Ashstaff Academy

A sprawling campus that exists within that labyrinthine Crossroads, Ashstaff originally started as a kind of observatory for that place between the material and magical realms. The scholars grew in number the school grew around them, the institute of learning long since replacing its original purpose… but ancient workshops and research projects can still be found, buried in deep basements or locked up in towers that only exist from certain angles.

The supposed pinnacle of magical education, wizards that graduate from Ashstaff are well taught, well regarded, and above all other things well *prepared*. Many wizards that enroll never graduate, though outright death is fairly rare that doesn’t mean your life cannot be ruined in other ways.

Much of that comes down to Ashstaff’s… lets call it ‘draconian’ education style. Students are expected to learn by doing. That means learning to duel by getting into duels, that means learning magical creature capture and distillation the hands-on way, and a host of practical examinations that range from challenging to legitimately hazardous.

Students are encouraged to hex each other, and so long as those hexes are *within the guidelines* there is almost never any punishment for doing so. After all, out in the real world falling for a hex can do much worse than turn you green for a week or make you cough up slugs, an actual criminal wizard can steal your very free will away from you and never give it back. The Ashstaff philosophy is that if you don’t learn vigilance in a low stakes environment, you’ll pay for it later when the stakes are real.

As you can imagine, Ashstaff graduates have a reputation for being unshakable. A lot of prestige is associated with the school, and with status comes wealth and opportunity. A lot of old money is invested in Ashstaff now, and children can quickly become pawns in the schemes of old family alliances and rivalries.

>>98773099

On Houses

There are multiple Houses associated with Ashstaff Academy, which have all but absorbed and replaced the school dorms. Only a handful of unaffiliated dorm rooms exist now, and its not a *good* thing to be assigned to one.

Each of the modern Houses is the result of a past donation by some powerful family or individual, funding the creation of a small institution within Ashstaff with their name on it. Some are larger than others, and while some Houses were sponsored by families that no longer have any pull in the world, others very much have ties to active forces out in the world and are used as a way to recruit kids to their way of thinking or encourage certain magical practices or ideologies.

Competition between Houses is common, often school sponsored and friendly but occasionally crossing over into real forms of sabotage. They never did figure out how to get Havelmoore House out of that sinkhole, they just conjured a stairway down to it and those dorms are underground now.

OOC: Obviously these are a stand-in for Harry Potter houses, but with lots of wiggle room to them since they are not meant to be equal. The way I see it, all of the players in a given party will probably be part of a small House that only has a few people in it, making managing NPCs easy for the GM and creating a baked-in answer for why these specific students are all lumped together, while other Houses can naturally be bigger, have more students and resources, and have external backing. Imagine a Syltherin-esq house that is actively sponsored by a prominent political figure in the world outside of the school, an explicit part of their movement and agenda. That sort of thing.
I think its probably fine to come up with a list of example or 'canon' Houses, and then encourage players to come up with their OWN small House with its own theme at campaign start as part of character creation. Makes it more personal.

>>98773112

On Hexes
As we all know, curses are both the greatest weapon and the greatest threat between wizards. The invention of the countercurse charm was a miracle. Such a simple spell that even children can learn it, and effective enough that all but the most powerful of curses are stopped in their tracks. But, of course, progress has a mean spirit and it wasn’t long before the next evolution of curses came: hexes.

A curse is cast directly on a target. A hex, meanwhile, is a complex spellform inscribed onto a sheet of paper that lies dormant until picked up. The hapless target, completely unaware of the danger, unknowlingly lets the spell within their defenses and only then does it trigger.

Paranoia is survival among wizards. Any book must be checked to ensure that there is not a hex script hidden between its pages before being picked up. A moment’s distraction can lead to a hex being slipped into your bag, waiting to go off when you next grab it.

Some teachers have even taken to using hex slips as a form of punishment for bad behavior or poor grades. These teacher-issued hexes are typically quite mild, as teachers could face repercussions for abusive hexes, but student-on-student hexing can get downright *nasty*. The only really enforced rules for hexes between students are that they must be temporary, cannot inflict pain or harm, and may not prevent a fellow student from attending class for longer than a day. That leaves a LOT of horrible things that bored and vindictive teenagers can do to each other.

OOC: the idea of hexes is to give low stakes threats and challenges that can inconvenience or embarrass the PCs or be used by them against others, which resolve in a more interesting way than just point and click “I cast a spell”. If you want to hex someone, you’ll have to find a way to slip it to them unawares. Trickery that, when successful, will make players feel clever for having accomplished something more than just rolling the dice.

On Stats
I think that gameplay wise, its best if the actual character sheets are pretty simple. I see two goals as being ideal: the core mechanics should be very simple with the expectation that GMs will naturally add onto that foundation as they grow out their own game’s curriculum, and that the inherent focus of the mechanics should be on *learning* stuff, not being superheroes.

To that end, I think that the system would have a handful of magical skills that define how good you are at particular kinds of magical practice. Not forms of magic in the vein of ‘necromancy, evocation, summoning’ but instead spell-agnostic skills like “dueling, hexing, warding, etc”.

These skills are simple numerical values, and the gulf between ranks is significant. A guy with Dueling 3 is MUCH better than a guy with Dueling 2, such that the default assumption is that without something to level the playing field the guy with Dueling 2 doesn’t even get to roll if he gets into a duel with someone that has a 3 or higher, he *just loses*. You only get to roll if you are both equal rank and the fight can go either way, or if you are within 1 rank of them and you find a way to give yourself a temporary boost (cheating, trickery, getting outside help, spending an action point, etc).

At the start of the game, everyone starts are 0 in everything. You are a newbie, you don’t know shit. Based on your year in the school (semester, maybe?) there is a hard cap on your maximum rank in any given skill. Older students are simply going to be capable of things that younger students can’t do yet. Not every older student will necessarily be better than you at THIS thing, but you should expect there to be a power gap.

The exception is Talent, which is chosen at character creation, which lets you pick lets say 2 Skills that your character has +1 max rank on. You still START at 0 in it, but you’re capable of getting higher in it than your year would normally allow if you train for it.

>>98773133
In addition to those skills described above, you learn spells. This isn’t complex: a spell is just written down on your sheet as a name and what it does. The goal is to be a little specific, but not HYPER specific. These are not DnD spells.

Indeed, the spells do not have inherent powers or mechanics on their own. Their goal is, instead, to be *ways you can use your Skills*.
Lets say, for example, you learn a spell that lets you create ice and snow. On its own, it doesn’t actually *do* anything aside from cosmetically. You can make as many snowballs as you want so long as it doesn’t cross over into having a mechanical impact or change how events would play out. You don't have to roll for it, you know the spell so it just works.
The moment that the GM decides that the situation *matters*, you have to filter that ice and snow spell through a Skill. Defend yourself in a duel? Maybe you are making the ground slippery to knock your opponent over, or you are throwing icicles at them, but either way its your Dueling skill that determines whether or not you are winning that fight. Want to create a wall of ice to block an attack? Thats Warding, and you use that skill to determine success or failure, etc.

So, essentially, magic skills are always how you decide success or failure mechanically, but by increasing your known spells you increase the opportunities and ways that you can do so. If you can’t think of a way to apply the spells you know to your current situation, it doesn’t MATTER how higher your skills are, because you don’t have a solution to the current problem that would let you use them. No matter how higher your Dueling skill is, you’re not beating anybody with a spell that freshens your breath.

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I figure that I will stop there for now, and see whether anyone else has any interest in the idea.

>>>/qst/