Chapter 8

I promised to tell about the studies at the adventurer guild academy, so here are my impressions on them.

The next day Ameiliee leaves and I start my training.

The academy training consists of both theoretical and practical training in the skills and the art of adventuring.

I will tell you about a typical day, so you will get some idea. This is day 25 in the training.

The day starts at 6 am.

The first thing we do every morning is a run after some stretching and gymnastics. The run is two miles. The teachers tell that by the end of the year it will be five miles. The run is at own pace and as I arrive back at the academy after the run, I have some time to wash up and have breakfast, as I run fast enough. Some people struggle with the run still and they do not have the extra time.

After that I go to the first class of the day. Each class lasts one and half hours with 15 minute break in between, with three classes in the morning, then a break for lunch and three in the afternoon/evening.

Today the first class is "know your enemy." It is a class about typical opponents an adventurer will encounter on adventures, their habits, weaknesses, strengths and so on. This class runs the whole academy year except for the field training periods at four classes/week. We have few lessons about a type of creatures or a group of closely related ones for three lessons and then on fourth we have a test. Thus during the year we will go through 40 groups.

Today is about ogres, trolls and lesser giants. They are large brutish humanoid creatures ranging from about three to five yards in height. I learn that they are extremely strong, but fairly stupid. Thus it is apparently fairly easy to trick them and fighting then directly should be avoided by beginning adventurers.

The teacher tells about the first troll he hunted with his adventuring group about 30 years earlier. (See: Tales of Adventure: Troll hunt in Abedale) and then goes onward to tell about other methods for dealing with them and similar.

The second class is "Utility magic", a basic magic class that all magic sensitives take. It deals mostly with magic defenses and detection. Basically the guild expects a mage to get their real magic training somewhere else, but as there are quite many magically adept people who do not either have enough of the gift or the temperament for deep magic studies, they want to all the sensitives to have some basic skills in magic defense and detection.

The third class is "Dungeon craft", a class about how to travel in and explore underground spaces like mines, caves and actual dungeons. Today is about trap detection. Many underground dwellers use a variety of traps to defend their lairs and passages. While dealing with the traps is best left to the rogue, it is very useful for all party members to have basic trap recognition skills. We went through the theoretical cases earlier and today is the test day.

The teachers divide us into teams of six and send us through a training dungeon built into a nearby mine. Each group is accompanied by an observer.

The event is timed, but as each trap that we trigger will add 15 minutes to the time and the expected real time used is about an hour, the real deciding factor will likely be the traps.

The first room is a suspiciously empty looking chamber that is about twenty by twenty feet with a door at other end. We start to slowly cross the room, trying to look for the traps with our rogue slightly ahead of us. Suddenly I notice a break in the ground just in front of the rogue and yell "Stop!". I have to point out the line to him before he notices it. There is a simulated trapdoor in the ground. Stepping on it would have dropped you down about two inches simulating a drop of maybe ten or twenty feet if the trap had been real.