Welcome To The T'reo School Of Martial Magic
On Kickstarter, right now, we have a campaign entitled Hexagram #10. But there's another release in that Kickstarter, and arguably I shot myself in the foot by dropping them together.
(Why release more than one thing in a Kickstarter? Because shipping these days is horribly expensive, and people don't like to pay shipping for a package with just one item.)
Anyway . . . The other release is a 92-page sourcebook that a lot of you will appreciate. It's by David Pulver, and it's The T'reo School of Martial Magic.
When I say "Magic School," you think "Harry Potter." Wrong. T'reo is definitely somewhat along the "British public school" line. But everything that T'reo teaches would be considered naughty, wicked Dark Arts at dear old Hogwarts. T'reo is an academy of martial magic. That is, killing stuff. Killing monsters, killing enemy troops, killing enemy wizards. (A statistic. Out of each entering class of about 32 teen-aged prodigies, two-thirds will survive to graduate. Some quit or die in training accidents. The rest are killed in duels with their fellow students. Including food fights. You do not want to get into a food fight with a wizard.)
The book includes, among other things:
- A history of T'reo. The last century's intrigues and murders drive this century's academic politics.
- A guide to T'reo Island and the university itself, with maps.
- Character stats and stories for the faculty and for quite a few students, and details of who likes whom/hates whom/fears whom/is blackmailing whom. But not all! There's plenty of room to add your own inventions and your own player characters.
- Secret societies! Including one, the Circle of Iron, that is so far underground that the very suggestion that it still exists will send one of the senior wizards into a killing rage. Of course, we never come out and say that it DOES exist. *
- Lots of rules for magical dueling . . . formal, informal, tutorial, and "Die, you pompous ass!"
- And, of course, an academic calendar and many pages of general background material to let you set an adventure, or a whole campaign, at T'reo.
- And, absolutely of course, an index, because we aren't going to drop you into an unindexed sourcebook.
There's even a new spell. Just one; new spells don't come easy on the world of Cidri. But wizards keep researching, and sometimes they come up with something good. (Actually, there are descriptions of a few "broken" spells in here as well, and that inspired an article which appears in Hexagram #10. Everything connects.)
The point of this screed is simple . . . We worked hard on T'reo. It ties in with many places we have already described, and I don't want those of you who are into magic – or fans of the growing story of Cidri – to miss out on it. In this golden age of RPG production, it's easy for things to get overlooked. Don't overlook this one.
* It does. Bite me, Worshipful Master Shadrach.