Gisk — Roleplayer Guild

June, 1994. Sanctuary Hills, Virginia. A small college town, isolated up in the Blue Ridge Mountains.

Welcome! This is a slice of life roleplay that takes place in a small college town in a world where magic exists. The narrative is meant to be character driven, and generally low stakes. There might be some adventure and/or peril, but it will not be the norm, and will not be the focus. Mostly this is about a loose group of friends and acquaintances getting into shenanigans over the summer. Magic is commonplace, as mundane as electricity in this world. So while some characters may be studying magic, it’s really just window dressing on a roleplay about the everyday problems of a handful of college aged kids. 

Regarding posting standards and pacing: 
I have no requirements for post length, as long as grammar and spelling are reasonable, and the post makes narrative sense. Sometimes short posts are called for, and sometimes long posts are inappropriate. Just make sure that it's furthering the story. 

I don't usually have a posting order, just try not to post back to back. I'd like to see everyone post about once a week, but if we get in a groove and go faster, that's fine. Let us know if there's a delay, or if you need us to skip you or auto-pilot your character. 

Regarding rules: I'm pretty casual, so follow site rules, be respectful, and we should be fine. If I ask for something to be changed, I'll usually allow you to argue your case, but reserve the right to make all final decisions.

This RP is meant to be inclusive, and the one thing I will not tolerate is disrespect toward your fellow players.

Name:
Age:
Appearance: However you want to convey this. Pictures are cool, but no photographs. 
Personality: 
Background: Just a little about who they are and what they do. It doesn't need to be long or complicated. 
Magic Specialty: if any, not every character needs to use magic. If they do, you can be really creative with this. I've listed a little bit of how magic works, mostly to make sure that we keep things consistent. Think about how their magic might be used in the modern age, what kind of work they might do with it(if it's something they seek to do professionally, that is). If they’re studying to be a magician, the specialty should be relatively broad. If the character is a witch, or just knows a little, it’s likely to be more specific. Some people only really know one or two spells(if they know any at all).
Other: Any notes that don’t fit neatly elsewhere.


Benjamin Greenwald served as the Magician General to the Governor of Virginia from the time it became a state. At the time, magic had a reputation of being erratic and dangerous, and it was very common for magicians to live somewhat removed from society. Greenwald was no different, he lived in an exceedingly secluded manor in the Blue Ridge Mountains. The estate was called Sanctuary Hills, and secluded as it was it still played host to a number of pupils who sought tutelage under Greenwald. Before long, he formalized the roles of school and teacher, and founded Sanctuary Hills University.
Students flocked to the school from the moment it was advertised. Before Sanctuary Hills, most who sought to learn magic had to seek an apprenticeship. More students meant more faculty and staff for the school. Staff needed places to stay, and soon had separate homes in the area. As more people moved nearby, more infrastructure was needed, which brought even more people. Within a few decades, Sanctuary Hills had snowballed into a small town, almost purpose built to support one of the foremost magical colleges of the day. 

The Industrial Revolution brought greater scientific understanding, and with it came advances in magic. As arcane processes became more fully understood, the dangerous stigma around magic started to fade. People were more willing to be neighbors with not only magicians, but schools for magicians. Soon SHU was competing with schools that were just plain closer to civilization. The school doubled down, and added law and medicine to their curriculum. And this worked, after a fashion. Over the years, the school’s prestige dropped, but never completely died out. The school expanded to include other sciences, as well as the liberal arts, and it was even a pioneer of trade school programs(mostly added to encourage locals to take up things like plumbing and electrical work to keep the town running).

The campus is almost completely undrivable. The official address is 1107 Green Way, and Green Way itself ends in an empty cul-de-sac a short distance from Brooke Hall.

Sanctuary Hall: The original manor home of Benjamin Greenwald. It seems to be a fairly prototypical brick colonial home. Two stories, seven rooms(not including the echoey foyer), and with two sets of stairs from the front porch, curving around a geometric topiary that comes up to the top of the porch railing. 
This building is so thoroughly haunted that it can’t be used for ordinary purposes anymore. However, among the multitude of ghosts are ten of the eleven deans that have served this school since it was first opened. Though Greenwald himself is absent from their ranks, tradition dictates that the ghosts of the former deans serve as a sort of advisory council to the incumbent. They’re not always the easiest to consult, however. Ghosts are notoriously forgetful and easily distracted. It’s often joked that the only reason Dean Winefred Gabstone goes into Sanctuary Hall is just to get away from everyone else. 

