From the campaign:
Magicians started out as a classroom roleplaying game after-school activity at the academy I taught at a few years ago in Korea. I had just finished reading The Magicians, by Lev Grossman, and loved the idea of a person's unhappiness dissatisfaction with the world being the source of their magic. So I came up with the better part of the game, but for teaching English and for some kids I knew had trouble with bullying at school. The kids made up characters, chose their name and we came up with a high school together via world building. The core of the game was largely the same - I gave them points for telling me stories about their character's troubles in school and then they used those points to fight monsters and do cool stuff.