100 Oddities for an Arcane Academy

Welcome to “100 Oddities for an Arcane Academy,” the latest entry in Skirmisher Publishing's bestselling “100 Oddities” series of system-free sourcebooks dedicated to helping develop rich stories and spicing up encounter areas with exciting curiosities! It includes an annotated list of 100 Oddities, a Student Organization Generator, and a section of 50 Arcane Academy Tomes, and is illustrated with more than a dozen custom images. 

“100 Oddities for an Arcane Academy” is inspired by the well-established boarding school story genre, which began with Thomas Hughes’ revered Tom Brown’s School Days and eventually evolved to spawn fantasy media that include Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials, Yoh Yoshinari’s Little Witch Academia, and a multitude of other movies-novels-and-sourcebooks-that-must-not-be-named. This universal supplement focuses on the eccentricities of magical schools and colleges, as well as their bizarre denizens, tuition-paying or otherwise. 

Oddities are designed to help storytellers make places in their scenarios as memorable as those that have appeared in innumerable sources like those mentioned above and to fascinate and engage players and prompt them to ask questions like, “Why is this thing here?”, “What is that for?”, or “Who would do something like this?” They are intended to aid creativity, to turn possibly bland areas or encounters into something more, and to take a storyteller’s imagination in directions it might not have otherwise gone. A chalkboard, a desk, or a raven might appear to be the common and unnoteworthy trappings of an arcane academy, but when the chalkboard could summon a demon, the desks are equipped with manacles, or the raven tries to extort money, each becomes worthy of investigation in its own right. 

Other volumes in this popular and bestselling series include 100 Oddities for a Chaotic Mutation, 100 Oddities for a Creepy Old House, 100 Oddities for a Dungeon, 100 Oddities for a Found Car, 100 Oddities for an Enchanted Forest, 100 Oddities for an Egyptian Tomb, 100 Oddities for a Graveyard, 100 Oddities for a Pilgrimage Trail, 100 Oddities for a Sewer, 100 Oddities for a Thieves’ Guild, 100 Oddities for a Treasure Horde, 100 Oddities for a Vampire Lair, 100 Oddities for a Viking Encounter, 100 Oddities for a Wasteland, 100 Oddities for a Wizard’s Library, and 100 Oddities for a Wizard’s Tower. 

~ TSRPG (Travel-Sized RPG) ~

Be sure to check out Skirmisher Publishing's new and already-bestselling TSRPG (Travel-Sized RPG)! This improv storytelling game designed for a storyteller and one or more players can easily be played anywhere, from the airport waiting area you are stuck in, to the overnight in some hotel where there is nothing to do (and also, of course, in your own home). All the basic rules fit on one page; no dice are needed; characters have just two stats; and any bookkeeping that might be required can be done on a cocktail napkin with a pen borrowed from a waiter. We have thus far released five compelling scenarios for TSRPG, "On the Plane of Magma," "A Violet Shade of Death," "A Rose for Erato," "Into the Terrorium," "Whiskey in the Jar," and "Temple of the Banished Suns," all of which include pregenerated characters and the basic rules for the game, allowing them to function as quick-starts for it. We have also released TSRPG in a number of other languages, including German (along with an adventure for it, „Auf der Ebene des Magmas“), Spanish, and Ukrainian!