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

 

[Parmandur]

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

Both Ravnica and Theros did a bunch of wild stuff that broke the mold, like Supernatural Gifts and Piety powers for Theros or the Baclgrounds in Ravnica. But this might be the single boldest rule experiment since...2014.

 

[Maxperson]

Now all the Bards, Warlocks, AND Wizards(except Bladesinger for obvious reasons) can enjoy that benefit without having to deal with elves......or Fey'ri...or whatever else would teach Bladesong.

Except you Valor Bard.............your not cool enough.

But Eldritch Blast/Agonizing Blast Warlocks hit the jackpot with this one!

You could have just left out Valor and changed nothing.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

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.

I wonder if they'll have restricted spell lists by house. Or maybe Strixhaven spells that include "summons house creature" as an additional effect of spells.

Alternately, "randomly summon house creature" could be a Magic Gift that makes them appear when other spellcasting is going on as a bonus.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

You could have just left out Valor and changed nothing.

True of 5th edition generally.

 

[Charlaquin]

I guess I just cannot agree with defining a new edition or half edition or whatever as anything less than rewriting the existing classes and saying, use one or the other but not both. I never saw a single game that used Essentials but didn't allow the rest of 4e. Essentials was just part of 4e, especially in hindsight, IMO. After essentials came more content of both types, and stuff influenced by the entirety of 4e. To me it's absurd to think of Essentials as being in any way separate from 4e.

I ran Essentials-only 4e a couple of times. Worked way better than allowing both (as did no-Essentials 4e). Yes, Essentials was fully compatible with 5e, but the game was much more cohesive with one class design philosophy or the other. Trying to combine them was just awkward.

Also, part of the reason they were compatible with one another was the liberal use of errata in 4e. If you tried to use Essentials and the original 4e core books together without any errata it would be a huge mess. Given WotC’s hesitancy to use errata this edition, I think a change on the scale of 4e to Essentials would kind of have to be a 5.5e (though I’m sure they wouldn’t call it that.)

 

[Parmandur]

I wonder if they'll have restricted spell lists by house. Or maybe Strixhaven spells that include "summons house creature" as an additional effect of spells.

Alternately, "randomly summon house creature" could be a Magic Gift that makes them appear when other spellcasting is going on as a bonus.

Well, Ravnica already had Guild Spell Lists that superceded the PHB Class lists, so Clerics or Wizards from the same Guild would have more in common than Wizards from different Guilds, in Spell selection terms.

 

[Ath-kethin]

Which I always viewed 5E's Subclasses as a modern take on 2E's original Kit system. So this is also another interesting take on it.

The problem with that progression is that kits could be taken by multiple different character types/classes, whereas subclasses are class-specific (at least until now). A big problem I've had with many 5e designers is their instinct to turn every option into a subclass - which limits said concepts to specific classes only (again, until now).

It's a big part of why we brought Kits back for 5e - we needed a design step between subclasses and backgrounds, so the archetype could be taken by anyone who wanted it instead of it only applying to specific classes.

Subclasses available to multiple classes could do the same thing, but since not every class gets its subclasses and class features art he same time that idea is really tricky to implement. We'll see how it goes.

 

[Maxperson]

Is it just me, or do these schools of magic sound a little Harry Potter-esque (at least the names)?

I've heard the MTG set this is patterned after referred to as, "Harry Potter meet Magic the Gathering."

 

[Maxperson]

10 points for Witherbloom!

DM: Okay guys, what do you do?
Player 1: I shout Fireballiarmus! And then I blast them with fire.
DM: Okay. Player 2, what about you?
Player 2: I shout Radicchio!
DM: That's a vegetable.
Player 2: Well, I'm hungry. Lunch was supposed to be an hour ago.
DM: ...

 

[Parmandur]

Just as an example, this is what Ravnica did, in addition to a couple new Subclasses, they recommended which existing Subclasses would fit where.in the Guild structure, and each Guild got a supplement of Spells known and narrative modification to Spell effects: