Game Recap: The Mirror Academy

Inktober 16, Mike Phillips

The Mirror Academy

To test out "Magus Ludus", a domain game centered on each character being a wizard, I threw 10 level 4 GLoG wizards into a school and told them they were responsible to raise up the next generation of students.

Things did not go according to plan.

NOTES ON PLAY

Co-Creating With Microscope

To begin our game, we played a few rounds of Ben Milton's "Microscope". This resulted in this document (not required reading, but it contains much of the lore).

Turn Structure

Each turn, players described their goal and how they pursued it. For the most part this meant they were working towards a particular plan of their own design, gaining progress on it until poof it happened at 100%. While this resulted in some interesting hijinks, I found that it often fell flat in terms of interesting play. Players had a lot of freedom to choose what they wanted to do, but the process often looked identical and presented few risks to the characters.

PLAY EXAMPLE

Here's how the game started, and what a turn looked like:

The Mirror Academy

The most prestigious school for those gifted with arcane ability. 

Its spiked walls and towers gaze menacingly down on the world below as a team of wizards whip the chaotic bands of starlight into a semblance of day and night for the rest of the world. 

True, the sun is dead, and we live now only by channeling the incredible energy of the school into maintaining the world's atmosphere and blasting trans-spatial beings out of the sky, but we are still breathing, and we will continue to do so. If that bloody bird could live with a sword through it, we can live through this.

The school faces many threats, not the least of which is the perpetual end of the world it resides on.

Some would have us undo Ozzam's razor, if such a feat is even possible.

Some would take the reigns from us, and steer our world to new destinations.

Some would let us fall into the abyss, for surely such brutal beings as us don't deserve to live after the crimes we've committed.

Damn the lot of 'em. This is our reality, we're the archlectors of the best school in history, and we've got things perfectly under control.

Week 1 Actions

Each week, I summarized the players' actions into something that looked like this:

Fly-in-Amber (Archlector of Bio) begins work on a unique anatomical exchange laboratory, specifically intended for the re-assignment of gendered features to those who would feel more at home in a physically different body. The main feature of this laboratory is a large blood-jelly.

Helvetios (Archlector of Hyadurgy) prepared for the start of classes, hoping to make them fun, engaging, and safe.

Renata (Archlector of Mentalism) seeks to dress her humble office with something modest, like a djinn.

Otlaltu (Archlector of Serpantmancy) began work on training their familiar to smell and track spells.

Roland (Archlector of Garbage) fought off some raccoons to turn a percentage of the local garbage heap into valuable coin, and used the funds to purchase liquor and party decorations.

Ellie Eille (Archlector of Narrative), concerned about the pro-bird movement, began drafting a play about the real history of the Bird Wars-not just the propaganda-starring none other than Cornelius de Jong. She also discussed the potential of loaning de Jong some of her better theatrical students to act as spies.

Cornelius de Jong (Archlector of Killin' Folk Dead) had an eventful week searching out the enemies of the school. He took to the ancient records to discern who has attacked the school in the past, and who may try again in the future.

During his trip into the library, he encountered a student lamenting his inability to kill. The old Archlector instructed the student that "Mercy is wasted on this world. We're all bastards, each and every one. We just have to kill the folk, or animals, that need killin'. Whether it looks like they've been doing wrong or not." The boy's companion, a stern young girl with less qualms about killing, agreed, saying that "some folk need to get on with dying in order to ensure the common good."

Alar Anwyn (Archlector of Doormancy), inspecting the school locks, encountered a door in the basement of the school so magically locked that even his own abilities were tested. Supposedly, the rooms beyond the door have been abandoned since the overgrowth due to a particularly nasty infestation of plants. Still, Alar had never seen it locked like this before.

Odtsetseg (Arclector of Spirits) spent her week studying the history of Ozzam's razor, a device used to destroy all other realities.

The World

It continues to spin, though in which direction it's hard to tell. The lack of a sun and the upset of the lunar bodies has wreaked havoc on most folks lives, and many doomsayers declare that all that remains is to wish your family farewell, and pray for a quick end.

Quite a few folks blame the wizards for this state of affairs.

CAMPAIGN HIGHLIGHTS

Over the course of the campaign, the Archlectors of the Mirror Academy:

• Created an Organ-transplant Jelly
• Threw a party with gold stolen from raccoons.
• Wrote a play about the history of the First End of All Things.
• Instructed the students of the academy on the necessity of Killin' Folks Dead.
• Taught a familiar to smell-out spells.
• Turned a few ruffians into paste, and showed mercy to another.
• Encountered students performing weird rituals with impalement and necromancy. Teenagers, y'know.
• Discovered Ozzam's Razor.
• Started the "Youngun's Magical Cackerlackian Association", which dramatically boosted the wizard's popularity with the wider world.
• Uncovered a rebellion lead by the senior students!
• Created and trained bees to create a new sun, which, shockingly, worked. Of course, Killer Space Bees are now on the loose in the outer sphere, but that's a problem for another wizard.
• Turned the dungeon into a PE room.
• Created the healing-rabbit "anti-abomination".
• Put up death threats against rebellious students, and then got bombed by them.
• Neatly dispatched a rebellion with far too many snakes and a brilliant counterspelling of Word of Death.
• Witnessed the final lesson of the Archlector of Killing Folk Dead—how to die with grace.

