Suggestions for Reasons To Send Harry Potter on an Adventure

[roguerouge]

I've done the dungeon exam thing and it is excellent. Have rewards for various individual actions and "updates" of other teams scores. That gets the competitive juices flowing!

Have you tried a game of battle chess? Have the players be the pieces with someone in charge of strategy.

Protect the mascot or find who kidnapped it before the big game.

The new teacher is a sadist. Prank time!

Buffy plots:

Someone's dosing the school swim team to improve their performance. Find out who and how to prevent the dangerous side effects.

A girl goes mad when she turns invisible due to her lack of popularity. Terror ensues.

Someone's cursing cheerleaders. Find out who before one of the PCs gets it.

Two words: Talent Show.

One of your PCs is on a first date and, through a series of circumstances, must bring them with them on the adventure. The catch: they're a Muggle. (Or provide some other reason why this person must be protected from harm and from learning what is going on.)

You take on your Halloween costume identity for the night. Wackiness ensues.

 

[roguerouge]

Have you tried:

An absurdly powerful (and secretive) Student Council?
A Cult of Personality around a Queen Bee?
An extremely annoying Cult of Personality around a PC?
Their enemies setting up a series of obstacles to make them late for school and thus get detention?
A new transfer student?
A parental threat to be sent to military school or a single sex school?
Picture day?
Have you considered that the entire school may be an evil government program?
Have you had one of them become an investigative reporter for the school newspaper?
I strongly recommend a school play with a Noises Off! scenario.

 

[Set]

A *totally safe* field trip to the former sanctum of a terrible evil wizard, where everything goes horribly, terribly wrong. The students blunder into an ancient trap and are transported to a dangerous place (right from in front of their helpless chaperones), where they must prevent an ancient evil from re-awakening (the 'trap' they triggered meant to bring servants of the ancient evil to its resting place on the anniversary of the celestial conjunction that filled the sky on the night of its defeat, so that the cultists life-forces could be consumed to restore life to their master, and, oh, what a coincidence, that celestial convergence thing might have something to do with the szygy happening tonight...).

The students have blundered a big blunder, and to fix it, need some rare component, which is only available in a specific place. They need to get that component, while also managing to sneak out of classes, since they can't allow their instructors to find out what they messed up, for fear of being expelled. Will they have to disguise friends as themselves while they are off-campus? Will they set up some sort of illusory 'answering machine' to convince anyone entering their dorm room that they are present and studying? Will one fake an illness, and sneak out of the infirmary, leaving a transformed pet pretending to be her feverish self? Will some sort of magical construct or ally of the kids be hornswaggled into helping cover for them?

Their secret ally among the teaching staff, Professor Too-Nice-For-Her-Own-Good, has been acting snappish and out of sorts, and over the course of several days, the students notice that the teachers are interacting less and less with the students, and acting all furtive and sinister... A ritual discovered by the conjurings professor appeared to fail, but instead called up an intangible possessing-entity, which then took over the professor and, over days, invited his friends and colleagues in to see 'something wonderful' that he wanted to show them. At least half of the teaching staff are possessed now, and the entities are performing the ritual every night, attempting to get all of the staff under their control, before they begin possessing the students!

Someone ate something they shouldn't have, from the potions lab, and has fallen into a coma. The PCs begin having dreams, in which their comatose classmate appears. They sleepwalk to the infirmary, and realize that the student is trapped in the Dreaming Lands, and is calling for them to help find their way home. They have to research a ritual to enter the Dreaming Lands (without the librarians getting suspicious of why these ne'er do well are suddently loitering around the library...), and sneak in and perform the ritual to enter the Dreaming Lands, where they have to fight off all sorts of phantasmagorical entities and challenges (manifestations of their own subconscious fears), as well as phantasms from the mind of the student they have come to rescue, and then find their way out.

 

[Ed_Laprade]

Someone ate something they shouldn't have, from the potions lab, and has fallen into a coma. The PCs begin having dreams, in which their comatose classmate appears. They sleepwalk to the infirmary, and realize that the student is trapped in the Dreaming Lands, and is calling for them to help find their way home. They have to research a ritual to enter the Dreaming Lands (without the librarians getting suspicious of why these ne'er do well are suddently loitering around the library...), and sneak in and perform the ritual to enter the Dreaming Lands, where they have to fight off all sorts of phantasmagorical entities and challenges (manifestations of their own subconscious fears), as well as phantasms from the mind of the student they have come to rescue, and then find their way out.

So why wouldn't they just tell the faculty about that one? That sort of nonsense might work in a children's book, but presumably the players are sane enough to know when to let the adults handle something like that.

 

[Stormonu]

The students have blundered a big blunder, and to fix it, need some rare component, which is only available in a specific place. They need to get that component, while also managing to sneak out of classes, since they can't allow their instructors to find out what they messed up, for fear of being expelled. Will they have to disguise friends as themselves while they are off-campus? Will they set up some sort of illusory 'answering machine' to convince anyone entering their dorm room that they are present and studying? Will one fake an illness, and sneak out of the infirmary, leaving a transformed pet pretending to be her feverish self? Will some sort of magical construct or ally of the kids be hornswaggled into helping cover for them?

Why am I having visions of Ferris Beuler's Day Off?

 

[I'm A Banana]

Why am I having visions of Ferris Beuler's Day Off?

I was thinking about John Hughes, and then I wondered which PC is Judd Nelson?

 

[Amphimir Míriel]

TV Tropes to the rescue!

I have been thinking of running a similar game to yours, set in an Olde Schoole of Magicke, a Larger-than-life School, probably a boarding school, so that adventure happens 24 hours a day.

This way, I could introduce all those characters common to school stories, like the Popular Bully and his inevitable girlfriend, the queen bee, the nosy Classroom Monitor, the Sadist Teacher who could even become the headmaster or at least a subprincipal

Now I have to convince my buddies to roll up an all-arcane party of teens... heh

 

[Amphimir Míriel]

So why wouldn't they just tell the faculty about that one? That sort of nonsense might work in a children's book, but presumably the players are sane enough to know when to let the adults handle something like that.

Because adults are useless, silly rabbit!

 

[Mistwell]

Just wanted to give another big thank you to those of you who contributed to this thread.

I'd still love more ideas to draw from, but those already given set the bar pretty high.

 

[coyote6]

Don't forget spring break! And/or other school breaks -- they can go on road trips to popular destinations, where they might stumble into any kind of adventure (i.e., pick one of the "beautiful young people go somewhere and horror happens" and rip off its plot, though tuned to kill fewer of your protagonists).

Or they can be invited to somebody's family cabin for a ski trip, and run into a renegade yeti shaman out to steal some winter-themed relic or kidnap some frosty entity.

Stealing from Buffy: some fraternity or similar club or organization on campus swiped some alcohol from somewhere, not knowing that it's cursed. Now they're turning into neanderthals, and smashing up campus.

Hmm, are they kids at a boarding school, or young adults at a university?