How to Structure a Magic School Campaign

The fundamental challenge when crafting tabletop adventures in a magic school is how to structure play. It is not feasible to roleplay every single class period and extracurricular obligation every single day. It is also probably a wasted opportunity to completely skip those aspects; your players want to feel like actual students, especially because the contrast between the “mundane” parts of a magic school and the exciting adventure makes narrative climaxes all the more fulfilling.

The question, then, is how to structure your playtime such that players get to experience a satisfying combination of classroom scenes, non-academic social encounters, extracurricular engagements, and campus hijinks in between dedicated adventure arcs. In this blog post, I’ll provide a few examples of mechanics that will help you to organize your playtime, weaving together narrative elements in a way that avoids ruining the pace of your campaigns.

This post is adapted from the Structuring Play appendix from the guide to Borough Bound’s magic school setting Elseridge Academy. If you want to read a more comprehensive explanation of different ways to organize your play sessions, consider picking up the full guide on itch.io or subscribe to our Patreon for access to all of our content.