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The administration is non-existent. The modules introduced the dining hall head cook, the supply center manager, and one groundskeeper, but those are staff rather than administration. I claim the teachers make administrative decisions when I need to explain decisions.
There very clearly is an administration. PCs can go ask them for help looking up records at a certain point. But the book isn't going to spend 200 pages painstakingly explaining how every aspect of the school works because its completely impractical.
I read, "Like you're not going to give an off the cuff lecture on using the Residue theorem to integrate to people who haven't even learned how to do Contour integrals yet," aloud to my wife and asked her if I would do that. Her response of "Totally" was matched by a chime of "Yes" from our housemate in the same room. I call my wife "long-suffering" for more than one reason.
Perhaps I model the teachers of the Magaambya after myself too much. I remember learning Cauchy's Reside Theorem in Prof. Lappan's Complex Analysis class in 1984 when I was a senior at Michigan State University.
The other thing about Strength of Thousands is that the PCs should be viewed as grad students, rather than undergrads- these are people you can and should offload unpleasant work to, not people who need to be coddled.
The Magaambya has a multi-millennia tradition of assigning students at all levels to service projects. The AP explains that they do projects for the city of Nantambu, too. This is a very clever gimmick by the authors of Strength of Thousands because it gave a reason why the PCs would be sent to encounters outside the classroom. The Nantambu chapter of Lost Omens: The Mwangi Expanse says on page 240, "The town’s prosperity remained entwined with the school’s popularity for many years, however. Students continue to serve the city as part of their curriculum, and classes moved from within the school’s walls and out into the community."
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I'm a big fan of The Alexandrian, who's been writing and foraying into youtube gamemastery advice. A particularly relevant episode is Calling in the Big Guns;
A unique challenge to running urban campaigns is figuring out what happens if the PCs, confronted with some horrible crime or circumstance, do the logical thing and seek help from powerful allies.
The video is well worth watching (15m), but there's a couple of key ideas in it that I think apply a lot to this discussion;
* At some point the PCs are going to run into an issue that is big and serious, and it just plain makes sense to take it to the authorities.
* But neither the GM or players want the authorities to take over and the PCs to be completely sidelined.
He goes on to discuss six different styles for achieving a much more satisfying outcome. A common trend in them is this: taking the issue to the authorities is a good thing, and should be validated in some way, but that doesn't mean the story ends for the PCs.
For example: there's a statue attacking people with lethal force. Okay, yeah that's pretty problematic, thanks for telling me. Let's turn this into a learning opportunity. I want you to deal with this statue, but I'll be standing by in case it gets out of hand. Also, let's review the magical theory of constructs, so that you can properly prepare for this fight.
Another one is to establish that powerful NPCs have big responsibilities. While they care about the issues the PCs bring up, that doesn't mean they have enough time to handle them. This is an opportunity to lift the curtain a bit and show that the faculty might be quietly handling some big crisis that they don't want to worry the population at large about. While they're doing that, they need the PCs to handle the new problem, but the faculty can give them some advice, and maybe a powerful scroll or too with just the right thing on it.
In these examples, the players are taking an issue to an authority figure who genuinely cares, and who validates that they did the right thing by bringing in the information. But the rest of the adventure isn't gonna be yanked out of the players' hands. They're going to be better off for having done this - face the monster with a bit more information and story context.
So players don't have to "play dumb" to get to actually play the adventure instead of delegating it entirely to their higher ups.
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I did it again in my game session yesterday, Tuesday, February 11. We were running the Spoken on the Song Wind scenario "Oozing into Trouble" in which the PCs are hunting down oozes that are loose in a conservatory garden that is not directly affiliated with the Magaambya. Instead, the timing was right before the Fall orientation week and Teacher Zuma received a request for help from the conservatory. Zuma wondered whether the problem could wait until orientation week, so that the new students arriving Fall Season could deal with it as a practice service project, so he sent the party to investigate. The 5th-level challenge was obviously higher than 1st- or 2nd-level new students could handle safely, so the party decided to clean up the oozes themselves. However, for extra challenge, I added a 7th-level Gahlepod that had been attracted by the scent of oozes and was eating an ooze it had killed.
The party looked at the gahlepod, rolled both natural 1s and natural 20s on their Recall Knowledge (Nature) checks, and retreated to argue. One was bitten for 18 damage by the gahlepod during their departure, but I let them retreat past other dead oozes and return to Exploration Mode. They figured out that the gahlepod was the mindless young polliwog form of a frog-like intelligent fey species called brughadatch. They decided that the Magaambya teachers should deal with it.
They contacted Zuma. He knew more about the oozes and the gahlepod. He concluded that the Magaambya teachers would have to set up a high-level team for a potential brughadatch incursion, but asked the PCs to finish clearing out the oozes, which he saw as a lesser problem.
I had chosen the gahlepod because (1) 7th-level was the challenge difficulty I wanted, (2) a fey or abberant creature seemed more likely than an animal or beast to eat oozes, and (3) the gahlepod was amphibious so could have swum to the conservatory unseen in local canals. My players, on the other hand, focused on the possibility of brughadatch parents nearby, so the gahlepod was more than they wanted to tackle without experienced guidance. My little addition flubbed due to common sense, but it did not derail the ooze mission.
... or being forced to wait for months after discovering that hostile snersons have already infiltrated the academy, wasting critical time while snersons are doing who knows what (because you're scripted to make more study checks), etc.That timeline is stupid. I will try to have the snerson subplot resolved in four weeks in-game time. Thanks for the heads up.
I wrote myself into a quandary due to wanting to finish the snerson subplot in four weeks in-game time. I need the PCs to level up to 6th level before they deal with the 9th-level snerson final boss. With a 5th-level 7-member party, that boss would be only a 91xp Moderate-Threat challenge, but with saving throws against 9th-level venom involved, the risk of a PC death is too high. I need the PCs to advance to better saving throws. The beginning of Fall Season is going to be very busy.
The party did earn 46xp for dealing with the gahlepod, even though they mostly avoided combat. They need 626 more xp to reach 6th level.