Academics
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| In wizard school, books hit you. |
Let me reiterate right off the bat that the tones of these two schools are drastically different. Strixhaven is a storied, respected, and successful institute of learning, magical and otherwise, attended by beings from across the multiverse. After all, as per the back-cover blurb: "The greatest minds in the multiverse meet at Strixhaven University."
The Academy of Serious Sorcery and Holistic Occult Learning, on the other hand, is practically driven by ulterior motives. Its best days are at least a century behind it, back when magic was more plentiful in the world. These days it's more concerned with keeping up appearances -- and tuition -- than with turning out a new generation of wizards. In the loosely defined setting of the Skullkickers comic series, magic is a rare, dangerous, and distrusted thing. There are any number of reasons someone might enroll at the Academy; "to be a wizard" is only one of them. (F'rinstance, in the comic that inspired the adventure, our protagonists pose as students for heist-pulling purposes.)
I mention all this because I think it's important to keep in mind when looking at their subsystems for handling the "education" part of getting an education. So let's get into it!
Structure and Focus
Strixhaven University offers a four-year course of study, in which students learn a variety of subjects through largely magical means. It's easy to think of Strixhaven as a "magic school," as in a place where people learn magic, but it's literally a magic school, in that not everyone's there to learn magic, but everyone uses magic to learn. Each of the university's five colleges (Lorehold, Prismari, Quandrix, Silverquill, and Witherbloom) has its own focus. In Magic: The Gathering, each college is limited to two opposing colors -- Lorehold is white and red, Witherbloom is black and green, etc. In narrative terms, this means that each college merges two opposing philosophies. The most obvious of these, to me, is Witherbloom, with its studies of life and growth (green) and death and decay (black). The other combos all work and make sense and are good, but Witherbloom is the exemplar, if you ask me.
Strixhaven (the book) emulates all this with four adventures, each of which represents a year of study, that take characters from 1st to 10th level. Most of these take place on campus, because the campus is big enough to basically be a town unto itself. There are excursions off-campus, but they aren't the focus. Each student receives their education through one of the five colleges.
In contrast, the Academy bills itself as a place where, as the headmaster puts it, students "strive to uncover their spellcasting potential." It doesn't put a time limit on this process, though -- instead, students earn something called "Whiffle Sparks" (don't laugh, it's very serious) through their studies and actions. When a student's Whiffle Sparks total is high enough at the end of a semester, passing their exams means they advance a rank, from fledgling to medial to prentice. When a prentice with 99 Whiffle Sparks advances, they go to the Graduate Dungeon under the Academy's tower. If they emerge alive, they graduate! (No one has graduated in about 40 years.)
Skullkickers (the RPG book) is split into three parts, and only in the first of those are the PCs students. Most of that section is meant to be relatively straightforward student life, with semester-long story arcs. Because things go all kinds of wrong in the second and third parts, it was important that the PCs' time as students feel like its own distinct thing. A semester is divided into downtime and story phases and ends with an exam focusing on one of the eight schools of magic. The story phases are where the adventure-type things happen. Replayability was a design priority from the start, so while there are four semester-long story arcs provided, the GM is expected to need only three, and there are also guidelines for creating more. All of this takes place at the Academy.
Both books use milestone leveling, telling you in each section what event triggers advancement. The structure of alternating downtime and adventure time (not that Adventure Time) aren't exactly the same between the two, but they're pretty similar. Obviously, I think that's the best way to do it, since that's the way we did it, and I struggle to think of another way to present a school term in a way that combines the mundanities of school-stuff with the exciting D&D-stuff most players are probably used to.
Curriculum and Exams
How does each book handle the business of actually taking classes? That is, how can you know what class(es) a character takes in a term, and how does that manifest mechanically? What are exams like? Because you know there's gotta be exams!
In Strixhaven, each of the four school-year-long adventures provides a table of courses to either randomly determine which courses the PCs take, or let the players choose. There's also a required course for each year that every PC takes, which provides a convenient justification for giving them a common goal at some point. Exams start with a studying phase, and the exam itself is reflected in the testing phase with a couple relevant ability checks. The exams seem to be pretty hard-coded into each adventure, with guidelines specific to the year's compulsory course. For example, in the first adventure, all the PCs have to take Magical Physiologies, and each of the exams is about a different kind of monster.
There are multiple exams each year/adventure. Studying is optional, but there isn't any opportunity cost or anything for doing so, so there seems to be no reason not to study. Studying involves making an ability check using any ability and skill against a DC established by the exam. On a success, the character gets one reroll in the testing phase. Short and sweet!
Passing your exam nets you one or two Student Dice, expendable dice that can be added as a bonus on a future ability check that includes one or the exam's two skills. They're lost at the end of the year, so don't be afraid of spending them. A character who aced all of their exams for the year sock away as many as six Student Dice, which is pretty significant. Note that they're only for ability checks, not attacks or saves, which makes sense.
The intro adventure (which I playtested -- the truth can now be told!) starts with a scavenger hunt that more or less compels the PCs to explore the campus. It's a good way to orient them and maybe get them involved in some detours. This includes Relationship encounters, but those will have to wait.
In Skullkickers, I really wanted to make more of academics to both emulate the source material (highest priority on a licensed product) and make school feel like an active thing. The interesting twist here is that the source material and the game material were being written concurrently, so we RPG writer-types ended up influencing Jim's story too. Cross-pollination!
The comic shows our heroes, Rex, Rolf, and Kusia, taking classes montage-style, intercut with the story that builds outside of class as the term goes on. To that end, each semester's story is split into three story phases separated by downtime, or meanwhile phases. The meanwhile phases are the montages, while the story phases are where we zoom in on a more conventional level. PCs can pursue lots of different activities during the meanwhile phase, from Studying to Partying.
Every meanwhile activity carries its own rewards, but Studying is the most efficient way to earn those precious Whiffle Sparks every student needs to advance in rank. It also comes with the fewest complications, but no meanwhile activity is free of those. At the end of a meanwhile phase, each player rolls a d20 to determine how many Whiffle Sparks they earned (or lost) in that time. This roll is often modified by the results of their meanwhile activity for that phase, but not always. Sometimes a PC who spends the phase Partying can come out of it smelling like a rose, academically speaking.
The stories of each semester aren't generally academic in nature, but in brief, they're self-contained, extra-curricular adventures that start small (usually) and spin into something bigger. I'll save the details for a future post comparing the two books' on-campus adventures.
Skullkickers provides eight exams, one for each of D&D's schools of magic. These exams are usually the most dangerous portion of the semester, though most of them don't start out that way. The professors of the Academy aren't out to kill their students, but, like... y'know, magic is unpredictable. No refunds. There are no mechanical benefits from passing an exam other than gaining a level.
I almost forgot about the courses. Like Strixhaven, Skullkickers has a random course generator, but because I was the lead writer, it's significantly larger. It also serves as a random school-of-magic or random professor generator. And, uh, it's kinda silly. Here's an eighth of it:
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