Review: Kids on Brooms (Chapter 3)
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ysabetwordsmithKids on Brooms: Core Rulebook - Hunters Entertainment
This is a collaborative role-playing game about portraying a student at a magical school, with a rules-light, narrative-first storytelling game.
Read my review of Chapters 1-2, Chapter 4, Chapter 5.
Character Creation
Overview of Process gives a set of steps for creating a character in this game.
Selecting a Trope discusses how to build characters starting with an iconic description of "Adjective + Noun" format, such as "Golden Child." Your chosen trope influences your character's statistics and traits. Appendix A: Tropes comes with 19 suggested tropes, but you can easily make your own. If you want more inspiration, check out the free playbook for Kids on Bikes, which has a bunch of partially constructed character sheets that are fairly compatible. You could, in fact, start with ordinary characters for Kids on Bikes and then transpose them to Kids on Brooms as they develop magic. This gives you more flexibility than a game with limited character classes.
Character Grades will define your character's approximate age: Underclass Student (up to 14 years old), Upperclass Student (15-20), and Faculty (21 and older). Each of these grades gives your character 2 stat bonuses and 1 free Strength. There are also prompts for adding your own details.
Selecting Strengths and Flaws covers the mechanical and cosmetic details of your character. See Appendix B: Flaws for one-word ideas to suggest characterization. See Appendix C: Strengths for a list of terms and their mechanical effects. Some of these are quite powerful and could transpose well to other games.
Option: Playing a Different Species is purely cosmetic. It's also completely useless unless you find the practical details of different species to be a bother. A tiny fairy and a huge centaur will not both have exactly the same physical prowess as a medium human, unless magic somehow bizarrely makes everyone same-ish. However, this is easily fixed by creating a +1 / -1 modification. For example, a tiny fairy might have +1 Flight / -1 Brawn whereas a huge centaur might have +1 Brawn / -1 Charm, depending how you conceptualize a given species. You might also wish to offer a species Strength instead of the standard age-based option above. Fairies might all be Gifted in Magic while centaurs might all be Tough.
Option: Including Disabled or Neurodiverse Characters ... well, they get points for mentioning it, but gamers have been doing this all along, and there are no mechanics to go beyond that. It's also kinda preachy again. However, there is one real gem in this part, which observes that magic can create all kinds of accommodations. Mobility issue? The enchanted staircase can scoop you up and deposit you at your requested destination. Visual impairment? Cast a read-aloud spell. Neurodiverse characters may favor different types of magic. For example, a dyslexic character might avoid Numerology and History of Magic in favor of Divination, while an autistic character might love Numerology and Astronomy but hate Divination. And so on. While some people find magical solutions to be a type of erasure, others enjoy fantasizing about them (and have for all of recorded history) or even using them as inspiration for devising accommodations.
Race, Ethnicity, Gender, and Sexuality is similar in that there are no mechanics, and the tone leans preachy, but at least they acknowledge that these are things that people might or might not want to include in a game.
Overview of Magic mentions two important points. 1) Your magic draws on who you are, so you can cast it with ANY of your stats, rather than having a separate "Magic" stat like many games. This makes for super-flexible spellcasting in which all characters are good at magic but tend to favor different types based on their higher stats. 2) Reckless or malicious magic can have consequences. This is true, but not handled very well when expanded upon. So feel free to use that base parameter and build consequences that make sense for your group and game.
Types of Magic does not break down into the usual groups of summoning, healing, etc. Instead it is sorted by the stats used to cast it: Fight, Flight, Brains, Brawn, Charm, Grit. Under each stat is a general description of how its magic works and some things people customarily do with it. So for instance, Grit is useful for healing and mental defense. If you like a relatively flexible and freeform magical system, this should work very well for you. See the Strengths material for ways to define your character's areas of expertise. Some of the details under specific stats, however, begin to reveal incongruities in how the setting is described. These issues can often be resolved by creating a spectrum, where the handbook simply describes one point on it.
Fight begins by pointing out that accidents and injuries can happen, even if people are being careful. This is one valid approach. Another is that a school full of competent adults could simply ward the place against accidents, injuries, and especially lethal results. Someone might still die of disease, but they shouldn't from a miscast spell. You can set the protections anywhere from none to moderate to high, depending on your gaming style.
