Student Life
Hey, but what about all the other stuff you do at school as a student that doesn't involve relationship drama or actually getting an education? I'm talking about the stuff a college puts in its recruiting brochure to convince graduating high-schoolers that it's a "cool place to be!" -- that hazy melange of social activities that adults think of when they look back on their college years.
I think the difference in tone between Strixhaven:ACoC and Skullkickers:CBatGG is worth repeating here, because it has a huge effect on the limits of "student life" at each of these institutes of higher learning. One of the first things Strixhaven tells you about the place is that "It's Cosmopolitan." It attracts students and faculty from across the M:TG multiverse, all of them "united by a desire to learn." Pretty classy!
In contrast, while the Academy is a highly esteemed school to the wealthy families that send their progeny there to increase their own status in polite society, to everyone else it's... something else. It's a place to drop off the village kook that's making everyone uncomfortable. It's a tower of riches waiting to be plundered. It's a weirdness magnet that draws the lost to itself. So there are all kinds of reasons someone might come to the Academy, and not all of them involve learning magic, or much of anything at all.
Plus, Strixhaven University is located on a world called Arcavios by default, but the book also suggests it could be placed in Planescape's Sigil or "in an interplanar nexus." The Academy is located in the remote Tower of Magyle, many miles from the nearest settlement where it can't cause any trouble.
With that out of the way, let's compare how each book handles student life through mechanics. Clearly, these two very different schools are going to have very different versions of student life -- or are they? (They are.)
Students at Strixhaven can participate in Extracurriculars, which are essentially clubs, and have Jobs, which are, uh... jobs. Each of them can confer certain benefits and, narratively, require some of a PC's downtime, if not time-time. Uptime? We never talk about uptime. Anyway.
Extracurriculars feel very contemporary in that way that both M:TG and D&D sometimes do. I mean, theoretically, D&D is some sort of cross between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance in terms of technology, but then there's, like, steampunky artificers and magictech stuff. Strixhaven takes this even further with its LARPing club and intra-mural sports. A PC can join two clubs at the start of a given academic year (or one plus a Job), and gets a d4 Student Die to spend when using either of the club's two skills.
(BTW, is it me, or does are they capitalizing a lot more terms than they used to?)
Jobs are similar, but replace the Student Dice with gold. Also similar between the two is how they interact with the relationship mechanics -- every year (I think?) a PC can gain a positive or negative Relationship Point from an Extracurricular or Job. I say "I think" because the actual wording is "participate in an Extracurricular" and "works a Job," which could possibly be interpreted as when the character actually does that thing in a scene as opposed to right off the bat. You can only gain each benefit from an Extracurricular or Job once per term, so there's that limiter in either case.
Other than that, it looks to me like most other stuff that'd fall under the heading of "student life" is either part of the adventures (because they involve a lot of fun activities I'd put under that header) or implicit in a student's college of choice. I mean, just look at this star-studded video intro to the five colleges and tell me it's not saying something about how their students spend their free time!
Fun-ish fact: The stories in Skullkickers -- that is, the adventures set in the Academy during the first third of the over-arching adventure -- were originally called extracurriculars, but I eventually changed it because I didn't think it accurately described them.
Anyway, Skullkickers' Academy isn't quite so modern as Strixhaven. I referenced this in an earlier post when I said there were no LARPers or magic coffee pots (although we came close on the latter!). There are no clubs (well, sorta), and the students' only "job" is their studies. Student-life stuff is largely comprised of downtime activities and the cabals.
The cabals are five student organizations that date back "centuries," according to the text. Each was founded by a prominent student (compare with each of Strixhaven's colleges being founded by a dragon) and takes a certain animal as its symbol and namesake. You can see them in the picture above, but in case you can't, but they're Wolf, Eagle, Stag, Lion, and, um, Duck. The founders had some pretty high ideals, but those have been watered down or subverted in the years since, and now they're more or less fraternities with different philosophies and focuses.
For example, Wolves are all about advancement and power, often through less-than-savory means, while Stags, like Strixhaven's Prismari, are the theater kids. Whatever a cabal is about, it provides a different benefit at each student rank. The big one is a new downtime activity for medial students specific to the cabal's aims. The Wolf cabal grants the Skullduggery activity, the Eagle cabal gives access to the Do-Gooding activity, Ducks get the Fowl Ritual, and so on. These can provide greater benefits than the general downtime activities available to everyone, and often with less-severe complications. The upshot is that as fledglings, most PCs will be pursuing the same goals, but as medials, each brings something special to the table.
Joining a cabal isn't mandatory, though, so for everyone else -- like the protagonists of the source material -- there's the Iconoclasts, a non-cabal cabal. Iconoclasts get their own downtime activity called Rocking the Boat, and can engage in one additional downtime activity each semester, since they don't have a cabal making demands on their free time.
Those downtime activities are the other place where student life happens, whether Partying, Snooping, or Bootlicking. The complications and/or benefits that come from these are frequently social in nature and feed into a PC's Popularity total, which in turn can affect the action in the story or exam phases.
Dorms and Getting Around
One non-mechanical thing I wanted to mention that I think belongs here is the physical spaces of Strixhaven and the Academy, because they're very different and imply even more stuff about student life. Every Strixhaven college has its own dormitory, and starting in a student's second year, they're expected to live there. The colleges are spread out in something like a five-pointed star around the Biblioplex, the center of campus life, and have their own architectural styles and subcultures.
In contrast, all of the Academy's students stay in the same dorms, located here:
That brings me to how students get around. Both schools have teleportation circles, but only Strixhaven's actually work (although they're only used by the faculty and a handful of students, and even then can be unpredictable). Strixhaven:ACoC also has carriages that run between colleges like a campus shuttle. The Academy has a sort of magical elevator, but otherwise it's very... vertical. The primary way to get from one floor to another is via the 700-foot staircase that wraps around the tower's core.
The big thing I wanted to mention I now can't find in the book, but it's this: Things like stairways and ramps on campus magically adjust themselves to accommodate differently abled students. I like that, and wish we'd thought to include something like it. I mean, there are some ramps, and the teleportation circles and elevator-thing I mentioned earlier, but that's about it. The lower-magic setting makes true accommodations harder to pull off, given the prevalence of stairs, but we could've found a mundane solution. If you have suggestions, please leave them in the comments, and if you have the book, consider this permission to use the ones you like!
This may be the last post before Christmas, in which case Merry Christmas to those of you who celebrate it. Next time, I'll take a look at the two books' campus adventures. Did I say last time that I was doing that next time? Because obviously I didn't do that, but next time, definitely.
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