Growing up is never easy, especially when you don’t fit into society. Auntie Gwendolyn’s Correctional School for Young Necromancers wonderfully captures this feeling and, via some excellently chosen mechanics, creates a fun but relatable magical school TTRPG that captures the angst and rebellion that the genre’s more generic entries tend to brush over.
Auntie Gwendolyn’s Correctional School for Young Necromancers casts players as a group of young necromancers who have been shipped off to a Correctional School in a bid to cure them of what the world sees as dark urges. Of course, this Correctional School is far from kind, and the students quickly start concocting escape plans, hoping to escape this horrible school with their magical abilities and personalities intact.
Fascinating Mechanics Hide Surprising Depth
The game is built around a unique system. Basic actions like running, jumping, and sneaking are handled by a pair of D6s while your attempts to cast magical spells require you to roll a single D12. Each character has two traits, one describes them as a necromancer (and gives them advantages when performing certain magical feats), and one covers them as a regular kid (which boosts some non-magical actions).
But, rather than a health system, you’ll have to manage a system of Frownies and Gold Stars, representing the Correctional School’s staff opinions of you. Whenever the staff catches you doing something they don’t like (like practicing magic), they will give your student a Frownie sticker. However, if your student does something the staff approves of (like sending revived bodies back to the grave or tattling,) they’ll give you a Gold Star. If you end up with five Frownies, the staff will cart you off to Aunty Gwen, the headmistress, who will zombify you and turn you into a goody two shoes. However, if you collect five Gold Stars, the staff will consider you reformed and let you walk free.
Sometimes You’ve Got To Do Good To Be Bad
However, Frownies and Gold Stars negate each other, making the game a tense balancing act where one slip-up can lead to you quickly snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. Plus, Frownies and Gold Stars give stacking buffs and debuffs the more you have of them. Gold Stars improve your interactions with the Correctional School’s staff while debuffing your magical abilities, while Frownies improve your magic but make it harder to interact with the staff.
This gives the game a good amount of strategy. If you’re cooking up an escape plan that requires you to cast several spells, it can be worth deliberately acquiring a few Frownies to improve your odds of casting the spells successfully. But of course, this makes failure even more risky as one slip-up could land you in detention.
A Focused Dedication To The Magical Theme
Auntie Gwendolyn’s Correctional School for Young Necromancer’s excellent theming is a massive part of why the game is so enjoyable. Every mechanic and block of text is carefully written to tie it back into the theme and remind readers of the tone the game is going for. Frownies and Gold Stars are the in-your-face examples, but they’re only the tip of the iceberg. For example, the game’s character sheet is designed to resemble a children’s activity sheet, complete with a space for the player to draw a picture of themselves (with the nearby crayon image making it clear that the designer expects you to approach this element with childish rather than artistic eyes).
A Clever Dice System That Enhances The Magic
The dice system also backs this up. While having one set of actions use 2D6 and the other use 1D12 may seem silly on paper, it massively enhances the game’s atmosphere and helps inform the storytelling. Whenever you roll two six-sided dice, you’re most likely to get a result of seven, as six of the possible 36 combinations of dice add up to that number. This means that your characters always feel competent when performing physical actions, as they’ll get solidly average results most of the time, with amazingly high rolls or humiliating low ones being rare.
However, when you roll a single D12, all numbers from 1 to 12 have an equal chance of appearing, meaning that horrible failure and jaw-dropping success are equally as likely, making the game’s magic spells feel wild and chaotic. This chaos helps players better embody their characters, as the uncertainty helps capture the idea that you’re tapping into things you don’t fully understand and can’t reliably harness or control.
Even the flavor text gets in on the act, with the vast majority of it having a fun, irreverent energy that wonderfully captures the voice of a rebellious teenager, giving the game plenty of personality and making it stand out from similar titles.
Embracing The Magical School Genre’s Subtext
The text also does a great job of making your characters’ outsider position clear. The game constantly draws a firm line between your necromantic teen and the world’s adults who want them to ditch their necromantic powers and become ‘regular’ teens who obey authority without question. While many other magical school pieces dance around the idea of otherness in their works, the fact that Auntie Gwendolyn’s Correctional School for Young Necromancers frequently and evocatively spotlights the idea makes its central metaphor clear and unmistakable, giving Auntie Gwendolyn’s a focus that many similar games (especially those in the magic school genre) lack.
This all comes together to help gently push players into the correct headspace for the game by perfectly modeling the type of teenagers the game wants you to play as. Teens who are passionate, rebellious, and keen to escape this terrible school while retaining their outsider quirks, even if their general impulsiveness means their plans will frequently go wrong as they act before they think things through.
Auntie Gwendolyn’s Correctional School for Young Necromancers is a cleverly designed TTRPG that uses the magic school setting and format to tell a story about embracing your weirdness and forging your own path, even when society tries to force you into a box. Because of its well-crafted but simple-to-follow mechanics, the game is a blast for both TTRPG veterans and those just dipping their toes into the water.
Jonathon Greenall is a freelance writer, TTRPG designer, and visual artist. They love creating and exploring the often overlooked corners of indie media, spotlighting things that dare to be different.