Graveyard: Sanctuary Hall itself is difficult to spend any time inside these days, but the graveyard behind it is kept habitable by the efforts of SHU’s faculty. The yard actually doesn’t have an official name, but is often called the Necromancy Classroom(despite being very much outside) as that is the primary use for the space. Spells are used to keep the dead quiet, unless they are asked for, and this is actually the primary reason that the Hall itself is so haunted. Those spirits who refuse to sleep are relegated to the nearest structure that holds personal relevance to them.
There are a handful of ghosts who consent to be summoned for the purpose of instruction, though some of them seem to delight in giving the students a hard time. 

Brooke Hall (AKA, The Old Building): Built in 1795 in response to the rapid influx of students, Brooke Hall was named for then-governor of Virginia. It’s a sprawling single story building, in a sort of U shape with a courtyard in the middle. The courtyard features a fountain that’s said to be host to a water fairy, though faculty officially deny this, and most stories seem to come from a friend of a friend. 
Brooke Hall is right on Green Way, and features one of only two parking lots on campus. The other is across the street. The central section connecting the two wings is parallel to the road, and serves as one of the first things people see when arriving at the school. Inside this central section are the administrative offices of the school. The two wings are essentially hallways 

Greenwald Hall (AKA, The “New” Building): Built after World War I to accommodate a fresh wave of students as scores of young men returned home from Europe, looking to make something new of themselves. It is a three story brick construction that takes deliberate design cues from Sanctuary Hall, which was already uninhabitable by this time. The first and third floor are both made up of classrooms, but for some reason the second floor is dedicated to faculty offices. 

The Conservatory: A large building on a hill, the highest point in town, let alone on campus. There’s a small attachment with a marble facade and tile roof, but the majority of the structure is a high domed glass roof, with windows stretching from the floor to ceiling, framed in shining brass. The greenhouse portion is divided into four sections that are each climate controlled differently, so that a wide array of plants can be nurtured under the one roof. Some plants are further locked away in fenced areas, due to toxic, caustic, or magical dangers. 
The small attached building has an administrative desk and filing room, to track student usage of the building, and the checking out of samples. There’s also a small storeroom that has doors both outside, and into the greenhouse itself. If someone were to desire sneaking into the greenhouse for any reason, they would find that this door is the most likely to be unlocked. 

Mary Parker Memorial Library: Remember to call for an extension, late books will be summoned. Still using Pneumatic tubes, and lacking even a single computer, the library is widely considered to be painfully old fashioned. 

Battle Stadium: Despite the exciting name, it’s a baseball diamond, and is just named for Governor John Battle. It’s across Green Way from the rest of the campus, and is thus one of the few campus locations that can be driven directly to. It has a larger parking lot than Brooke Hall, and visitors are often ticketed for parking there when it’s closed. SHU has a few athletic programs, but baseball is the only sport that the Church Grims play home games for. 

Feral Familiars: They can be seen around town, too, but are most heavily concentrated on the campus. These can be a wide variety of things. Some are just particularly clever birds or cats, but some are animated objects, or wholly fabricated creatures. A familiar is anything created through magic that acts of its own accord. Not all magicians work with a kind of magic that would create such a thing, and of those that do, not all of them bother. Familiars are debatably useful, difficult to make, and some argue there are ethical issues to their creation. 
Some people make a hobby of tracking familiar sightings, and if you cared to ask one of these people, they would tell you there are somewhere between twenty and twenty-four feral familiars in the town. There are a few of them that these hobbyists either can’t agree exist, or don’t agree are even familiars. 

Labeled simply as “Dormitory One,” and on like that through four. These are four buildings around campus, each distinctly odd in some way or another. The Dorms were a project by the class of 1954, attempting to use magic to create buildings out of the nearby stone, earth, and trees. There were five groups for the project, each devising their own spell for the building. Not a single one of the projects produced a usable dwelling, and builders had to be brought in from the nearest town to finish the construction. When the spells were first cast, they were each sitting in their own eerily perfect square hole, where the spells that were cast pulled the very dirt out as a material component. With erosion, and some deliberate landscaping over the years, this has rounded down, but still leaves most of the buildings in their own little divot in the ground. 

Dormitory One has a floor made of fine, soft sand on the first level. It’s actually a very complex and impressive spell, which prevents the sand from actually leaving the floor. It can move around, and still takes impressions when things are put on it, but the sand doesn’t stick to clothes, and refuses to be kicked out of the doors, or onto furniture. The secrets to maintaining this spell have been passed down from one RA to the next through the years. Nobody else even knows where the spell is. 
The rest of the building is completely normal, because that was the only part of the construction spell that worked, and the rest of the dorm was built around this bizarre floor.

