School life sim IN A DUNGEON! where you must manipulate your own mental state to use magic, make friends, and appear human even if you’re not.
You may on occasion want to see through a glamour. To do this you need top focus and few expectations.
I think the expectations should be a category of Interest (described below) which, though useful to have, also make you more vulnerable to being fooled by glamour.
Your commitment to your studies may waver if you burn out or get too interested in other pastimes.
Specific schools of magic go well with specific emotional states, but intense emotions make it harder to sit down and study.
Your character expresses themself best when in a particular emotional state chosen at creation. This is the state you want to be in when you socialize.
Remaining emotionally neutral isn’t difficult, but basically no buffs will work on you in such a state.
The magic points are actually tiny tiny bits of your soul, which regenerates at about the same pace that your bloodstream refills. Your emotions affect the quality of your spellcasting rather than the quantity.
The general absence of combat-related magic is deliberate, because the game’s not about that. I guess it’s just not that kind of school.
Nonhumans have to keep up a glamour 24/7 cos this is a human school.
Some humans do this as well, because they want to look good.
Glamours are responsive to the aesthetics of the observer, and are therefore harder to keep up with multiple observers, particularly if they are in different emotional states.
Best when you are in a worrying mood.
The most useful for altering your own emotions. It’s possible to alter those of others too, but doing that without consent is considered assault.
Theoretically includes mind control, but it’s a high-level deal, and even if you can do it, getting someone to follow a specific non-trivial command through mind control requires precise timing: a command that arrives while they’re already doing something unrelated, or that doesn’t jibe with their emotional state, will make them confused, which makes the mind control that much harder to maintain and might just cause them to guess that they are being mind-controlled.
Best when in that mood associated with intellectual fascination. Curiosity perhaps.
Heals wounds, resurrects dead, promotes growth, and inflicts cancer. Because cancer is uncontrolled growth.
You can use this to convert ambient magical energy into magic points you can cast.
Best when in a kind, happy mood.
Kills stuff, including eg. bacteria, so this is the school for curing disease. Does not have any special effect on souls, however–only biological life. To affect souls you want mentalism.
Best when feeling rage.
All sorts of random junk teleports into the dungeon for no reason. Much of it is vendor trash, but you do get the odd spellbook or scroll you might study from.
Living creatures can only enter via stabilized portals, which you can create yourself–though doing this on-campus presents the risk of a monster invasion, and is therefore grounds for expulsion. But when you learn the spell for it, you can do it anyway, and thereby eg. summon gnomes to help you cheat on your homework.
Apart from being desirable as such, friendship will make your studying a lot more effective, and it will help you get more information as to what’s going on around you, potentially helping you spot eg. who’s a vampire and who ain’t.
You can generically “socialize” with anyone, or with no one in particular, in which case you’ll try to make nice on anyone who’s in the area and not otherwise occupied.
Get food and alcohol together and you can throw a party. These work best when there’s an entertainment on offer.
Magic is actually pretty boring when you have to do it day-in and day-out.
Remote viewing can suffice for television, though it relies on already knowing something entertaining to look at. There are illusions you might cast to show like a movie or a TV show, but these rely on the caster having memorized the particular film to show. So it’s a good idea to build up an inventory of castable memories to entertain with.
You could take a trip through a stable portal and see what entertainments are on offer outside the dungeon, but to do that within school rules you have to dress and pack in a way so that you don’t draw attention to yourself wherever you’re going, and you need to satisfy an instructor who is from the world behind that portal that you’re familiar with the customs and traditions there.
You could of course try to sneak through without permission and risk expulsion.
In any case the worlds beyond the portals are simulated only as random event tables.
The game makes no hardline mechanical distinction between eg. friendship, romance, professional respect or whatever.
Every relationship has some level of Intensity, Trust, Respect, and Commitment. Every relationship is bidirectional, so one party’s levels of these may be entirely different from the other’s.
Intensity makes people want to do things with each other, or just spend time together.
Trust affects what they are willing to do together. Activities that require high levels of it include dungeon-delving (trust someone to protect your life), independent study (trust someone to do their share of the research and so forth), and nookie (trust someone to touch you only just so). You might want to bone someone but not trust them enough to actually do it.
Respect mainly affects how people treat one another when their emotions get heated. Any intense emotion can provoke a person to do something careless, though some emotions are riskier for your friends than others; high Respect will make you stop yourself before yelling at them when you’re angry, and will make you pay attention to them when you’re otherwise too blissed out to care.
Commitment is a defense stat. When something happens to damage a relationship, Commitment reduces the damage, regardless of which of these four stats is taking damage. This isn’t necessarily a good thing, as you might be highly committed to a character who doesn’t have much respect for you.
Irrespective of any of these, people have Interests–energy reserves, sort of like mana bars, but there are many types, and each person has access to only a few. You fill up the Interest by doing things related to it (so you can eg. talk about it) or possibly just waiting.
Some interests are linked, such that you have to spend them all at once or not at all; this helps simulate highly specific interests while only actually defining general ones.
It is difficult to form a strong relationship with someone you don’t share any interests with. It’s possible, but you have to make do with only the social bonuses you get from emotional states. Interest bonuses are each somewhat harder to get than emotion bonuses, but there are more interests than there are emotions, so interests are better for stacking modifiers.
The school’s attended by dragons and the like, but in human form. The administration knows this, and indeed there are classes for keeping up your disguise; but not all of the students know this, and some of them may try to kill you if they find out your true nature.
Actual humans may have the reverse problem, getting bit by vampires (non consensually) when it becomes apparent they have a human soul (tasty, we is). So it is generally advisable to maintain a glamour even if you don’t have a special need for one. It creates ambiguity over your humanity.
Each day you have some classes scheduled for you but may override those with other actions.
Each class has several tests you have to pass. Each test has certain skill requirements, which you may reach by book study, practice, tutoring from a TA, actually attending the class and so forth. The motives for attending the classes are, first, that in 100 level classes your attendance is in fact part of your overall score; second, your familiarity with the class (and not the content) gives a modifier to your performance on the test; and third, it really helps your relationship with your teacher, which is the best avenue for skill leveling.
These have random shapes, meaning random capacity and random suitability for the classes.
They are more o less randomly connected although you can make new connections between them by winning at certain adventures.
As in …that Kairosoft game… students may use rooms for practice when there’s no class, and indeed there are rooms that have that purpose only. Many, perhaps most rooms have permanent enchantments on them that you only get partial information on what they do.
Permanent storefronts are rare due to the whole wandering-monster thing, but there are lots of adventurers willing to trade. For game purposes they all act kind of like traveling merchants even when they’re really looters.
You sleep in these.
You might have to set one up correctly for your species – vampires need coffins, dwarves need a secure way to stash extra gold to keep their spirits up.
Each represents something to do. Play it where you want to do it.
Upon playing a card, you “pencil in” your next actions to the ingame planner. A “Go” button appears on the next action, and you click it to advance to the end of that one action.
The biggie is graduating from the university and beginning a career in the magical arts. That means building skills, but also connections, so you’ll find out things about fellow students’ background that suggest opportunities–many of them will come from families already established in life-magic surgery, some of them will be related to the adventurers who pass thru the dungeon and can get you an internship as a sidekick, that kind of thing.
I was aiming to give mentalism a lot of very risky side effects, such that indirect, low-power, but reliable manipulations of mental state thru illusions and so-forth is the better bargain most of the time. I’ll devote some more thought to the varieties of insanity that you can develop by the indiscreet application of mentalism. They will be much more insidious than your usual Eternal Darkness insanity; for instance, you may not notice the game is misreporting your relationship levels until you are already stuck in an abusive one.