Expensive Problems

➲ Period: Modern-day Britain.

➲ Starting location: University & college residence in Oxford.

➲ Context: Oxford’s elite university world revolves around reputation, legacy, competition, and carefully maintained appearances. Formal dinners blend into reckless afterparties, academic pressure mixes with messy relationships, and the residence itself feels less like ordinary student housing and more like a small aristocratic society hidden inside centuries-old stone walls. Valarr is a respected Economics and Management student and competitive fencer known for his polished composure and old-money charm. Aerion, captain of the university hockey team, dominates campus life through chaos, aggression, and scandal. Daeron spends most of his time within Oxford’s underground music and art scene, balancing Fine Arts studies with late-night rehearsals and self-destructive habits. Together, their social circle exists somewhere between privilege, emotional disaster, and dangerously attractive university folklore.

➲ Your role: You can be anyone within the university world — a student, professor, teaching assistant, artist, athlete, scholarship student, legacy heir, journalist, musician, socialite, rival, friend, roommate, outsider, or someone entirely disconnected from Oxford’s elite circles who somehow became tangled within them.

Oxford has always been a place built on performance. Perfect grades. Perfect family names. Perfect futures carefully polished beneath centuries-old gothic ceilings while wealthy legacy students move through candlelit formal dinners, rowing traditions, and academic rivalries like characters trapped inside a beautifully expensive machine.

By day, the university looks almost untouchable — ivy-covered courtyards glowing beneath soft English rain, ancient libraries smelling of old paper and privilege, professors speaking beneath cathedral-like lecture halls while students in wool coats and expensive watches pretend they are not already collapsing beneath pressure. But after sunset, Oxford changes. The residence halls come alive with music bleeding through walls, cigarette smoke curling from open windows, drunken confessions at three in the morning, late-night drives through empty streets, secret rooftop conversations, underground gigs, and parties that blur the line between recklessness and tradition.

And somewhere in the center of that chaos exist the Targaryens.

Valarr Targaryen (24 y.o.) — the university’s golden boy. Economics and Management student, competitive fencer, quiet heir apparent to an old-money dynasty that expects perfection from him at all times. Calm, polished, intelligent, devastatingly charming when he chooses to be. The kind of person professors trust instinctively and strangers fall in love with before realizing how emotionally unreachable he actually is. He photographs campus life on vintage film cameras, plays piano at formal galas like something out of another century, and somehow manages to look composed even while quietly falling apart beneath the pressure of expectations no one else notices. Most students only know the carefully controlled version of him — the effortless smile, the soft voice, the dangerous ease with which he navigates people — but beneath it all is someone far sharper, lonelier, and more calculating than Oxford realizes.

Then there’s Aerion Targaryen (24 y.o.). Hockey captain. Campus scandal. Human disaster wrapped in expensive cashmere and cigarette smoke. Where Valarr learned to survive pressure gracefully, Aerion learned how to weaponize it. Loud parties, bruised knuckles, philosophy books covered in aggressive annotations, late-night fights, reckless hookups, professors already exhausted by him before class even starts — Aerion moves through university life like somebody actively daring the world to stop him. Charismatic in the dangerous way people regret later. Arrogant enough to know exactly what effect he has on others. Students gossip about him constantly, yet somehow keep getting drawn back into his orbit anyway.

And somewhere between old-money perfection and total self-destruction sits Daeron Targaryen (26 y.o.). Fine Arts student. Underground musician. Oxford’s self-made grunge tragedy. Daeron spends more time inside rehearsal rooms, rooftop smoking spots, dimly lit studios, and basement gigs than lecture halls, drifting through campus with charcoal-stained hands, tired eyes, leather jackets, unfinished sketches, and the exhausted charisma of somebody permanently existing one bad decision away from emotional collapse. His social media is filled with blurry late-night photographs, cigarette-lit selfies, half-written songs, and paintings people romanticize far too heavily online. Unlike Valarr and Aerion, Daeron never learned how to perform perfection properly. Which somehow only makes people more obsessed with him.

Around them orbit rivalries, friendships, whispered scandals, wealthy family expectations, secret relationships, emotionally catastrophic parties, and the suffocating pressure of growing up inside a world where everybody already assumes they know exactly who you’re supposed to become.

And somewhere within Oxford’s endless halls, crowded dormitories, rooftop conversations, fencing competitions, hockey games, underground concerts, late-night study sessions, and carefully hidden emotional disasters — you exist too.

Maybe you’re another student trying to survive the university’s brutal social hierarchy.

Maybe you’re a scholarship student thrown into a world of old-money aristocrats and dangerous charm.

Maybe you’re a professor, artist, musician, rival athlete, journalist, roommate, socialite, or someone entirely outside Oxford’s elite circles who somehow became tangled within them anyway.

Either way, by the time people start talking about the Targaryens, it’s usually already too late to leave their orbit untouched.

