Tag: Techniques

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 VII: Example/Examples of How to Teach a Spell so That the Teaching Makes It Clear How to Play

This final part of the series gives practical examples on how to apply the techniques and ideas explained in the previous parts.

The Opt in/Opt out Truth Serum

The class brews a babbling beverage that is then tested on a volunteer student.

The class is told that the potion will force the object to speak out loud anything on her mind for a specific period of time (not too long, 90 seconds for instance), and therefore can be used as a truth serum by asking or tricking the subject to think about specific things (or have an antidote at hand to counter the effect, this is also usable to create an artificial stop to the exercise).

The class is also told that the point of this exercise is to practice methods of resisting the potion: you can’t stop talking, but you can cover your mouth with your hand (this is good to demonstrate to the class – keep talking but muffle the sound with your hand, so they know what to do), or you can eat something at the same time to make your speech unclear, or try to focus your mind on for instance a strong childhood memory to only tell things that “aren’t secret”.

All of these instructions are given at least once before students are asked to volunteer, so that the player knows what she is asked to do in front of the class – some will find this specific exercise very easy, others will find it hard to think of things to say and will then opt out by not volunteering.

Others from the group will be given tasks – to barrage the subject with questions (everyone can do this if the group is not enormous, in which case it can get so loud you’ll need a whistle to silence them), to hand the subject food, to clock the effect on an old-fashioned stopwatch and count down the last ten seconds, etc.

The test subject player will understand from the teaching (and can be reminded during the experiment by repeating the above) that they can now choose to do different things under the influence of the potion: speak the character’s inner monologue, blurt out secrets to further play, share something very personal about the character that they get to be embarrassed about later – or if they can’t think of anything to say (because it can actually be quite hard to speak non stop for 90 seconds) either clamp their hand in front of their mouth while continuing mumbling, or stuff themselves with cookies while talking and spray everyone with crumbs. Most will do a mixture of the above.

If the player panics or freaks out or goes completely silent or is struggling to find things to say, you as a teacher will immediately blame the potion, which was clearly not correctly brewed – “Aha! Group one, your potion is not working! As you see here, Ms McNally is sometimes silent for several seconds”, or if the player looks tormented and falters “Group two, Ms McNally manages with an impressive mental effort to resist the urge to speak – the potion works, but it’s not strong enough!”

The purpose of this is to make sure that the PLAYER can never fail. If you manage to babble for 90 seconds, that’s great play and very entertaining or moving or horrible (depending on what comes out) –  but they don’t, that is still great storytelling because it manufactures a fíctional truth about the quality of the potion. And you can reward the player for volunteering by telling them, honestly, that they did great.

The groups whose potion works (or might work, if you don’t have time to test them all) can keep them for use in the game. You can urge them as homework to perform the same experiment on each other to practice resisting the potion. Another option is to tell the students that it is absolutely forbidden to take the potion from the classroom and then turn your back to them and give the student an opportunity to steal them.

The characters now know how to use the potion to get secrets. The players now know how to use the potion to give secrets, and how to brief other players about the potion while playing, so they too can access this experience of functional magic without breaking for briefing. (If the other player doesn’t understand the in-game instruction and do something else, don’t break the game to correct them – clearly the potion was unstable, or dysfunctional, or reacting badly with some other magic the target was using. Your character can wonder at this out loud).

Torture Curses in Class

This is an excerpt from Mike Pohjola’s article about playing a Dark Arts teacher at College of Wizardry.

For the larp I had prepared two lectures, and Bane gave both of them three times. The first one started with a test on their natural learning ability and on theory of the Unforgivable Curses. The second one was all about practicing the Torture Curse on other students.

He found these great one-use Solberg wands where some anonymous person had already imbued with the unforgivable Imperius Curse. (The Imperius forces the victim to do whatever the caster says.)
 As you know, in a case like this, the legal responsibility for the Torture Curse is on whoever placed the Imperius Curse on the wands, but unfortunately we will never know who that wonderful person is.
 So as you can see, it’s all perfectly legal and moral and educational.

