Battlemap
The Short Course
The first thing you notice is the slate board asking you to state your discipline before the empty classroom answers.
The Short Course is a neglected training hall where apprentice mages once learned to control battle magic, warding, and summoned creatures. Its classrooms remain charged with failed exercises, and the final instructor still enforces lessons with lethal seriousness. The party must cross practical exams that have continued long after the school closed.
Dusty chalk, hot copper, and old candle smoke cling to the air. Faint incantations murmur from behind sealed doors, while blue-white sparks occasionally flicker through cracks in the stone. The halls grow warmer near the lower chambers, and every footstep seems to answer from somewhere unseen.
☠ Threat
Master Orest Vardas persists as a bound arcane tutor in the final chamber, his body reduced to a charred skeleton wrapped in lesson-scrolls. He believes the party are late-arriving students and attempts to grade them through escalating combat exercises. Each spell cast in the hall feeds the copper conduits, restoring his power and awakening more of the training constructs.
History
The hall was built by Master Orest Vardas, a blunt battlemage who called it the Short Course because he promised to make competent casters in twelve weeks. Copper conduits, slate classrooms, and a final examination chamber were installed beneath an abandoned civic school. When Vardas died during a containment exercise, the doors sealed, leaving his students and teaching constructs trapped inside.
Encounter Table
CRAnimated practice wands that drift in formation like a nervous flock, firing weak bolts at anyone carrying an unsheathed weapon.
A headless training dummy wearing a faded student robe and carrying a chalk baton. It repeats fragments of old corrections in a stern whisper.
A translucent apprentice with ink-black hands, visible only in reflections on polished metal. It points toward room-2 and begs silently for someone to read its name.
Rumours & Whispers
A school beneath the old civic building still rings its bells, though no teacher has lived there for decades.
The final test in the buried hall grants a spellbook to anyone who survives it, but failed students are turned into wooden dummies.
A missing hedge-mage was seen carrying a copper token marked with the letters O.V.
The founder's ghost does not kill talented students. It kills students who refuse to take notes.
Blue sparks have begun leaking from the old schoolhouse whenever thunder rolls over the valley.
Quest Hooks
Quest giver: Dimo, a one-eyed charcoal seller
A village hedge-mage vanished after finding a bronze student token near an old schoolhouse. The party must enter the hall, locate the missing apprentice, and bring back proof that the final lesson has ended.
A spellbook containing three useful second-circle combat spells and 150 gold pieces
Quest giver: Katalin Orvo, quartermaster of the city watch
A war captain wants the hall's tactical diagrams before a rival army acquires them. The party must recover the instructor's sealed lesson ledger without destroying the copper ward network.
A military writ, 300 gold pieces, and free passage through the captain's territory
Quest giver: Eleni Sava, a local shrine keeper
Blue sparks have begun appearing in nearby houses, and children are speaking in unison during thunderstorms. The party must find the hall's damaged grounding shrine and repair it before the bound magic spreads into the town.
A pearl worth 400 gold pieces and a blessing that grants advantage on one future saving throw against a spell
Corridor Notes
Bronze plaques list former student rankings, with the lowest names scratched away and replaced by fresh warnings in red chalk.
Thin copper wires run through the mortar and hum softly when a creature carrying magic passes nearby.
A trail of scorched handprints leads toward the locked door to Room 3, each print smaller than the last.
Classroom bells hang from the ceiling at irregular intervals. One rings whenever a spell is cast within thirty feet.
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