Tag: New World Magischola

Creating Play in the Magical Classroom is a multi-part guide to playing a teacher at the College of Wizardry and New World Magischola larps. While it was written specifically with these events in mind, it can be applied to many other larps and settings.

The texts in this series are written collectively by (in alphabetical order) Maury Brown, Stefan Deutsch, Johanna Koljonen, Eevi Korhonen, Ben Morrow, Juhana Pettersson, Maria Pettersson, Mike Pohjola, Staffan Rosenberg and Jaakko Stenros. The series is edited by Johanna Koljonen.

Part 1 – Part 2 – Part 3 – Part 4 – Part 5 – Part 6 – Part 7

Part III: Class Objectives and Making Up Knowledge

As discussed in the previous section, a good class will provide players with something useful for the game as a whole: a deeper understanding of their own character, an opportunity to develop the relationships between their characters, knowledge or gossip that is actionable in the game, or a tool or a skill to bring into the rest of the game.

The fictional or actual knowledge you impart is of course also in itself fodder for the game, since it imparts knowledge about the world that the larp will not directly explore. At the end of this section are some pointers about handling the pressures of inventing the universe in an authoritative voice.

But first, some practical suggestions about what to do in class, tested by the authors in game.

Self-reflection Goals

• Have an ethics debate, forcing student characters to verbalise their opinions about controversial magical/moral topics (they’ll be surprised about what they find out about themselves).
• Ask your students to design a magical rune or sigil for themselves (or identify their totem, etc). It should reflect who they are and their passions and goals. Perhaps tell them that drawing it on their bodies will release a slow magic that will make them more like the thing they want to be – but to be careful, because our secrets and fears can seep into this kind of magic as well…
• Some divination techniques can be used in this way. E.g. tea leaf reading is ideal for self-reflection, as the symbols are always somehow ambiguous and players can thus interpret them in any way that fits their character’s story.
• Lead the group in a mindfulness-suggestion exercise. Have them first slowly pay attention to a raisin, how it looks, feels, sounds, smells, tastes (check a website, a book, or a video of this). Then have them feel the magic inside them, warm and moving, surging, just barely in control, trying to escape towards the wand hand. Have them “breath out” the magic. Explain how this teaches control. (This has no game mechanics value, but more immersive players have reported it as a moment when they really ‘felt’ the magic inside them.)

Relationship Goals

• Teach a spell that brings secrets to the forefront, for instance one that forces one to blurt out what one is thinking about. Demonstrate with a student or a few (you can practice this in advance with one or a few students if you’re worried about them getting it). This will demonstrate a few possible ways to create play with this tool – like comedy (“uh… uh… blue… cows.” or the obvious “sex”), plot-driving (blurting out a secret) or relationship-building (“Miranda is so beautiful” or “I want to take Bob to the prom” or “The girls from [some house] just made me cry at lunch”).
• In your first class, especially if you teach juniors, ask students to introduce themselves, and (if this is the kind of topic they’d have studied before), to say how good they were in [your topic] in their previous school. That will help people to know whether to play them up or down, and remind them of their classmates’ names.
• You can affect the social dynamic in the classroom by having favourites, or students you hate (set this up with the player in advance), or perhaps giving people successes without them even doing anything (see the Mind Magic anecdote under “Playing a fun professor” in the next instalment of this article).
• If you divide the class into groups, think about how. Random groups help players build relationships to characters they might not know. You can have students count off, or pull their names from a hat, or divide by the predominant color they are wearing or hair color, or any other randomizing technique.

Playable Tools Goals

• Teach a dance they can dance at the ball.
• Teach them a spell they can use in the game and practice it together.
• Have them make a potion with a specific effect that they can steal some of, then or later (you can ask them to mark their bottles with a label describing the effect, and the names of everyone in their group, and to leave them in a specific place so you can grade them “later”). Please note – if any potions are to be ingested by any players at any time during the larp, all potions present at the larp should be potable and edible. You can still do impressive experiments with kitchen chemistry!
• Ask for model/bright students before the game in the FB group. Share your lesson plan and all questions you plan to ask with everyone who wants to play a model student, to give them a real chance to experience success. For the majority of the students that will have missed the post it will feel magical. (You can plant a few gold star moments for students in your class in advance even if you don’t otherwise work from a detailed plan).
• Set a task that will create play as it is solved outside of class. Here is an example from a Mind Magic class: “On Friday I gave them homework and told them to return their essays before the Saturday classes. I gave them two options: you can either write an essay OR you can use any means of mind magic to produce one. About 20 people wrote an essay. The rest used Mind Magic to make their friend write it for them, to hex me into believing they had already turned in the essay (which was of course the BEST essay I had ever read) and so on. (I told them I’d call off my mind protection spells for 24 hours so they would have a chance to actually hex me.) Some used telepathy to deliver the essay directly into my mind and one even brewed her essay into a potion. Very fun!”
• Palm reading was used by students outside classes to “find out” what will happen (i.e. reveal information known to one student, but not the others).
• Use the lectures to seed relationship information to the students. What are the other teachers like, really? What kind of a dark history do you, their favourite teacher, have? Hints tend to work better than more overt explanations. It makes the students feel like they have stumbled on a secret. You can of course also have them work on solving a “hypothetical scenario” that is a real problem experienced by some students at the college or even in your class. This offers great opportunities for resentment, disappointment in you, passive-aggressive sniping among students, as well as allowing the real parties or their sympathisers to argue their case.

