A college year runs from enrolment to exams. Assignments pay merits, merits open the exams, and each passed exam lets Professor Carlyle teach one spell. The day closes with a wellbeing tally.
The acceptance letter drops you in Mossport with the aunt's cottage already waiting. Classes cost money, so surviving on instant noodles is the joke Fable refuses to accept. The cottage familiar walks you to enrolment with a plan that funds both the house and the coursework. Professor Carlyle leads the coven you live and study with, and that coven is the group beside you in class, in study groups, and later in their own stories.
Townsfolk want goods and services only a witch can supply, and each new class widens what you can sell them. Orders go out on a moped until the broom license, then on a broom. Filling an order raises the business relationship and unlocks perks and upgrades for the shop. Sunday is a separate stall in town, where you stock goods and try for a better deal. Tuition comes out of that income. Credits, earned for helping the town and for filling knowledge, stay a different tally from both the money and the merits.
Class is where a witch learns the skills that assignments, crafting, and new activities all use, and it is also where you get to know the professors and the covenmates. Early disciplines are tea, incense, and salves. Later classes move on to potion brewing, astrological divination, and arcane rituals. Professor Wixx's session is a practical demonstration rather than a lecture you only sit through. A passing grade is what opens the next set of classes.
Through the week the college board posts jobs that use the skills from class. A typical assignment sends you to a resident, then to the library to work out a fix, then back out to do the practical part. Completing it pays college merits. Merits spend in the college shop and, more importantly, they are the ticket into the exams. The people you help often send a thank-you gift of their own on top of the merits.
What you learn lands in a knowledge collection, which also lists what you still have to memorise. Finding a herb in the forest for the first time unlocks that herb and its description. The growth time unlocks only after you have grown the same herb enough times. Until the collection fills in, the same facts live in books borrowed from the school library, and those books are due back on time. The mark on an exam follows how full the tested parts of the collection are.
A grade is a set of exams, and every paper in that set needs a passing mark before the next grade. The next grade opens new classes, spells, activities, and some dangerous parts of Mossport. A magical medicine exam can test herbal tea, salves, and herbology together. If the mark looks uncertain, a coven study group runs mock exams. Graduation is not the only ending: many witches stay on as postgrads to finish the collection, lift earlier marks, and push the business further.
Once you have a wand, moving objects is already possible, which is how heavy furniture crosses a room before any lesson. Further spells arrive one at a time. Each finished exam entitles you to a private tutorial with Professor Carlyle, the coven head. Those lessons run from guidance spells that track rare ingredients through to flying a broom over the rooftops.
Between classes, the day itself is scored. Petting a dog, taking a walk, or holding a conversation can raise wellbeing. Staying up too late, or upsetting a friend, can lower it. When the day closes, those events are tallied and the level moves. A higher level can mean more income, better deals, gifts, relationship benefits, and a stronger exam sitting. Playtests of the first in-game year ran about 40 to 50 hours. Covenmate stories open as the relationship rises, and they play as short visual novels.
| Step | System | What changes | What it opens |
|---|---|---|---|
| 01 | Cottage and Fable's plan | Coven with Professor Carlyle | |
| 02 | Orders, moped, Sunday stall | Goods from new classes | |
| 03 | Tea, incense, then potions | Skills for assignments | |
| 04 | Merits from the board | College shop and exams | |
| 05 | Herbs, then growth time | Library until it fills | |
| 06 | Pass every paper in the grade | Next grade, new areas | |
| 07 | One lesson per passed exam | Tracking, then broom flight | |
| 08 | Walks and talks versus late nights | Income, deals, exam help |