Things took a turn for the intense during my group’s latest session of The Magical Millennium. What was supposed to be an easy job standing guard for a few hours outside a warehouse while it was cleaned up so some pests couldn’t get back inside turned into an intense and almost deadly combat encounter. The general framing for this was that the party, all first-level characters and in their first semester of Magical Ability school, signed up as guild members sponsored by the school as part of their second week of class. They were tasked with going on an adventure as a group, spent some time picking out a few from the Magical Ability Level 1 group, and then tried to fit in their other homework and social activities between the three jobs they’d taken. For reference, all “class” powers in the D&D system use, in this world, either woven magic (spellcasting) or ambient magic (everything else), so their school teaches them how to harness their powers as the students figure out the extent of their powers and their willingness to live a life relying on said powers. This adventure and the interviews I’ve covered extensively in past posts, were meant to get the characters (and the players) to appreciate the guild system. The idea was that they would learn about the protections it affords to both magical and non-magical people, the way it helps people find an appropriate tier of labor for whatever job needs doing, and provides the guild members with a means of ensuring no one swoops in to steal work out from underneath them. Unbeknownst to my players, they picked the one job of the six on offer that was build in as a cautionary tale about blindly trusting in the system they’re buying into. Thankfully, though, they all escaped with their lives even if the group feels even more fractured than it did after the last session (which is saying something since at least one player made a back-up character after that one).