To Teach Their Own

To Teach Their Own is a game about a small group of grown-up witches teaching student witches valuable lessons about magic. It pulls from things like The Magic Schoolbus, The Wizard of Earthsea, Little Witch Academia, Strixhaven, and more, to tell classroom-adventure stories from a new point of view.

Instead of retelling the same stories of plucky students in a boarding school with the world on their shoulders, this game invites you to witness and play from a different point of view: you'll play teachers who have come together to take a group of magically-adept students on a field trip to remember, where everyone has the opportunity to learn something new.

To Teach Their Own is a Forged in the Dark game with some significant twists. You build your instructor by writing Expertises, which stand in for stress and quirks from other Forged in the Dark games. To refill your Expertises in-play, you'll pick two triggers specific to your playbook, each of which you'll hit during the course of play, like the keys in Lady Blackbird. It's designed for a GM and 1-4 additional players, each of whom will pick a playbook for the instructor they're embodying:

• The Champion, whose past experience as a magical-sport athlete fuels their desire to be loved by an audience and their capacity to win over a crowd of students
• The Librarian, whose expansive knowledge of history and precise knowledge of formulae allows them to answer nearly any question a student might pose
• The Hedge-Witch, whose affinity for nature and the underlying weave of magic allows them to show without preaching, repair the unnatural, and befriend the unseen
• The Intercessor, whose skill at preparation and insistence on precaution gives them the strength to say "no" even when it is not easy (which is often when it is direly needed!)

Threads on the design behind the game can be found here and here.

If you're interested in playing To Teach Their Own as a one-shot on a stream or a podcast, feel free! But also please feel free to let me know so I can help promote it, or answer any questions you might have.

The game consists of twelve information-rich easy-to-read pages, with a complete ruleset and four playbooks. All you need to play is the rules, some friends, a few d6, and two hours of your time. Familiarity with systems like Blades in the Dark or Lady Blackbird can be helpful, but is absolutely not necessary. To Teach Their Own is feature-complete, with fillable character sheets here and GM screens coming Summer of 2022. Pick it up today!