Brutus, Selina, Alex and Theresa.
Every one hundred years, the small country of Thameland is best by the Ravener, an ancient evil that causes dungeons to appear and flood the kingdom with monsters. In response, five youths are granted a divine mark to empower them to fight back: the Champion, the Mage, the Fighter, the Cleric...and the Fool. For millenia this cycle has repeated with the Ravener defeated by the chosen heroes but never destroyed.
Mark of the Fool
is a webserial following Alex, a young man on the eve of leaving for the most prestigious wizard university in the world when he is marked as the latest Fool. Deciding that being the token joke character doesn't sound appealing Alex instead escapes to follow his original plan. Joining him are his young sister, Selina, his childhood best friend Theresa, and her pet cerberus Brutus.
Mark of the Fool contains examples of:
- Action Girl: Theresa is the grand-daughter of a famous swordsman, and has grown up hunting in the forests around their town. She is by far the most physically capable of the original three humans.
- Adults Are Useless: Subverted. Theresa's parents support and help Alex and Theresa escape, and the faculty at Generasi are both competent and understanding when Alex comes to them with problems or requests.Baelin cocked his head. “You mean, that you—my student—have come to me during my office hours—which I have set aside to help my students with—with a problem that involves both academia, another student, and wizardry?...Were I to complain about this, then it might be time for me to find another profession.”
- Big Bad: The Ravener, buried deep beneath the earth, attempts to kill everything in Thameland every century.
- Chekhov's Gun: Drestra the Sage has a secret she's keeping from the other heroes. She's a shapeshifting dragon.
- The Chosen One: A divine mark appears on those who are chosen, selected by the god Uldar from those who have just turned eighteen.
- Distinguishing Mark: A magically glowing symbol appears on the shoulder of those chosen, in the shape of the role granted them. Alex's, as the Fool, is a grinning jester's face.
- Dungeon Crawling: This is the traditional mission of the five heroes, as destroying the dungeon cores the Ravener creates is the only way to stop it from wiping out all life in Thameland.
- Empowered Badass Normal: Once Theresa starts learning Lifeforce enhancement she becomes capable of duelling trained mage warriors and winning.
- Fluffy the Terrible: Harmless the crocodile who's being fed enhancement potions so he'll grow even larger and stronger than normal. Purely as a joke.
- Functional Magic: Spells are created from "mana circuits", which behave like their electrical equivalents. It's possible with enough knowledge to replace, remove or alter the functionality of a spell by changing how it's "wired".
- Genre Savvy: Alex knows the fates of the previous Fools - either ineffectual mascot, heroic sacrifice or traitor, and decides that none of those sound like fun. He also decides to tell Baelin and the cabal everything as he knows keeping it secret won't work long term and only make it worse when the truth does finally come out.
- Heart Is an Awesome Power: While the mark interfering with casting magic does somewhat suck for a student at wizard school, with practice Alex just casts spells slower than others. When combined with the the ability to learn anything else much faster (including magical theory and alchemy) Alex slowly comes around to the idea that the mark might actually be pretty cool.
- Heroes Prefer Swords: Theresa's ancestral sword almost never leaves her sight.
- Instant Expert: The Fool's Mark interferes with anything in the domain of the other heroes (fighting and spellcasting), but makes learning anything else much easier. Including learning, which is useful when studying at a university.
- Interspecies Romance: Considered perfectly normal by most, such as Thundar (a minotaur) and his fox-kin crush.
- Interrupted Declaration of Love: When Alex tries to confess his love to Theresa, he is interrupted first by the host of the party they are at, then by a monster attack. Subverted, Alex is well aware of this trope and quickly confesses to Theresa before they get ready for the fight.
- It Sucks to Be the Chosen One: Alex's initial reaction to becoming the latest Fool.
- Jumped at the Call: Cedric the Chosen, Hart the Champion and Merzhin the Saint of the current generation's heroes all enthusiastically joined the war against the Ravener. Drestra the Sage, not so much.
- Longevity Treatment: Baelin, the dean of the university, is exceptionally old, and any powerful enough mage can learn to extend their lifespan.
- Magic Enhancement: Body strengthening magic is commonplace and one of the first things several of the students learn.
- Mundane Utility: Create a glowing ball of magic force you can control with your mind? Use it to carry your books for class!
- Not Completely Useless: Forceball is considered a very basic spell, but since it's one of the few spells Alex can actually cast he learns to put it to a lot of surprising uses.
- Our Mages Are Different: Mages are effectively the equivalent of our engineers, designing and building spells using magical circuitry.
- Punny Name: It's a running joke that Alex is terrible at naming things, often because he tries to force one of these.
- Refusal of the Call: Alex literally ran as far as possible away from the call, and isn't planning on coming back for a while.
- Science Hero: Despite the name of the story, Alex is closest to this - using his knowledge of magic and quick-thinking to overcome obstacles and threats.
- Sufficiently Analyzed Magic: Magic is very well understood, and that understanding is only getting better as new technology comes along. Alex gets to analyse the remains of a dungeon core with devices that didn't even exist last time the Ravener appeared, making understanding what it is and how to defeat it a much more likely prospect this time around.
- Super-Reflexes: Several magic creatures have these, notably the mana vampires, but there are simple spells that can even the playing field for other creatures too.
- Super-Strength: Body enhancing magic, again. Thundar as a minotaur is naturally very strong, but Grimloch, as a ten-foot tall humanoid shark, is by far the strongest. And then he starts learning lifeforce enhancement from Theresa...
- Surprisingly Realistic Outcome: Alex is worried about what Baelin will say when he learns Alex is the Fool, but Baelin points out he is far from the first student running from something, and in the wider picture it's really not that big a deal.
- There Are No Therapists: Alex and Selina's parents died in a fire when the children were young, and while they've learnt to cope the trauma is still there, especially for Selina.
- Priests of Uldar do double as therapists; they also will try to kidnap/conscript Alex if he goes to close to them.
- Useless Useful Spell: Since the Fool's Mark interferes with spellcasting, one of Alex's tutors points out that it doesn't matter how well Alex can cast spells if he can't cast them quickly enough to react to sudden danger.
- Weapons-Grade Vocabulary: Alex goes with class, into hell. They discuss list of demons they may meet, and goal is triplets that have ability to laugh that directly harms people.
- Weak, but Skilled: Alex will never learn a lot of spells, nor cast them particularly fast, but he can learn to cast them really well and learn to use them in unexpected ways.
- What Kind of Lame Power Is Heart, Anyway?: The general attitude to the Fool's Mark. At best they're support or The Heart, in worse cases they become an Heroic Sacrifice or even undergo a Face–Heel Turn.
- Wizarding School: Generasi is a city built around the best university in the world for magical learning. Princes and future court mages come from across the world to study, but it will accept anyone who can prove they have sufficient talent.
