[Artemis Entreri]

Hey!
I'm definitely in SH mode and while one of my gaming tables are playing their first campaign, another group is asking for more goodness xD

After nights of inner delirium in between earthquakes constantly hitting us, I had this little tricky concept of a (handle this with care) sprawl hogwarts academy with all mages dealing with supernatural investigations and thrillers... Assuming the challenge of not including pure deckers/samurais and so forth, allowing mages only... do you have any degree oof experience with similar attempts?

Cheers!

[Mirikon]

Well, first off, love the name, though my favorite drow wants to stab you.

Now, about your post, there's some things to consider, outside of 'how will we get through security without a hacker'.

1. Any centralized school for magic-users, especially one that is cross-traditional, is going to be up to its eyeballs in megacorps. They might be funding it, or they might be the ones that actively put it together, or they could simply be keeping the school as a prime poaching ground for getting magical assets.
2. Remember the demographics, here. Awakened are roughly 1% of the population. That includes your high-level mages, but it also includes every barely-there almost mundane that has a single magic trick they can do, or are even only latent awakenings. Your population of people that have any talent worth mentioning is probably more around .01% of the population or less, and that's across all age groups. The number of teenagers showing the Talent, and strong enough to warrant training, is going to be smaller still. The number of those who aren't snapped up by existing megacorp recruiters (who are ALWAYS looking for more magical talent) is reduced even further, and concentrated primarily on the SINless, who also don't have money for training, as a rule.
3. An all-mage/adept team could work, though the lack of Matrix skills will hurt you, bad. The school aspect is the most problematic part of your idea, from a lore standpoint. Would work better as a wizgang, or as just a standard runner team that happens to be all awakened.

[Beta]

A few semi-random thoughts:

- I'm running a single player game where the PC is a shaman and it has gone well -- magic is pretty flexible!  But I do have a small roster of non-mage NPC who get called on to fill in missing skills.

- outright hogwarts scale seems unlikely for reason mentioned above.  A couple of things I could imagine as being more likely area:
  - some sort policlub/cult that has gathered poor students and offered free training ... at which case the campaign arc would probably have to invlude figuring out the real agenda and if they want any part of it or not, and if not when/how to get out. 
   - in the barrens some sort of elderly or burnt out mage, probably with a beef against the corps, who has gathered some talented kids from the barrens.  Here the agenda is more clear, but they have to deal with the biases and limits of their teacher and decide if/when they need to move on.

- It might be interesting to put in some build restrictions so that not everyone goes with the most classically efficient mage build.  Could be no full mages and no mysads (but allow the various restrcted types from FA), or could be something more complex on build priorities.

- have you ever rad any of the Ars Magica rpg rule sets?  They have a structure with mages, companions, and grunts that you could maybe get some inspiration from?

[DigitalZombie]

The nice thing about and all mage group is that they can go on their first initiation rite together...  Maybe to some uber crazy meta plane. 

[Mirikon]

The nice thing about and all mage group is that they can go on their first initiation rite together...  Maybe to some uber crazy meta plane.

If they're the same tradition, and spend karma to be an initiatory group, yeah.

[Marcus]

There are many advantages to the idea of the all mage game, and of course it can work. Your biggest issue imo, is role protection.
IE You don't want a group that basically the same build with a couple slight variants. Now that just means you need players to came up with concepts that work in the context of the magic team.

I truly, madly deeply love Aetherology game, and the best way to do it, is the all mage game. When you think about it, Astral Questing has nearly limitless possibilities. Given that it can answer question literally no one has the answer to. So if you can get truly specific you could use high rating astral quests to solve all kinds of weird data requests. Not to mention killing some really bad spirits, or just wandering around the Astral Planes learning more about the nature of magic.

What would be hard to do, is to make the scenes with the guardian of the gate meaningful as they are intended to be. System wise it's actually really easy to put together, the 3rd edition magic book has the RNG astral Quest generator, and there is nothing those rules that are hard to translate. That my 2 cents for it. If go ahead with it please let us know how it goes

[DigitalZombie]

The nice thing about and all mage group is that they can go on their first initiation rite together...  Maybe to some uber crazy meta plane.

If they're the same tradition, and spend karma to be an initiatory group, yeah.

Well true they could do that. But I dont think they need to. They could easily NOT be in an inititation group with the same traditions, they just wouldnt get any karma discount.

[Overbyte]

I run a game with only two people but I tailor the game to the skills they have not the ones they don't. If they need matrix support  (they are not deckers) they hire an NPC and give him a cut and I "hand wave" the details to keep the game moving.
That being said if you are going to have a bunch of mages you definitely want to make sure they have as little overlap as possible.
If you have access to Forbidden Arcana there are a lot of options in there that can help with this.
Here are some thoughts:

1) Healer (Specialty: Healing and augmentation magics)
2) Face (Specialty: Illusions and CHA skills, possibly a shapeshifter)
3) Combat Mage (Specialty: Offensive combat spells, possibly a Shark Shaman)
4) Interrogator (Specialty: Mind probing and control)
5) Summoner (Specialty: Spirits and banishing, may also be Face because of high CHA)
6) Astralist (Specialty: Assensing and Astral Combat)

These are just a few off the top of my head.

[Marcus]

3) Combat Mage (Specialty: Offensive combat spells, possibly a Shark Shaman)

Stag Shaman!!!

[Overbyte]

3) Combat Mage (Specialty: Offensive combat spells, possibly a Shark Shaman)

Stag Shaman!!!

When I go to a mage party.. I never go stag.

[Marcus]

Stag Shaman!!!
When I go to a mage party.. I never go stag.

LOL  well what can i say I'm just bachelor at heart.

[Beta]

The specialization should really be about making sure they all get spotlight time, more than covering a range of abilities ... mages are so flexible that it shouldn't be that hard to end up with a fair scope of abilities, and if some are missing a few new spells learned can cover a lot of that.  But it can kind of suck if another character does mostly what yours does, but happens to have a slightly more optimized build so tends to do it first or bigger or whatever. 

But in a game like this, that spotlight time doesn't have to be magical, or at least not directly.  Maybe one races motorbikes, another likes to hang glide with air spirits, a third is a skilled negotiator, etc.

[cantrip]

Yeah, quite doable. We have a small group - An Adept, Mystic Adept and Magician and they work well together. The adept doubles as a face and the other two are fairly well rounded.
The games are heavily magic focused, but that's expected - you can cover some of the other areas with NPCs if needed. They tend to take jobs from those in the magic community so matrix and physical security is not as big of deal as it could be. Some free spirits have even hired them for various jobs, though they don't necessarily know that.
And with the 6th World Tarot, there is even more potential for a mage group.
Nutshell - it works fine, just have to be flexible as a GM.