Shadowrun Play > Gamemasters' Lounge

All Mages Campaign (small table) viable?

(1/3) > >>

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:

--- Quote from: DigitalZombie on ---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.

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

Navigation

[0] Message Index

[#] Next page