[quote=@Expendable]As a suggestion, why not have it going on over the summer? Just a handful of students present for a handful of classes, or having decided to stay in town instead of going home during the summer break?

The townies are happy because they can finally get downtown. Maybe now they can hit that diner that's always thronged with students during the fall and spring semesters? Fourth of July fireworks, art festivals, farmer markets, yard sales. Who knows what bit of elderich horror one might find in a pile of old books? Say an old diary that used to belong to a long dead professor?

Perhaps the gang are all members of a paranormal club - ghost hunting and the like?

The college is an old one, there are actual graves on campus where various members of the faculty were buried. Perhaps a few stories of strange things going on? Like rumors of strange beings in the stacks of the library at night? Or why the steam tunnels are all locked up and alarmed? Perhaps a few empty houses with hidden bunkers under them? Or a network of odd underground tunnels leading to hidden speakeasies long abandoned - or so you thought?

And let's not forget frats and secret societies.[/quote]
Barring the fact of course that this is all up to Gisk, I also like these ideas. Fantasy being interwoven with daily life in a mundane way. Small-town mysteries, local incidents and scandals, petty social drama - rather than the grandiose adventures and magnanimous ambitions we're accustomed to from traditional fantasy.

Crunching hard on an electrokinetics lab assignment, staying up late a day in advance to write a reflection paper for a cultural divination class, calling your mom to tell her you're studying hard. All this right before you get dressed for a party at a stranger's rental, drunkenly casting charms on the other partygoers and throwing up in the pool while sneaking out the back to avoid the cops. Someone invites you on a date, enticing you with a shared interest in potioncraft, but neither of you are prepared for the shock that your date is actually your professor. Your friends make fun of you the following day for being so starved for romantic attention that you didn't see the signs.

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[quote=@Gisk]One of my favorite descriptions of magic is in Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, by Susannah Clarke. It's deliberately vague, we rarely see a description of what magicians are actually [i]doing[/i] to make magic happen. They talk a lot about formulas, and mention techniques by name without describing them. It makes for a fun, arcane "technobabble" that I personally really enjoy. 

"No, see here? You've forgotten to set a boundary parameter. If you cast a spell like this, it'll keep going until it burns up all its fuel, or runs out of targets, whichever comes first. Try [i]Cervantes' Discriminación[/I], it's a great framework for selective description." 

I also like magic that has a cost, I think it would just be material components, that are usually burned up in the process. The required components are symbolic, and depend on the nature of the spell. DnD has great examples, it could be something like a quantity of fine sand, special herbs, maybe blood, bone or hair(though maybe these are seen as kind of sloppy and uncouth). 

This is something I don't want to put too much specific thought into, though, as it's really just a background for social roleplay.[/quote]
I love when magic is left fairly vague, with little to no hints as to how it might work. It's what I enjoy about Star Trek - the mention of concepts which have rules and mechanisms beyond the scope of the viewer's knowledge but which serve to create an immersion into the setting.

With this setting incorporating magic as a normal part of everyday life, such that magic is its own profession, would it be safe to assume that everyone in-universe can use it? I also think it would be awesome to see how magic is passed down through families or shared across cultures, like you could log onto the internet to look up a particular spell or ritual, or you'd find stupid trends on social media involving dangerous uses of magic or its implements.