Making Stuff up During Class

You will be forced to improvise, because students will ask you questions you never even thought of. Don’t panic! Here are some choices you can make in that situation:

• Make something up. If you’re not sure whether the stuff you’re spouting syncs with the canon, frame it as myth, folklore, a controversial opinion that your character has, and make bitter allusions to Some Other Teachers or Magical Authorities who, as the students well know, may not agree with your obviously correct ideas on this topic. (Or similar, as appropriate for your character.) This makes magic more like actual academia, and contributes to building the world. Make a note after class about what you now so firmly believe, so you can use it later in the game.
• Ask the other students what the correct answer is. This gives the characters a chance to shine, but in addition players also get an opportunity to contribute. The answers can be considered “right” by your teacher character or maybe disputed, thus generating interesting discussions out of nowhere. In a situation like this, when a student player exposes themselves, you should never downplay them – except if you agreed to do exactly that with the player involved in advance. If no one has anything, ask them to look in their textbooks, or ask leading questions, or describe a hypothetical scenario (or a personal anecdote from your character’s exciting life) and ask them to make deductions from the facts you’ve just presented. When they come up with something good, reward them with praise and/or house points. (Make a note afterwards of the thing you have just claimed to be true. You can also bring it up with some of the other faculty in a social situation – “my students were discussing this principle in class…” – because it might be valuable input for their classes, whether their characters agree or disagree)
• Divert or delay. If they ask something during class, tell them it’s a good question and that we shall discuss that topic later this semester – or if it’s not related to class, tell them to come talk to you after class. If they come to you outside class, you can always be busy and tell them to come back to you later or ask another Professor (who might be more knowledgeable on the subject than your character!). If they are asking about something suspicious, you can always question their reasons (“why are you asking about love potions anyway?”)

This work is distributed under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license. That means you are allowed to use elements of this text beyond the extent of referring and linking to it as long as you credit the original authors and source. It’s not allowed to use parts of this work for commercial purposes, if you are unsure if this applies to your project, please contact us.

This is not intended as a cut and paste smorgasbord but rather a complete text. Please reference it, but avoid using parts out of context. It’s better to just link the articles where it’s appropriate for use.

Images and logos from New World Magischola in this article are © 2015-16 Learn Larp, LLC. New World Magischola and Magimundi are trademarks of Learn Larp, LLC. Used with permission.

Creating Play in the Magical Classroom is a multi-part guide to playing a teacher at the College of Wizardry and New World Magischola larps. While it was written specifically with these events in mind, it can be applied to many other larps and settings.

The texts in this series are written collectively by (in alphabetical order) Maury Brown, Stefan Deutsch, Johanna Koljonen, Eevi Korhonen, Ben Morrow, Juhana Pettersson, Maria Pettersson, Mike Pohjola, Staffan Rosenberg and Jaakko Stenros. The series is edited by Johanna Koljonen.

Part 1 – Part 2 – Part 3 – Part 4 – Part 5 – Part 6 – Part 7

Part II: Designing and Running a Good Magic Class in the Nordic, Wysiwyg, Trust-based Style

What Is a Playable Class?

While the professor is the leader of the class, the professor is not putting on a one-person show for the entertainment of the students. The professor is a facilitator who is helping to promote interactivity, participation, collaboration, risk-taking, and play.

Fundamentally, a class is a mini-sized collaborative game that teaches the students how to play it as it unfolds. Obviously, your teacher character will give the students in-character instructions about how to behave in the class, and you can also design and affect their interactions and mood through for instance the lighting of the room, selection and placement of seating, or the props and tools you provide for exercises.

