pdf comes fully bookmarked for your convenience. The pdf sports solid, sketchbook-like artworks, which in particular make the bestiary section really feel like a field guide - it is an acquired taste, though, and will not sit 100% well with everyone. The cartography in full-color is excellent and now comes with full player-friendly map support!

Adam Meyers, with Andrew Stoeckle, Derfael Oliveira, Michael Uhland, Douglas Schaub, John Little and Casey Hayes, has created a massive, extremely modular adventure/ supplement that really surprised me.

Why? Because I really, really hate Harry Potter. I am not the biggest fan of the magic school trope. But this one is amazing - it is bonkers, creative and the unique professors and personalities are thoroughly captivating. The schedule and time management issues, the modularity - all of these potentially enhance the value of this book...oh, and as a bonus, it manages to feel a bit like playing a Persona game. Heck, I bet I could easily craft a whole campaign against the backdrop of this module and its evocative academy - add characters, students, etc. and there you go! Additional dungeons and materials are similarly easily sprinkled in, blending to a degree the boundaries between module and campaign setting. Particularly as a high-level module, when you get to use the cool NPCs and high-level threats, this really shines.

In short: This is well worth getting! The colorful NPCs and creative monsters and the modular set-up make this a really interesting offering that has plenty to offer beyond the plotline it features. In short: I really love this. If you're using Spheres of Power, then this is pretty much a no-brainer-purchase...and even if you don't, this may be worth it for scavenging-purposes. My final verdict will clock in at 5 stars, and since by now, player-friendly maps have been added, this now also gets my seal of approval.

Endzeitgeist out.


4/5

Disclaimer: I backed the Kickstarter campaign that created this product - so while I didn't exactly pay the full price for it, I did pay.

All right, so this product has been quite a long time coming... but it's here at last. This is actually a two-part product - an adventure module and a small bestiary for Spheres of Power. The adventure itself is designed to be genuinely modular - the enemy and the ally during the campaign are randomly selected at the start, which offers a certain degree of replay value for the GM.

As you might expect of an adventure produced for an alternate magic system, there's a certain emphasis on magic in the plot - namely, that it works best if the PCs are students who are enrolling in the Academy where all of this takes place. If someone truly doesn't want to be a magic user, a few suggestions are included (mainly, being staff at the school), but this may separate them a bit from the rest of the party.

Now, the actual layout of this adventure is a bit reminiscent of a PFS module. Unlike the high/low tiers that many modules are broken into, though, Wizard's Academy scales all the way from Level 1 to Level 20, with content broken into five different tiers. The player's objectives change based on how strong they are - in lower tiers their goal is to find and rescue allies who have the power to stop the plan, while at higher tiers they'll be the ones fighting the villain. Now, many groups are used to being the ones who do everything themselves, so be certain to drop hints about what's appropriate for their tier, especially in the lowest rank.

In addition, students are given a schedule for their days - after all, it's expected that a student will spend classes, and doing so offers various mechanical benefits throughout the rest of the module. This helps to keep up the pace of things. Given the sheer amount of randomness to the adventure, though, it's very possible that three or four playthroughs could end up being quite distinct from each other. This is particularly notable with the allies and enemies, all of whom have a unique dungeon section to help close out the adventure.

After all of this, we're only halfway through the book. The rest of this product is composed of a bestiary with a respectable number of entries. Many of these are conversions of existing creatures (Unicorns, Succubi, Rakshasa, etc.), but there are some new creatures to go with them, and the entire section is filled with notes from teachers. It's fairly fun to read through, and it's even applicable in-game since players who own the Bestiary have the option to look through it (for six real-life seconds at a time) during combat in order to try and get information.

Unfortunately, the book stumbles a bit here with the art. Most of it honestly isn't too bad, but in some cases the art either has pencil marks that weren't removed or consists of actual rough sketches. That does make this section feel a bit rushed and incomplete, and I think that's a shame. It's not a game-ending problem - the statblocks are all there, and that's what really matters - but it's definitely something you'll notice.

Overall, I rate this product a 4/5. The adventure section is put together reasonably well and offers a great deal of flexibility (and even replayability), and the bestiary is quite functional, but just a bit less polished than it should have been. I know art can be expensive, but it probably would have been better to have no art for a creature at all than something that looks too rough.



Reviewed here on Paizo.com. o wo/ Feel free to ask any questions you might have about the product, and I'll do my best to answer them.

Liberty's Edge

Regarding the art, the 'sketchy-ness' was, I believe, an artistic choice as the bestiary portion is a pseudo 'in-game' document. In fact, players that have it are allowed to have their characters look things up in combat, giving the player the 6 seconds of a full round action to check things.


I purchased this yesterday, and have only started reading it, up to page 12, so apologies if I ask some questions that are covered later in the adventure, but I need to ask as I come up with questions.

Event 5:

The Ice Spider Trap is CR 10. The other two traps are CR 3 and CR 8. How is a Tier 1 or Tier 2 party supposed to handle this? Or even get into the room with a Disable Device DC 25?

There does not seem to be a "scaling" sidebar, unless it is much further into the document.

-- david

ps. I really like the idea of this adventure, and will probably run at least one group thru it as a PbP once I have read and understood the whole thing.


