Adventure seed: The Grammar School Wars.

This kind of started off being based on an Onion article, but it all went occult pretty darn quickly.

The Grammar School Wars

Not ‘grammar school’ in the “child’s/teenager’s education” sense: these are the Grammar Schools.  These are the schools that teach adepts the operating language of the universe. Or least one variant of one operating language of the universe.  It turns out that if you use a ‘dialect’ that strays too far from a particular meta-language (and you want it to stray, because changing the dialect gives you arcane power), you sort of… disconnect from this reality and end up somewhere that’s more congenial to your worldview.  And before you ask, adepts know this because the occasional entity pops into our dimension using this method.  It happens barely often enough to give researchers some idea of the process involved.

Now in the past, knowledge of this fact seemed to tamp down active struggles between the various Grammar Schools: if other groups got too weird in their dialect, either they’d translate themselves to another dimension, or maybe the original group would translate itself to another dimension (really, how would you know?).  And since that would eliminate contact and thus active friction, why start a conflict? Wait long enough, and the situation would resolve itself.

Unfortunately, over the last ten years – a bare moment in time, from the Grammar Schools’ collective perspective – there’s been a series of fights over the possession and disposition of a particular type of metasyntactic variable.  There’s absolutely no need to explain why or what’s involved: all you need to know is that at least four to six groups of remarkably arrogant and powerful magic users are willing to turn each other inside out in order to gain the upper hand. Which would be fine, if they would stick to inverting each other’s surface areas.  

Even more unfortunately, the Wars are starting to get subconsciously noted by the Masses, which means that it’s time for some Shadow Government Black Ops diplomacy.  The team’s job is to make various overpowered idiots stop thinking with their wands and start remembering why it is that magic is secret in the first place. And why is it secret?  …Because the Masses don’t really like or trust magic these days.  If they got proof that magic exists, then they’d start wishing for it to go away.  And seven billion people can fuel enough wishes to make magic go away.

Possibly forever. And possibly not: the equations are a bit hairy.  But who wants to take that risk?