The Actual Adventures
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| These Strixhaven students would appear to be on some sort of adventure. |
Whoa, this got away from me, huh? First it was the holidays and then our 3rd grader went back to school in person after a long, long period of online learning, which you'd think would mean I'd have all kinds of time to be productive, when in reality my "one week to decompress" turned into, like, almost two months. But this Skullkickers-meets-Strixhaven series of posts has been on my mind the whole time, so let's get to it!
So in this post, I'm going to look at the core of each of these two books, the adventures themselves. When the PCs aren't doing school stuff as students, or dealing with their relationships, or any of that, what's putting their lives in peril? What feats of heroism are they called upon to perform? Like that.
I want to note right off the bat that there's a significant structural dichotomy between these two books that makes this comparison a little more difficult than the others. In Strixhaven, the adventures is the book, by which I mean that everything the characters do in their academic careers is presented in the format of a series of adventures, and when the last one's done, you're at the end of the book, more or less. It's like any other hardcover adventure from WotC. Nothing wrong with that!
In Skullkickers, well, I don't want to give anything away, but the portion of the adventure in which the PCs are students doing student-things is only the first of three acts. In the second act, there's the Graduate Dungeon, and in the third act there's... something else. In a sense, the purpose of the adventures in Act I is to show the players around the tower and all it has to offer. It's a big tower, and if you don't make the players go places they wouldn't ordinarily go, well, they wouldn't go there. And although I am proud of that Act I content, this isn't just vanity. Knowledge of the school's layout and locations will be helpful later on. No spoilers. Act I is a sizable chunk of the book, but it's only one of three.
Regardless, an implied message in each is "Something is going on here, and we don't know what." Strixhaven provides the characters with clear direction -- there's a prompt for characters to get involved in something, and then they do, and that leads to other adventures. There's wiggle-room to allow for player shenanigans, but there's also an intended arc there, with a an over-villain at the end. Each year, a series of events occurs that tends to follow the same narrative thread, each one (usually) building on the one before, and which culminates in a finale that wraps everything up, or at least everything that the players didn't contribute themselves.
(It's easy to see how Strixhaven can be split up into four short campaigns, or a series of one-shots, or one longer campaign that takes the characters from enrolling to graduating. This makes a lot of sense in light of changes with the Adventurers League. In years past, WotC has produced AL-specific adventures to pair with each hardcover. That's not happening anymore. Instead, the hardcovers themselves will be the AL's focus. You could always play the hardcovers as AL games, going all the way back to Hoard of the Dragon Queen, but it was clear that they weren't written with the AL's specific needs in mind. And also they want us to buy the books. Anyway.)
Act I of Skullkickers has a similar structure, but there's no larger-scale "wrapping up" at the end of each semester. I mean, there is in that each semester's three-part story does come to a conclusion, but it's not something (usually) that concerns or affects the entire Academy to any significant degree. The answer to the question "What's going on here?" doesn't so much point the characters in a new direction as it does just confirm that "Yeah, things are weird, right?" That weirdness is something that the Academy's residents have just come to accept as their day-to-day. Weird things happen, sometimes with tragic results, but it isn't especially focused or directed.
That may sound counter-intuitive, or like it doesn't frame the characters as heroes solving problems, but that's not the case. As I said earlier, Skullkickers's school-time adventures are just the tip of the proverbial iceberg. (I'm sorry, I should've had some wordplay there, but I'm fresh out.) If the adventures in Act I consistently presented problems so severe that they threatened the Academy itself, then other students, maybe even the professors, would get involved. The end of each semester's story leaves the players with something to think and wonder about, but for everyone else's it's more along the lines of "Okay, show's over, back to your seats."
There's one other thing I wanted to say, and please don't take this as me running down Strixhaven, because I don't mean it that way, although I do think it's worth pointing out. A lot of adventure scenes in Strixhaven rope the players in by having a student say something like "You gotta come see this!" or "Come with us!" The you gotta see or go with them for is generally something rather light-hearted student-life stuff that snowballs from there into something that potentially leads to combat.
Look out, I'm going to use an analogy. Say you're driving on the freeway (I'm in Southern California; we do a of that here) and you see a billboard for a diner. If you're hungry, you'll choose to get off at the exit and eat. If you're not, you won't. Compare that to, say, having a blowout, or being pulled over by a cop -- it happens directly to you, and you have to deal with whether you want to or not. The adventure hooks for most of these adventures are like the billboard, not the blowout or cop. As long as the players at least say "I could eat," it's all good.
I think that wraps up this series! Two great books with distinctive identities. We talked about academics, student life, relationships, adventures... yeah, I think that's everything. In the unlikely event that it isn't, please let me know by leaving a comment on this post, and I'll look into it.
Also, as subtly mentioned above, Skullkickers: Caster Bastards and the Great Grotesque is now on sale in both PDF and hard-copy form. Go get it now!
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