I dunno, a (high) Tier 2 party might be able to handle it. The very end of the event has a comment on that, though. XD You can also exercise GM discretion and reroll events that seem wholly inappropriate for the party, since it's not required to run them in order.


GM Rednal wrote:
I dunno, a (high) Tier 2 party might be able to handle it. The very end of the event has a comment on that, though. XD You can also exercise GM discretion and reroll events that seem wholly inappropriate for the party, since it's not required to run them in order.

Yea, a high Tier 2 might make it. I am more concerned that there might be a TPK before "help" arrives especially with a Tier 1 group. Depending on the group that I run thru this, I will either skip this event (and probably others) or lower the CRs.

thanks, -- david


Yeah, we specifically asked the artist to keep the pencil marks in, to make the bestiary feel more like an actual guidebook Winterlynn wrote herself, then left in the library for future generations of students to find and read.


I can see deliberately keeping a sketching style - and for me, that wasn't a problem. The ones that were only very rough sketches (the Choir Angel, the Greater Daemon, and the Guardian Plant, Champion in particular) were the ones that threw me off. Even just making the images a little darker and easier to see might have worked - light grey pencil on light grey background meant I had to squint carefully to see a number of the details there. As it is, my first thought was to wonder if you'd run out your budget for art. ^^;


Note: Not arguing; reviews are just so few and far between sometimes that I'm excited for the chance to delve into specifics, if you're willing.

The choir has a full picture on the first page of the entry, then a sketch on the following page. The guardian plants' likewise have a main picture, then a sketch a few pages later. It's true there is no full picture for the greater daemon, but they're a summoned creature and not an actual CR'ed monster, so it doesn't have an entry in the book. Is it simply the existence of the light sketches that were the problem, or are you specifically referring to something like the way we handled the unicorn and the yaksha?


Does the module require to use the Spheres of Power magic system?


Require - No, however it would take a major re-write to have it conform to Vancian (sp?) casting. The SoP rules are here in SRD format HERE.

-- david


Over on OneBookShelf the preview seems to have a glitch on p 5-6 that move the text out of alignment.


How many students are enrolled at the Academy?

I figure with 8 professors, each teaching a class in each slot every day, and 10 students to a class that means 80 students. This could be lowered if each professor does not teach during all 4 slots a day, or 10 students per class is too many. It could also be upped if each class has more than 10 students.

-- david


Collin Acrule on Page 19 is a Hedgewitch, but I can only find one Tradition. Isn't he supposed to have two?

-- david


DM Papa.DRB wrote:

Collin Acrule on Page 19 is a Hedgewitch, but I can only find one Tradition. Isn't he supposed to have two?

-- david

bump...

Also Satyr mUSician on page 131 and prof. meeda on page 199.

Can you give an idea on what traditions of hedgewitch they are supposed to have.

-- david


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Reviewed first on endzeitgeist.com, then submitted to Nerdtrek and GMS magazine and posted here, on OBS, etc.


DM Papa.DRB wrote:

Collin Acrule on Page 19 is a Hedgewitch, but I can only find one Tradition. Isn't he supposed to have two?

Also Satyr mUSician on page 131 and prof. meeda on page 199.

Can you give an idea on what traditions of hedgewitch they are supposed to have.

-- david

Collin Acrule is a hedgewitch with the Charlatanism and Spiritualism hedgewitch traditions (this is obvious with his special attacks listing guile pool and spiritualism.

Satyr Musician is possibly a hedgewitch with both the Charlatanism and Academia hedgewitch traditions (I am unsure about Academia). If I am wrong and the Satyr is infact missing the Academia hedgewitch tradition, all that is needed to rectify this is increase the Satyr's spell pool by 3.

Professor Meeda is an Entropic Sage Hedgewitch (an archetype from the Destroyer's Handbook that trades out one hedgewitch tradition for a bunch of monk abilities) with the Spiritualism hedgewitch tradition.

Silver Crusade

Well, this product pretty much sold the Spheres of Power system. I bought it to mine for ideas and, after looking through the book, decided to look into the Spheres of Power system. After reading a lot of reviews and checking out the SRD, I have resolved to go buy the entire library of Spheres of Power PDFs, sans the player's guide to the Wizard's Academy (whatever it is called).


King Faleyros of Mendycia wrote:
....sans the player's guide to the Wizard's Academy (whatever it is called).

There's no players guide to this product specifically. You're either thinking of the Player's Guide to Skybourne, or the product that's just this thing's monster section cut out (which is too long to remember).


SilvercatMoonpaw wrote:
King Faleyros of Mendycia wrote:
....sans the player's guide to the Wizard's Academy (whatever it is called).
There's no players guide to this product specifically. You're either thinking of the Player's Guide to Skybourne, or the product that's just this thing's monster section cut out (which is too long to remember).

Fantastical Creatures and How to Survive Them. Its pretty much a Spheres of Power bestiary.

Dark Archive

Why is there no teacher, or any teacher that teaches War magic?


Updated my review to account for the inclusion of player-friendly maps.


The Bestiary part contains a Gazebo. Enough said.


Yoshiknight92 wrote:
Why is there no teacher, or any teacher that teaches War magic?

No Blood magic teacher either.

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