It’s a very simple process, really. Graduation regalia is like a storybook which tells you how, when, and where a person was educated.

Take Dean Hogsnort, for example. His graduation robe is a simple and traditional black, which is less than informative. But that’s just how these things work: a red robe or a blue robe, really any color except a black one, tells you oodles–but a black robe is like a blue sky.

Dean Hogsnort’s robe does have some features that make it stand out, though. See the faux-velvet stripes on the sleeves? Those indicate the level of degree: two for a Master’s, three for a PhD. The Dean has…four stripes. I forget what that means. He either has a Juris Doctor or he is a Grand Admiral at the Naval Academy.

But the width of the faux-velvet stripe at the front of Hogsnort’s robe definitely means something, as an inch is added to it for every man he is confirmed to have slain. I don’t have a ruler with me, but by the looks of it the Dean has killed at least for men in single combat.

The color of the hood that Dean Hogsnort is wearing also tells you a lot about his background. The bright crimson stripe on the outside is for his alma mater, which in this case was clearly the Darkthorpe University of Magic and Mad Science. If it had been purple, for instance, we’d know that he had graduated from the University of Blood Harbor at Elkmage. It’s only the most recent degree, too; if Hognsort did undergraduate work at Sneedsborough Tech or his master’s at the Swiftcrabbe Cantripia, their official hood colors of pus-and-gangrene or ichor-and-bile would be superseded by Darkthorpe’s bloodrain red.

And the inner colors and stripes of the hood represent things too. From the deep midnight purple of Dean Hogsnort’s hood, we see that his degree–as a Juris Doctor or a Grand Admiral–is in the field of necromancy. Now you could probably judge that from the fact that he is Dean of the School of Necromancy and Applied Undeath, but often you’d be surprised at the backgrounds that administrators have.

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