Miskatonic School of Wizardry

[Ancient History]

Sort of a spin-off of the Redhurst OSSR and some side conversations Frank and I had, I decided as an intellectual exercise to meditate on what a wizard's school would look like in Call of Cthulhu - basically, a Mythos-themed version of Hogwarts.

Surprisingly, at least from a fluff angle, the concept has legs - Miskatonic University is renowned for its collection of occult texts and has several occult societies. Even if you went for a more straight adaptation of Harry Potter with 4-or-5 color-coded Houses and lower the age so that we're in that weird British realm between junior high and highschool, I personally would love for the Yithian Sorting Helmet to put me in Arkham House or Innsmouth House or whatever.

The problem - well, first hurdle, let us say - is when it comes to the mechanics. The Call of Cthulhu magic system sucks. Most of the variants, spin-offs, and tacked-on rules systems to try and mimic it suck. It's really weird to me that pretty much every designer of every game that branches off from CoC's version of BRP acknowledges that players want their characters to know magic right off the bat, but each and every one also wants to make that as cumbersome and useless and painful a fucking process as possible.

But let's not talk hypotheticals and generalities; after looking at several different systems, I found two quasi-compatible systems that could, together, almost approach something that might be workable. Not really, but...let me just lay it out.

Okay, so in the Miskatonic University sourcebook from Chaosium (this is a thick-ass book; it's denser than the corebook and has almost as many pages), there is an education system if you're going to do a campaign where one or more PCs is actually going to school as a student. This involves a degree plan worksheet, and something called the Semester Check, where you roll to see how many skill points you get to put towards skills related to the classes you're taking (capped by the level of a course; no course lets you raise a skill above 50%). Now, it's clunky and unnecessarily limited (we won't get into the Varsity Athletics rules), but it does amazingly accomplish the raw basics of what you want from an education sub-system - gradual improvement in specific fields depending on what the character decides to invest their time in. There's even specific rules for characters that want to spend some of their time studying specific Mythos books and learning spells.

Very good - well, okay, nothing in CoC mechanics is very good, but this is bordering on marginally acceptable. In the Miskatonic School of Wizardry you can go in and have your default curriculum devoted to Occult and various related skills. That's really all we're asking for the front half of this rules-engine. Now the back half...

...like I said, there's not a really good magic system in CoC. The spells that work are supposed to be Mythos magic, which generally drives you insane and is not organized in any meaningful way. But some fans have tried to rectify that with various quasi-magical skills like Exorcism or Crystal-gazing, and even CoC has "Hermetic" magic which looks a lot like Mythos magic but is less powerful and isn't supposed to drive you insane...at least, not as fast. The two trends sort of came together in a supplement called The Golden Dawn by Pagan Publishing, which details the biggest Hermetic magical organization in real-life, and outlines a system of magical development that player characters (as members) can use. It's...okay.

The basic concept is pretty simple; the authors call it the Point System. They take some of your important attributes (POW, INT, Credit Rating, Occult skill, Cthulhu Mythos skill) and convert them by math and fractions into a pile of Points; you then use these Points to by Grades in the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, as well as Hermetic spells, certain skills, and contacts. It actually dovetails not terribly bad with the education system, because the Golden Dawn was supposed to be about study with exams on theory being a big part of moving up the grades to gain access to better spells and stuff.

It's...okay. You're not going to be Master of the Mystic Arts just with this book. Even if you roll really well on attributes and devote your skill points carefully and everything, the Point-calculations are designed for exceedingly slow growth, and the spells and skills almost uniformly suck. Now, if you actually use some of the Hermetic spells in Miskatonic University that let you pump up your POW, progress is more rapid; if you combine the two so that you're an initiate in the Golden Dawn (or, well, equivalent - the time periods don't quite match up) going to Miskatonic, then each semester you're probably increasing your POW, Occult Skill, and Cthulhu Mythos skill - which means you're slowly climbing up the ranks, gaining new accessory skills like esoteric languages and spells. So you can see how if you kinda sorta put these two systems together, you almost have a workable magic school system.

Almost. There are some issues. For one, the education system tops out every skill rating at 50% - which means that after maxing out your Occult skill (which only gives you 10 Points to play with for buying spells and whatnot in your initiate society), you're only going to get more by adventuring investigating, or by reading occult books (which can also be down by the education system); even then, you're still looking at a very slow and cumbersome process of learning any spells you actually want...and, at rock bottom, any studies into actual Cthulhu Mythos magic makes you lose precious Sanity points.

