H E A T H E N S
Welcome to Lockheath Academy, the single most selective institution of higher education in the United States. Every year, twenty thousand applicants vie for about a hundred spots. Matriculants enroll straight out of secondary school. The collegiate-level curriculum runs for two years, and then you can transfer to whatever university you could possibly want. Every imaginable door of opportunity yawns wide open. You're set for life.
If you've made it here, you're the literal less-than-one percent. You were chosen because you're
better. Better than the nineteen thousand nine hundred others you beat out. Better than the unprivileged masses crowding into their public schools with their need-based grants and work-study programs. Better than your professors and your administrators. Maybe even better than your peers.
You're the son of a Senator. You're the daughter of a tycoon. You're money as old as fuck, or you're the next big thing. Maybe, just maybe, you're a rare prodigy who won your place by merit.
For the next two years, you'll live, sleep, eat and breathe Lockheath. It's an experience unlike any other. A firm foundation in liberal arts and quantitative reasoning. Lessons in debate, logic and etiquette. Sports and athletics to keep the body as sharp as the mind. Small classes. Close quarters. A whole lot of free time. But you're never free from your peers.
You'll make friends here. And enemies. Alliances are made and broken over too many drinks at all-night ragers. Romance is fleeting and usually toxic; rivalries are forever. Ruthless cliques rule the cafeterias, quadrangles and dormitories, and those without a people are relentlessly bullied. The administration turns a blind eye to all of this.
The people you meet here? We call ourselves the Heathens. Because there's a savagery beneath all the wealth and polish. Locked in, pent up, it's a feral world of hormones, tribes, and urges. We whet ourselves on each other so when they let us out we're ready to eat the world. The relationships formed here won't just shape the rest of our lives. It'll dictate society for the next thirty years.
Because if you're here, you were born to rule to world.
This game is inspired by several great GMs and their games. It's designed to be tight-knit, fast-paced, and rooted in interpersonal relationships, dysfunctions and conflicts. The setting is inspired by various school/bully dramas that loom large in pop culture as well as actual real-life ultra-selective boarding schools in a similar vein. It's worth noting this is not meant to be a happy, feel-good, wholesome game. We'll deal with a lot of adult themes - bullying, toxic relationships, dramas, substances, feuds - and the ending might be bittersweet at best.
Speaking of which, the idea is to have a defined ending. I don't like it when games start strong and then sputter out. The goal is to keep things moving and to bring it to a close early enough to leave 'em wanting more. We're going to try to keep a pretty regular clock in this game, and it'll be designed as a limited run - a single academic year. If the limited run goes well and everyone wants a second season, we can think about playing out the second (and final) year of these characters' time at Lockheath. However, a lot of the dynamics might be set by the end of the run, we may also start with a completely new cast.
We'll start in the early fall and play through to the following summer, though we probably won't play every single minute of every single day. Instead, we'll skip through some critical moments and plan to move the clock every week or two.
As time advances, we'll throw characters together in ways that encourage interaction. There's a single dorm, and every character will be assigned a shared room with another character. Characters will be rotated through classes in groups of 2-4. Downtime will be open play for shenanigans, and we've got plenty of extracurricular activities planned. If you hit an interesting post count (100, 200, 1234, etc), you'll get a PM offering you some neat perk or other.
That said, this is NOT a strongly GM-driven game with a planned plot arc. We'll give you plenty of hooks and events to work with, we're looking for complex characters with a lot of play off, and we ask that you reach out to each other to establish connections and dynamics. But in the end, the story is what you make it. We provide the kindling. You bring the spark.
This message was last edited by the user at 08:25, Sun 10 Mar.