The Blackhall Bards College

To teach the skills of the arts to anybody willing to learn, and pay.

The Blackhall Bards College was founded about 50 years ago by Cornelius Blackhall, a famed bard and adventurer. He spent most of his life traveling the country and performing, getting into mischief and magic alike, and often leaving quite the impression wherever he went. No fear was had of nobles, and he wrote scathing reviews of Kingdoms and Kings alike in his ballads and poems, scribing plays that critiqued the worlds governments and armies, and dirty jokes about local law enforcements. When he began to age he simply became more clever, wittier, his tongue sharper with each year that passed, even as grey began to speckle his flowing hair. He believed that musicians and bards were becoming a rare breed, cowed into submission by nobility as they sponsored their education and limited to those who could afford instruments and private tutors. In response Blackhall invested his entire fortune into building the Bards Academy, a school dedicated to raising up any who wished to succeed in the arts. His goal was to allow it so that any could pick up a lute or pen and follow their dreams, and to instill the courage to stand up to those who wrong others and cause evil, even if it's within the relative safety of a poem.    Blackhall hired the most powerful and influential entertainers from all the Kingdoms to work as professors at his school, entrusted the deanship to his most successful student, and in his final years supposedly hid the remainder of his fortune somewhere in Knotside, or so the story goes. Each year students enter the bards academy for a full education, but any may come and simple take classes to learn a new skill or hear lectures. Many come from far and wide simply to see the beauty of the school, and to try their hand at finding the secret Blackhall fortune.