Another aspect concerns the malicious use of the magic and the Council for the Ethical Use of Magic. Note that there is a class in Defense Against Malicious Magic but no Combat Magic and no Magical Ethics. This is what I mean by inconsistency. A game might have high or low violence, high or low ethics. But when you start trying to describe a dangerous setting with lots of mayhem, then try to claim high ethics at the same time, it doesn't mesh well. The more danger, the more free characters need to be to fight back, or they are going to die quickly. If you hobble or remove the use of violence, a lot of players will resent it -- unless you have all decided you want to play a fluff game, in which case the Council will be very useful in keeping a lid on things.
Charm deals in magic that influences other people. The rules state -- and some but not all magical systems in local-Earth agree -- that this is usually wrong. If you find mind-altering magic to be creepy and unfun, then you can use this entry to minimize or eliminate its presence in the game. However, that's another large set of techniques that some players may be very upset about losing. If your game runs heavy to intrigue and influence, a lack of magical options could be very limiting.
Wands consist of a wood and a core, each of which gives a +1 bonus to a different stat when casting magic. This is a straightforward but flexible mechanic. It draws pretty heavily on Harry Potter, which is a major influence on the game as a whole. However, there's a note that you can make any other magical artifact with the same mechanics, so for instance a potioneer might have a cauldron using metal/gemstone to create the bonuses.
Brooms allow flight. Each has a brand name, the type of rider who likes it, and a mechanical benefit when riding it. You could just as well use a magic carpet, Baba Yaga's flying cauldron, 7-League Boots, or any other magical transportation. The simplicity of the framework makes it flexible that way.
Familiars simply have a general description and a one-way mental link. While various types are suggested, there is no table of mechanics. It's easy to extrapolate, however, that bird familiars can fly whereas a snake could fit into places a raven would not. If your gamers wand to diversify familiars in ways that matter, one advantage and one disadvantage per type would make sense.
Introductions and Questions is another of the really great parts that you can adapt to other games. It gives you three basic options:
* Quick Start Questions (about 2 minutes per character) where you answer one question relating your character to one other player's character. This is well suited for a demo or pickup game that will only run one session, so you don't need or want to spend a lot of time on characterization. Not mentioned, this is also what to use if you're playing the game as described, with high danger but several serious limitations on character actions. If you only spent a few minutes building each character, you are less likely to lose your temper should they die quickly.
* One-Sided Questions (about 6 minutes per character) where each player answers one question relating their character to each other character in the game. This is a good middle road for a wide variety of game styles.
* Complete Questions (about 8 minutes per character) where you answer two questions about each other character that your character knows and one about each unknown character. This version is recommended for multi-session games. I will add two things: the time estimate is shorter than most people will take once they get talking like that, and do not invest this much energy in characters unless you are playing a game where the risk of character loss is low or none. It will aggravate everyone to spend a ton of time building characters only to lose them and then not only have to work around the missing connections but also have to spend more time building a replacement.
For any roleplaying game, you can give your players that spread of fast, medium, and slow development options then let them pick how much time they want to invest in it. Some of us find character development a major part of the fun; others consider it a tedious obstacle they have to get through in order to start playing.
Finishing Touches includes several non-mechanical aspects including Full Name, Motivation, and Trope-Specific Questions. However, two important things are also hidden here where readers might miss them. Fears refers to something scary that makes it hard to think under pressure (see Stat Checks and Fears on page 51). Schoolbag is a list of physical objects (small to medium size) that you always carry, and nonphysical advantages that you can call on at need. Don't miss those key points.
Class Schedule deals with how your characters spend their time and what they learn. There is a list of 10 options, but you only get to choose 3, and you get 3 sessions of each class per week. The schedule -- which is NOT included in the book, you have to get it online -- lists the periods as Morning, Afternoon, Extracurricular Activities, and Night. That is three slots per day, five days per schoolweek, which makes absolutely no sense as much of the time (2/5 of the slots, effectively 2 days) would be empty. Not to mention weekends, which aren't even in the schedule! It's even worse if you want the school to work like an American one with 8 or so class periods every day of the week. Even in college, 3 classes wouldn't be a full course load unless they were huge ones (e.g. all 4-credit lab classes). One solution would simply to be to say that you take a bunch more classes but these three are your favorite or best classes where you are doing well enough to be worth marking on your character sheet. Maybe the other classes are mundane and these are just the magical ones. Another would be to say that these classes are "intensives" where you would spend more time learning fewer things, then switch. If you had three classes each filling one timeslot every day of the week (e.g. a morning class, an afternoon class, and a night class), then it would actually fill everything but the extracurricular slot; drop that to four days a week and you would have a few free periods for adventuring. I can only think of one explanation for only 3 classes at 3 sessions/week each: if the school expects students to do a ton of practice, homework, or other self-study work. This seems extremely risky for learning magic, but if you want a high-risk setting then that would be one possibility for it.