Ask yourself these control questions:

• What kinds of activities will your students be doing? (Sitting, listening are not enough)
• What kinds of interactions are possible in your class?
• How are the players able to express their character during the the class?
• How many opportunities for collaborative creativity and mutual or collective storytelling have you included?
• Is your class design playable for the number of students in the classroom?
• Is your class design playable for the constraints of the physical space?
• Do you need supplies and/or NPCs that you must request ahead of time?
• How will this class affect the players, physically and emotionally?

The class should be possible to play as a good student, but also allow for alternative entertainments. If you’re the boring teacher, you can start by absolutely forbidding the passing around of notes in class, and then make sure to turn your back a lot to enable your students to pass notes. (Have a plan for what to do when you catch someone breaking your rule). If you’re a potions teacher, create an experiment that involves many sub-tasks, but also takes time, so students can gossip and flirt and sabotage each other while waiting for the stuff to boil. If you’re teaching a physical subject, buid in a few roles that are important for the class but don’t involve moving very much, to include players that aren’t very mobile (and characters that can’t be bothered).

You can design a class where you do a knowledge-dump on the students in lecture form. But it’s probably more fun to think of a topic that works well using one of the following methods instead:

• in Socratic teaching (you asking them questions)
• that can be structured like a quest;
• or an exploration of objects, text or environments you’ve prepared in advance;
• “Concept attainment,” which is a pedagogical technique that has students deduce a greater learning or idea from a presentation of non-examples and examples of the concept and has them actively comparing and contrasting and refining hypotheses;
• or to set up exercises that are so evil they push the class to rebel against you (this is you playing to lose!);
• or an experiment you have them perform in groups and reflect on together.

Theoretical lectures can be spiced up in many ways.

• One good way is to have a homework text that the students are supposed to have read and then ask a few questions. This lets students clearly show if their characters have done their homework really well — or if they just don’t care.
• You can also assign a reading and then, as the professor, disagree with it entirely, and see what kind of discussion you can create.
• Another trick is to use the theory in practice as “there is nothing more practical than a good theory”, for example by bringing in a monster for the class to study (“Let us explore the two souls in one body dilemma by experimenting on this pregnant cyclops”).
• Also, you can arrange for the lecture to be interrupted in someway that is interesting, dramatic, and creates play opportunities.

Any kind of practicing of using spells on each other, as well as strategies for countering, deflecting or resisting them, is great. Remember you are setting the tone for what range of play is appropriate for the magic you’re teaching! Tell the class what the spell does when it works, and some common side-effects, and perhaps some very rare extreme cases that might happen. The more ludicrous or comical the effect you describe, the more serious you should sound when describing it.((Also see “Examples of how to teach a spell so that the teaching makes it clear how to play” in Part VII))

A good class will give the players something that enriches the game: a deeper understanding of their own character, an opportunity to develop the relationships between their characters, knowledge or gossip that is actionable in the game, or a tool or a skill to bring into the rest of the game. Class is also the only framework where student-players will feel confident about playing with magic they don’t know. You are literally teaching them [how to larp] magic.

This work is distributed under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license. That means you are allowed to use elements of this text beyond the extent of referring and linking to it as long as you credit the original authors and source. It’s not allowed to use parts of this work for commercial purposes, if you are unsure if this applies to your project, please contact us.

This is not intended as a cut and paste smorgasbord but rather a complete text. Please reference it, but avoid using parts out of context. It’s better to just link the articles where it’s appropriate for use.

Images and logos from New World Magischola in this article are © 2015-16 Learn Larp, LLC. New World Magischola and Magimundi are trademarks of Learn Larp, LLC. Used with permission.

Creating Play in the Magical Classroom is a multi-part guide to playing a teacher at the College of Wizardry and New World Magischola larps. While it was written specifically with these events in mind, it can be applied to many other larps and settings.

The texts in this series are written collectively by (in alphabetical order) Maury Brown, Stefan Deutsch, Johanna Koljonen, Eevi Korhonen, Ben Morrow, Juhana Pettersson, Maria Pettersson, Mike Pohjola, Staffan Rosenberg and Jaakko Stenros. The series is edited by Johanna Koljonen.

Part 1 – Part 2 – Part 3 – Part 4 – Part 5 – Part 6 – Part 7

Part I: Playing a Professor

Playing a professor is great fun. You have the perfect excuse to play an over-the-top character and the classroom setting offers an entertaining combination of performance, run-time game mastering, and attentive, game-creating play.