Dormitory Two is the McCormick Road Dormitories from the University of Virginia. The group assigned this lot thought it might be easier to move a building than to create one. The specifics of the spell have been hushed up, but it caused a lot of damage to the surrounding landscaping, and rumors persist that the casting of the spell killed one of the students. 
SHU had to pay quite a lot in fines, and lost a suit which forced them to reconstruct the building for UVA(attempting to move it again was determined to be out of the question). 

Dormitory Three has too many windows on the first floor, and they’re all placed very irregularly. The second and third floor are more normal. The spell put all the windows on the first floor, and seems to have placed them at random. Not all of them were kept, the builders were forced to fill in close to half of them. You can still see where they were to this day, as the magically laid brickwork has a bluish tinge that the builders couldn’t replicate(nor could the magician students, when asked to do so). 

Dormitory Four had to be built almost from scratch, the original spell produced a structure that was tall, skinny, and stuck out of the ground at an eighty six degree angle. It fell shortly after being erected, and injured two students. A small section of the first floor had the lopsided brickwork left in place, as an homage to the project. 
For some reason that nobody has been able to determine, the attic attracts owls, and they can’t be kept out.

Dormitory Five is an empty plot. The group wasn’t able to produce anything at all, but given the chaos and expense that the other four buildings incurred, nobody was exactly mad at them. On the contrary, when they turned in all the notes that led them to their conclusion that the task wasn’t possible, they were commended for their thorough due diligence. Group Five was the only one that received top marks for the project.


Town Square: It’s actually a circle, but that name never caught on. The Town Square is simply where the first homes for SHU’s nascent staff were built. There is a roughly circular arrangement of bricks about thirty yards across, surrounded by buildings of various ages. The perimeter of the circle is laid out in pink granite stones, each about two feet square and bearing a rune. Careful study by decades of students has determined that the runes are only a part of whatever spell this is meant to indicate. Nobody living knows what it’s for, or how to use it.
The square is for foot traffic, and most of the shop fronts on it have both a front and back entrance, so they can be reached easily by those who are driving the streets and alleys behind them.

Phil's Coffeehouse: The owner’s first name is actually Philomena Hios. The shop is situated in town square, and is actually in the second oldest building in town. It was originally a house, but the bottom floor has been renovated, and is a much more open space than it was originally. There are several rooms in the second floor that have been converted to apartments, and the attic is where Miss Hios lives. Philomena actually bought the building as is from the previous proprietor, back when it was called Common Grounds Coffee. Though it’s been Phil’s coffeehouse for over a decade, some older townies still call it by the wrong name. 
The interior is a dazzling mix of mismatched and vintage furniture, owing to Miss Hios’ habit of antiquing when she’s on vacation. The floor is similarly done in a variety of tiling and hardwood styles, laid out in a sort of checkerboard of four foot squares. 

J. W. Steward's: Now owned by James Stewards’ daughter, Emily Steward. J. W. Steward’s is a small thrift furniture store, specifically targeted at the dorm-living college student crowd. The stock is a mix of donated goods, and stuff bought cheaply and resold by Emily. There is a Goodwill in town, but it can’t stock furniture because everyone donates to Steward’s.
It boasts a wildly eclectic assortment of furniture, and is famous for redoing its front window display every week. Each sunday, Philomena from across the square comes over and helps set up the display to resemble a small furnished room. Despite Phil’s own particular taste, the room displays usually have matching furniture(or, furniture that looks like it goes together, in any case). Philomena Hios also donates every piece of furniture that she replaces when she redecorates Phil’s Coffeehouse.
There’s a small workshop in the back, for minor repairs or refinishing of stock, and there’s a small apartment above the shop. 

George’s Garage: Sometimes the joke is to say “George” with a hard G, and sometimes it’s to say “Garage” with a soft G. As long as you pay, and don’t argue about the work, George Keen does not mind. George Keen(The Fourth! As he insists on introducing himself) is the latest in a long line of George’s to own the garage, which first opened in 1923. At the time it was built, it was meant to be a short distance from the town proper, but due to expansion in the intervening years, it’s just on the outskirts. It’s a squat building with a large garage that has six bays(three on each side). Attached to the garage is a smaller and shorter office(that also has better climate control) where the actual business is done.
George is a short, and somewhat cantankerous middle aged man. Despite a temper, he’s generally good natured, and is popular with most of the older townies. 