The students were divided into pairs (“Partner up with someone you will have no trouble hating.” This suited Bane’s character perfectly, and also provided interesting play for the student players.), and each pair was given one of these wands.

The victim would cast the Imperius Curse on the torturer saying: “Cast the Torture Curse on me for one second.” Then the torturer would torture the victim with their own wand. After this, the victim would tell the torturer what they felt. Then they would switch. (The wand had one use per caster.)
At the end of the class we would discuss our experiences, and figure out ways to use what we have learned for defense.

In one of these classes Bane had one pregnant student, Norah Asar (Pernilla Rosenberg). She was partnered up with Sebastian Dolohov (Markus Montola).

Bane did have a soft spot of sorts for protecting babies, and another one for Norah Asar. So he didn’t want the baby hurt.

Dolohov: “Professor! Can the baby be accidentally hurt when you cast the Torture Curse on the mother?”


“NOT UNLESS YOU REALLY WANT TO TORTURE THE BABY. BUT THEN YOU WOULD HAVE TO TARGET YOUR HATRED AT THE BABY, WHICH CAN BE DIFFICULT.”


At this Bane remembered how his own pregnant wife had been taken to Azkaban to be tortured by Dementors.
”BUT REMEMBER CLASS, YOU SHOULD NEVER USE THE TORTURE CURSE ON A BABY, ESPECIALLY AN UNBORN ONE.”


Class snickers.


“IN FACT, YOU SHOULDN’T USE THE TORTURE CURSE ON ANY BABY.”


More snickering.


“TO CORRECT MYSELF, YOU SHOULD NEVER USE THE TORTURE CURSE AT ALL, SINCE IT IS COMPLETELY ILLEGAL.”

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.

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 VI: Reasons for Your Professor Character Not to Get Personally Involved in Students’ Life-shattering Personal and/or Occult Drama, and How to Play Them

Most of the larp (but especially the last six hours of the game, when every remaining plot-line is culminating at the same time) will be great for students riding their respective plot trains, and an incoherent mess for anyone with some overview of the situation. (That’s people like you, because students will run up to you continuously to report what’s happening).

Towards the very end of the game, it therefore makes good sense for at least a few of the most powerful teacher characters to accidentally incapacitate themselves with port wine or potions to conveniently miss most of the plotting and battles  – of course rewarding themselves with some other kind of awesome play, like sitting around a fireplace talking about other memorably failed proms, or making their own incoherent expedition in the wrong direction, or choosing to help the students with the most inconsequential problems, or drafting very long documents for some purportedly urgent purpose, or having an earnestly moving heart-to-heart with an unhappy student, or dancing “old people” dances on the dance floor.

A Good General Strategy All Through the Game Is to Be Exceedingly Optimistic and Trusting of Student’s Abilities

Downplay the severity of any situation and tell them that you trust them to sort it out themselves. If they are alone in the problem, ask them to go to a more senior or specialised student or get a bunch of their friends and get them to help (“you’re all smart students, of course you can do a simple banishment ritual”). If you must be co-opted into a plot, you can say this is a wonderful learning opportunity for students, so they should do most of the work and you are there just as backup in case things go bad.

You Can Ask Students with Similar Problems (or Situations That Appear to Have Narrative Similarities) to Collaborate on Solutions

If you have a student in your class with a special skill you can try attaching them to some other students’ plots (this is especially great if it’s a student who has performed poorly in the actual subject of your class: if you can identify a positive quality anyway and send them on an adventure they’ll love you for it).

Your Character Might Also Not Care about Students or Their Troubles That Much

If you have created a comically grumpy or snobbily cold-hearted character, they might simply not care if a student has gotten themselves into trouble they cannot get out of (“it’s probably their own fault”). Or they might be secretly or even openly glad that students might get injured or die (it’s weeding out the weak and the stupid or you’re just happy there will be less students for you to worry about). You might also think students are lying and telling tall tales (but this might cause them to try to prove it to you and you get sucked in).

