Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Sparky McDibben" data-source="post: 9161592" data-attributes="member: 7041430">Thanks! I appreciate folks engaging with the material, so I'm glad it's of use!Sounds like it was pretty awesome!Alright, folks, on to Chapter 5: The Magister's Masquerade! This chapter is all about the character's junior year. They've leveled up to level six at the end of last year, so now they're ready to take on some Tier 2 nonsense! The big focal point of the year is an investigative scenario about how Murgaxor is using a magic item to control one of the college deans. Everything comes to a head at the end of year Magister's Masquerade!So, there are some problems with this setup. First off, the lore and history professor gets snared by a cursed magic item. Did she not know to cast identify? Having a professor get snared to act as Murgaxor's dupe seems implausible, at least the way the adventure has it laid out. I'd either do a secret traitor (a la Quirrell from Harry Potter), or Murgaxor's charmed like thirty students to work for him on campus, spreading his curse. See, the whole point of what Murgaxor's doing is to curse people. The curse itself is mechanically toothless - it can drive people to attack folks around them, and potentially knock cursed targets out. Curiously, the adventure makes the decision to avoid having the PCs get cursed. I suspect this is because they made the curse a little too effective on the NPCs (there's no save), and did not balance it against PC abilities. Personally, I'd want to butch this up a bit. Murgaxor's magic is specifically the life-draining kind. I'd probably have the curse remove spell slots or hit dice from the PCs, then also give Murgaxor some kind of meta currency (like Doom points) that increases whenever the PCs crit on something. This makes it far more consistent with the lore dropped in the last chapter, without the curse removing player agency.At any rate, the adventure introduces the big social set piece at the start of term. The Magister's Masquerade takes place at the end of the year, and is a required school function. Everyone gets a free disguise self charm along with their invite. Weirdly, using the charm outside the Masquerade gets you withdrawn from any extracurriculars (despite the fact that it mimics a 1st level spell that's trivially easy to get hold of). Even weirder, the adventure then expects that PCs will actually dress up, despite the fact that they have an illusory costume they can perfectly control. The whole setup here is just bizarre. The first day back to classes is capped off with a reception at the campus tavern, where PCs are invited to learn about the Masquerade, and that the student committee might ask them to do certain tasks to help with it over the year.  At the end of the reception, someone (the adventure suggests one of the PCs rivals) challenges them to a magical duel in the Furygale Repository. This is a dumping ground for magical art projects, and it's a little nuts. There are statues that can animate and try to kill you, secret doors hidden in the living walls of elemental energy, and all of it is functionally meaningless. The book expects PCs to stand in a spot and cast a bunch of magic at their rival. There's literal X's where you should stand, y'all, I'm not even kidding. God, it's like they didn't even try to make this interesting! You could have had dynamic terrain! Active threats that interrupt the duel! There's so much you can do with this setup! And we get, "stand on an X and cast magic." OOF.Anyone who drops to zero stabilizes and recovers, thus removing the possibility of a Goku-style "I beat you then saved you so now we're friends" moment. At the end of it, the curse intervenes, knocking out four students and causing the last one to panic and summon an oni. There's nothing more to this, the adventure goes out of its way to block further investigation, and it's another Classic Strixhaven "That's Weird" Moment. Reading this book at times makes me want to punch something. The next thing that happens is an actual lecture on ancient relics! You guys! They're finally putting classroom time into this adventure at a magical school! Too bad it starts in junior year. Oh well, better late than never, I suppose. This whole scene is a big flashing sign that "HEY! THERE'S SOMETHING UP WITH THIS TEACHER AND HER WEIRD MAGIC ORB!!!" The teacher in question is Dean Tullus, and the orb is Murgaxor's orb that spreads his curse around. Never mind why a professional educator is showing a group of students an unidentified magic item, or how that might be really dangerous, no, we're just going to have this poor teacher get pwned by the bad guy. After this there's an exam, which thankfully has a higher DC (17!!).  After this, the Dean announces that everyone should dress in a way that honors Strixhaven's history throughout the years. Students can go do some research on this, potentially getting some extra credit on their next exam, and possibly learning some critical context to the mystery for this year, though again the adventure does everything it can to stop the PCs from following up on this. After that, there's a fashion show. The most remarkable thing about this is that it isn't interrupted by a monster attack. After that, there's two literal fetch-quests for the Masquerade committee. The PCs have to go find stuff in the swamp (again? What is it with this swamp?) and move stuff out of the library. This is largely pointless and involves a lot of running into random encounters. The encounters are at least funny, but they're not exactly interesting. The PCs then get their next exam, which have a robust DC 18, but since Dean Tullus (the charmed professor) doesn't show up, the cheating DC is only 12. Add in the potential extra credit from their research earlier, and this should be a walk in the park. After that, the adventure tells the DM that the PCs might want to check up on the Dean! The adventure is finally anticipating probably PC actions! It only took them two adventures to start doing that. Sheesh. Any credit I'd give the adventure for this is quickly neutralized when the adventure advises the DM to "Ultimately, fuel the characters' suspicions, but they shouldn't have a chance to act until the Magister's Masquerade." This is some Dragonlance-level railroading. JFC.After this there are some dance lessons. Nice fodder for the PCs to play matchmaker with any NPCs they care about. The PCs then have to help set up for the big dance. There's a bunch of little problems that interfere, including several cursed students who rampage through the hall, afflicted with the orb's madness as they (in terror) try to fight other students whom they see as monsters. It's quite confusing and not well linked to the Dean Tullus mystery, but it does foreshadow something, so yay! They're trying! The adventure then provides some actual next steps! The problem is that at this point you'll need to point the PCs at the possibility of investigating, because the last two years have been stonewalls. Regardless, the adventure sets up some on-rails investigating, trying to keep the PCs in the dark until it's time for the Big Reveal. While I hate the implementation, at least they're letting players do something, even if the results can't affect much.At this point, the PCs level up to 7th level. There's one more exam, and then we're off the Masquerade! There's a great table of disruptions that could happen to the PCs as everything from a poorly timed rain to their date backing out at the last minute could upset the PCs plans. These would be awesome, except that most of them tie into affecting the PCs attire, which (as we discussed earlier) can be covered over by the disguise self charm. The ball itself has no structure, and no way to further character goals outside of just free-form improv. Free-form improv ain't bad, but I'd prefer something with some more substance (again, see Pendragon). There's a great section where the head of an ancient Lorehold monastic animates and tells everybody to be on their guard, yada, yada, yada. Boy, it would be great if it could tell people what to be on guard against. Finally, it's time for the Big Reveal! Three students get cursed with the "Attack anyone" madness, and start going nuts. Subduing them gives clues that it was actually Dean Tullus all along!I know, I know. I had to really sit with it for a minute, too. Not like the adventure's been hamhandedly signaling this for the last 20 pages or anything.The PCs follow Tullus, potentially rob a bunch of teachers' offices, and then cheerfully beat the snot out of the Dean. Huzzah. After that, Murgaxor's orb reveals his projected form, and he taunts the heroes with...absolutely nothing useful. Also huzzah. The PCs break the orb, and that's it. Everyone levels up to 8th level. This feels empty to me - the PCs only interact with the villain once? C'mon, y'all. Put that villain in front of the PCs early and often and let it impact the campaign. This chapter came the closest for me of fulfilling the promise of the book. There was a campus investigation, social stakes, and some drama. For me, the weird railroaded nature of the investigation significantly undercut the stakes of the game with hand-holdy BS. Look, either let me solve it on my own (with proper support), or let me fail to solve it and watch evil influence keep spreading. But aside from that, this is what I figured chapter 3 should have been. This chapter, with better execution, is the starting point - so it does not speak well that it took two whole chapters to reach that mark and then botched the implementation. Alright folks! Next time we're going to circle back with Chapter 6: A Reckoning In Ruins!</blockquote>

Verification