Hello, I had the idea to have a Bonisagus discover a breakthru that lets a magus teach the arts to more than one gifted person at a time.... he has integrated it into Magic Therory and can teach it to any who learn from him... He then contacted other magi (some he was writing letters to, others were found thru divination) to create a magic shcool.
The PC's are the most jr. of the magi found to create the school and are therefore "troubleshooters", the first task is to find a location.... it will turn out to be a piller of stone that moves from tribunal to tribunal.. it stays one place for about a year then moves on... not sure if movement and time between movement would be the same each time, random, or some other schedule..
Wanted to get more ideas and see what others thought of the idea, Thanks
RAW says Arts can only be taught 1 on 1.
Cant say i´ve exactly stuck to that though.
Its a nice idea. And its vaguely in the same direction as the first AM5 campaign i was in.
The player characters and their masters practically ran head over heels from their original covenant to avoid a complete civil war inside it. I think one of the final straws was when 2 of the old masters sat down and started intentionally writing primers, causing stunned outrage among the traditionalist faction.
Their other "horrors" were things like not bothering much about which apprentice belonged to who and which house with 3 masters practically sharing 7 apprentices between them.
Out of curiosity what sort of boons hooks and resources where you thinking of giving this covenant. It takes a lot of stuff to run a school right. Where does it's resources come from both magical and mundane. What sort of problems do you expect the covenant to have to deal with. For instance I think it would be reasonable for such a school to catch a lot of political flack for trying to change "How Things are Done"
Even if you are able to teach arts to multiple students a lot of magi might not think you should. One on one teaching gets a +6 bonus so instructing a class instead of just one pupil might be considered an incomplete training season and prosecutable under the code.
Being mobile and not part of any one tribunal doesn't help either. Harder to build alliances you know will be there when you need them. It doesn't help to have a lot of friends in the Stonehenge tribunal when your being prosecuted in Levant.
Also I can just imagine how other Magi might vote when the think of all those poor students of yours who already know Latin and Magic theory and have their arts opened. Well they'll just have to be sent off to more responsible masters that can give them a proper 15 year apprenticeship if your found guilty of neglecting them.
It might be interesting to start out by having the covenant be in the business of finding gifted children for other magi to have as apprentices. You find them vet them and even give them a nice basic training in Latin and Magic theory. Then you offer them up for a nominal finders fee. Be prepared for some battles legal and otherwise to keep Mages from just coming in and claiming a gifted child without paying. But if you build a covenant with enough political juice and play your cards right you might get enough tribunal rulings in your favor that your services become an excepted practice.
You could offer other services like specialists in difficult gift openings and fostering services for magi who can't devote time to training their apprentices. If the covenant houses some truly phenomenal teachers the fostering service should be in fairly high demand. All the time those Magi who are able should be training their own apprentices with fairly great results.
Once their reputations in these endeavors is established and they have made lots of friends, including if their careful many a young magi with found memories of there time at the covenant they can implement their plans to become a full fledged magic school.
Probably a lot of traditional-minded magi will be angry with them for 'stealing our apprentices', but mostly maine75 and Direwolf have mentioned the obvious problems.
I want to do something similar, instead of a Hermetic breakthough to allow teaching Arts to more than one student, I was just going to have the students study full time from books and lab texts for 15 years. If someone wanted to improve the practice of magic, changing over from an aprenticeship system to a school system would be a good way to do this.
The only tricky thing with this system is that you do have to provide one season a year personally teaching the aprentice. Of course, it doesn't have to be arts, a Flambeau might teach his aprentice Penetration or Single Weapon in that season. So, the Magic Theory specialist with a score in 10 that doesn't have Good Teacher but a reasonable score in teaching could spend 13 years profitably teaching a group of aprentices Magic Theory, directing their study the remaining time, having opened their arts in the first season and teaching them Parma Magica in the final season and end up with magi that are much more powerful than standard magi just past guantlet.
Now, the Tremere and Jerbiton are probably all over this. But I can't see it working with the mystery cults or the Tytalus. A large part of their training is incompatable with school training. So, I would think your troubleshooters had better be your most powerful magi, because it will be the most powerful magi from those five houses who will have to be dealt with.
Tremere are probably too traditionalist for it. Jerbiton, oh they will probably be the ones to support the idea(or the closest to it at least).
Why not the cults? Criamon no they probably wont work. The other 3 cults, why not?
Since its going to be going against the regular standards of the order, i would more likely expect Flambeau to a problem really. Along with Tytalus.
But overall, i think the traditionalism is fairly strong in most houses, and i would expect a low level reaction from just about everywhere.
Yeah, so there will be a strong need for this to be amended. Of course you can have each master in the covenant have several official apprentices and once a year they teach all of them Magic Theory or something all at once. This would get very messy though whenever some of the masters are needed elsewhere the exact season that is meant for this.
My impression of the Tremere is that they are soldiers, and are very interested in ways to make their members more capable. The usual reasons for taking apprentices don’t apply, if you really need someone to provide lab assistance, the house can assign someone. The traditions that the Tremere try to develop would probably be easier to develop in a school setting than an apprentice setting anyway. Now, whether they support Jerbiton or Bonisagus in creating schools or not, I can easly see them developing one in the Transylvania Tribunal.
As for why the mystery cults would not get on board, I don’t see their mysteries being something that is taught concurrently with school. A Verditius apprentice needs to be working his craft rather than just reading books. A lot of Ex Miscellaneous traditions would be the same way.
Tytalus have this whole “We need to torture our apprentice according to the sacred book to make him into Tytalus” thing going. Something that started churning out magi who were clearly superior to Tytalus coming out of gauntlet is going to rub them the wrong way. So they are going to have to prove that all those high art scores don’t matter compared to the life lessons learned from a Tytalus apprenticeship.
For boons and hooks for the school I was not going to give much... I was going to give mostly Site hooks/boons, such as Aura 5 all over (with 6 in caves- for labs), A bedrock island rising up, with a narrow stone bridge crossing a large flat area. Each mage that is starting the school will be bringing some items.. part of the building prosess will be getting the magi to share/allow others to use some of the resources.
For NPC's I was thinking of one or two magi from each house, from all over the world.
So far my player's have created the following:
A Tytlus (with shapechanging abilities- animals, and the Persona ability)
A Tremere (the player was thinking a necromancer, but he was thinking of remaking the character)
A Flambaue (perdo expert)
A Bonisagus (my character from a past game, he is a arabic language expert)