The standard 10 classes are: Defense Against Malicious Magic, History of Magic, Potions, Divination, Astronomy, Numerology, Charms, Brooms, Summoning, and Transfiguration. Again, this is almost all taken from Harry Potter. It would've been fun to see some from totally different settings, such as True Names or Elementalism. Back in Collaborative Creation, the players are supposed to chip in at least two "unconventional classes" so that gives you plenty of room for other magical subjects. Seriously, cut and paste to put your class schedule on the back of your character sheet to track this.
Using Your Class Schedule explains the 3 sessions per week approach, and that your extracurricular activity happens 2 sessions per week (leaving the other 3 empty). This section further assumes that most or all of the class time will be abstracted instead of played through. This would make more sense if you had a bunch of subjects but only cared about 3 of them. As it is, most of the time students spend with people in school is in classes -- especially with people they don't like, who tend to avoid each other to spend time with friends during free periods. So if you're going to find out things about other people at school, a majority of that will happen in one or another class. The same is true if you want to play a game in a magical school because you like both magic and school so you want to fantasize about things like making potions or training your familiar. There's little about that in the handbook, so you'll have to use your imagination.
Option: Creating a Character from Scratch gives a good description of how to do this. You can use a similar approach to create more Tropes.
Changes to Your Character Across Multiple Sessions is only needed for campaigns. This touches on the evolution of character relationships, Strengths and Fears, learning things, and so on.
The characterization chapter runs 29 pages -- nearly a third of the book. That's great if you want to build robust, interesting characters for an ongoing game where you're confident they will survive. It's probably overkill for a one-shot game, and a frustrating waste of time in a high-risk game with a lot of character death. So think about the game type when building characters.
This is a collaborative role-playing game about portraying a student at a magical school, with a rules-light, narrative-first storytelling game.
Read my review of Chapters 1-2, Chapter 4, Chapter 5.
Character Creation
Overview of Process gives a set of steps for creating a character in this game.
Selecting a Trope discusses how to build characters starting with an iconic description of "Adjective + Noun" format, such as "Golden Child." Your chosen trope influences your character's statistics and traits. Appendix A: Tropes comes with 19 suggested tropes, but you can easily make your own. If you want more inspiration, check out the free playbook for Kids on Bikes, which has a bunch of partially constructed character sheets that are fairly compatible. You could, in fact, start with ordinary characters for Kids on Bikes and then transpose them to Kids on Brooms as they develop magic. This gives you more flexibility than a game with limited character classes.
Character Grades will define your character's approximate age: Underclass Student (up to 14 years old), Upperclass Student (15-20), and Faculty (21 and older). Each of these grades gives your character 2 stat bonuses and 1 free Strength. There are also prompts for adding your own details.
Selecting Strengths and Flaws covers the mechanical and cosmetic details of your character. See Appendix B: Flaws for one-word ideas to suggest characterization. See Appendix C: Strengths for a list of terms and their mechanical effects. Some of these are quite powerful and could transpose well to other games.
Option: Playing a Different Species is purely cosmetic. It's also completely useless unless you find the practical details of different species to be a bother. A tiny fairy and a huge centaur will not both have exactly the same physical prowess as a medium human, unless magic somehow bizarrely makes everyone same-ish. However, this is easily fixed by creating a +1 / -1 modification. For example, a tiny fairy might have +1 Flight / -1 Brawn whereas a huge centaur might have +1 Brawn / -1 Charm, depending how you conceptualize a given species. You might also wish to offer a species Strength instead of the standard age-based option above. Fairies might all be Gifted in Magic while centaurs might all be Tough.
