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]

It states in the document that not all members of a particular college have to choose the subclass. So, there certainly can be Prismari bards, just not with the Mage of Prismari subclass.

What's the harm in making it available to bards, though? Yes, there's a bit of a trap in that it wouldn't be optimal for bards as is, but if there are other ways to add elemental spells to their line-up, either within the subclass or without, why not do it?

I mean, depending on who you ask, we already have whole trap classes.

 

[Tonguez]

This is I’ve disliked about the recent design trend in the game, a filing away of the various silos in which a player keeps the large design chunks of their character. D&D has always been built largely on the engine of “get your Ability Scores, pick your Race, pick your Class,” with those determining in large the mechanical structure of the character by mixing and matching collections of gathered options. The introduction of Proficiencies, Feats, Skills, and such have helped add edge options, but your Elven Fighter was still mainly built around the things determined for an Elf and a Fighter. Even Kits or Subclasses were largely a way of adding more class choices that happened to just be very similar to other choices (while still giving you a set template). Whether that was good or bad, that’s been D&D for fifty years, and (along with the level system this was all built around) differentiated it from other games like Rolemaster, GURPS, World of Darkness, or the explosion on small modern systems.

Starting with removing Race as a real determinant for the character build (without the initial Ability Score changes, Race/Lineage becomes more of a feat package of sorts), the current generation of designers — influenced by other sorts of games — is apparently now making Class very DIY. I’m not a power-gamer/build sort of guy, and I wouldn’t really consider myself a grognard (as much as I grew up reading and rereading Gygax’s 1st edition DMG), but I’ve always liked how D&D (even when it batted for the fences with 4e) remained unabashedly itself in structure; lose that structure, you lose the game and all you have is a brand. That’s not to say the things being done here aren’t fascinating (change often is; I remain convinced that the 4e engine should be built into a new Chainmail war game, for example), but it strikes me as going too far in ways that aren’t foreseen.

I know that making this argument isn’t popular and I’ll probably be disparaged in numerous slights against my alleged beliefs for doing so, but someone had to introduce the point where a lot of us are: the game-structure, if for the best of cultural intentions, is being shifted in a way that is going to potentially cause certain chaos as the old question of “What is D&D?” comes back to the fore, albeit with new aspersions to cast on those disagreeing with the new game.

Heh, yeah after going through the van Richten book I actually commented that things were starting to look like 3.5e again. Afterall lineages, gifts, proficiencies etc are essentially Feats and subclasses work as class-based Feat Trees.

I like 3.5e btw

 

[Parmandur]

What's the harm in making it available to bards, though? Yes, there's a bit of a trap in that it wouldn't be optimal for bards as is, but if there are other ways to add elemental spells to their line-up, either within the subclass or without, why not do it?

I mean, depending on who you ask, we already have whole trap classes.

The really weird one to me is that Quandrix doesn't apply to Druids, since Druids and Wizards already have an exact overlap with Subclass structure.

The more I think about Prismari Bards, though, I think we'll see the book recommend any Bard for Prismari, and new Spells will really sell the flavor.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

No game will last twenty years.

My campaign has been running since 2006 and has several years ahead of it before we reach the expected conclusion.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

The other big thing I think is missing, other than certain classes having access to certain of these subclasses, is inklings. They're all over the Silverquill artwork. I guess they're probably going to be summoned via spells, but that means they're a choice that will often get skipped in favor of other class spells. I'd have liked to have seen them summoned as an ability, as they appear to be at least as central to the house identity as Lorehold's walking talking statues.

Also, I assume Lorehold's house is basically a statue garden and gallery, with statues never back where you last saw them.

 

[Parmandur]

The other big thing I think is missing, other than certain classes having access to certain of these subclasses, is inklings. They're all over the Silverquill artwork. I guess they're probably going to be summoned via spells, but that means they're a choice that will often get skipped in favor of other class spells. I'd have liked to have seen them summoned as an ability, as they appear to be at least as central to the house identity as Lorehold's walking talking statues.

Also, I assume Lorehold's house is basically a statue garden and gallery, with statues never back where you last saw them.

No mention of Inklings, Elementals, Fractals or Pests, yes. This makes me think they will be elsewhere in the book, in some capacity. Fractal Spells could be pretty radical, in particular. Been hit pretty hard by those a few times on Arena...

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

No mention of Inklings, Elementals, Fractals or Pests, yes. This makes me think they will be elsewhere in the book, in some capacity. Fractal Spells could be pretty radical, in particular. Been hit pretty hard by those a few times on Arena...

I don't play MTG, so I didn't realize there were multiple affiliated creatures. My guess is they'll be part of a Magical Gift or feat or something, then, maybe both.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

People have been wondering what might be changed in a hypothetical 5.5 edition. I think this might be one of those changes. I can definitely see them doing this with some martial classes as well.

I thought this as well. Some interesting bits that come to mind:

1. Though "PB uses, regained with long rest" has largely replaced the short-rest-recharge mechanic, using short rests has NOT been completely excised like some were suggesting. Some features let you realign your focus or otherwise adapt, and there's no evidence they intend to shift the Warlock to being long-rest-based. I'm assuming this is their way of mostly solving the "too few short rests" problem, but that they will continue to iterate on it up until an official 5.5e-equivalent.

2. They're getting bolder and more flexible in a LOT of ways. I was...leery about the idea of poly-class subclasses, but these seem to be done pretty well. Not perfectly, but not nearly as bad as I feared. It's...not easy for me to say this, because in general I'm VERY critical of the poly-class subclass concept...but I have to admit when I see it done reasonably well. The Lorehold companion is an excellent demonstration of how to integrate a strong, useful companion without making it overpowered, at least at first blush. Etc. This gives me hope that an eventual 5.5e might actually get over its forebear's intense dislike of doing anything that looks remotely like 4e.

3. Spells that don't count against your spells known. That's pretty huge, since they explicitly shied away from that choice back when people got upset over the playtest Storm Sorcerers being stronger than other Sorcs by way of bonus spells. At the time, their excuse was (effectively) "wow okay we get it, this is a power bump and that would devalue older options...but we cannot do large-scale errata sooooo...we'll just nix that feature!" Which kinda fell flat at the time and remained a sore spot for Sorc fans. Honestly to me this is the strongest evidence yet that we actually WILL get a 5.5e-equivalent somewhere along the line, because it represents an explicit turnaround on a policy...that can only be fairly applied to older classes if they do large-scale errata or full-on rewrites of core, PHB options.

So yeah. I'm still not sure how to feel about the fact that these options ACTUALLY excite me, just a little. As a major major 4e fan, I've long felt snubbed by 5e, and this...almost kind-of vaguely sorta suggests potentially they might consider thinking about walking back parts of 5e that felt so exclusionary to my preferences and interests.

 

[darjr]

Wait, is this the first time WotC has gone to this extent to modify the rules to match a Magic setting?

 

[Parmandur]

I don't play MTG, so I didn't realize there were multiple affiliated creatures. My guess is they'll be part of a Magical Gift or feat or something, then, maybe both.

Each Collwge has an emblematic Cresture type that gets used constantly in Tokens (a game item that is not a card in the deck, but gets generated and modified by actual cards: Silverwuill decks don'tplay Inkling Cards, but Silverquill cards generate Inkling Tokens or do things with or to those tokens): only Spirits for Lorehold show up in these Subclasses.