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]

The Bard can do all of the witch tropes, no?

Because I want an actual witch in my games.

Agree totally. Bard is great for witch, especially if Nordic or Scot.

But if going for a devilish flavor, probably Warlock.

 

[Weiley31]

I’d say it’s the player who only uses the Warlock as a magic-flavored archer who’s missing out.

I jokingly say to myself that the Eldritch Blasting Warlock makes a better Arcane Archer than the actual 5E Arcane Archer subclass. to the point where I say that a reasonable house rule for it would be that the Arcane Archer gets it's own version of Eldritch Blaster+Agonizing Blast or just homebrew the spell to them and let the DM handout a Magic Bow that gives the Agonizing Blast Invocation+their choice of casting stat to key off it.

 

[Parmandur]

I guess. I keep asking for explanations on how Ravnica clerics make sense and keep getting told the equivalent of "because." Maybe it's just me, but I suspect I'm not alone on this hill.

I won't disagree that 5E clerics are a big step backwards from 2E and 3E, when they had a lot more flavor and clerics of different faiths were much more distinct from one another.

In the card game, Clerics are simply White Mana using Mages, with the aesthetic and artistic short hand of, frankly, the Catholic Church as filtered by 90's Renn Faire. Now, 5E Vlerics actually cover more tropal space than MtG Clerics, so they include that sort of White Mage but also things like War Clerics or Tempest Clerics. It's a bit of a kludge, but treating Clerics as armored Wizards who get certain Spells works for the Setting.

 

[Xohar17]

I

The really weird one to me is that Whithervloom 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.

Think bards are better suited to silverquill to be honest.

 

[Charlaquin]

The other popular warlock build is the hexblade. Also not very witchy.

I'm not saying they didn't build a few witchy things into warlock when they made the class. But it is still very much a development of the 3.5E class, which was not supposed to be very witchy.

Hexblade is just a warlock subclass, not a build. There are many ways to build a Hexblade - as many as there are to build a Fiend warlock or a Great Old One Warlock. Warlocks are dripping with witchy flavor and can be used to make a wide variety of different witch characters. You don’t have to use the cookie cutter builds, there are tons of other, perfectly viable approaches.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

Sorcerers, who channel the power of the bloodline, should have been Constitution casters. Expressing that inner magic should be physically taxing!

That would also line up with some spellcasters in fiction who get exhausted by magic use and can even ruin their health doing it. Then you could have things like a blood mage sorcerer subclass that turns hit points into spell levels on the fly, which is a fun mechanic a lot of CRPGs use and which brings a meaningful tactical choice to the D&D table.

 

[Weiley31]

If I recall correctly, didn't DND, in like the really early editions, have basically the Wiccan as a class or something? I recall one of the reasonings why that still isn't around is cuz actual Wiccans weren't too thrilled about it, especially during the time of the whole Satan Pact saga of DND's history.

 

[Xohar17]

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.

There is one mascot for every house, whiterbloom has pests, silverquill inklings, lorehold spirit statues, prismati elementals, and quandrix fractals.

 

[Faolyn]

I think that's definitely a worthwhile way to do it. I was surprised, coming from 3E, to see that specialists no longer had banned subschools, either pre-defined (2E) or chosen by the player (3E).

"Everyone casts everything" is a problem. Either they shouldn't be able to get all the spells or specialists should be straight-up better with their subschool than everyone else. (Again, see my idea of enchanters being able to charm with fewer repercussions.)

What I would do is: give as many spells as possible upcasting ability (even those that don't do damage), and say that you can automatically upcast spells from your school.

Technically, enchanters can charm with fewer repercussions... once they hit 14th level.

 

[Cadence]

Scryfall lets one search the MtG cards for the various Strixhaven colleges by watermark. Below are the searches for creatures. Remove the type:creature in the search box to get all of the cards associated with the school:

Lorehold wm:lorehold type:creature
Prismari wm:prismari type:creature
Quandrix wm:quandrix type:creature
Silverquill wm:silverquill type:creature
Witherbloom wm:witherbloom type:creature


Here are the ones to get from the set by the five MtG spell casting classes, that are primarily color based* (followed by MtG story usage) and not particularly DnD fluff related:

Cleric (White primary): set:stx type:cleric
Wizard (Blue primary): set:stx type:wizard
Warlock (Black primary): set:stx type:warlock
Shaman (Red primary): set:stx type:shaman
Druid (Green primary): set:stx type:druid

*