Strixhaven: A Curriculum of Chaos - First Party Review

[bedir than]

Oh, I see the misunderstanding. I wasn't asking WotC to rewrite the lore. I was asking them to come up with more interesting monster abilities for their casters. I offered one example that apparently didn't fit the lore, despite the fact that both the lore and the ability support summoning a bunch of ghost-warriors to fight.

The lore doesn't do that.

Lorehold fight with artifacts.

 

[Libertad]

Is there anything explicitly saying that they can't fight in other ways than using artifacts? I mean, by using the traditional D&D magic system instead of the elemental colors, MtG 5e settings are already breaking the lore in another way. At some point something has to give in the conversion process.

Of course, I say this as someone who doesn't keep up religiously with Magic: the Gathering. Spellcasters being super-limited in how they can fight based on their colleges may be that world's equivalent of "Middle-Earth has elves, dwarves, and hobbits" being an important piece of lore fans cling to. Important enough to keep that changing it will "destroy the brand," as you said. But with how Strixhaven has been portrayed in WotC promotions (and it being just as new a setting addition to MtG as D&D) I don't get the feeling that its mages are so restricted.

 

[Necropolitan]

Lorehold summons spirits to fight.

They do often bind them into statues to do so, but both the lore and the cards show them summoning spirits for combat and it's not just artifacts. In fact the spirit tokens Lorehold cards create are nonartifact creatures, not artifact creatures.

Plus the Lorehold cards have abilities that transform creatures that die or have died into Spirits that are put onto the battlefield.

Lorehold

Lorehold is the College of Archaeomancy at Strixhaven University on the plane of Arcavios. It is aligned and uses Spirits as mascots. The founder of the college is the elder dragon Velomachus Lorehold.[1] Loreholds are diligent researchers and daring adventurers. Passionate scholars obsessed...

mtg.fandom.com

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

This thread has definitely made me reconsider whether I'll ever actually run this, rather than just update Redhurst or homebrew my own school of magic.

I think my copy of this will be included next time I sell used books to Noble Knight.

 

[Henadic Theologian]

I think one of the biggest problems with Strixhaven is, that it uses pure D&D 5e. Outside of spells and invocations, 5e doesn’t have mechanics for learning things.
The whole Skillsystem with a unified Proficiency-Bonus is also not really useful if you want to simulate Students to learn something.

Like any magic school setting/adventure would ne a complete new subsystem about Learning stuff.

And I don't know if that could be done with 5e without twisting it into something completely different.
I bought the strixhaven book and thr lack of any "how to run a class" and "how to have students actually learn" things was just painful.

Like, for a Wizard (and maybe Warcraft for non-Casterz) academy/school to work, we perhaps need to start at a level 0.
We would need to start with a lower standard array (13, 12, 11, 10, 8, 6) and have Students actually do classes and training and studying to improve the attributes over the next 4 years while they also gain class levels.
We would need a system to track training/learning progress. We need a system for training and learning.
Like (just a simple system I just made up) a school semester has 20 weeks (+Holidays) and you pick every week where you will focus your training on am attribute and one skill. If you train an attribute for a number of weeks equal to the attribute score (like if your Strength score is 6, you need to train 6 weeks) to have a good chance to increase it to 7. The same with skills. Maybe we need to introduce more granular Proficiency steps, to simulate the learning experience. Like 0,5 (half Proficiency), 1 (normal Proficiency), 1,5x profiency and 2x (expertise) and you need to train and study to increase your skills. The same with weapon and armor proficencies and spell casting.
So let's say per semester you will gain a level. You start at level 0. You have 20 weeks per semester. Every week you can focus on up to 3 things - study, friends, student job, extra curricular activities...
And now you have to make decisions. You can go full on studying and training in one attribute or skill or ability, but than you have no friends and no money ... you can go to parties to increase train your charisma, but you could get hangover and study worse and so on.
You are know making decisions on how to gradually build your character.

That is something you would need for a magical school setting. Like, if you don't have rules for learning, studying and getting better, what is the point of a magical school setting?

What about experience points?

 

[bedir than]

Lorehold summons spirits to fight.

They do often bind them into statues to do so, but both the lore and the cards show them summoning spirits for combat and it's not just artifacts. In fact the spirit tokens Lorehold cards create are nonartifact creatures, not artifact creatures.

Plus the Lorehold cards have abilities that transform creatures that die or have died into Spirits that are put onto the battlefield.

Lorehold

Lorehold is the College of Archaeomancy at Strixhaven University on the plane of Arcavios. It is aligned and uses Spirits as mascots. The founder of the college is the elder dragon Velomachus Lorehold.[1] Loreholds are diligent researchers and daring adventurers. Passionate scholars obsessed...

mtg.fandom.com

"binding them into statues" is not the creation of a swarm of wraiths

Those are significantly different lore elements

 

[Necropolitan]

"binding them into statues" is not the creation of a swarm of wraiths

Those are significantly different lore elements

You said Lorehold only uses artifacts.

The spirits aren't artifact cards in the card game so I don't see why they'd need to use construct stats in 5E.
Celestial or Undead would make more sense.

 

[bedir than]

You said Lorehold only uses artifacts.

The spirits aren't artifact cards in the card game so I don't see why they'd need to use construct stats in 5E.
Celestial or Undead would make more sense.

Yes, there is a single spirit card.
No, that doesn't mean that they summon a swarm of wraiths. The MtG token spirits are as weak as skeletons.

Arguing that the senior Lorehold instructors should primarily summon wraiths is like insisting that soccer is mostly played by heading the ball.

Could the abilities of the high CR school leadership have invoked more of their card abilities? Absolutely!!!
Should it be wraiths - no

 

[Necropolitan]

Arguing that the senior Lorehold instructors should primarily summon wraiths is like insisting that soccer is mostly played by heading the ball.

Nobody said that, a swarm of wraiths was given as an example of a power, you're moving the goalposts.

And the MtG spirit tokens (3/2) are 3 times as powerful and twice as tough as a normal human or an undead skeleton (1/1), they're not "weak as skeletons."

 

[bedir than]

Nobody said that, a swarm of wraiths was given as an example of a power, you're moving the goalposts.

My objection from the first moment was the concepts of wraiths.