So, y'know, from the perspective of "let's take existing rules and combine them like materia to see what we get" only results in a quasi-functional (albeit probably very well-rounded) sorcerer that can draw a pentagram like nobody's business but probably cannot draw an Elder Sign and will get eaten by a gug. But as inspiration, there's a bit there to recommend it. You could, for example, have each House have a specific Mythos book (or collection of books) in their private libraries, which only House members are allowed to study; this provides some differentiation of abilities while giving PCs immediate access to those tomes (Innsmouth House has the R'leyh Text and Codex Dagonensis, for example). There should also be a central library with occult tomes or "general" Mythos tomes that PCs can consult and copy spells from into their personal grimoires. The languages that these grimoires are written in also suggests modifications and guidelines to the coursework; if your school's texts are primarily in Latin or Sanskrit or Muvian, you sign your ass up for that course of study.

Skill limits...well, if we're doing BRP, skills are going to suck. Guaranteed. The only thing that can make them suck less is to remove the BRP mechanics entirely (and there is not a good replacement in the other material for the game), or to do everything in your power to make it so that the PCs can max out at least their core skills (Occult and various languages/divination skills) within their term of study. That's not impossible; it basically means you make Hermetic magic the default, Occult class is mandatory until you hit the 50% skill cap, and then you do independent study researching various occult books from the library to get it up to pretty close to 100%. That's...possible, and you're earning Points all the while, so that gives you access to "free" magical power in a relatively safe structure.

Having said that, the basic structure of what PCs spend their points on in the Golden Dawn has to go. You really just want it to be that they spend their points buying spells that they want/need from a generic list, some of which have prerequisites; they should be relatively safe spells that cost little Sanity or POW, and ideally not require any rolls at all - like making an enchanted knife you can use to store Magic points from sacrificing bunnies or hoboes or something.

Which is all a long way to say that...heh. This is all of a waste, because the system is so terrible and even bending it almost to the breaking point and ignoring or twisting rules, you still end up with a system that isn't terribly good at what you want it to do. But whenever you have a system this complex, possibilities jump out at you (even when they shouldn't), and mind caulk tends to fill in the gaps. But I like the idea of being sorted into Innsmouth House and croaking out the chants to Cthulhu and Mother Hydra, and shaking my webbed fist bitterly at those bastards over in Carcosa House. I wish that there was a good system for such a setting.

[JigokuBosatsu]

To be honest, if someone had asked me whether CoC's magic system was good enough for a project like this, I would have answered "CoC has a magic system?"

[Dean]

You'd need to sell me on the feel and flavor of the setting before the mechanics. The venn diagram of my passion for Lovecraft and my fondness of Harry Potter are just two circles. There really isn't much conceptual overlap there. Lovecraft is an extremely dark fantasy, it's extremely disempowering and nihilistic and I love those elements but every one of them is out of place in a game about magical british schoolchildren.

Is the game a comedy or is it serious? If it's serious then I think that Miskatonic should stay a college where the student body could uncover mysteries and unlock knowledge that should always have stayed hidden and so on. If its played for comedy I guess you can do whatever you want but comedy ttrpgs just seem to become elaborate multi-person trolling excersizes so you should probably make your thing good at that if that's the goal.

[Maxus]

Well, for starters, the setting is this:



And probably looks like this



And you spend time doing this



Except you're trying to correlate some ancient linguistics and art-archeology to find out why this figure recurs in different civilizations


And you're doing your charity work for the Old Society of Egypt, 175-year-old club/fraternity currently sponsored by Professor Thotep, who really enjoys wearing the pharaoic headdress.

And your buddy comes up to you with a this deciphering of ancient cave drawing, which agree in general line with sketches drawn by a farmer of these lobster-crab-men and--

You get the idea. If we're doing Miskatonic, Lovecraft set it up so folklorism branches into the occult and some of the characters had read the Necronomicon and heard of Cthulhu and hints of the history before humanity. It's not uncommon--or really hazardous--for people to know that there's things out there, or had been, and that Abdul Alhazred was terrified of shoggoths to the point of denying they existed.

[Ancient History]

To be honest, if someone had asked me whether CoC's magic system was good enough for a project like this, I would have answered "CoC has a magic system?"

Depending on the products you're talking about CoC's brand of BRP has like five different magic systems, not counting miscellaneous paranormal or occult skills. But you have to remember that you're talking about a game where for thirty years has not had any sort of consistent line development...so it's a fucking mess. Even insofar as BRP work (which, y'know, it doesn't) every single subsystem is also incomplete and broken. There's a bazillion spells scattered throughout the books, and they rarely make any effort to compile that shit like D&D does. If you sift through enough of the books you can sort of maybe compile something that almost looks workable...but there are weird gaps.

Is the game a comedy or is it serious? If it's serious then I think that Miskatonic should stay a college where the student body could uncover mysteries and unlock knowledge that should always have stayed hidden and so on. If its played for comedy I guess you can do whatever you want but comedy ttrpgs just seem to become elaborate multi-person trolling excersizes so you should probably make your thing good at that if that's the goal.

As a concept, I'm not terribly concerned with with fluff - I think it would definitely be the sort of secret society/fraternity sort of thing at Miskatonic University rather than a straight "teenagers summon tentacle demons" sort of nonsense Hogwarts ripoff.