outline.txt

* High Concept
  School life sim IN A DUNGEON! where you must manipulate your own
  mental state to use magic, make friends, and appear human
  even if you're not.
** Manipulate your own mental state
*** Perception
    You may on occasion want to see through a glamour. To do this you
    need top focus and few expectations.

    I think the expectations should be a category of Interest
    (described below) which, though useful to have, also make you more
    vulnerable to being fooled by glamour.
*** Emotion
    Your commitment to your studies may waver if you burn out or get
    too interested in other pastimes.

    Specific schools of magic go well with specific emotional states,
    but intense emotions make it harder to sit down and study.

    Your character expresses themself best when in a particular
    emotional state chosen at creation. This is the state you want to
    be in when you socialize.

    Remaining emotionally neutral isn't difficult, but basically no
    buffs will work on you in such a state.
** Use magic
   The magic points are actually tiny tiny bits of your soul, which
   regenerates at about the same pace that your bloodstream
   refills. Your emotions affect the *quality* of your spellcasting
   rather than the quantity.

   The general absence of combat-related magic is deliberate, because
   the game's not about that. I guess it's just not that kind of
   school.
*** Illusions and Glamour
    Nonhumans have to keep up a glamour 24/7 cos this is a human school.

    Some humans do this as well, because they want to look good.

    Glamours are responsive to the aesthetics of the observer, and are
    therefore harder to keep up with multiple observers, particularly
    if they are in different emotional states.

    Best when you are in a worrying mood.
*** Mentalism
    The most useful for altering your own emotions. It's possible to
    alter those of others too, but doing that without consent is
    considered assault.

    Theoretically includes mind control, but it's
    a high-level deal, and even if you can do it, getting someone to
    follow a specific non-trivial command through mind control
    requires precise timing: a command that arrives while they're
    already doing something unrelated, or that doesn't jibe with their
    emotional state, will make them confused, which makes the mind
    control that much harder to maintain and might just cause them to
    guess that they are being mind-controlled.

    Best when in that mood associated with intellectual
    fascination. Curiosity perhaps.
*** Life Magic
    Heals wounds, resurrects dead, promotes growth, and inflicts
    cancer. Because cancer is uncontrolled growth.

    You can use this to convert ambient magical energy into magic
    points you can cast.

    Best when in a kind, happy mood.
*** Death magic
    Kills stuff, including eg. bacteria, so this is the school for
    curing disease. Does not have any special effect on souls,
    however--only biological life. To affect souls you want mentalism.

    Best when feeling rage.
** Use the dungeon
   All sorts of random junk teleports into the dungeon for no
   reason. Much of it is vendor trash, but you do get the odd
   spellbook or scroll you might study from.

   *Living creatures* can only enter via *stabilized* portals, which
   you can create yourself--though doing this on-campus presents the
   risk of a monster invasion, and is therefore grounds for
   expulsion. But when you learn the spell for it, you can do it
   anyway, and thereby eg. summon gnomes to help you cheat on your
   homework.
** Make friends
   Apart from being desirable as such, friendship will make your
   studying a lot more effective, and it will help you get more
   information as to what's going on around you, potentially helping
   you spot eg. who's a vampire and who ain't.

*** Social actions
    You can generically "socialize" with anyone, or with no one in
    particular, in which case you'll try to make nice on anyone who's
    in the area and not otherwise occupied.

    Get food and alcohol together and you can throw a party. These
    work best when there's an entertainment on offer.

*** Entertainments
    Magic is actually pretty boring when you have to do it day-in and
    day-out.

    Remote viewing can suffice for television, though it relies on
    already knowing something entertaining to look at. There are
    illusions you might cast to show like a movie or a TV show, but
    these rely on the caster having memorized the particular film to
    show. So it's a good idea to build up an inventory of castable
    memories to entertain with.

    You could take a trip through a stable portal and see what
    entertainments are on offer outside the dungeon, but to do that
    within school rules you have to dress and pack in a way so that
    you don't draw attention to yourself wherever you're going, and
    you need to satisfy an instructor who is from the world behind
    that portal that you're familiar with the customs and traditions
    there.

