Rival Schools?

 

In July 2020, I was lucky enough to be hired as the lead writer for a D&D supplement in which the player characters would be students at a wizard academy. Because a lot of it didn't involve traditional D&D monster-slaying and world-saving, the social game was a big focus. There were also new downtime activities to abstractly handle the actual business of going to school, and each term inevitably involved something going wrong at academy for the PCs to set right. The school had five organizations to which the PCs could belong, each of which came with distinct benefits. Throw in some new spells and magic items, along with an extensive adventure, and buddy, you got yourself a book!

That book was not the recently released Strixhaven: A Curriculum of Chaos. It was, rather, Skullkickers: Caster Bastards and the Great Grotesque, a setting/adventure based on the Skullkickers comic series written by Jim Zub to celebrate its 10th anniversary. But the parallels are notable and interesting to me, so I wanted to do a little compare-and-contrast. By the time previews and leaks from Strixhaven were hitting the Internet, Skullkickers was text-complete, and I've been eager to see how I and our team (E.R.F. Jordan, Clint Cronk, and of course Jim Zub) approached the idea of "D&D in school."

(Plus, Wizards of the Coast were nice enough to send me a review copy of Strixhaven, so it seems only right that I, y'know, attempt to review it.)

On the surface, the two books would seem to have a lot in common, but scratch a little deeper and they're quite distinct. Yes, they both but D&D characters through school, provide students with personality-defining organizations to join, include new social mechanics, and include new downtime activities, spells, and magic items, not to mention statblocks. However, as you could probably guess just from looking at their covers, the tone each sets is drastically different from the other.

Strixhaven takes its cues from the typical American (it seems) university experience, including social clubs and student jobs. In contrast, Skullkickers' Academy of Serious Sorcery and Holistic Occult Learning -- and that acronym only reinforces this difference in tone -- starts with the comic's loosely defined setting and extrapolates a wizard school from that. There are no magic coffee pots or LARPers, not that there's anything wrong with those.

So that's the deal. I'm resurrecting this blog after a nine-year hiatus to make a metaphorical Venn diagram of these two books, starting, I think, with academics. And also tomorrow, I further think. Fingers crossed!