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

 

[Yaarel]

It strikes me that having the two narratives separated makes the most sense, but letting them be Wizards, Sorcerers or Bards or what have you makes it more sensible.

Explain more?

 

[Parmandur]

Looking through the wiki yesterday, it's clear that their plane outside of the school has a lot of cool mysteries, with ancient ruins, a precursor race, mysterious structures that float over the world, etc. A scholarly "go investigate this thing and bring back information to the school" play loop seems to be the likely dominant way of doing things. (As opposed to Redhurst's "there's a conspiracy against the school, and lots of shady professors who actually are good guys to confuse things" set up.)

It feels almost like they set it up for D&D on purpose, frankly.

 

[Parmandur]

Explain more?

Having the Preserver and Defiler as the major stories, but allowing Wizards or Sorcerers to fall under those umbrellas in slightly different ways. Better than Presercer and Defiler Wizadd Subclasses while Sorcerers are all banned, as I hear Mearls speculate he'd want to do back in the day.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

It doesn't mean the Patron can't be an NPC, although you don't need a warlock patron to come up with an antagonist.

It renders the patron NPCs toothless, though.

"How dare you ignore me after all I did for you" is Divorced Dad vs. "if you want to save the world, you'll need to do this super-shady sidequest I need you to do, otherwise you're a commoner with a non-magical sword."

If you're making a deal with a devil, the devil calling in their marker shouldn't be suggestions player characters are free to ignore.

Again, I get that this is trying to avoid the paladin problem, which let jerk DMs needlessly torture old school paladins, who already spent all their time on a tightrope as it was.

But I do think there's something lost, going by Crawford's ruling on this.

(Of course, the best answer is always to not play with a jerk DM, but that situation isn't always clear until two years into a campaign.)

 

[ph0rk]

It renders the patron NPCs toothless, though.

They can still kill the party. That isn't toothless at all.

You don't need the lazy-dm "I'll take your powers" plot device for an NPC to motivate player actions.

Lord Vetinari didn't need to be able to remove anyone's powers to be an effective antagonist - he could order people to remove limbs, life, or liberty.

 

[Parmandur]

It renders the patron NPCs toothless, though.

"How dare you ignore me after all I did for you" is Divorced Dad vs. "if you want to save the world, you'll need to do this super-shady sidequest I need you to do, otherwise you're a commoner with a non-magical sword."

If you're making a deal with a devil, the devil calling in their marker shouldn't be suggestions player characters are free to ignore.

Again, I get that this is trying to avoid the paladin problem, which let jerk DMs needlessly torture old school paladins, who already spent all their time on a tightrope as it was.

But I do think there's something lost, going by Crawford's ruling on this.

(Of course, the best answer is always to not play with a jerk DM, but that situation isn't always clear until two years into a campaign.)

The thing I love about 5E, if I had to put a finger on it, is that the rules support both the Uk'atoa (uk'atoa!) approach, or the Ravnica approach without a single rule being changed. For Ravnica and, apparently, Strixhaven, the role of gods and patrons as default is in the realm of DM ruling and Session Zero expectation setting. And hey, in my Ravnica, I can insert the hypercharged Theros Pantheon and Piety if I feel like it. More tools for the DM to build a world.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

Well, actually, the most religiony of the Guilds, Orzhav, does sort of worship compound interest?

But, yes, Clerics in Ravnica are not really necessarily "religous" at all: they have their Guild Background instead of any PHB one,, and don't need to take Religion as a Skill. They are armored Mages with healing spells, basically, which matches the MtG game fiction. Wizards can easily be Healers in Ravnica, too, depending on their Guild Spells, but without armor or weapons. Guildmasters Guide specifically blurs the spellcaster lines, because they are blurry in MtG as a Setting (primarily about Mana Color, but that can be mixed, and is usually.mixed in Ravnica or Strixhaven).

See, I'd rather they just rebranded the clerics as something else. It does make sense, in-fiction, that healing magic would be a thing. It doesn't need to follow traditional D&D structures, though. (Guild symbol as holy symbol is eye-rollingly stupid.) Again, though, that would have meant more work than they were apparently interested in putting on on clerics.

 

[Parmandur]

See, I'd rather they just rebranded the clerics as something else. It does make sense, in-fiction, that healing magic would be a thing. It doesn't need to follow traditional D&D structures, though. (Guild symbol as holy symbol is eye-rollingly stupid.) Again, though, that would have meant more work than they were apparently interested in putting on on clerics.

Well, it's interesting, I recall Crawford and Wyatt talking in am interview about the process of deciding how they would approach this sort of thing, and they put a lot of work into alternate approaches particularly with Color Wheel metaphysics. They decided to see how little they could change the rules, as a specific decision to see how they could bend the rules around rulings, without adjusting the actual mechanics.

 

[Minigiant]

Maybe it always was... considering the number of Subclass the Wizard got in the PHB compared to say the Barbarian

That's more of a lack of creativity problem. Most D&D fans and designers can imagine and design new magic a lot easier than anything else.

Strixhaven is design easy mode.

 

[Yaarel]

Having the Preserver and Defiler as the major stories, but allowing Wizards or Sorcerers to fall under those umbrellas in slightly different ways. Better than Presercer and Defiler Wizadd Subclasses while Sorcerers are all banned, as I hear Mearls speculate he'd want to do back in the day.

Ah.

I am less sure about how to actualize the Preserver mechanically.

But for the Defiler, I am now of the opinion that it needs to be a level 1 feat. The Defiler feat requires plants to be nearby, and vividly destroys them, in exchange for a free spell slot. The slot level depends on the density of the nearby plants: very rare slot 1, rare 2, uncommon 3, common 4, and lush slot 5.

The reason for a feat is, most other characters will be getting a Psionic Talent feat as their level 1 feat. They will have their own special kind of power. And, a Defiler is less likely to be Psionic, thus less able and less interested in avoiding Defiling.

As a feat, perhaps any arcane class can benefit from it. Maybe even non-arcane spellcasters can utilize the fuel from these plants destroyed by arcane means.