 Warning, stay away from this video if you don't want roughly 8 minutes of tilted whinging about the Magic Dice game because there is no guidance here, only screams. I don't like rant videos, I like clickbaity titles, but only when they've got like wholesome reverse messages and aren't just 8 hour rants against the thing that I don't like. I only took pleasure in tearing apart Tyranny of Dragons because I was forced to run that game four times in a row, and the universe owed me some vindication, but this, this is a different beast. Strixhaven's four part, four year adventure, is by and large the most frustrating thing I have ever ran. It's a hollow shell of school life that may have once held a dream of magic and whimsy, but like all school experiences, the reality is all wart and no hog. This book made half of my gaming groups want to end their campaigns immediately so that they could live out their dreams of taking wizard SATs and having a shot with Alan Rickman. By Grabthar's hammer, what a savings. So I opened the tome expecting to find artistic license and clever plays on the tropes of the wizarding world, and instead I found the barest bones of plot and mechanics that I have ever seen in a 5e book. Malnourished ideas barely put to print. The amount of filling in the gaps that I had to do in order to make Strixhaven's narrative work as a cohesive story should have given me a writing credit. I found dozens of interesting concepts, but they only served to try and trick me into a false sense of security, since digging into almost any of them revealed an IOU sticker in place of actual content. Now before I get into the details, keep in mind, no matter what adventure you play, it lives or dies on the back of the DM. Tyranny of Dragons can be terrific and Curse of Strahd can be a nightmare and your interpretation of whether those are good or bad things has everything to do with your personal table. If you enjoy Strixhaven or you haven't played it yet and you want to give it a shot, go crazy. Get that acceptance letter that you never got when you were a kid. I don't want to make you feel bad for liking anything about Strixhaven other than the magecraft card mechanic because that shit was busted, but I do want to warn potential DMs who are looking to run it that you are gonna have a hard time. And I can't properly express what I mean without walking you through a chapter, so without spoiling the story, the sequence of events for the first chapter of the game is players go to a room on campus for a random weird activity, something goes wrong, players fix it with no further fanfare, end of scene. Then the players take an exam which consists of rolling two or three skill checks, and that's it. There's lip service to studying, but it's not woven into the plot, it's just tacked on as an optional things that the players can do to remind them that yeah, there's still students. Then they have another after-school hijink that goes wrong somehow, and the players fix it, which immediately ends the scene. Then another quiz, rinse and repeat until the end of the book. There is no agency, no narrative through-line between the different activities just, oh, you finished with this thing? Here's the next scenario, it's three weeks later. Are you having fun yet? I wouldn't have a problem with that if there was something to do during the downtime between events, but there are barely any rules for the actual wizard school part of the wizard school game outside of studying, which is given all of this paragraph to flesh it out. And if you pause the video, you might notice that it just says, roll some dice, dummy, which is as far as most of this adventure goes. It feels like padding for a good part that never arrives, which sucks because there's so much lip service given to the good part that I feel like it should be pay-per-view. For instance, there's this thing in the game called mage tower. It's like quidditch, it's basically two opposing teams of wizard jocks playing capture the flag, but the flag is a living mascot for the enemy team. It's given this whole thing about rules, how to make a team, there's the side quest about capturing your own mascot before the game. The whole chapter is named after this event. It's a big deal, but what are the actual mechanics of the game? Well, every player either rolls athletics, acrobatics, or arcana, and whichever team rolled higher wins, and you can cast spells to either give advantage on the check or if its third level automatically succeed. Do this three times to represent the three periods of the game, and that's the extent of the rules. Can you see the problem yet? This is the most boring way possible to run such a massively hyped event in the story. I read this and my mind is already spinning with ways to add on to it. I can add more types of skill checks, I can have the mascots wander on their own and force the players to actively move around the map, I can get hecklers from the crowd to distract people, I can add traps to the environment, I can infuse the area with wild magic surges, there's so much I can do here. But then I stop and think, wait, this book just got me thinking for it. I'm doing the job of my 60 dollar adventure module, and that is the problem. Every mechanic introduced is so bare bones that it requires me to fill in the blanks, which yeah, I'm gonna do anyway. I like modifying stuff, but that's not supposed to be a requirement. You can't just say feel free to come up with your own ideas when my own idea was to buy the book. Another instance is with the part-time jobs in school clubs. They sound like cool things to