Okay. So I might have gotten a bit carried away, but I have always had some characters in the back of my mind that I never created because I don't have enough time to write them all, and this idea of getting to create professor NPCs for the unfilled teaching positions gave me an outlet for some of those characters. I hope no one minds that I went ahead and did this. I want you to know that although I did this all in one sweep, I am more than open to suggestions on how these characters could be different or better, or if you want to scrap any of them altogether.
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So here's the list:
Ancient RunesNmur Maddrool stands roughly three feet high, but his goblin pride makes him appear much more intimidating than his height might suggest. Nmur has the characteristic pointed ears and permanent frown of the goblin species, and he wears oversized, thick round glasses perched on his sharply hooked nose. These glasses exaggerate the size of his eyes, which gives him the permanently startled look of a woodland creature caught in headlights. Nmur is a man of very few words – in fact, most of his lessons consist only of writing on the chalkboard and having students copy down notes in silence. He is a bit of a contradiction in that he can sometimes be skeptical about sharing his not-insignificant knowledge about runes with the wizarding population (goblins can be so secretive), but he has chosen to teach at Hogwarts so the knowledge will not be lost altogether.
- Credit to the brilliant
Amelia LyonsArithmancyCalpernicus Patzner is a 48-year-old wizard with a penchant for numbers. He has been married for a number of years and has three children: Xenon, Gideon, and Magdelena. He is an amiable person, but can come off as a bit eccentric. He has a very odd sense of humor and will often make jokes that he is the only one to understand. He has a “geek” appearance to him, with dark, combed over hair, pressed white shirts, and clean khaki pants. He also has a habit of quoting from muggle movies and television shows no one has ever heard of. Calpernicus is a brilliant mind, probably one of the most naturally intelligent professors at Hogwarts, but his peculiarities make him a bit of a running joke among the student population.
- Credit to the brilliant
Amelia LyonsAstronomyAutumn Mazzulla is a statuesque, dark-skinned, 30-year-old woman with a heavy African accent. She has close-cut, tightly curled hair that she often wears beneath a brightly colored turban. She is partial to heavy metal jewelry and wears brightly colored wraps almost exclusively. She grew up in Zimbabwe and was taught to chart the stars and their movements from a young age. Autumn is a very commanding presence in her classroom, and has a temper that has snapped on more than a few of her students. She is easily irritated by impertinent questions because they are a waste of time, but is prone to going off on tangents about her personal life during class. Most students think this makes her hypocritical (and more than a little odd), but wouldn’t dream of pointing this out for fear of her sharp temper and heavy-handed house point deductions.
- Credit to the brilliant
Amelia LyonsDivinationClinton Iola is the third in a series of centaur professors of divination, carrying on the tradition Dumbledore began when he hired Firenze to split teaching duties with the then professor, Sybil Trelawny. Trelawny has since retired in her old age, and no centaur wants to retain professorial positions for too long (too much time indoors in bad for centaurs’ auras), but Clinton is taking his turn indoors. He took the teaching position two years ago, and since then, his wavy, shoulder-length auburn hair and bare, muscular torso have been drawing the female population to his class like bees to honey. Clinton is overly philosophical, so much of what he tries to teach to his student audience goes right over their heads, but that doesn’t seem to bother many of his students. He has a “there is no wrong answer” policy, which allows students to scrape through his classes with little to no effort, as long as they can keep the glazed look out of their eyes while he is explaining the meaning of the universe…. for the 12th time this term.
- Credit to the brilliant
Amelia LyonsFlyingJordan Grissman is a 22-year-old former Gryffindor student who has just recently taken the position of flight instructor and quidditch referee. He is tall to the point of looking stretched, with exceedingly pale skin and hair. Jordan played chaser for a professional quidditch team for a few years, but didn’t see much action on the pitch, and was eventually forced out of the league by a bludger-induced injury. Jordan is well-meaning and polite, but has roughly the same intellectual capacity as a well-trained Labrador Retriever. He is easily distracted from everything except flying and women (unless one is distracting him from the other - - he would really be torn, then) and has a haphazard teaching method that mostly involves trial and error.
- Credit to the brilliant
Amelia LyonsHerbologyRobert Frankenberg is a man in his late 50’s, with rough dark hair starting to be strewn through with grey. He has dark olive-tone skin that has seen a lot of sun damage. In his younger years, Professor Frankenberg had a bit of a reputation for being wild; he smoked and drank from a young age, and marijuana was the tamest of the drugs he indulged in (and, ironically, the drug that gave him his passion for all things grown). He has since settled down considerably, and has two daughters from a former marriage, both of them married and getting ready to start families of their own. Robert has a flair for the dramatic, and tends to run his lessons as though they were stage performances, flailing around and occasionally knocking over the very plants he is trying to teach. He is known for his clumsiness, and tends to have a “cooky grandfather” approach to teaching.
- Credit to the brilliant
Amelia LyonsHistory of Magic (this is the only one I didn’t write. I took this from HPL)Professor Cuthbert Binns was a wizard and History of Magic professor at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. taught until a very old age, when he fell asleep in the staff room and died in slumber. Now, he is a ghost who continued to teach, droning on about various Goblin Rebellions and Giant Wars to bored, sleeping students. Professor Binns's lessons were regarded as some of the most boring at Hogwarts.
Muggle StudiesKaren Gosse is a 63-year-old witch who, at age 18, married a muggle dentist six years her senior and has never looked back. She has been teaching at Hogwarts since her mid-twenties, when she discovered she would be unable to have children. Karen had always wanted to surround herself with young people, and found that teaching at Hogwarts allowed her to fill that void. Karen in muggle-born, so it was only natural for her to have a working knowledge that could be put to use as the muggle studies professor. Karen is a bookish woman and wears horn-rimmed glasses that are permanently perched on the tip of her nose or hanging from a necklace of small colored beads around her neck. She is a kindly teacher who sometimes ends up being taken advantage of because of her soft spot for her students.
- Credit to the brilliant
Amelia Lyons-------------------------------------
Please feel free to give me feedback on this list. Also, once we complete the list and descriptions, I think it might be a good idea to also make this list available to the general membership so they will know to whom we are referring when we mention a particular NPC professor, and they could also use these as situation building blocks (i.e. could be doing homework for Professor Gosse's class, but consider blowing it off because she's so nice; that sort of thing). What do people think of that idea?
Let me know your thoughts, everyone!
by Amelia Lyons Sun Aug 14, 2011 1:24 am
Awe, Thanks Jess. I'm glad your response was so overwhelmingly positive.