The Students' Rebellion

Due to the Archlectors' previous (and catastrophic) failures, a group of senior students rebelled against the Archlectors. The following is a selection of direct quotes from that battle.

A fighting force of four people is... Not a whole lot, unless you see people as ablative armor, a threshold which Cornelius hasn't yet crossed. You know what's a damn good force multiplier, though? Magic, baby, especially the killin' folk kind.

Helvetios (A storm wizard) will summon up his students to make sure they are all sane and safe. "These frightful fellows are using, apparently, iron stakes to animate a sort of undead. Yes, large iron stakes. Very conductive. It is sad, but give them, ah, what is it, yes, Hell."

After stumbling down a trapped staircase, the wizards come to the headquarters of the rebellion.

"Point thish inshide-" Cornelius shoves his FANCY FOLDING WAND into the un-ruined hands of one of his freshly-educated peasant warriors. "And presh the button and think of killin!"

Helvetions turns to address, with reasonable volume, his students. "Now, students, allow me to demonstrate the, ah, uses of diplomacy in a dangerous situation." He turns around suddenly, and flings the door open. His robes whip and billow around him. A voice like thunder speaks: "O WINDS, O RAINS, O MIGHTY STORMS, HEED OUR ANCIENT PACT! COME THOU FORTH IN SERPENT FORM! NOW AT LAST TO ACT!" He holds aloft the Stormglass Orb, which shatters as eleven enormous snakes appear from the air. (and 3 small, but poisonous, ones) With this, he shuts the door again. ... "That was, ah, slightly more serpents than expected."

"Lock the door 'til the screaming stops."

Helvetios turns to his students. "As you can see, class, or, well, I suppose you can't, but, diplomacy is all about, er, gathering allies, so that you may call on them, you see. 50 years ago, I performed a, ah, service for the queen of air and darkness, yes, and we made a pact, and that pact is, well, the spell you just saw, yes. The other thing, you might surmise, that diplomacy is all about, is this: don't fuck with wizards."

The screaming lasts for several minutes. Between blood-curdling howls you hear the occasional pulse, whirring, and whoosh of spellfire.

Then all goes quiet. 

Otlaltu eventually peers through the door, being the most friendly with snakes.

Bodies—humanoid and serpentine—litter the floor. Some are burnt by fire, some shriveled, some seemingly torn in half, and a great many crushed, mangled, or poisoned.

Several snakes peer up into the air where 2 students—both of them impaled with iron spikes—stare down from a floating platform. Their expressions, first of shock and grief, quickly turn to rage.

They lock hands, and it is then that Cornelius recognizes the pair. A boy and girl from the library, studying killing curses.

With a yell, power floods up from him, more than you would think such a slip of a boy is capable of, and channels through her, towards the archlectors standing in the hall.

Together, they cast Word of Death.

As Helvetios, Lector of Hyadurgy, lifts his voice at the young students, power rips through the basement chamber of the Mirror Academy. The walls shake, and a pillar cracks, crushing a corpse beyond recognition as it falls.

Odtsetseg, Lector of Spirits, with eyes that can see every detail of the invisible realms, sees a face framed with low-curling horns rise up behind the young students—drawing on their power, draining them, growing stronger even as the young girl's lips form the forbidden word.

And yet! Storm spirits rush forth with Helvetios's power, grappling at the beast with all their might—the invisible detaining the invisible.

As their power meets, the room continues to shake, dust swirls.

And swirls.

And settles.

Two bodies, fingers still entwined, fall to the floor as their magic fades. 

Their eyes stare across at each other, but they do not see each other.

They will see nothing ever again.

The rebellion is ended.

Cornelius de Jong, dead on the floor, has nothing to say, no remark to celebrate with. He's done.

Strangely enough, that killing word doesn't seem to be what finished him off, though it probably helped. He saw them die... And then immediately died himself. Just willed himself to stop being, like he'd been holding it back for years and could finally let go.

It's a damn disturbing thing to see a corpse smile.

"...Cornelius?" Ellie asks, concerned.

His body shoots up! "And don't even THINK of reanimatin' me! I'm finished with thish!" 

Dead.

Final Comments

Many thanks to Farblade, Phantom Gardener, Gorinich, TheisticGilthoniel, Moondog, Primeumaton, Abyssin, and Bamzolino for playing! I had a blast, and learned a lot about domain games. Probably how not to run them, but oh well.

With the information gleaned from this game, I have refined the rules into Roam, which you can read here.

I do have a campaign underway using the Roam rules. Unfortunately it's a little more involved than Magus Ludus, so I had to limit myself to 5 players, but I am very excited to see how the campaign plays out. Right now we've got:

• The last survivor of a slaughter seeking to become the dark lord of his undead house.
• A goblin commander seeking a new home for his people.
• A royal advisor trying to raise the Emperor's son from the dead.
• A young duelist looking to test his mettle against the world.
• And a fae spirit aiming to slaughter the humans encroaching on their territory.

It's looking like a lot of fun so far, with a few more systems in place to handle a variety of situations smoothly. Stay tuned!