"Enter with open eyes and behold the truths of the world unending"
-Inscription beneath the fountain of the pensive sage, in the gatehouse courtyard.
Founded by dedicates of Ioun who wished to study where the land met the sea and sky, the institution that eventually became the University was founded three centuries ago when the sages of Taloncliff found themselves inundated with eager pupils who had travelled far and wide seeking their wisdom.
Growing quickly along with the coastal village that supported it, the university is today one of the most famed and foremost centres of learning on the continent entertaining scholars of what seems like every discipline imaginable. If the party needs to know something, Taloncliff is the place to go.
Adventure Hooks
Gaining access to the halls of knowledge is not as easy the heroes may hope, as only those who have joined the university are allowed to peruse it's near endless archives and deep vaults of lore. That said there are other options: they might find a sympathetic ear at one of the tea-houses wherein students and faculty partake in the boisterous debate discouraged in the august lecture halls, or persuade a smuggler of forbidden literature to clue them in on the tunnels beneath the university's walls.
The easiest way to gain entry by far however, is to simply join as a student, bypassing the yearly enrolment process by earning an invitation as a renowned seeker of knowledge... or by having the party's noble patron purchase your way in.
Alternatively, you could start your campaign with students already enrolled as students of the University, engaging in a few apprentice level adventures before flashing forward to when they've graduated to doing fieldwork.
Also, I'd be remiss if I made a whole faction dedicated to learning and didn't mention my advice/system for how you should let your players research in campaigns, which you should check out before exploring the University's inner workings below the cut.
Though it appears stately and unified from outside, behind its alabaster walls Taloncliff is in fact a contradictory mess of overlapping "Curricula" like a dozen different organizations of varying sizes dressed up in a wizard's robe trying to look important. Each Curricula is named after one of the original Sages and follows generally in their footsteps, here are some of the most relevant:
Curricula Endaris: The prestigious institute of learning to which the noble families of nearby realms send their learning minded scions. Endaris gave council to kings, and her followers teach statecraft, diplomacy, history, as well as the good governance of the land itself. One of the largest factions and the one most likely to receive outside donations, Endaris maintains a strong influence over the rest of the university as holding onto its coin purse.
Curricula Jadek: Adherants of the knowing mistress who maintain the campus as part of their devotion and studies into more mystical forms of knowledge. They tend to be inward focused and act to balance out the other voices, giving them a respect that superscedes rivalry.
Curricula Gazerette: a wizarding school that functions like a music conservatory, looking to instill a basic level of competence in all students while hunting for talent that could be refined into something prodigious. Gazerette wanted only the best from his apprentices, and the cutthroat rivalries between Gazerette wizards are the stuff of legend, going back nearly as far as the university's founding.
Curricula Oddolgyn: Still headed by the ancient eleven astronomer of the same name, last of the original sages. This group operates out of the university's observatory studying the ephemeral patterns of the firmament and the multiverse beyond. Currently small and thought of mostly as dabblers It's been more than a century since they were superseded by Gazerette as the foremost of Taloncliff's mages.
Curricula Narthex: Adventurous and daring, the explorers of the Narthex always seem to be recounting their last great expedition or planning their next, even maintaining their own airship docks to make it easier to seek out new horizons.
Shortly after one of the party have really proven themselves to be a true asset ( or liability) to the school, they'll receive a note that says "seek to Know the secret of the waters, at the place where Torthane met her Mistress". This requires catching up on some very old University gossip, as well as tracking down some otherwise unnoticeable histories that are always misfiled in the library. Doing so reveals Torthane to be one of sage Jadek's first pupils, one who frequently clashed with her austere teacher about his insistence that dedication to Ioun and true knowledge meant abstaining from the physical world and the "earthly knowledge" that came with it. Torthane loved Ioun, but she also loved the ladies, and was said to meet with her lovers right under Jadek's nose in a particular garden that the campus grounds have since grown to encompass.
