Hello again!
So I had talked before about my magic academy game and I wish i had the money to buy the materials suggested, but I didn't so I had to design it pretty much by myself.
That's not a problem though, as I actually found designing the school and it's layout rather fun. However as the students drift into class for their first few days, I realized that while I've built a fairly sturdy framework to run the campaign and the story underlying it, School life is... more than just a simple campaign plot.
So my school framework is this:
Each school year is broken down into 4 semesters. Each semester is split up by a big event.
School Year
Semester 1->Yearly Fair->Semester 2->Midterms->Semester 3->Inter School Competition->Semester 4->Finals
Each of the big events are planned out, so there won't be any problems with those.
Each Semester is just shy of 2 and 1/2 months long, with the big event happening in the last week. There are breaks distributed during the semesters so I can have plot points with families and so forth.
What I would like help with, if you will, is a bunch of 'school event' type ideas that I could put in a table and randomly roll to generate for each week of school. (Examples being 'The Mysterious Transfer Student from Numeria', or quite literally 'There's a Troll in the Dungeon...')
So... Here's the start:
1. A mysterious new transfer student has arrived at school from Numeria. Who are they and why are they so weird?
2. There's a troll in the Dungeon! What happened to the rest of them?
3. The menagery of pet animals meant for students to pick a future Familiar from, has gained some sort of group intelligence. They escaped en masse and are now reaping havoc on the school grounds.
4. A rampaging horde of students from the orc barbarian school a few miles away are having a week long midterm on looting and pillaging. In the spirit of good will and cultural understanding, your school has volunteered to help with this assignment and for a solid week orc barbarians in training will be rampaging around campus.
5. An a!*&~+% genie summoned by an incompetent upperclassman has taken up residence in the boy's bathroom and is offering wishes for 20 gold each, flooding the school with ducks, 12 inch piano players, and other such distractions.
First, the best place for brainstorming plot and storytelling is http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SchoolTropes. Take these tropes and make them your own. In addition, read up on the plots of Dawson's Creek, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Roswell, anime set in high schools, Sabrina the Teenage Witch, Community, Veronica Mars, etc.
Second, how gritty is this setting? Are we talking nonlethal only? Gang warfare over drugs? Harry Potter? X-Men? Brick?
6. Bob has a crush on the new girl. Is it real or is it a charm spell?
7. The school has a Danger Room for training young wizards that only does nonlethal damage. (Mechanics: using illusion spells at impossibly high DCs.) Sets up later events like how somebody is cheating in these exercises or the Danger Room is actually a sentient artifact that wants to be freed.
8. The campaign to become Homecoming Queen! Diplomacy, bribery, gather information, social quests, antagonists you can't fight...
9. You seek to date the most popular _____. But he/she/it doesn't know you exist. How are you going to win X's heart?
10. The teacher hates you, but you have to pass this course and he plays favorites. How do you get on his good side?
11. A PC develops an antagonism with the rich kid. Ideally, this will culminate in a duel.
12. You've antagonized the principal, who decides that you need more school spirit. You're now in the talent show. But you have no talent. How do you stave off embarrassment? Can someone give me a training montage?
13. Your favorite club didn't get its request for funding in on time and membership is dwindling. How will you save your club?
14. The Kobayashi Maru: Design a no-win scenario, that all the students know about, then see what your PCs roleplay.
15. Class trip! What could go wrong?
16. School dance: Who's first on the dance floor? Who cleans up surprisingly well? Who spikes the punch with hallucinogens? Who gets their romance on?
17. Science Fair meets fantasy technology. Who likes steampunk? Who does theirs the night before?
18. Your own personal bully. Who fights? Who schemes? Who tries to understand the bully's painful past?
19. Detention. Meet new and interesting people and try not to piss them off. Watch Breakfast Club for inspiration.
20. Gym class. Dodge ball. Ropes courses. Towel whips. Grudge match wrestling day. Sadistic Gym teachers who let class become ever more Darwinian.
21. FOOD FIGHT!
22. The sleepover party: spin the bottle, truth or dare, pillow fights, panty raids, and, of course, the serial killer trying to kill you all because he couldn't get a date in high school.
First, the best place for brainstorming plot and storytelling is http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SchoolTropes. Take these tropes and make them your own. In addition, read up on the plots of Dawson's Creek, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Roswell, anime set in high schools, Sabrina the Teenage Witch, Community, Veronica Mars, etc.
Second, how gritty is this setting? Are we talking nonlethal only? Gang warfare over drugs? Harry Potter? X-Men? Brick?
