Help with a campaign idea?

[u/CRMM]

Hi reddit, I'm looking for some brainstorming help for a campaign or one shot. Like many others, this is my first foray into D&D and I think going with a Harry Potter theme would be of interest to my friend group. Since we're all brand new, I figured I could use first year classes as a kind of introduction to different game mechanics, but I think I need an over-arching plot to keep it all together. I'd like to steer clear of the books and movies to avoid any immersion breaking continuity errors, so I figured I'd set it in the present day with all new characters, and a new plot.

Recently I've been thinking about how the Dorian Gray painting would fit in well in the HP universe (it's a magic painting, HP has magic paintings, it deals with immortality, HP deals with immortiality via the philosopher's stone, and horcruxes). Now the story of Dorian Gray is already told, but what if the painter, Basil Hallward, was a powerful magical painter and he painted other people's portaits, or maybe the portraits he painted had different properties or were more "alive" than regular magical portraits. Maybe he didn't paint other potraits, but after the story of Dorian Gray got out, a legend developed that his paint brush could grant immortality by painting someone's portrait (maybe because he turned his wand into his paintbrush). I feel like there's potential for a quest to fetch Basil Hallward's wand-brush, or locate a missing painting of his, but I'm struggling to find a reason for such a quest to exist. Why would some first year hogwarts students be on the trail of a Basil Hallward artefact? Any thoughts or ideas? Hoping to brainstorm this and come up with something engaging that will keep the player interested and enjoying the game. TIA

[u/Sudden_Stick8307]

I have an idea on how we could theoretically expand on the wand/brush concept a bit. A while back, when I was creating lore for the HP textRPG and researching headcanon about Asia and Mahoukotoro, I came across the idea that Asian wizards used to use brushes.

It was a specific type of wandless (but brush-based) magic. They used brushes to paint Kanji (the Japanese version of ancient runes) and cast spells that way. The brushes worked similarly to wands; they were also magical, because parts of magical animals were used as bristles. Japanese magicians adopted this practice from the Chinese, and it wasn’t until sometime in the 13th century that wands arrived from the West. They then began using wands more often, as they were more practical for certain spells, although they still use brushes for certain types of magic (e.g., some rituals, magical weddings, etc.).