Public Wizard High School Teens

It’s senior year at Wolfboil High… 

A public high school for urban and suburban kids who want to do wizard stuff but can’t afford the snooty private school up the hill, on the lake, in the woods. As usual, yet another life-threatening problem has emerged that the highly qualified and experienced (but apathetic) adult staff of wizards is ill equipped to deal with. That leaves you, a scrappy band of dramatic libidinous teenagers to save the day. But there’s also crazy important school stuff to think about AND your life sucks hard because you have your own even more important problems to deal with.

About

PWHST is a one-page RPG created to let you play through a(nother) particularly eventful year at Wolfboil. This is a story-based one-pager, so don't expect deep combat, tactics, or stat sheets. Players create their characters, learn spells, unravel a plot against the school, and deal with their important personal problems; like asking out their crush so they can finally get to second base at the party of the century; or maybe they need to get into magic university, with an amazing letter to the dean, so they can finally impress their overbearing father. The choice is yours (or the dice's). They do this through using a limited (but growing) number of spells they can still remember after 7 years of going to school, and keeping up their self esteem.

My playthroughs

I've played this 3 times with a 1dm:3player crew, and each time it has been a riot. The spells are crazy. The high school drama is real. And don't even talk to  me about the Lich King who tried to become the dean via an elaborate magic contest, and only lost when a player performed a ritual to transmute his dragon's confidence into the angsty worries of a teen asking out a crush.

Conflict Resolution

PWHST comes in two variants : roll for shoes and adventure dice. Links have been included to both works' websites below.

With Roll For Shoes as its conflict resolution mechanism. This variant only really requires a maximum of 6d6 (12d6 for best comfort, though), so it's nice and compact, but requires players to track their spells, and adding up your score can slow things down a bit.

Using Adventure dice is quite a bit more straightforward during gameplay, and moves much quicker, but requires you to either create custom dice, have adventure dice, or assign adventure dice faces to numbers on a D6. It's fun for a DM who is less interested in managing dice amounts and just wants to get to the roll result as quickly as possible.

Of course, both are meant to be lightweight and support the story, so they'll both work fine. The story should be less about the result of the conflict than the conflict  itself (and hopefully the humor of it).

Links

• Adventure Dice
• Roll For Shoes

Final Words

I consider this v1.0, but it's definitely possible that it may have spelling/grammar errors, and could use some tweaks in balance, so feel free to offer constructive feedback. But, generally, it's a one page RPG meant for a fun hour or two. Make a fun story, bend or break the rules if it'll make things more interesting, and enjoy.