D&D 5E Two New D&D Books Revealed: Feywild & Strixhaven Mage School

Amazon has revealed the next two D&D hardcovers! The Wild Beyond the Witchlight is a feywild adventure due in September, and Curriculum of Chaos is a Magic: the Gathering setting of Strixhaven, which looks like a Harry Potter-esque mage school, set for November.

Amazon.com: The Wild Beyond the Witchlight: A Feywild Adventure (Dungeons & Dragons Book) (9780786967278): Wizards RPG Team: Books

Amazon.com: The Wild Beyond the Witchlight: A Feywild Adventure (Dungeons & Dragons Book) (9780786967278): Wizards RPG Team: Books

www.amazon.com

The Wild Beyond the Witchlight is D&D's next big adventure storyline that brings the wicked whimsy of the Feywild to fifth edition for the first time.

The recent Unearthed Arcana, Folk of the Feywild, contained the fairy, hobgoblin of the Feywild, owlfolk, and rabbitfolk. UA is usually a good preview of what's in upcoming D&D books.

Strixhaven: Curriculum of Chaos (D&D/MTG Adventure Book) (Dungeons & Dragons): Wizards RPG Team: 9780786967445: Books

Strixhaven: Curriculum of Chaos (D&D/MTG Adventure Book) (Dungeons & Dragons) [Wizards RPG Team] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. Strixhaven: Curriculum of Chaos (D&D/MTG Adventure Book) (Dungeons & Dragons)

www.amazon.com

Curriculum of Chaos is an upcoming D&D release set in the Magic: The Gathering world of Strixhaven -- a brand new MtG set only just launched.

Strixhaven is a school of mages on the plane of Arcavios, an elite university with five rival colleges founded by dragons: Silverquill (eloquence), Prismari (elemental arts), Witherbloom (life and death), Lorehold (archaeomancy), and Quandrix (numeromancy). You can read more about the M:tG set here.

You will be able to tune into WotC's streamed event D&D Live on July 16 and 17 for details on both, including new character options, monsters, mechanics, story hooks, and more!

D&D 5E - Here Is The Full & Alternate Cover Art Of The Wild Beyond the Witchlight

Here is the cover art for The Wild Beyond the Witchlight, the hardcover D&D product revealed this weekend. Cover art by Tyler Jacobson Alternate cover by Hydro74 https://www.enworld.org/threads/two-new-d-d-books-revealed-feywild-strixhaven-mage-school.680500/

www.enworld.org

D&D 5E - And Here Is Strixhaven's Cover Art!

It's not just The Wild Beyond The Witchlight's cover art being revealed today! We also have Magali Villeneuve's cover art for Strixhaven: Curriculum of Chaos! Strixhaven is an upcoming D&D setting based on the recently released Magic: the Gathering world, and features a mage school -- as Theros...

www.enworld.org

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

I don't have much to say about the other classes right now, but I have felt for a long time that Paladin should not be it's own class. There should be a Holy Warrior class, that has a sub-class for each alignment, with the Paladin just the LG sub-class.

I suspect 3E, 4E and now 5E have killed off paladin as a Lawful Good class for good.

 

[Mind of tempest]

I don't have much to say about the other classes right now, but I have felt for a long time that Paladin should not be it's own class. There should be a Holy Warrior class, that has a sub-class for each alignment, with the Paladin just the LG sub-class. Barbarian should be a culture, or sub-culture, and not a class. Instead we could have a barbarian-themed sub-class for several of the other classes, such as berserker for Fighter.

And Mystic should be removed from any association with psionics and instead be used to cover shaman, witch doctor, medicine man, and all the other similar real world animistic/nature-oriented/mystical beliefs. Maybe fold Druid into this too.

what would we call the holy warrior other than paladin? plus alignment is shaky go with a broad set of faith ideals as those have both diversity and nuance.

mystic I am uncertain of your solution, also witch doctor and medicine man are not technical terms the real words would help.
plus psion is a terrible name outside of low budget sci-fi.

 

[Enevhar Aldarion]

what would we call the holy warrior other than paladin? plus alignment is shaky go with a broad set of faith ideals as those have both diversity and nuance.

mystic I am uncertain of your solution, also witch doctor and medicine man are not technical terms the real words would help.
plus psion is a terrible name outside of low budget sci-fi.

Green Ronin did a book called Book of the Righteous for 3.x that included a Holy Warrior class like I am talking about and had paladin variations for each of the other alignments, so that you could have more than the paladin and anti-paladin. They tried to kickstart a 5E version of the book, but I don't know whatever happened with that.

Medicine Man, or Medicine People, as Native Americans say, because there are Medicine Women too, is a legitimate title used by many tribes.

 

[Yaarel]

And Mystic should be removed from any association with psionics and instead be used to cover shaman, witch doctor, medicine man, and all the other similar real world animistic/nature-oriented/mystical beliefs. Maybe fold Druid into this too.

Most reallife traditions of "Mysticism" involve "mind".

Contemplation, enlightenment, intellect, thought, wisdom, understanding, knowledge, intelligence, idea, ideal, word, saying, speech, intuition, consciousness, awareness, universal mind, personal mind, seat of consciousness, perception, etcetera,

are all terms that come from reallife mysticism − and are fully "psionic".