Thank you for the advice! I have been watching a few high school animes and actually also looked at persona 4 for the more personal touches to interpersonal relations.
As for grit... it's mostly nonlethal. The school has a ridiculously high tuition so only those on scholarship or paid for by their (admittedly accomplished) arcane using parents. They actually have money set aside in case of death, but it shouldn't happen.
For the campaign, most threats should be rather light, with the threat of death rising as they graduate to the higher years. By the time they complete year 4, they should be at Pathfinder normal "Everything is trying to end you" threats.
23. A previously mediocre student is acing every test. Are they cheating, have they been replaced by an impostor, or have they been hiding their skills until now?
24. A previously top student is failing every test. Have they been cursed, have they been replaced by an impostor, or is it a perfectly normal breakdown?
25. The potion instructor is out of frog legs. Todays class is on collecting frogs from the moat/cursed swamp/water feature and distinguishing them from princes. Why does this one have a yellow ring around its head?
26. A teacher brought their child to school today and now Little Timmy/Missy has gone missing! Find Timmy! (Or Missy, as appropriate)
27. As detention the party must embark into the 37th Layer of Infinite Suffering of the Abyss, aka an endless labyrinthine high school populated by teenage demons, sadistic teacher lords, and endless games of dodge ball, in order to retrieve misplaced janitorial supplies.
28. The new librarian may or may not be a daemon and the fines for late library books are rumored to be most severe... cue a friend of the party needing help for a late night infiltration of the library to return a book to the drop box before it is late, but the after hours denizens of the library will not take this lightly.
32. Some years ago one student omitted suicide. Now his/her ghost is causing trouble -- but it only appears to students. Can your team of unlikely friends figure out what happened and lay the ghost to rest before it possesses a really big donor who's on campus this weekend?
33. A teacher asks the party to find out who's trafficking drugs through the school.
34. Rumors of a Vampire living in the catacombs of the school float through the halls. The disappearance of two students almost certainly confirms it.
35. A classmate's skills are called into question. He's convinced the one spreading the rumors is one of the players. He challenges this player to a Wizard duel.
36. When the Transmutation teacher arrives to class inebriated, things take a turn for the worse when he accidentally turns the classroom into a hedge maze filled with mischievous creatures, then promptly falls asleep.
38. The toilets in the girl's room are clogged, and from the miserable ranks, a hero must rise to un-clog the plumbing!
39. The alchemical professor has been pulling long hours into the night recently and rumors of exotic experiments and secret labs circulate around campus. In other news, locals have gone missing recently, including the newly hired groundskeeper.
40. A group of transfer students who look suspiciously older than the rest of the student population have started asking around of the flayleaf and other narcotics trade.
41. Several of the students have been clashing with other schools in dangerous, unsupervised duels.
42. A recruiter for the local thieves guild has been trying to entice students away from their studies to get a head start on a life of vice & crime, while in actuality using the students as potential marks to access their family fortunes.
43. The swim team is developing gills. Is something in the water causing this? Is a transmuter to blame? Has the swim coach gone too far?
44. The ____ team is superb, making its way to nationals. But first, they have to defeat Nemesis High's team. While one of the PCs is on the court, the others are behind the scenes thwarting the nefarious cheating, all without being caught!
45. It's National Thanksgiving Day! Who goes home? Who stays on campus with the foreign students? Who goes to a friend's house? A perfect RP opportunity to show rather than tell about family backgrounds and showcase future plot devices for the DM.
46. The meet-cute. Every romance narrative has this scene. It could be wacky. It could be embarrassing. It could involve a magical accident. It could be hate at first sight, until.... In any case, you'll need to think of some of these.
47. "You MADE me!" Set up one NPC that is always the one who gets affected by the party's mistakes or their successful heroism. Eventually, he'll snap and become the villain who the party is completely responsible for. This is your Snape, your Faith, etc.
48. Another great kind of villain is the one who thinks he's a hero. This is your Magneto. But what was Magneto like as a high school student?
49+. Academics. The most important thing you're going to be creating is a mechanic for studying, doing homework, group projects, writing, and participation in class. This will be necessary for establishing antagonists and allies in the classroom, cramming for finals, and bonding in the library. A skill challenge system may work fine. But it needs to be a quick way to resolve RP on these issues. It needs to be there, but how prominent it is depends on your players. Because nothing kills a school setting's plausibility than a school where no one seems to go to class or study.
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49+. Academics. The most important thing you're going to be creating is a mechanic for studying, doing homework, group projects, writing, and participation in class. This will be necessary for establishing antagonists and allies in the classroom, cramming for finals, and bonding in the library. A skill challenge system may work fine. But it needs to be a quick way to resolve RP on these issues. It needs to be there, but how prominent it is depends on your players. Because nothing kills a school setting's plausibility than a school where no one seems to go to class or study.
This is a very valid concern. I have it set up as thus:
Each player has x classes a day. Each player has the first two classes together (Spellcraft 101 and Arcana 101) and then they have their other classes. They are in school until evening and then have club activities after dinner, then they can get to bed. I made it so that classes take up a whole lot of their time, so they have to make the choice to skip if they want to go on adventures.If a player goes to a class almost every day for the whole semester, they earn a 'floating' +1 to that related skill they can use during the Midterm and finals for that class that year. (For example, spellcraft) All midterms and finals are a week long extended skill test (5 checks, beat the base DC to get a C, but there's a B grade if beaten by 5 and an A+ if you beat it by 10) This floating bonus can go up to +6
They can get this +1 so long as they attend 4 of the 5 days each week.
This means that by attending the class every day for the whole year means they have a +4 bonus to that skill test for the finals. If they miss a day or two though they don't get to have that bonus for that semester unless the class itself was disrupted. This is to emulate the benefits of being attentive for the whole school year.
They can also get an additional + bonus (up to the +6 cap) for Spending the week before the midterm/final studying, but this bonus only applies for the upcoming test and doesn't carry over to the final if done on the midterm.
Last, but not least, but certainly risky, is cheating. Having figured a method to 'cheat' the tests can give a +1 bonus to your skill test, but you run the risk (5% cumulative for each day of the test, for 25% chance on the last day) of getting caught and instead getting punished and forced to take the test without any bonuses. Repeat cheaters may get a test that isn't like everyone else, negating their study bonuses.
Additionally, they may get the equivalent of masterwork tools for their studybooks. The midterms are open notes so a +2 can help them pass that one.
First year Skill test pass DC is 15, 20, and 25 respectively. The next year increases the DC's by 2, each year.
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So... How does that sound? You can pass the classes while missing one or two days, but if you keep skipping, not only will the Disciplinary committee come down on you (an arcane bloodrager leads the group) but you'll also start suffering and risk not passing your classes.
Clubs... they don't have real attendance requirements, but the clubs may have some RP consequences for skipping out.
ON THE WHOLE OTHER SIDE, I have the above list of adventure seeds that can sometimes work with their class schedule... sometimes they don't.
The bonus system above should work because I can just keep track on paper how many days a player skips for each class and then give them their bonuses when it comes time for the tests.
I was thinking about lowering the DC a little bit, to maybe 13/18/23 for the first year since they'd be level 1.
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50. A professor's experiment has gone awry causing his skeleton to climb out his mouth and run around campus pulling pranks and causing trouble. The professor has been reduced to a boneless mass that can be tied on as a cape and talk in a bubbly rasp begging the students to help get his bones back before he is fired.
Does anybody have any ideas for what I can do to with detention?
I have a player who likes to slack off and gambles against school rules, so it seems more likely that he'll end up in detention at least once.
Detention should be endless tests of Concentration skills. each test takes at least an hour. Picking up hundreds of marbles with chopsticks and putting them into a narrow necked vase. Counting the hairs on a cat. weighing individual grains of sand. Writing your name exactly the same way 1000 times.
If you don't pass the Concentration test, you don't get out of Detention for an extra hour, with that time being chained up under a dripping faucet.
The Chinese Water Torture has proven incredibly effective at motivating even the most recalcitrant of young wizardly students to focus more on their essential skills.
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This reminds of the old Sigil University thread back on the WotC 3.5 boards. That was a HILARIOUS read. Regdar memorizing every single religious holiday from every god possible so he could skip practice whenever he wanted to was just genius.
==Aelryinth
51.
You are sitting in detention when the new student, that managed to get themselves into detention on the first day, quietly says "psst, you don't see that do you?", and points at the head of another student. Nothing seems amiss, but they nod and lean back into their chair. Suddenly alert and watching the rest of the students in detention they look a little pale.
It is probably nothing... Or you might want to steal the lenses of true seeing and have a look.
38. The toilets in the girl's room are clogged, and from the miserable ranks, a hero must rise to un-clog the plumbing!
The last time they clogged up like that, it attracted otyughs!