The player character is Ernie Eaglebeak, a teenager just out of high school living in the town of Port Gecko, pining for his sexy neighbour Lola Tigerbelly and struggling in a seriously bad relationship with his stepfather, Joey Rottenwood.

In the meantime, Ernie is interested to know females such as the university president's daughter Gretchen Snowbunny or Hillary, the young wife of his ancient advisor Otto Tickingclock.

Suddenly SU gets attacked by mysterious foes who kidnap Tickingclock and take away the Sorcerer's Appliance, a powerful magical device which could become extremely dangerous in inappropriate hands.

Equipped with his spell book and a magical guided surfboard, Ernie sets out on a mission to several islands on the Fizzbuttle Ocean in search for items that will aid him in getting into the sinister Fort Blackwand.

The islands visited are: The player can learn spells and obtain items during his quest until Ernie can take on the challenge of the fort and confront the mastermind behind the theft of the Sorcerer's Appliance, who turns out to be Joey Rottenwood, his own stepfather.

In a climactic final showdown Ernie manages to shut down the Appliance's self-destruct system by burying it, along with Rottenwood, under a pile of whale dung, and frees all the prisoners, including his presumed-dead real father.

Similar to the famous earlier risqué work of Meretzky, Leather Goddesses of Phobos, Spellcasting 101 offers two gameplay modes of differing levels of sexual content.

The game features a two-part copy protection system, with the first one involving filling in the gaps in Ernie's enrollment records with information from the registration form and class schedule enclosed with the game, at the time of him enrolling at the university, and the second using the enclosed map to obtain co-ordinates for various locations Ernie must visit on the Fizzbuttle Ocean.

Unlike another Don Juan of the gaming world, Larry Laffer, most of the time he succeeds at his advances, with his "one true love" being seemingly the only woman he's never managed to get into bed.

Much like Biff Tannen from the Back to the Future trilogy, he has a tendency to have his plans thwarted by getting buried under large amounts of dung.

While apparently a great magician, his advanced age tends to get the better of him quite often by making him only loosely attached to reality and prone to falling asleep easily.

During this period, Legend Entertainment founder Bob Bates contacted him about the possibility of developing a direct spiritual successor to Meretzky's Infocom title Leather Goddesses of Phobos, because of that game's commercial success.