Roll Some Dice

  BUY SKULLKICKERS: CASTER BASTARDS AND THE GREAT GROTESQUE NOW! 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 betwe...

  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 incre...

  Rolf being "charming." One of the big things I knew we had to figure out for an adventure set in a school was the social stuff. And There are the dramatic relationships that punctuate a student's life in college or high school, yes, but also the kind social soup that a student ends up in that consists of acquaintances, members of clubs or organizations they belong to, dorm-mates, and so on. If a big chunk of the adventure was going to involve day-to-day student life, then those relationships needed to be engaging. It couldn't be just rolling Persuasion and Insight over and over, and I wanted the DM to have something to fall back on, just in case. I come from indie-ish games, sorta, where social interactions are often mechanized. For example, in Fate you can threaten someone with Provoke and deal mental stress to them, and that could take a character out of the scene as easily as a sword could. But D&D is a different beast, and usually relegates social interactio...

  In wizard school, books hit you. One of the big challenges with an RPG setting that revolves around school is figuring out how to make that part interesting. Yeah, there'll be adventures when Something Goes Wrong that more closely resemble mainline D&D, but just glossing over the school-stuff will rob the setting of the intended atmosphere. At the same time, going day-to-day with the school-stuff is obviously not an option. The tricky balance between those two poles will be our first point of comparison between Strixhaven and Skullkickers . 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, ...

  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...