DnD campaign idea: Hogwarts in Silverymoon? (My group stay out)

[arwink]

Nice idea

random thoughts - If you're stealing from Harry Potter, go ahead and lift the idea of various houses. you may not want to play it up to much if you want to avoid an overt "Potter" feel, but you can easily add in the idea of fraternies or colleges in as a replacement. Something to instil that sense of competition, to give the Pc's someone to hate and strive against without necessarily destroying. Then, when the head of the college is toast and the allies are thin on the ground, there's a game of "can I trust them or can't I" when you start dealing with the Slitherin types.

Play up the social aspect as much as the adventure aspect. Run university sporting events, be it sprinting or magical football, where the PC's have a chance to interact with people outside of adventuring. This'll help set up the tone that it's a school, that they should be safe, and the campaign isn't all about combat. Then you take that all away from them, and who has the high score on the quiditch team doesn't mean that much anymore

Again, in the social vien, give the PC's a place to hang with others in their situation between adventures - a tavern with a chalk board that holds the names of all the recruit teams, alongside the number of arrests and commendations they've received. If it doesn't get trashed, it'd make an interesting place to hold resistance meetings later on - "Remember when we used to come here and compare tallies against Trogan's crew? man, seems so long ago..."

 

[Atticus_of_Amber]

Nice idea

random thoughts - If you're stealing from Harry Potter, go ahead and lift the idea of various houses. you may not want to play it up to much if you want to avoid an overt "Potter" feel, but you can easily add in the idea of fraternies or colleges in as a replacement. Something to instil that sense of competition, to give the Pc's someone to hate and strive against without necessarily destroying. Then, when the head of the college is toast and the allies are thin on the ground, there's a game of "can I trust them or can't I" when you start dealing with the Slitherin types.

Play up the social aspect as much as the adventure aspect. Run university sporting events, be it sprinting or magical football, where the PC's have a chance to interact with people outside of adventuring. This'll help set up the tone that it's a school, that they should be safe, and the campaign isn't all about combat. Then you take that all away from them, and who has the high score on the quiditch team doesn't mean that much anymore

Again, in the social vien, give the PC's a place to hang with others in their situation between adventures - a tavern with a chalk board that holds the names of all the recruit teams, alongside the number of arrests and commendations they've received. If it doesn't get trashed, it'd make an interesting place to hold resistance meetings later on - "Remember when we used to come here and compare tallies against Trogan's crew? man, seems so long ago..."

Arwink, to borrow a catch-phrase from my "native" Nutkinland, I want to have your manbabies, man.

That is a truly great idea.

Maybe I could adopt the Oxford/Caimbridge stucture of faculties and Colleges. The Faculties do the lecturing and examinations while the Colleges do the more personal seminar/tutorial-style teaching is done through the colleges. members of a College can live there - most do in their early years - or live "out" but are attached to teh college.

Maybe some of the temples could act as colleges...

Hmm... ideas are flowing.

 

[tensen]

A couple of years back now - actually around the time I was still running the old campaign - I stumbled across a site on the internet called Project Silverymoon. I'm not sure if it's still up - it may have copyright issues now WotC has done The Silver Marches - but I printed it all out and filed it at the time. Anyway, the thing that really interested me was the rules for studying at the University of Silverymoon.

By the way.. Project Silverymoon was handled by Wil Upchurch and Joseph Carriker... both now with numerous published credits.

Wil is d20Dwarf here, and will probably be helpful for reference points.
Unfortunately I forget Joseph's nick here.

The website is:
http://www.gemofthenorth.org/

 

[Graf]

In general I think the game has tremendous potential but you need to decide whether you want to play Buffy or Harry Potter.
(What? You might be saying).
Basically in Buffy the school stuff doesn’t matter. Its just the backdrop against which adventures occur.
By comparison a lot of the harry potter books -are- about going to class, learning new things, studying and so on. Heck there are whole pages of the most recent book which are basically “and then Harry and Ron sat down and spent all day studying. And what interrupted their studying and how their paper turned out, etc”.

The nuisance of your original post is that the game is about what’s not happening in class. If you really want to capture the HP feel you should do more class work.

Other general comments
Most good games have recurring characters. This is a tremendous opportunity to have recurring characters the party can’t kill off or get rid of.
So you can have students and professors who are recurring and interesting.
I would definitely include a headmaster, a head of departments like combat arts, divine arts, arcane arts, academic learning (knowledge skills), wilderness arts (including skills like survival, animal handling, spot, listen, hide, move silently, etc).
I would also include a spiritual advisor (very different than the master of divine arts).

You might want to think about adopting the –yearly- schedule that us used by Rowling in her books. So you have different terms, and things you as the seasons pass.

Students you want both older and younger students. Students who are good a something particular (fighting, the best survivalist in school). Students who are particularly inept at things. Kids who are there to be supported by their rich families. Lesser royalty from visiting nations, (Look at Thayan transfer student!).

The student groups idea is good: One of the weaknesses of the HP books is that there are really only two groups (especially in the later books): The villainous Slytherin (sp?) and the “other good houses”. And the Slytherin are only bad because their parents are members of evil death cults.
Having a bunch of different student groups would help with this.

Learning: D&D isn’t very good at modeling learning. A fighter can go to a class about monster lore, but they will get, at best: a point or so. You might want to set up a way for people to learn stuff outside of the skill system. Even if it’s just “you took creatures of the underdark and know about common creatures of the underdark).

That’s all I can think of right now.

 

[blargney]

You might want to have a look at the link in my sig.
-blarg