If Your Character Has Been a Teacher for a Long Time, There Is Very Little in the Way of Student Generated Drama They Have Not Seen Before

You can play on generational differences, in an infuriating manner if possible. “When I was your age, all seniors actually had to banish a Yeti as part of their final exams – we don’t do it these days, because students just don’t have that kind of mettle”… or “this reminds me of that unfortunate business with the Harpies in ‘86…of course very few of them made it out, so I think we can all agree that the philosopher’s stone is NOT going to be the answer to your question!”

Also, You Can Always Remind the Students That There Is One Force Greater than Magic: Bureaucracy

You would love to help defend the school but there are overdue performance evaluations that need to filled right now — or there will be no school to defend come morning. Alternatively, you can start by reflecting on how to go about saving the school through the proper channels. “First of all you need to put in a request to stay mobile during curfew. Then we need to check that the janitors are informed that watering the lawn should be cancelled, if there is a pack of werewolves on the lawn. Indeed, why don’t I do that.”

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.

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 V: Authority Awry: Stop, Shut Up, Do What I Tell You

In this series, we have had lots of examples of what is encouraged play for professors. Here are a few examples of discouraged play. Professors sit in a position of authority and players (and characters) will be conditioned to obey them. This is good to an extent — the game needs to function and having students follow the directions of in-game authority figures is an important part of the game continuing to work. However, this style of larp is opt-in, which means a player always must be given a choice about what to play and how to react.

As a consequence, you should refrain from the following kinds of play.

Denying Agency

For example, a professor can offer the opportunity for a character to tell (under a spell) what is on their mind (see above). However, a professor should not suddenly put a character under a spell and then tell them what they are thinking, or what happened to them, or a family member, etc. Remember both the design of the magic system and your position as a teacher inside the fiction actively encourage you to explain what you magic will do – you can do this in an open-ended way (and perhaps even taking some extra time doing it) to allow the player choices and a second to reflect on how they want to play it.

Players should not feel ambushed, or that they have to stop what they were doing or playing as a result of what someone else did to them. An example is a professor turning another student into a vampire without their consent, or telling them that their character’s parents have died, or killing/incapacitating a student or faculty member and exorcising or resurrecting them, unless these scenes have been agreed to beforehand.

Shaming the Player (Not the Character, Whom You Have Agreed to Play Abuse With)

Professors teaching magic are also, on the meta-level, teaching the availability of safety techniques and the importance of consent-based play. A professor should never make it impossible or difficult for a player to use a safety technique such as cut or break, or make it difficult to step away or exit a scene. “Impossible” or “difficult” does not have to mean physically blocking the door or refusing to stop when asked (though these have happened). Because of a professor’s explicit in-game authority, a player who is feeling uncomfortable about continuing (like a student with a fear of snakes continuing with a cryptozoology class that may include an encounter with a snake-like creature), or even triggered by a scene, may not want to opt-out for fear of losing house points or social status.

House points should never be threatened or deducted for off-game reasons, and a player who has their character leave a scene for off-game reasons should not become the object of derision. But unless there is a specific game mechanic in play to signal off-game reasons for opting out, you will in practice not know which reactions are in and which are off. This makes it even more vital to offer students in-game opportunities to leave or not participate.

The organisers can encourage players who opt out for offgame reasons to discreetly tell the teacher-players so, just to make sure their characters will not be punished for it. But actually this can also be handled mostly or entirely in-game, assuming that all players know that playing punishments will be just as much fun as any other part of the larp. In that case, players can choose for off-game reasons to opt out of certain situations, safe in the knowledge that this might either pass entirely uncommented or open the door to a fantastic in-game experience. (For instance, at the first College of Wizardry, then set in the Harry Potter universe, the janitorial staff had students in detention participating in a dangerous ritual to destroy a horcrux).

Focusing the Attention on You, Your Power, or Your Plot to the Detriment of Other Players

For example, a professor is bored at the dance, where students are having a good time. They decide to create a scene that disrupts the scene in progress, for their own excitement and amusement.

The most problematic use of the spell casting system to my anecdotal observations were spell effects that stopped people from doing what they wanted to do, and spell effects that denied players voice (and consequently, agency).  These types of actions tended to disrupt others’ gameplay without providing any “replacement play”. While these are might be enacted by student players on their own, student players are looking to Professors for behavioral precedents. What a professor does in controlled circumstances for entertainment purposes only, has a strong possibility of being reproduced by the student players.  With this in mind, if the outcome of your professor’s interactions with students can be summarized as “stop/shut up”, try to find alternative outcomes that set a better precedent. (Ben Morrow)

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.

