A 15-week literature course where each student picks an archetype at the start of the campaign. The archetype isn't a costume. It's a reading stance — a standing question you bring to every text for the rest of the term.
| Archetype | The stance it makes you take |
|---|---|
| The Seeker | What does your character not yet know about this text? Read for the gap. |
| The Prodigy | Make the boldest claim your character can actually defend — then defend it. |
| The Trickster | Read the text against the grain. Find what it doesn't want you to notice. |
| The Fallen Angel | Where does this text break its own rules? Hunt the place it betrays itself. |
| The Completionist | Account for everything — the footnote, the epigraph, the thing everyone skips. |
| The Warrior of Words | Take the hardest passage head-on and hold the line until it yields. |
Stance: where does this text break its own rules? The narrator swears he's sane and gives us a clean, orderly confession — and the prose itself keeps fracturing into the exclamation and repetition of a mind that isn't. The story's form breaks the narrator's own claim before the plot ever does. A Seeker would miss it; the Fallen Angel is built to walk straight to it.
Same book, six stances, one seminar — and every student has a reason to read the passage a fifth time. The archetype gives the re-read a motive that "participation points" never could.
Underneath the campaign is the same Course Organism that runs a straight composition class: real syllabus, rubrics, feedback banks, a 15-week calendar — generated and kept in sync. The D&D layer is a skin, not a rewrite. Which means the stance-based reading can drop into any course you already teach.
If you assign reading — high school, college, a book club that means it — I'll send you the archetype set and the prompts, free, to run in your own room. Tell me what you teach.
Send me the archetype set →