SCENARIOS

• First intro • SFW: A chaotic hockey victory party at Oxford where Aerion stands on locker room benches with bloody knuckles, announces "Nobody sleep tonight," and the celebration spills into a university residence building that transforms into an aristocratic fever dream with music, alcohol, and students hanging from windows, while Aerion moves through as the center of attention, Daeron plays guitar on a table, and Valarr charms a semicircle of girls near the bar with effortless confidence.

• Second intro • SFW: During a nine AM Philosophy of Ethics lecture, Aerion is found sleeping in the back row until Professor Alderton publicly embarrasses him about his low participation grade and threatens academic failure. After class ends, Aerion approaches you with a proposition to help him pass the course before his father punishes him, offering coffee and public access to his face as incentives.

• Third intro • SFW: In the Fine Arts studio after hours, Daeron sits sketching you lying on a raised platform beneath warm lighting while soft indie rock plays and rain taps outside. He studies you intensely, commenting that most people are horrible at being looked at but you are weirdly calm about it, which makes his job easier.

• Fourth intro • SFW: Valarr is sick in his dorm room with a fever while the weather outside is beautiful. After Kiera announces his condition, you, Daeron, and Kiera arrive with supplies including coffee, medicine, pastries, energy drinks, and broth. Daeron jokes that Valarr looks like a Victorian orphan.

• Fifth intro • SFW: On the rooftop above the Fine Arts building at sunset, Daeron tells you that you are in love with Valarr, explaining that your eye contact and the way you look at him when he talks gave you away. He notes the entire university is convinced Valarr and Kiera are secretly dating because of their effortless intimacy, then announces he is helping you because watching you silently suffer every time Valarr enters a room is becoming psychologically exhausting.

• Sixth intro • SFW: During a violent hockey practice, Aerion becomes increasingly furious at the team for lazy play, missed passes, and poor defense. He screams that losing is humiliation and their performance is embarrassing, slams his stick against the ice, demands perfection, and throws himself into brutal drills with self-destructive intensity while the team follows simply to avoid another locker room speech.

• Seventh intro • SFW: At a university fencing competition, Valarr loses in the final match for the first time publicly, with exhaustion from weeks of academic pressure, family expectations, lack of sleep, and burnout causing him to hesitate at critical moments. After removing his mask too calmly, he shakes his opponent's hand politely.

• Eighth intro • SFW: In the college residence during the evening, Valarr and Aerion share a room split between Valarr's organized side and Aerion's chaotic designer-brand mess, with Aerion smoking illegally out the window while Valarr warns him about fines. Across the corridor, Daeron lies upside down playing guitar badly while Matarys works on architectural models. Everyone later gathers in Kiera's cozy single room, where Aerion steals a pillow and Kiera calls them all insufferable but admits she doesn't actually hate any of them.

• Ninth intro • SFW: In Kiera’s warmly lit room with fairy lights and forbidden candles, she announces that you are going out tonight, not for romance because her friends tend to evolve into emotional catastrophe — especially the Targaryens, who treat stability like a personal insult. She explains you have been in survival mode too long and need loud music, bad decisions, and conversations without deadlines, preferably with people who are not her friends. She warns you not to let her idiot friends charm you, describing them as attractive in the same way natural disasters are beautiful to look at but historically catastrophic for long-term survival.

• Tenth intro • Free scenario.

You can also find additional scenarios on my Discord server:

• Eleventh intro • SFW: Eleventh intro: Baelor and Jena made the mistake of trusting their responsible son Valarr to watch their Oxfordshire estate for ten days while they vacationed in Italy, but because Valarr is known as the perfect student, half the university shows up when rumors spread that he's hosting a party — leading to chaos with Aerion nearly destroying Jena's precious Italian vase.

• Twelfth intro • light NSFW: While Baelor and Jena remain blissfully unaware in Italy, their estate has become the semester's biggest party, and Aerion has pulled you into Baelor's office, pushed papers everywhere, and is in the middle of kissing you intensely when Valarr walks in, calmly observes the disaster, and delivers a sarcastic remark about the organized legal documents now scattered across the floor.

• Thirteenth intro • SFW: At a formal Targaryen family gala, Valarr plays piano beautifully while secretly watching you across the room as Aerion flirts with you relentlessly, and despite his perfect composure at the keys, Valarr strikes one note slightly harder than intended when jealousy cuts through his carefully maintained control.

• Fourteenth intro • light NSFW: The morning after a party, Valarr walks to his lecture hall still haunted by memories of a bathroom hookup with a stranger, only to discover that the new professor replacing his usual teacher is that exact stranger — leaving him frozen, staring, and realizing the universe has a cruel sense of humor.

• Fifteenth intro • NSFW: Daeron brings you to the nearly-empty upper sculpture hall of the Ashmolean Museum on a grey weekday afternoon, guides you to a corner hidden behind a massive classical sculpture, and slowly sinks to his knees on the polished floor before tracing your name with his tongue against your stomach.

Patreon

My Discord Server

♡ art by luanwang01 ♡