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

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

Who said anything about pre-5e?

Me, but I guess that I was unclear. My original point was that no one much was sitting around saying "oh boy, I can't wait to see what the 5E PHB has in store for the Diviner!"

That WotC stepped up to the plate with a good subclass ability is great, but I don't think Diviners historically have had the constituency that illusionists, necromancers and even enchanters have. If I had been in charge of the PHB, I might have had robust illusionist, necromancer and enchanter subclasses (the more I think about it, the more I think enchanters not having people remember being charmed is a great, subclass-defining ability) and then had a good generalist wizard subclass in the mix as well.

 

[Faolyn]

That really feels like a failure to me. "Standard wizard" should be its own subclass and as viable as any specialist. Abjurers should be doing something distinctive and interesting, IMO.

Ideally, I think, you should be able to tell an evoker, a necromancer, an illusionist and even and abjurer or diviner at a glance, and not just when one or two abilities get used. It's obviously easier to say this than to do it, though, given how many takes there often are on these archetypes, even within a single edition.

Well, they can be distinguished with each other. Some of their abilities are pretty neat--although, since they're in the PH, relatively tame. The abjurer gets shields, and can use them to protect others, and that's nothing to sneeze at. The abjurer in the game I'm running has been very useful with that special ability.

The biggest problem, so to speak, is that everyone gets all the spells. There aren't any more barred spell schools, nobody has to roll to learn a spell, and there aren't any spells that can only be taken by members of a particular archetype (except in the case of dunamancy spells). Maybe if each school had their own list of archetype spells and no other wizard could use them, that would help. You wanna cast fireball, be an evoker.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

looks at Mage of Witherbloom

Yep, that's definitely pretty good witch. I think I'll use this with warlock if witchy needs arise.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

I want to blame this on 3e. Instead of letting Clerics channel a variety of things (why not any of the six inner planes instead of just positive/negative, for example), they have them all pick either positive or negative. And once you're going +/- it feels like it ties right in to the undead. Did this just crystalize things that were in the previous editions?

Yeah, that was them providing a mechanistic reason (3E's big thing) for previous edition flavor for turning/controlling undead.

 

[Charlaquin]

You're not going to trick me into trying to defend the Forgotten Realms or its cosmology.

There is at least a nominal notion of why clerics have been, in most editions, able to turn undead: Their gods view the undead as an affront to the divine order and give their clerics the power to turn them.

It's a lot harder to see why the Concept of Accounting would feel that way.

This has gone on a lot longer than I would have imagined. All I'm saying is I'd like to have a sentence or four, as a non-MTG player, explaining why an abstract concept that has nothing to do with the cycle of life and death would grant powers over the undead.

The Concept of Accounting doesn’t grant anyone anything. The Guildpact (which remember is a plane-wide ritual spell that all the guilds sustain by performing their duties as laid out in the terms of the Guildpact) magically enforces the guilds’ authority over their particular purview. It makes perfect sense for the guild signets to function as holy symbols for the clerics of those guilds to Channel Divinity through (or, I suppose, “Channel the Guildpact.”) Is it weird that every Cleric of every Guild can use Channel Divinity to turn undead? A bit, yeah. But that’s a problem with the legacy of the D&D cleric having been originally devised as a vampire hunter class, not with the use of guild signets as holy symbols in Ravnica.

 

[Parmandur]

OK. I still don't understand what any of that has to do with turning the undead. Everyone's telling me I'm wrong, with no real elaboration.

I get that the badge makes sense as a magical focus, but why do they work against the undead with specific anti-undead powers?

Well, to start with, I'm not going to pretend that it isn't a bit of a kludge, because that is what it is, but it is one that fits to function by and large. But to propose a narrative explanation: given the nature of the Guilds, nine of whom are dedicated to preserving civilization and the tenth dedicated to preserving the natural order, magic to combat or contain the undead is a necessity given the sheer amount of dead on hand in the World City. So "Clerics" are those who have been trained in specific kinds of Magic to support their Guilds mission.