The Witch Scouts: A local youth organization for children who are interested in magic. They go on outings, and learn about magic as it appears in nature. And of course they learn a few basic spells. Things like changing the color of fabric, or making lights and sounds. The lessons don’t go very deep, but many Witch Scouts go on to study magic in earnest.

101.1, The Astral Plane: A local radio station DJed by someone who is named either Aaron or Erin. It’s unclear, as they leave their gender mysterious and speak through a vocoder that gives their voice an ethereal sound. 

Sanctuary Thrills: A local amusement park. You really won’t find anyone traveling to visit this attraction, its most exhilarating ride is its singular wooden roller coaster. Most would argue that the ferris wheel is a good deal more exciting, owing to a truly breathtaking view of the mountains from the top. Bribing the operator to stop your car at the apex is such a problem that most people just assume it will stop irregularly.


The intention for this RP is for the fantastical elements to be just the background for the narrative. We won't get too in depth, because it just isn't the focus of the story, but I will give some background, and lay some ground rules. These are just to keep things consistent, but I want us to keep magic deliberately vague. Treat it like it’s mundane. Describe magic like you would describe turning on the lights. 

In this world, magic is a natural force that exists in nature. Like fire or electricity, chemistry, or radiation. Humankind learned to harness it through experimentation, trial and error, and many thousands of years of careful study. It’s a scientific process, in a way, and anyone can do it. This is not to say that everyone does. It's a skill like baking or working on cars. Obviously some people do it professionally, but a lot of people have some knowledge and skill in the subject that they've picked up here and there. Conversely, some people can't work a spell to save their life, and that's okay! 

When performing a spell, you might include any number of elements like incantations, writing, symbology, geometry, burning herbs or candles, or a physical catalyst(a material that is necessary for the spell, but that is not used up by it). Each element, and how it is used carries meaning, and affects the outcome of the spell. Writing a spell involves describing exactly what you want the magic to do, using what amounts to a multimedia magical programming language. 

So more complicated magical effects will require more complicated spellcasting. A simple spell to move objects might just need a couple words, a wand(the best material for the wand is hotly debated), and some spit(blood, if it’s heavy enough). A spell to sort objects might be a complex algorithm expressed in a mix of geometry and some dead language, cornered by the right kind of crystals, and activated by burning the right kind of candle.
Just like with computer programming, there can be multiple(or even a multitude) of different spells that would achieve the same effect. Choosing which method you use can depend on a variety of factors from materials on hand, to just plain personal preference. 
There’s always a cost, whether it be a small part of yourself(like the spit or blood) or burning a candle or herb. The cost is called a reagent, and if the spell is working properly, they burn away without smoke or heat. 

Magic can’t create something from nothing, and creating complex effects requires understanding how to describe them in the symbolic language of magic. Magicians need to be knowledgeable about physics, chemistry, biology, or any number of things depending on what kind of magic they’re doing. As a result, the advancement of magic has been directly tied to humankind’s understanding of the natural world and the laws that govern it. Early magicians operated on trial and error, repeating formulae that got the effects they wanted. For a very long time, magic had a reputation for being unpredictable and dangerous; a reputation that’s only starting to fall away in modern times.

More complex types of magic are highly specialized, though there’s a good deal of overlapping skills and ability, and all magicians have a certain baseline of understanding. 

This is a world where magic is treated like any other general field. One might say that they’re a scientist, or they could be specific and say that they’re  an aerospace engineer. Likewise, you could say that you're a magician, or more specifically a kinetic thaumaturgist. 

Magic is a skill like baking or working on cars. Obviously some people do it professionally, but a lot of people have some knowledge and skill in the subject that they've picked up here and there. Conversely, some people can't work a spell to save their life, and that's okay!

"Magician" is an official title, like a medical doctor. You can't just call yourself one, you have to actually attend school and pass exams. Someone who practices magic without passing official exams is called a witch(this term is gender neutral). Not all professional magic users are fully qualified magicians, witches can be employed in all kinds of fields. If they do magic for money, technically they are supposed to be registered with a state governing body.

Colloquially speaking the difference between a magician and a witch is often said to be that a witch just learns spells. A magician writes them. They understand the principles of the magic, and know enough about the fundamentals of the physical world to know how the magic will interact with it. They know the "language" of magic, so to speak, and how to tell it what to do. 

Witches will, however, usually know enough to be able to alter a spell as necessary for their specific use. Like setting the scale of the magical effect, or specifying the object of the spell.
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