Option: Including Disabled or Neurodiverse Characters ... well, they get points for mentioning it, but gamers have been doing this all along, and there are no mechanics to go beyond that. It's also kinda preachy again. However, there is one real gem in this part, which observes that magic can create all kinds of accommodations. Mobility issue? The enchanted staircase can scoop you up and deposit you at your requested destination. Visual impairment? Cast a read-aloud spell. Neurodiverse characters may favor different types of magic. For example, a dyslexic character might avoid Numerology and History of Magic in favor of Divination, while an autistic character might love Numerology and Astronomy but hate Divination. And so on. While some people find magical solutions to be a type of erasure, others enjoy fantasizing about them (and have for all of recorded history) or even using them as inspiration for devising accommodations.
Race, Ethnicity, Gender, and Sexuality is similar in that there are no mechanics, and the tone leans preachy, but at least they acknowledge that these are things that people might or might not want to include in a game.
Overview of Magic mentions two important points. 1) Your magic draws on who you are, so you can cast it with ANY of your stats, rather than having a separate "Magic" stat like many games. This makes for super-flexible spellcasting in which all characters are good at magic but tend to favor different types based on their higher stats. 2) Reckless or malicious magic can have consequences. This is true, but not handled very well when expanded upon. So feel free to use that base parameter and build consequences that make sense for your group and game.
Types of Magic does not break down into the usual groups of summoning, healing, etc. Instead it is sorted by the stats used to cast it: Fight, Flight, Brains, Brawn, Charm, Grit. Under each stat is a general description of how its magic works and some things people customarily do with it. So for instance, Grit is useful for healing and mental defense. If you like a relatively flexible and freeform magical system, this should work very well for you. See the Strengths material for ways to define your character's areas of expertise. Some of the details under specific stats, however, begin to reveal incongruities in how the setting is described. These issues can often be resolved by creating a spectrum, where the handbook simply describes one point on it.
Fight begins by pointing out that accidents and injuries can happen, even if people are being careful. This is one valid approach. Another is that a school full of competent adults could simply ward the place against accidents, injuries, and especially lethal results. Someone might still die of disease, but they shouldn't from a miscast spell. You can set the protections anywhere from none to moderate to high, depending on your gaming style.
Another aspect concerns the malicious use of the magic and the Council for the Ethical Use of Magic. Note that there is a class in Defense Against Malicious Magic but no Combat Magic and no Magical Ethics. This is what I mean by inconsistency. A game might have high or low violence, high or low ethics. But when you start trying to describe a dangerous setting with lots of mayhem, then try to claim high ethics at the same time, it doesn't mesh well. The more danger, the more free characters need to be to fight back, or they are going to die quickly. If you hobble or remove the use of violence, a lot of players will resent it -- unless you have all decided you want to play a fluff game, in which case the Council will be very useful in keeping a lid on things.
Charm deals in magic that influences other people. The rules state -- and some but not all magical systems in local-Earth agree -- that this is usually wrong. If you find mind-altering magic to be creepy and unfun, then you can use this entry to minimize or eliminate its presence in the game. However, that's another large set of techniques that some players may be very upset about losing. If your game runs heavy to intrigue and influence, a lack of magical options could be very limiting.
Wands consist of a wood and a core, each of which gives a +1 bonus to a different stat when casting magic. This is a straightforward but flexible mechanic. It draws pretty heavily on Harry Potter, which is a major influence on the game as a whole. However, there's a note that you can make any other magical artifact with the same mechanics, so for instance a potioneer might have a cauldron using metal/gemstone to create the bonuses.
Brooms allow flight. Each has a brand name, the type of rider who likes it, and a mechanical benefit when riding it. You could just as well use a magic carpet, Baba Yaga's flying cauldron, 7-League Boots, or any other magical transportation. The simplicity of the framework makes it flexible that way.
Familiars simply have a general description and a one-way mental link. While various types are suggested, there is no table of mechanics. It's easy to extrapolate, however, that bird familiars can fly whereas a snake could fit into places a raven would not. If your gamers wand to diversify familiars in ways that matter, one advantage and one disadvantage per type would make sense.
Introductions and Questions is another of the really great parts that you can adapt to other games. It gives you three basic options:
* Quick Start Questions (about 2 minutes per character) where you answer one question relating your character to one other player's character. This is well suited for a demo or pickup game that will only run one session, so you don't need or want to spend a lot of time on characterization. Not mentioned, this is also what to use if you're playing the game as described, with high danger but several serious limitations on character actions. If you only spent a few minutes building each character, you are less likely to lose your temper should they die quickly.
