The Institutional Campaign and the Adventuring University

 

Stamford - a fetching but obscure small Lincolnshire market town - had in the early 14th century a rival to Oxford and Cambridge universities. A falling-out between scholars at Oxford led to a number of them decamping to Stamford, where they set up shop in 1333. But some things never change: Oxford University quickly lobbied the king (Edward III) to put an end to the 'evil, which we think every way hurtful and pestilential, namely, the new assembly of scholars at the town of Stamford for university instructions'. The king duly acted to suppress Oxford's competitor, and the University of Stamford came to an end with a whimper, with the king's emissary and the local sheriff prohibiting any further 'scholastic acts' and threatening the scholars there with total forfeiture of their property if they continued. Stamford sank back into quiescence in academic terms,* though I have passed through it a few times and can confirm it does have a Gregg's, so it's not a complete wash-out. 

The idea of rogue scholars trying to set up a new centre of learning is a fascinating one, and it actually meshes nicely with a longstanding idea of mine, which I call (in my own head, and when I talk to strangers on a park bench) the 'institutional campaign'. The idea here is that players do not have individual responsibility for a PC and his/her retainers, but rather collective responsibility for an institution of some kind - an adventuring guild, temple, order of paladins, monastery of monk-assassins, whatever - and garner XP and treasure as a unit, to then spend either on levelling up individual members of the institution or on expanding/reparing it. I doubt very much I am the only person to have ever thought about doing this, and this is usually the point at which somebody will pop up in the comments to recommend I play X, Y or Z, which does something similar - but the point remains that this is the type of campaign I would like to run.

The idea of a group of adventurer-scholar-sage-wizard (-assassins?) setting up a new place of learning from scratch (and against other, more established such institutions in the region) is I think a rich variant on this theme. Here, I imagine the players taking control of a couple of dozen first level PCs perhaps in a single small building, and having to expand from there. They need money to expand, to buy guards and servants and so on; they need students to come to study; they need to fend off agents of the king and attacks from monsters and robbers; and they need above all to actually get the material with which to teach - new spells, new magic items and materials, new maps of the world, new bestiaries of monsters, new knowledge about the deep dark places under the mountains, new philosophies, new artworks and mystical artefacts, new beasts of wonder, and so on and so forth. Availing themselves of these things allows them to take on new students and open new fields of study and new departments and extensions - not to mention, of course, new members of staff, who presumably inhabit far flung regions of the globe only reachable by long and dangerous journeys.

Would this 'adventuring university' not be a good idea? Would this not be a wonderful variation on the core game? Would writing it not earn me millions of pounds, not to mention the undying loyalty of thousands of devotees? ANSWER ME THESE QUESTIONS.

*Although until the 19th century Oxford graduates apparently still had to swear an oath specifically promising not to ever teach anything in Stamford.