    You could of course try to sneak through without permission and
    risk expulsion.

    In any case the worlds beyond the portals are simulated only as
    random event tables.
*** Relationship model
    The game makes no hardline mechanical distinction between
    eg. friendship, romance, professional respect or whatever.

    Every relationship has some level of Intensity, Trust, Respect,
    and Commitment. Every relationship is bidirectional, so one
    party's levels of these may be entirely different from the
    other's.

    Intensity makes people *want* to do things with each other, or
    just spend time together.

    Trust affects what they are *willing* to do together. Activities
    that require high levels of it include dungeon-delving (trust
    someone to protect your life), independent study (trust someone to
    do their share of the research and so forth), and nookie (trust
    someone to touch you only just so). You might want to bone someone
    but not trust them enough to actually do it.

    Respect mainly affects how people treat one another when their
    emotions get heated. Any intense emotion can provoke a person to
    do something careless, though some emotions are riskier for your
    friends than others; high Respect will make you stop yourself
    before yelling at them when you're angry, and will make you pay
    attention to them when you're otherwise too blissed out to care.

    Commitment is a defense stat. When something happens to damage a
    relationship, Commitment reduces the damage, regardless of which
    of these four stats is taking damage. This isn't necessarily a
    good thing, as you might be highly committed to a character who
    doesn't have much respect for you.

    Irrespective of any of these, people have Interests--energy
    reserves, sort of like mana bars, but there are many types, and
    each person has access to only a few. You fill up the Interest by
    doing things related to it (so you can eg. talk about it) or
    possibly just waiting.

    Some interests are linked, such that you have to spend them all at
    once or not at all; this helps simulate highly specific interests
    while only actually defining general ones.

    It is difficult to form a strong relationship with someone you
    don't share any interests with. It's possible, but you have to
    make do with only the social bonuses you get from emotional
    states. Interest bonuses are each somewhat harder to get than
    emotion bonuses, but there are more interests than there are
    emotions, so interests are better for stacking modifiers.
** Appear human
   The school's attended by dragons and the like, but in human
   form. The administration knows this, and indeed there are classes
   for keeping up your disguise; but not all of the *students* know
   this, and some of them may try to kill you if they find out your
   true nature.

   Actual humans may have the reverse problem, getting bit by vampires
   (non consensually) when it becomes apparent they have a human soul
   (tasty, we is). So it is generally advisable to maintain a glamour
   even if you don't have a special need for one. It creates ambiguity
   over your humanity.
* Gameplay
  Each day you have some classes scheduled for you but may override
  those with other actions.

  Each class has several tests you have to pass. Each test has certain
  skill requirements, which you may reach by book study, practice,
  tutoring from a TA, actually attending the class and so forth. The
  motives for attending the classes are, first, that in 100 level
  classes your attendance is in fact part of your overall score;
  second, your familiarity with the class (and not the content) gives
  a modifier to your performance on the test; and third, it really
  helps your relationship with your teacher, which is the
  best avenue for skill leveling.
* Interface
** Map
*** Portals
*** Classrooms
    These have random shapes, meaning random capacity and random
    suitability for the classes.

    They are more o less randomly connected although you can *make*
    new connections between them by winning at certain adventures.

    As in ...that Kairosoft game... students may use rooms for
    practice when there's no class, and indeed there are rooms that
    have that purpose only. Many, perhaps most rooms have permanent
    enchantments on them that you only get partial information on what
    they do.
*** Shops
    Permanent storefronts are rare due to the whole wandering-monster
    thing, but there are lots of adventurers willing to trade. For
    game purposes they all act kind of like traveling merchants even
    when they're really looters.
*** Dorms
    You sleep in these.

    You might have to set one up correctly for your species --
    vampires need coffins, dwarves need a secure way to stash extra
    gold to keep their spirits up.
** Cards
   Each represents something to do. Play it where you want to do it.
** Scheduler
  Upon playing a card, you "pencil in" your next actions to the
  ingame planner. A "Go" button appears on the next action, and you
  click it to advance to the end of that one action.