Indeed, the term "psionic" itself derives from "psukhe", means "sense of self", and is also a main part of the discourse of mystics.



That said. Animism is the "minds" of the features of nature, so that the shamanic traditions should be psionic too.

 

[Marandahir]

I don't have much to say about the other classes right now, but I have felt for a long time that Paladin should not be it's own class. There should be a Holy Warrior class, that has a sub-class for each alignment, with the Paladin just the LG sub-class. Barbarian should be a culture, or sub-culture, and not a class. Instead we could have a barbarian-themed sub-class for several of the other classes, such as berserker for Fighter.

And Mystic should be removed from any association with psionics and instead be used to cover shaman, witch doctor, medicine man, and all the other similar real world animistic/nature-oriented/mystical beliefs. Maybe fold Druid into this too.

The thing is, the Paladin already is this, mostly. It's just that the name Paladin has been applied to the top-level of the class. I'd have been fine with Knight, actually, though I get that they want to distinguish a divine magic knight from a non-magical knight, that way the Paladin features like lay on hands can be baked in.

Do I think some of the default class features should be moved into the Oath of Protection or given alternate class features to let you dial in the type of divine magic knight you want? Of course. I feel like you could replace Lay on Hands with some sort of Warden feature from 4e, for example, and feel a bit better with the Oath of the Ancients emulating your 4e Warden. But I don't think the class needs to fundamentally change in a way that limits options (I think it's great that we have multiple flavours of holy knight in the class - protector, avenger, martyr, paragon, etc) in addition to flavours that reflect other types of holy knights (profane knights like the Oathbreaker, knights of warmongering deities like the Oath Conquest, Green Knights like Oath of the Ancients, Guardians of the Grey Middle like Oath of the Watchers). I don't think we need to make it into Oath of LG, Oath of CG, Oath of TN, Oath of LE, etc. That would be limiting in scope to D&D-specific tropes.

I think the Barbarian class is fine, mechanically. Subclasses like Oath of the Zealot and Oath of the Beast show what it can be when you pull away from the "othered-peoples warrior rage-monster guy" that it's so often played as. It needs a new name, yes, and WotC already has used the best alternative for the class as a whole (Berserker) for the archetypal Primal Path of the class. "Warrior" isn't a bad term, though it's been used already in 5e by WotC for a generic NPC fighter-lite class, much like it had been in 3e and in D&D generally gives off vibes of a catch-all term for Fighter-like classes (probably inheritance of 2e's class groupings).

 

[Levistus's_Leviathan]

We've got only very distinctive flavor of amphibian people for playable frog people: the grung. They're poisonous tree frogs, which are not at all suitable for general frog people.

A more standard frog people, that could be used for bullywug or frogloks or what have you, would have a niche.

They could do Grippli. They were supposed to get stats for player characters as them in Candlekeep Mysteries. This would be a nice way to bring that back.

 

[Faolyn]

Indeed, the term "psionic" itself derives from "psukhe", means "sense of self", and is also a main part of the discourse of mystics.

The term psionics came from the idea of the "psion" as a unit of mental energy (in a story published in Astounding Science Fiction in '51), and quickly came to mean using psychic abilities with electronics.

Psionics - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

 

[Marandahir]

I don't think that Mystic can or should be divorced from Psionics. Rather, I thought it was pretty profound of WotC to realise that western ideas of Psionics are deeply rooted in the cultural appropriation of mystic traditions they had come into contact with. They kinda realised this in 4e too when they decided to axe the Ki Power Source and move Monk into the Psionic Power Source alongside the Psion, Ardent, and Battlemind (though using an entirely different mechanic than those three Psionic classes, so really the only thing that the Monk benefited from there was being able to access features that required the Psionic keyword). I think the Psion or Mystic is essentially the Yoda to the Monk's Mace Windu. Now, Psionics have been distributed in part to other classes' subclasses, and I'm not sure there's much of a need for a Psionics core class in 5e. I don't think Psionics have to work significantly differently (especially when they've been defined all edition as basically just being magic cast without material components). I also think that subclasses like the College of Spirits Bard are occupying space that the Psion/Mystic would have. But if they DID make a Psion/Mystic, I would hope they would follow that trajectory a bit more fully to explore the occult themes of early psychic power stories.

 

[Marandahir]

They could do Grippli. They were supposed to get stats for player characters as them in Candlekeep Mysteries. This would be a nice way to bring that back.

Tortle and Grung were released as Extra Life print-on-demand PDFs as ties-in to Tomb of Annihilation, but a few months later. Locathah the same as a tie-in to Ghosts of Saltmarsh, and it came out several months later. They could still make Grippli a tie-in to Candlekeep Mysteries, even though it's been a few months.

 

[Rabulias]

Green Ronin did a book called Book of the Righteous for 3.x that included a Holy Warrior class like I am talking about and had paladin variations for each of the other alignments, so that you could have more than the paladin and anti-paladin. They tried to kickstart a 5E version of the book, but I don't know whatever happened with that.

They made it: The Book of the Righteous (5E)