These clues further lead the party to the statue of the fountain of the pensive sage, which boasts a statue of Jadek poking his staff into a basin of ever rippling water. One who looked closely might notice a glow distorted by the ripples of the fountain, and that if the primary spout is plugged or diverted that the glow originates from where Jadek's staff disturbs the unearthly white sand that rests at the basin's bottom. (Leave a comment if you can figure out what the party will need to draw in the sand to progress)
With the passphrase entered, a secret stair opens in the cobbles surrounding the statue, inviting the party down into a dungeon crawl that takes them to the university's flooded foundations. After battling past arcane traps, more puzzles, and creatures of the tide, they stumble into a room wreathed in cascading water, in which the images of a dozen or more cloaked figures manifest and pass judgment upon them. The question that the figures are to argue: Are these trespassers cringe?
Some of the figures will argue that the party are indeed cringe, a never-before seen collection of narcs, fuckboys, killjoys, and karens. It will be up to the party to plead their case. If they manage to win over a majority of the crowd then the waters will part and they'll be invited into the secret headquarters/speakeasy of Curricula Torthane, the resident secret society of Taloncliff made up of all those who are willing to bend the rules and collaborate in the pursuit of knowledge and those little pleasures that are so often neglected in scholastic dourness. You haven't lived till you've had wizard moonshine, so cheers and bottoms up troublemakers.
Further adventures
I'll be adding more Taloncliff adventures in the future, so feel free to check out my blog.
While the party is sure to meet no end of red tape as they explore the campus, they'll make an easy ally in Oroteia, a rising star in the Gazerette and Narthex Curricula who seeks to overturn every expectation placed on her by her by others after discovering her lowborn country origins. Blazing a trail through the University's establishment, she'll see the party as useful allies against whatever campaign level threats the rest of the institution is too set in their ways to even contemplate dealing with.
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Born from waters tainted by the arcane, the species known as mindleeches are a mostly innocuous pest that mostly trouble the dreams of apprentice wizards. Sometimes however, the psychic energies they feed upon can link the squirming beasts together in a nightmarish mass compelled to devour and terrorize to sustain it's makeshift consciousness.
You can feel it before you see it, a whisper of sensation in the corner of your mind that tells you that something is touching you slowly rises into a wave of discomfort and writhing fear. This is how the Mass hunts, questing out with its wordless telepathy for anything capable of response, something it can track down and feed upon until it is comatose and exsanguinated. Life for the mindleech mass is short and unplesant, like a fire it exists in a state of constant consumption, growing each time it is fed but needing to feed more and more as it grows. The creature is either then destroyed or the limit is hit and it devours its own consciousness, collapsing back into a pile of egoless animals.
In their natural state, mindleeches and their ability to sense and drain magic can be quite helpful, as they're often used to treat arcane maladies much the same way their mundane cousins can treat poor circulation. A jar of the lil buggers can likewise be used as a quick fix for detecting magical auras.
Adventure Hooks:
When sent to the swap to gather some leeches as a favour for the local healer, the party have no way of knowing that a dark artifact has been dropped into the local waters, imbuing the creepy crawlies with a malign sapience. After they defeat the beast, the artifact will come spilling out on a tide of wiggling wormbodies, leaving them to decide what to do with it.
A hazing prank between students at the local magic college went too far and one of the apprentices ended up drowned in the sewers during a storm. Before they died their body ended up swept into a nest of thought leeches, who absorbed the student's fear and resentment and began to swarm. Now the Mass hunts students and faculty through the pipes and drains of the school, leaving the sort of bloodless bodies behind that may have the party thinking they're hunting a vampire.
Though it was once a place of beauty and arcane might, the elven enclave of Xor'Izil is today nothing more than a boggy ruin. None alive today remember its downfall, save for the colony of mindleeches that now dwell in its flooded foundations. Bred for a now forgotten war, the leeches burst free from their containment and in a single day and night devoured the inhabitants of the elven city, granting it a stockpile of psychic energy that has sustained the Mass through centuries. Now in possession of the semi-digested consciousnesses of a coterie of elven warmages, the Mindleech Mass seeks to evolve itself into a sustainable, and even more dangerous form: A Worm-that-walks. In order to do so it'll need a suitable vessel to devour and then possess, say a powerful mage allied to the party.