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 IV: Professor Personalities

Being a Fun Professor Without Playing It All for Laughs

Magic school professors are inevitably strong characters. Whatever they are, they are to the extreme. Super wise, or bitter, or dotty, or eccentric. Actually, most of you can be eccentric, that just adds to the game.

Here are some questions to round out your character:

• What is your character like in class vs. out of class?
• Do they enjoy teaching? Like students? Why?
• What are their pet peeves, their bitter disappointments?
• If they are super controlled in class, what is something you can build in that will allow you to show another side of the character?
• What is their attitude toward house points? Are they generous or stingy with them? Do they give positive points or mainly take them away for infractions?
• Do they have a favorite house or branch of knowledge?
• What sort of students do they favor, if any? Do they downplay or do they relish in this favoritism?
• Also, what kinds of emotions do you want for the professor to inspire in the students?
• What kinds of interactions would create the most interesting play for them – and you?
• Will you offer to explain their dreams and other omens to them?
• Will you ask them to assist you on a research project?
• Will you invite a few people from each of your classes to a secret society? (Remember that secret society meetings should be designed just as much as classes are; this is true even if they are mostly social events – always ask yourself “what can we create together in this group that makes the experience of the larp richer?”)

Playing a Strict or Evil Professor

A magic school should have all kinds of teachers. Many of them are supportive, encouraging and wise role models. But at least a few should be strict and of dubious morals, who may even base their pedagogy on fear and terror. It can be a lot of fun to play at being terrified and being reprimanded, as that is such a big part of fictional magic schools.

Note: some players may be triggered by abusive play, especially from authority figures, so please save the really harsh stuff for those you have agreed to play that way with ahead of time. All play should be opt-in, because when a player (not the character) is genuinely afraid, they can lose the ability to opt out.

Practical tricks on how to play a terrifying professor:

• Start a class by making everyone stand up. Wait a moment before letting them sit (as it establishes authority).
• Expect punctuality, berate students who are tardy.
• Hand out too much homework. (But demand that it is turned in “in five days” so that players need not actually complete it if they do not want to.)
• Pick a name for your character that is impossible to pronouce, have the class practice the pronunciation (but not long enough for the class to learn it), then deduct points if someone mispronounces it. (“How can you understand someone’s ideas if you cannot even pronounce their name?”)
• Don’t smile, glare a lot, keep pregnant pauses.
• Keep your voice steady, never shout. When you want to emphasise something force the students to really pay attention by whispering your words.
• Never use your wand. Build up expectations, but know that whatever the students have envisioned, you’ll never be able to top in game. Keep them guessing. (This is most efficient if only one teacher does it).
• Place students in danger (obviously NOT the players), for example by having the student practice dangerous, illegal magic on each other. Remember to do this in a way that ensures that players can easily opt out without losing face if they don’t like the emotional content of the scene – for instance, you can ask for volunteers to take notes, observe and evaluate, or even construct a reason for students to choose to leave. If a player chooses to leave a class, never shame them or threaten them or gossip about them, in or out-of-character.
• Discuss key events in history from the point of view of the “bad guys” and explain how history is written by the victors and how the “good guys” in power have done terrible things that have been hushed up. (“In this school we pride ourselves in looking at the world as it is, not as we wish it was. Your education thus far has been rife with propaganda. However, I vow to tell you what the world is like — even when the knowledge is deemed “dangerous”, “blasphemous”, or even “treasonous”.)
• Have enough redeeming qualities. Maybe hint at lost innocence or a tragedy hard not to empathise with? Be fiercely devoted to your students, or maybe the protection of the school? Interesting villains are always multi-faceted. Perhaps your character is very strict until students get them started on that one topic they love, when they will suddenly spill all the dirt about their past or share magical stuff that is “really not for the undergraduate level”.

Here are some anecdotes from teacher players about expressing their personality:

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.

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.