Founding a School for Magic

[ZSZS]

Hey all! I'll be starting a game of pathfinder soon as a level 1 Wizard. When the DM described the background for the world, he explicitly said that there is no Wizard's guild, Hogwarts, or anything of that sort. Wizards are essentially all self taught or have a single mentor. The setting isn't extremely low magic, but the average person will not have much (if any) first hand experience with magic. However, as the party we will. Anyway, this is all to give you a bit of background.

Having heard this background, I decided that I wanted my character's "personal" objective to be to found a school of magic. There's something to be said for making the first of something in your game world. I floated this idea to the DM, and he is good with it!

However, I wanted to see if anyone had any cool/creative advice for going about this. From a mechanical perspective I plan to take leadership at 7 to start pulling my staff together, but beyond that I'm not sure how to tackle this. Any thoughts or advice? I figure pre-7 I can be scouting for a location, trying to secure funding, and stuff of that sort. My goal isn't to powergame this. I really just want to make an awesome school of magic, because that's a objective in and of itself.

[Orfamay Quest]

How detailed do you want to go?

The Ultimate Campaign sourcebook has a lot of resources for world-building, from the simple "I want to open a distillery" to "I want to found my own kingdom."

You probably don't need Leadership unless you want an extremely high degree of loyalty from your staff. What you really need is funding and time.....

[Zotpox]

I am recomending a school campus for each specialist school with a central campus for universalist's. Do the towers thing it's all wizardy and stuff.

[MagusJanus]

Also, you want the experiment labs for high-level spells separate from all of them, as well as a magic item vault. And, you want to use massive amounts of permanent wards.

If your GM allows alchemists, include a campus for them as well. That would potentially produce a steady supply of healing magic items... which you will need.

[Orfamay Quest]

MagusJanus wrote:

Also, you want the experiment labs for high-level spells separate from all of them, as well as a magic item vault. And, you want to use massive amounts of permanent wards.

And if you know what you're doing, you don't do any of this stuff yourself. There's a reason that Dumbledore gets his potions from Snape.

[revaar]

Check out the rules for Downtime and Kingdom Building, and talk to your DM about which one would better suit your needs. They both have aspect that can be used however. It really depends on how independent you want your school to be.

[ZSZS]

Thank you for the pointers to the Ultimate Campaign sourcebook. I've let my DM know about it, and we'll see whether we want to play it close to the rules or a bit fast and loose. My guess is that he will prefer a fast and loose approach, but at the very least those resources give me a lot of great source material to think about.

As I'll be starting from scratch in a world with a disorganized magical community, I am going to have my work cut out for me.

One of the first big hurdles is securing funding and a location for the school. While taking an independent road may work, I think it may make sense to get the sponsorship of a strong political entity. I know that we will be starting in a city state of some sort, and that may be a good entity to petition for funding. What do you think I can offer in exchange? What would you do to get funding?

In terms of down the road stuff, I agree with and like the ideas of separate campuses, particularly for the deadlier elements of arcane learning and research. Unfortunately, there are no alchemists in the setting (or Clerics) - which means healing magic could be a bit tough to come by. However, the DM is planning on moving some of the healing spells into the arcane spell pools to potentially make up for this. So, maybe we will be fine from that standpoint.

[revaar]

In terms of arcane healing, both Witches and Bards can handle it well enough to reduce the number of fatalities in your new school. It should be simple enough to have a Bardic wing in your school.

[Orfamay Quest]

ZSZS wrote:

One of the first big hurdles is securing funding and a location for the school. While taking an independent road may work, I think it may make sense to get the sponsorship of a strong political entity. I know that we will be starting in a city state of some sort, and that may be a good entity to petition for funding. What do you think I can offer in exchange?

Magic items or spellcasting would be the obvious things.

Quote:

What would you do to get funding?

First, how much funding do you think you will need? You may be able simply to hand the stonemasons a bag of gold and say "dig here."

Divination magic, in particular, is something very valuable to politicians and merchants alike. Tell them what is going to happen next month so they can prepare for it, and then just point out that they're 10,000 gp richer now. How much is knowing what the month after will bring worth?

Fertility magic -- control weather, plant growth, et cetera, is also useful.

I'd focus on consumables rather than magic item crafting because you're less likely to flood the market.