Story seeds for child to adolescent characters

If you were running a story for characters in the age bands given in Apprentices, what type of stories would you run?

Stories about children and adolescents have tended towards more light hearted play in my group. We use them as a change of pace when things have gotten to heavy.

  • A task for the Master, which gets somehow messed up. Can you fix the issue/recover the item and avoid getting in trouble? Things like this can be run as a scavenger hunt or a mission impossible heist.

  • Apprentice gets a free day, going out and about in the Covenant. Does he have one friend to hang out with or is he trying to make a friend? Is there a girl he likes? Maybe the only person who really likes him is a little girl who overlooks how "creepy" he is because she can see his true heart and enjoys the 'magic' tricks he can do. Fist fights are also a possibility here, which can introduce players to the combat rules.

  • Mandatory Combat Training. Depending on their House, some Magi will require that their apprentices spend time training with the turb and learning at least basic combat skills. While a seasonal activity, this opens up all kinds of game play possibilities and provides a chance for an apprentice to make a friend or two.

  • Taking care of the Master's Familiar or Covenant magical animals has all sorts of possibilities. Our Covenant has a bunch of Hermetic Cats and a group of Crows of Virtue. You ever try herding cats? Now imagine if those cats had human level intelligence and magical powers. Flip things around even, with the cats trying to save and protect the Apprentice who has gotten themself into trouble somehow. My group has run this type of game with the apprentice run by the SQ and all of us playing the cats. A normal cat with "Puffed Up & Hissing" and "Claws of the Razor" can be surprisingly scary in combat, especially from ambush. Had one kill an adult warrior grog in a single ambush claw attack. Basically an intelligent lynx with steel claws jumping on their back and slitting their throat.

  • Any time the Master travels, it opens up all kinds of possibilities. While his Master is busy doing what he traveled for, his apprentice might hang out with other apprentices and/or explore the new location.

  • If there are Faeries around the Covenant, any number of story options are opened up. A variant would be a Magical Beast or Hedge Tradition near but not part of the Covenant. Most likely you want to avoid combat or kidnapping, since the first might be outside of the apprentices abilities and the second would kick the game up to adults rescuing them.

  • The "Oh Shiny!" game. The shiny can be anything from something mundane, a a hermetically enchanted device, an other enchanted/magic item, to something forbidden. It can even be Infernal, though that is getting a little dark and runs the chance of ruining the character. The item doesn't have to actually be valuable, as long as the characters think it is.

If you can't tell by some of the bullets, my group tends to mix apprentice games with familiar/magic animal games. Things like having two of the magic cats make their homes in the Library, with one specifically (Iris) hanging out in the classrooms, means that they are already familiar to each other. Iris has been known to apply claw to butt of more than one student she felt was not paying proper attention during a lesson.

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Sneaking out - maybe there's a fair in the nearby village, or the covenfolk are off to celebrate a religious holiday, and it's time for the children to try and dodge their duties and get to have some fun.

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As one of my long term personal fun projects is to sum up in an adventure sense the years of my character's apprenticeship I might have to yoink some of them for my personal solo game. hehe

I own apprentices and while the book is generally very interesting and useful the one thing it does lack is apprentice era story seeds - well it has a few but not enough to actually run an apprentice saga that goes for over a decade of in universe play. So yeah these ideas are quite helpful and useful and cool!

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This list is fantastic.

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