* One-Sided Questions (about 6 minutes per character) where each player answers one question relating their character to each other character in the game. This is a good middle road for a wide variety of game styles.
* Complete Questions (about 8 minutes per character) where you answer two questions about each other character that your character knows and one about each unknown character. This version is recommended for multi-session games. I will add two things: the time estimate is shorter than most people will take once they get talking like that, and do not invest this much energy in characters unless you are playing a game where the risk of character loss is low or none. It will aggravate everyone to spend a ton of time building characters only to lose them and then not only have to work around the missing connections but also have to spend more time building a replacement.
For any roleplaying game, you can give your players that spread of fast, medium, and slow development options then let them pick how much time they want to invest in it. Some of us find character development a major part of the fun; others consider it a tedious obstacle they have to get through in order to start playing.
Finishing Touches includes several non-mechanical aspects including Full Name, Motivation, and Trope-Specific Questions. However, two important things are also hidden here where readers might miss them. Fears refers to something scary that makes it hard to think under pressure (see Stat Checks and Fears on page 51). Schoolbag is a list of physical objects (small to medium size) that you always carry, and nonphysical advantages that you can call on at need. Don't miss those key points.
Class Schedule deals with how your characters spend their time and what they learn. There is a list of 10 options, but you only get to choose 3, and you get 3 sessions of each class per week. The schedule -- which is NOT included in the book, you have to get it online -- lists the periods as Morning, Afternoon, Extracurricular Activities, and Night. That is three slots per day, five days per schoolweek, which makes absolutely no sense as much of the time (2/5 of the slots, effectively 2 days) would be empty. Not to mention weekends, which aren't even in the schedule! It's even worse if you want the school to work like an American one with 8 or so class periods every day of the week. Even in college, 3 classes wouldn't be a full course load unless they were huge ones (e.g. all 4-credit lab classes). One solution would simply to be to say that you take a bunch more classes but these three are your favorite or best classes where you are doing well enough to be worth marking on your character sheet. Maybe the other classes are mundane and these are just the magical ones. Another would be to say that these classes are "intensives" where you would spend more time learning fewer things, then switch. If you had three classes each filling one timeslot every day of the week (e.g. a morning class, an afternoon class, and a night class), then it would actually fill everything but the extracurricular slot; drop that to four days a week and you would have a few free periods for adventuring. I can only think of one explanation for only 3 classes at 3 sessions/week each: if the school expects students to do a ton of practice, homework, or other self-study work. This seems extremely risky for learning magic, but if you want a high-risk setting then that would be one possibility for it.
The standard 10 classes are: Defense Against Malicious Magic, History of Magic, Potions, Divination, Astronomy, Numerology, Charms, Brooms, Summoning, and Transfiguration. Again, this is almost all taken from Harry Potter. It would've been fun to see some from totally different settings, such as True Names or Elementalism. Back in Collaborative Creation, the players are supposed to chip in at least two "unconventional classes" so that gives you plenty of room for other magical subjects. Seriously, cut and paste to put your class schedule on the back of your character sheet to track this.
Using Your Class Schedule explains the 3 sessions per week approach, and that your extracurricular activity happens 2 sessions per week (leaving the other 3 empty). This section further assumes that most or all of the class time will be abstracted instead of played through. This would make more sense if you had a bunch of subjects but only cared about 3 of them. As it is, most of the time students spend with people in school is in classes -- especially with people they don't like, who tend to avoid each other to spend time with friends during free periods. So if you're going to find out things about other people at school, a majority of that will happen in one or another class. The same is true if you want to play a game in a magical school because you like both magic and school so you want to fantasize about things like making potions or training your familiar. There's little about that in the handbook, so you'll have to use your imagination.
Option: Creating a Character from Scratch gives a good description of how to do this. You can use a similar approach to create more Tropes.
Changes to Your Character Across Multiple Sessions is only needed for campaigns. This touches on the evolution of character relationships, Strengths and Fears, learning things, and so on.
The characterization chapter runs 29 pages -- nearly a third of the book. That's great if you want to build robust, interesting characters for an ongoing game where you're confident they will survive. It's probably overkill for a one-shot game, and a frustrating waste of time in a high-risk game with a lot of character death. So think about the game type when building characters.
