Strixhaven: A Curriculum of Chaos - First Party Review (2024)

Throne of Glass is a YA novel by Sarah J Maas, in which a teenaged assassin is offered commutation if she will serve as the crown's personal killer. The only catch? She's got to exceed everyone else in the running for the job.

So there I was, one rainy day in the Barnes & Ignoble, and I'm looking for something to read for a couple of hours while my car's being fixed (this was back before I had kids and still had time to do stuff like burn two hours in a bookstore). So I pick up Throne, read the blurb and think, "Well this sounds great! Kickass hijinks, high action, and since it's YA, there's probably a neat romance angle in there too." I sat down, read it, and concluded that it was not for me. The promised action was quickly subsumed by the POV character forming a book club, getting into a love triangle, and discussing the myriad ways in which menstruation makes assassin training not fun (I empathize; that sounds naughty word). So I chalked it up to a divide between the author's vision and the marketing team's angle, and put the book down. But I frequently think back to it as a textbook example of how not to market a product.

I tell y'all this so you'll know how I usually deal with media that disappoint me - I just put them down and walk away. Strixhaven falls into a different category, that of "Products That Actively Piss Me Off," for reasons we'll discuss at the end.

Strixhaven: A Curriculum of Chaos is the third (and so far, final) Magic: The Gathering setting released in a D&D supplement. It released 12/21 in the US for $49.95. I was excited as hell for this; I put it on pre-order for my Christmas gift that year. Theros had been excellent in helping realize divine beings' role in a campaign. Ravnica was genuinely revolutionary and helped usher in no fewer than six intrigue campaigns in my personal knock-off city. So getting a Magic setting for a magical school? Oh buddy, I was over the moon.

And then I sat down to read it and just...felt all of that excitement drain out of me. Strixhaven isn't just poorly designed and written. It's actively subversive to the characters making meaningful choices, which is the whole experience I am seeking in an RPG.

So in this review, I am going to go through Strixhaven and we're going to see what I mean. I'm going to take this chapter by chapter, and we'll discuss the various ways it removes agency, dismisses player choice, and fails to consider practically even the most obvious player actions (thereby setting the DM up to fail). At the same time, we're going to discuss what Strixhaven gets right, because there are some things it does very well, and that I think can be ported over and learned from. At the end, I want to take everything here and discuss how I would run a magical school campaign, how we can use Strixhaven's materials to make it more interesting, and what we can do to have some more fun with this material. As always, if you like Strixhaven and this is your absolute jam, this is not any attack on you. My tastes differ from yours, and I'm just offering my opinion on the work.

Things I will not be covering:

• Anything not in the book; if you've got developer interviews, live-plays that "prove it can be fun," etc., go ahead and post them, but I'm not factoring that into my analysis here
• The impact of any of the spells / magic items / backgrounds outside of the Strixhaven setting

One thing I want to clear up: Strixhaven ain't Harry Potter. Strixhaven also ain't an adventuring academy. Strixhaven is very clearly dealing with adult or near-adult students, in the context of the American higher-education system. No, not the one we actually have, but some kind of utopian made-up one that only exists in John Hughes' fever dreams. For example, you could reasonably expect stories set in higher education to deal with / comment on:

• Student inequality on campus (wealth, race, gender, ableist, etc)
• The predatory nature of student lending
• The exploitative nature of student athletics
• The frequently brutal nature of faculty politics, assignments, and perquisites
• How underfunding the education system places students and educators at risk
• The risks imposed by censorship or political control over curricula
• The benefits provided by higher education, including the specific case for studying the humanities

If you thought Strixhaven was going to deal with any of these, congratulations! You have thought more about this book than the developers did. Strixhaven instead deals with the more pressing matters of frog racing, steam mephits harassing kitchen staff, and magical sports. Now, if you were worried there might be some stakes to any of this, don't be! If anyone falls unconscious, a faculty member shows up, deals with the problem, heals the PCs, and tells them, "Better luck next time, champ." Did you want to treat social stakes seriously and wonder if your character might be expelled for misbehavior? Nope! It never comes up. Wondering how your PC will afford tuition at this elite university? Well, don't! There's no map for the bursar's office, and it's never ever described how anyone pays for college.

Are you also wondering how they square the circle of having an Edenic, safe, respectful college while also having opportunities to adventure? Please stop. The adventure mostly handwaves this concern with, "The teachers are caught out of position to stop the threat; only the PCs can help!" This, of course, raises two questions in my mind. 1) How often does this happen? Are there just mounds of dead students not coming back from field trips? 2) How do these poor teachers not all have PTSD? If they're busy trying (and failing) to save students, how do they deal with the stress? God I bet alcoholism is secretly rampant here!

This is why the "It's low stakes! Don't overthink it!" argument fails to move me. It's not "low-stakes" it's a complete lack of stakes.

So let's GET STARTED ON STRIXHAVEN!!!!! All aboard the Strixhaven Express, the railroad the book never mentions but you should definitely put in!

Strixhaven retails for $27.99 on Amazon, but $49.99 from Wizards of the Coast. It details a magical school, Strixhaven University, where students use magic to enhance their studies. The vibe they're going for here seems to be somewhere between "utopian" and "Edenic." The students never need to worry about tuition, never need to refill their meal plan, and there's an occasional owlbear rampage but the teachers deal with it. This might be going for lighthearted, low-stakes storytelling, but the text functionally offers no stakes the PCs need to be worried about.

Strixhaven is governed by five different magic colleges. Lorehold is mostly concerned with history, Prismari with art, Quandrix with math, Silverquill with social sciences, and Witherbloom with life sciences. All five adjoin the central campus, with all five being on separate demiplanes linked to the main campus in the middle. Each college was founded by a dragon who embodies the tensions within each college that produce magic itself. So within Witherbloom, magic is produced by the tension between life and death, and only a true master can fully understand both. The idea of magic as a dialectic is genuinely interesting worldbuilding! Honestly, I wish it went somewhere, but it's mostly just ignored for the rest of the book.

After that, we get into Chapter 1: Life on Campus. This 20-page chapter leads off with a quick discussion of how students chart their courses of study. Each student gets two faculty members who coach them in the nuances of that particular college, helping those students decide which part of the false dichotomy of the college to engage with. So in Prismari, you might have one professor who encourages you to refine your technical skill (Perfection) and another who encourages you to view life itself as a canvas you can paint on (Expression). How does this inform class selection? Don't know. The book literally never makes any of this concrete. A lot of this is walls of text that could be safely cut without risk. There's literally a section on what an instructor is.

The main campus is detailed in a few pages, including the professor emeritus' house, the local café, library, etc. This is all thumbnail sketches, with notes that "This location comes up in Chapter X." So if you want the map for the Firejolt Café, it's located in the encounter about frog-racing. Hope you like bookmarking.

After that, each college is detailed in a three-page spread. Each college has the conflicts within it detailed pretty thoroughly. Each college also has five faculty described, though it's never really identified why a dean would interact with undergrads that extensively. Each campus also has some key areas get roughly described, and then we're on to the next college. This is good information to know, but none of it keys into an adventure, or an encounter, or really anything I can use to put in front of my players:

Like, that's good to know that the Lorehold campus has this massive row of effigies you can walk into, but what the hell do I do with that to create an adventure? Where, in fact, is the adventure in this book? It's full of happy, well-adjusted people having fun! That's awesome! It's also kinda boring. There's nothing to do; no adventure to be had. By this point in Ravnica I had at least three characters I wanted to play. In Theros I was gobsmacked by how much my gods were leaving on the table when they've been interacting with PCs. Here? I got nothing.

The phrase I most associate with Strixhaven is "missed opportunity." They really could have made this book shine. I mourn what could have been; but that's it for tonight, y'all. Tomorrow, Sparky's gotta go do some BUDGETING!!!

Next time, folks, tune it to discuss Chapter 2: Character Options!