Unearthed Arcana Unearthed Arcana: Mages of Strixhaven

An Unearthed Arcana playtest document for the upcoming Strixhaven: Curriculum of Chaos hardcover has been released by WotC!

"Become a student of magic in this installment of Unearthed Arcana! This playtest document presents five subclasses for Dungeons & Dragons. Each of these subclasses allows you to play a mage associated with one of the five colleges of Strixhaven, a university of magic. These subclasses are special, with each one being available to more than one class."

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It's 9 pages, and contains five subclasses, one for each the Strixhaven colleges:

• Lorehold College, dedicated to the pursuit of history by conversing with ancient spirits and understanding the whims of time itself
• Prismari College, dedicated to the visual and performing arts and bolstered with the power of the elements
• Quandrix College, dedicated to the study and manipulation of nature’s core mathematic principles
• Silverquill College, dedicated to the magic of words, whether encouraging speeches that uplift allies or piercing wit that derides foes
• Witherbloom College, dedicated to the alchemy of life and death and harnessing the devastating energies of both

 

[Urriak Uruk]

Why would they do a 5.5 or 6e when this is working just fine? Try things in books known to be a bit experimental, then adopt the popular stuff in later more core books, and while the PHB is doing just fine, leave the golden goose alone.

I think they are in a good position to leave 5.5 or 6e off to when their good and ready, if ever.

Yeah, what people don't understand about 6E, is that there's only 2 reasons to start developing it. 1 is if the money runs out, 2 is if the rules run out.

The first isn't happening (the gold mine hasn't run dry); 5E is perhaps the most successful edition (certainly more than 3E or 4E), and is having year-over-year growth. Essentially, the next book is selling more than the last book. From that perspective, there is no financial or business reason to start a new edition; in fact if it's ever suggested, I'm sure the sales team would actively protest. "Don't fix what's not broken!"

The second (they run out of rules to publish) also doesn't seem to be happening, though people are interpreting lineages and these multi-class subclasses as if they are. Yes, the rules team are experimenting with new ways of revising 5E rules. That said, there's clearly a lot of books that can be made to expand the rules of 5E, chiefly through the vehicle of settings. Dark Sun can introduce a lot of psionics options. Spelljammer can introduce ship combat and navigation. Birthright can introduce kingdom management and warfare. This doesn't include new settings, that D&D has just demonstrated they can do by jointly creating new worlds with Magic the Gathering.

Anyway, I don't expect 6E to come until sales dip, or until Disney buys Hasbro (who knows what will happen first).

 

[Kurotowa]

I feel like the patron would have opinions about that, which would be a lot of fun to play out in game.

Depends what the pact terms were. As I recently pointed out on another site, a Warlock's pact powers can be fully bought and paid for, rented day to day, or on a long term lease that can only be canceled under specific clauses. Well, there's also oddballs like scamming the patron or beating them in a contest (fiddles at the crossroads!), but those are the big three. A lot of people default to assuming the rental model, but nothing in either the fluff or the mechanics demands that.

You're not wrong that you could create an interesting backstory about trying to out from under a patron's thumb by getting some formal schooling in how to magic. I'm just saying, it's not a requisite.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

It can be both. You gain your sorcery powers as normal. You take classes to learn how to hone them.

Still sounds thematically confused. Wizards are the arcane casters who learn their magic by studying.

 

[Charlaquin]

A scholarship and an injection of Arcanerine.
...



One thing I liked about the warlock fluff change of 4e and then 5e was that warlocks were empowered by minor powers. Strong magical beings that were not deities but were strong enough to lend power to or transform mortals to make them into semimagical beings. Demon princess, fey kings and queens, archdevils, archangels, powerful artifacts, vestiges of dead gods, old far beings of great power.

Turning a school into a patron is weird. It's like Captain America Super Serum. Johnny passes his entrance exam and is injected with magic? I dunno. I can get... like.. a magic military force gang-empowering troops into warlocks Sabbat style.

But a school?

I don’t think the school is actually the patron. The text suggests that the warlock eschews their patron’s normal gifts in favor of the magic taught by one of the Strixhaven colleges. The student loan analogy is really quite apt. Instead of asking your patron to directly grant you magic powers, you ask them to pull strings for you to get you accepted into Strixhaven.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

I don’t think the school is actually the patron. The text suggests that the warlock eschews their patron’s normal gifts in favor of the magic taught by one of the Strixhaven colleges. The student loan analogy is really quite apt. Instead of asking your patron to directly grant you magic powers, you ask them to pull strings for you to get you accepted into Strixhaven.

Why are they not Warlock (level 1)/Wizard (rest of the levels) multiclass then? If they eschew the gifts of their patron, why they gain more warlock spells and invocations etc? If these things can just be learned in a school, how is this thematically and metaphysically different from wizardry?

 

[Minigiant]

I don’t think the school is actually the patron. The text suggests that the warlock eschews their patron’s normal gifts in favor of the magic taught by one of the Strixhaven colleges. The student loan analogy is really quite apt. Instead of asking your patron to directly grant you magic powers, you ask them to pull strings for you to get you accepted into Strixhaven.

Doesn't work.

You can't learn to be a warlock. You have to be made or cursed into one.
If Titania cheats you into Silverquill, you'll be taught to be a bard or wizard. Your teachers cannot make you into a fey warlock unless one of them is a high fey who can make pacts.

 

[SkidAce]

That's a very good point. I want them to explain this explicitly in the text of the book.

"For Warlocks, these are alternate features that replace your Patron. Your Warlock still has a Patron that grants you your Pact Magic, but the precise nature of your magic is tied to the eldritch forces of the college you honed your abilities at afterward."

Just a line or two like this for how these variations on the subclass pillar of character building interacts with the core assumptions of the class would go a long way to reconciling the feeling of the class.

Why?

My Patron is Cthulhu...I bargained for magical power. He granted the spark.
I decide to go to college and learn more.

Imagine the story potential of these dubious fiends are making warlock pacts and letting their thralls go to this college, maybe there is a conflict of interest? Do the dragons care? Does it depend on the patron? (Archfey okay, fiends dubious, cthulhu no way!)

 

[Parmandur]

Yeah, that's what I mean by it's weird. I want them to make it very clear that the school is not your patron, it's just replacing your patron's specific magic features with twists of the magic that you learned in class. You made your pact and got your patron magic before you enrolled, but when you enrolled you learned new ways to channel that magic.

That's not necessarily how Warlocks work in MtG, though. Warlocks don't have specific Patrons, they just use Black Mana. It seems that these options eschew the flavor of a patron entirely, while keeping the overall structure.

 

[Faolyn]

Still sounds thematically confused. Wizards are the arcane casters who learn their magic by studying.

Think of sorcery as more like art. Even if you're naturally a talented artist, you can take art classes to improve your skills.

 

[Charlaquin]

Why would they do a 5.5 or 6e when this is working just fine? Try things in books known to be a bit experimental, then adopt the popular stuff in later more core books, and while the PHB is doing just fine, leave the golden goose alone.

The issue is that the more they do this, the more the old material becomes outdated. Take, for example, the recent trend of races and feats that grant spells X times between long rests now also allowing you to use your own spell slots to cast those spells. Fantastic innovation, and something that in the 4e era they would have gone back and errata’d old races and feats to do. But since WotC is allergic to errata this edition, those old features are just stuck feeling outdated forever. A new edition, or at least a revised edition, would allow them to bring those old features into line with more recent design innovations.