As a professor character in a hierarchical setting like a school, your character will likely have a fair amount of authority. This means you as a player will have four jobs. They are rewarding, but also time-consuming, so you should ideally plan your character’s personality, relationships, and interests in a way that makes them playable in short snatches whenever your attention is not consumed by your duties — or grabbed by events hurling themselves at you.

These are the four tasks:

1. Creating and running what are essentially nano-larps – your classes – in the context of the overall game. These need to be designed to be playable in at least two different ways (for students/players who are interested in your topic and teaching style, and for students/players who are not interested). Students can skip classes, but if all student players start skipping all classes because class is boring to play, that might actually break the game. Ideally, the classes will give your players something to bring into the rest of the game as well as an opportunity to either explore their characters deeper, further their social plots, or both. (This will be covered in more depth later in this series).
2. In hierarchical organisations in larps, plot tends to run upward. Student-players will come to you with their characters’ problems, either because that would be a reasonable thing to do (“Professor! My classmates have started a necromantic cult that threatens the very survival of the school!”), or because they don’t know how to get further with some kind of plot they’ve found, invented, misunderstood, etc. (“Professor! There’s a living tree in the forbidden forest who has half the soul of a former student that needs liberating so he can die!”). Your job is to listen, get the gist by asking questions, and rapidly enable the student-player to go on solving these problems themselves, ideally with the aid of other students. You can get personally involved with plot and events that involves school administration, the house cup, and perhaps one random thing during the larp that is totally irresistible to you as a player – but between classes, school administration, house monitoring duties, faculty meetings, grading if you give homework, and responding to the emergencies of the next 30 students, you won’t have time to go on adventures. In fact, if you do, you might actually hamper the play of student characters who need to speak to a teacher for legitimate, teacherly reasons (see point 3 below). Playing a professor is a practice in running away from plot. If you want to go on quests, request to play a student instead.PLEASE NOTE: Quite often it would be more realistic for your character to get involved in the crises of the students, but you can’t and you will need to give your character a good reason not to. We will return to this in a later instalment.
3. Runtime game-mastering, through the in-game actions of your characters, everything that has to do with or affects the school as a whole – teaching, points for houses, meetings where all characters gather, administration of prefects/presidents and house selection, new situations that might require a change in school rules or a faculty response, etc. If the school has rules, you may also be involved in maintaining those rules, so that breaking them becomes playable (but please remember that punishments like detention have to be just as fun and interesting to play as classes – while the character should feel bummed out, the player should feel like they won the lottery by getting caught).These responsibilities are super important, because you have eyes on the ground in a way the actual game-masters never can. On the other hand, it doesn’t feel like work, because this stuff is what your characters would logically be doing anyway. It’s just important to stick to the limits agreed upon with the organisers, which will probably be the following: The overall schedule of the larp must be adhered to under all circumstances – small in-game delays for major in-game reasons are acceptable, but you can’t cancel events like the ball (unless you make sure to dramatically un-cancel it) and teaching will continue no matter what. If you’re cursed and can’t move, have the students carry you to class, or come to you. In brief, in-game problems will typically be solved in-game, but the schedule is holy, which might require you occasionally to heavily steer your character’s actions towards this goal.
4. Portraying a diverse, interesting, and functioning school faculty. Larping is a team effort, and your portrayal of a professor happens in the context of a school with students, staff, and faculty. One part of this is to ensure that the teachers are different. There should be good, evil, and neutral teachers, lax, strict and lazy ones, teachers who are absent-minded, paranoid, over-protective, ethical, irrational etc. For a dynamic game, it’s good to check with the other teachers that you don’t all have same teaching style or pedagogical methods. One very boring, theoretical class is great – so that people will have a boring teacher to hate on (except for that tiny minority who find that teacher the best). Some should be very practical, others more conversational, some physical, etc.Another important thing is to portray a unified facade. Even if two professors hate each other, they should publicly treat each other with respect — fundamentally, the enemy of the faculty are the students. If too many teachers lose respect in the eyes of the students, the game will no longer function. In the interest of maintaining the cohesion of the larp, the faculty should always play each other up when it comes to status.

This work is distributed under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license. That means you are allowed to use elements of this text beyond the extent of referring and linking to it as long as you credit the original authors and source. It’s not allowed to use parts of this work for commercial purposes, if you are unsure if this applies to your project, please contact us.

This is not intended as a cut and paste smorgasbord but rather a complete text. Please reference it, but avoid using parts out of context. It’s better to just link the articles where it’s appropriate for use.

Images and logos from New World Magischola in this article are © 2015-16 Learn Larp, LLC. New World Magischola and Magimundi are trademarks of Learn Larp, LLC. Used with permission.