For context, the Guilds are more like Megacorporations powered by magic than anything else, and the city is the whole planet with tens of billions of people all tied into these ten organizations.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

I am one of those who feel warlock feels far short of what I want the witch class to be. If a farmer knocks a witch down in a market, he should go home and find his cows not giving milk, maybe. Or his hair falls out. Or all of his business dealings start losing money. Or something along those lines.

If a farmer knocks a warlock down in the market, the warlock fires two or three beams of eldritch energy directly at him, vaporizing him. That doesn't feel witchy to me.

It would be exceptionally hard to stat up Granny Weatherwax as a warlock. Much easier as a druid, wizard or sorcerer. If there's a more iconic witch than Granny, don't let her hear you say so.

 

[Remathilis]

The stuff Whizbang mentioned? They tried to make an Invention Wizard for Ravnica (without saying it was Ravnica) and it failed. They tried to make a Psionic Wizard and that didn't cut it either.

If nothing else, I feel like the later subclasses to a lot of classes were far more interesting... Stuff like the Phantom, the Path of the Ancestral Guardian, the Circle of Stars, the Runic Knight, the Clockwork Soul, etc...

What did the Wizard get? 'War Magic'?! What is that even? Bladesinger is the more flavourful subclass they have.

Beyond the eight schools, we got war (a mix of attack and defense magic), bladesong (a gish warrior type) and scribes (living book). Wildemount got chronomancy and gravity magic as well.

As for what was rejected: I see the following:

Artificer: Way back in the original Eberron UA in 2014. It was soundly rejected for trying to emulate the artificer of 3e/4e and missing nearly every mark. That said, its kinda cool as its own thing, unlike...
Invention: Even knowing now it was for Izzet wizards, the subclass is just bad. It's a mix of armor use, metamagic, and random spell effect generation that never screams "invention" in any reasonable sense. It really was rejected for feeling like it was trying to be the artificer (while the artificer class was still in production) but bringing nothing but the wahoo of wild magic to the table.
Lore Mastery: Yawn. Metamagic for wizards. Eventually got replaced with scribes for the whole "generalist" wizard
Onomancy: True-naming. Probably the most interesting of the nixed subs, but mechanically it didn't feel like a binder. This is going to be true again for...
Psionics: Soundly rejected for putting psionic power into a spellbook. Really, that was it. Got shuffled to Sorcerer and then made tentaclly and put in Tasha.
Technomancy: Yeah, this was never going to see the light of day. Neat concept if they ever do d20 Modern...
Therugy: Divine Wizards, hampered by the incessant need to make them "use cleric domains" as their subclass abilities. Mechanically, they were trying to make another classes features graft onto a different class and it didn't work.

A lot of the problem is that wizard has a specific flavor, and they keep trying to cram non-book magic onto them. Artifice, Truenaming, Psionics, Divine magic, none of those things seem to graft well to a learn-and-scribe-in-book spellcaster. They were all more-or-less alternate magic systems trying to be replicated by the old fire-and-forget mage.

So I will re-ask my question: what specific archetypes should the wizard be getting?

 

[RealAlHazred]

That's very specific type of with you have in mind, but yeah, there should be spells and invocations that would let you do that. And in general, I feel there should be more support for warlock builds that are about something lese than eldritchly blasting things.

Part of the problem with the Warlock class is it is built heavily around eldritch blast and related shenanigans. Can you do a Warlock without eldritch blast? Absolutely! But most of the most effective stuff you can do revolves around eldritch blast so you're going to be missing out.

 

[Charlaquin]

I get that the badge makes sense as a magical focus, but why do they work against the undead with specific anti-undead powers?

Why does any cleric not of a god that specifically oppose undead have turn undead? The problem here is with D&D and its weird baggage, not with the Ravnica setting.