Professor of Magical Studies

Research magic that probably won't destroy the world! Plus, if you do have to save the world, that'll look great when you're up for tenure.

"Professor of Magical Studies" is a 500,000-word interactive fantasy novel by Stephen Granade. Your choices control the story. It's entirely text-based, without graphics or sound effects, and fueled by the vast, unstoppable power of your imagination.

You are a practitioner of pattern magic: an arcane art that allows you to reshape the very nature of reality, with an extra advantage thanks to your synesthesia, which enables you to see patterns more clearly. With a few strokes of a pen on paper, you can draw magical energy from the space between universes to do everything from levitating objects to preserving memories that you can walk through later to creating pocket dimensions.

You've just been hired for your first faculty position at Winfield Phillips, the seemingly normal New England college that happens to have a secret magic department. It's a great first job, or would be except for Darcy Bozeman. Your former school friend used magic to cheat you out of a coveted fellowship, almost derailing your academic career before it began. Now Darcy's a fellow professor at Winfield Phillips, and is still working to undermine you.

Armed with a cutting-edge knowledge of magic and untried political skills, you'll have to juggle your work and navigate the demands of being a new faculty member. You have to get your magical research started with the help of a not-very-skilled student. You've got classes to teach to students who are supremely uninterested in what you're trying to teach them. The college president assigned you a mathematician as a faculty peer, which will only take time away from your actual work. The town council is angry at the college, and you've been volunteered to be the liaison between the college and the council. And don't even get started over the arguments about who's going to clean the stockroom.

And those mysterious issues plaguing magic? The ones growing worse? Those are a sign of something ominous, threatening reality as we know it. You can handle that, too, can't you?

* Play as male, female, or nonbinary; gay, straight, asexual, aromantic, or poly.
* Create new and irresponsibly dangerous magical patterns.
* Improve your student advisee's skills and confidence, or terrorize them to boost your own research.
* Deal with petty university politics, if you want to have any hope of getting tenure.
* Romance a brilliant algebraic geometrist who doesn't know about magic, the city councilperson assigned to work with Winfield Phillips, the CEO of a magical company, the friend who betrayed you, or even the extra-dimensional being who comes to live in your head.
* Uncover what really happened to the professor who vanished, leading to you being hired.
* Save the world from an extra-dimensional threat—or use the threat to become leader of the survivors.

If only someone had warned you before you applied to grad school that you'll have to stop an otherworldly threat from ending the universe!