do, but you don't get any benefit from being in them besides a D4 to occasional skill checks to remind yourself that yeah, you work at Starbucks. There's no dialogue options or suggestions of how to roleplay downtime with these kinds of activities. And while we're at it, why does LARPing have animal handling? Why does the Dead Language Society use athletics? But I digress, the only thing that I think is fleshed out here is the dating sim, where you get to try to live out your long forgotten dream of being loved by your peers. It's got rules for how to do that, varying levels of mechanical and roleplay benefits for how much they love or hate you, and the whole catalog of characters means that I have as many NPCs as I need, such as the tongue troll. Somebody mentioned that those are tusks and not actually his tongue, but maybe shut off about it. It shows that the designers can create something worthwhile when they put their minds to it, but when the best that you can say about a D&D campaign is, well, at least they got the dating sim right, it does not bode well for the overall image of the game. It's not the focus on a social game that makes it bad either. The previous adventure, Wild Beyond the Witchlight, was completely combat optional, and it's got the most crazy, colorful encounters and characters. Some of those encounters are just rolled ice, framed in a weird way, but they're carnival attractions, so it works. It's probably my favorite 5e adventure. It takes the idea of the Feywild and fleshes out an Alice in Wonderland style of mysterious new environments that are just not quite correct for our world. It's in an uncanny valley given form in the best way, and that's all without sacrificing any of the combat or options thereof. Strixhaven, however, doesn't have the restriction that every combat needs to be optional, which should give them more freedom to do whatever they want, but all they end up doing are some disjointed schoolyard hijinks and some scantrons. Where I think they went wrong is that in more traditional adventures, every chapter ends with an idea of where the party's going to go next. It's very this happened, and so this will happen storytelling. But Strixhaven takes place over an entire year per chapter of the story, so massive time jumps are par for the course. You can't exactly have one thing be an immediate reaction to the last thing. However, instead of integrating that into the plot, a specific scene will simply end. Without so much as a closing statement, and it'll pick back up in the next place at the exact moment in time that the plot demands the party focuses on. The massive jump in between, wherein the party would reasonably try to investigate strange occurrences considering their, you know, D&D players, is just glossed over. It makes sense that the characters can't go on Strix Google and look up the answers to all the mysteries, even if the players will. But the book doesn't even mention how to deal with such a likely scenario, or how to passively entertain the players if they want to experience more of the mundane campus life, such as interacting with that dating sim that they put so much effort into. All this means that as a DM, I have to work harder to make the game make sense. It doesn't make sense to haphazardly flash forward to random bits in the school year, but the game doesn't provide downtime activities, or even dormitories for them to hang out in at the end of every adventure, so that's what I gotta do. I gotta make fun, weird social encounters between the players and their doki-doki schoolmates, because of course they'd be expecting it with how much the book hyped it up. When I look back at the book for guidance, it just tells me you can come up with a way of roleplaying things like enrollment and hanging out between classes, and I'm like, I know that! I didn't want to come up with that, that's why I bought you! But now I feel like the best song in Incanto, because there's a lot of pressure to turn this limp-dick extracurricular into some hard-thropping school spirit. Some people might say, hey, this is a sourcebook, the adventures in sourcebooks are never that good, but this game was marketed with the adventure front and center. It still called itself a sourcebook, but all the marketing was like, hey, play the big adventure thing, you'll love it! The other sourcebooks don't do that. They make a quick, half-thought-out introductory adventure to lead you into the world, and that's what this felt like, only this isn't a one-shot, it's, and I did the math here, 60% of the book. To be perfectly fair, I don't think the design team meant to break new ground with this adventure. I have to believe that Strixhaven started out as a sourcebook with an adventure included, just like Eberron and Theros, but then the UA for Strixhaven tanked, and they gutted most of the actual source out of the book. I do think that, unlike other books, the adventure in Strixhaven was meant to be bigger, because let's be honest, no amount of talking about a wizard school is going to be better than living in a wizard school. But they didn't set out to make a grand storyline. Strixhaven was a sourcebook, but the rules it does have for new mechanics involving school, part-time jobs, and sweet sensual romance, are very Strixhaven centric, and I truly can't see myself using them outside of this adventure, because what am I going to do with rules for holding down a part-time campus job? Overall, don't let this video stop you from buying the book if you really want the skeleton of a magic school storyline, because it's not like the adventure doesn't have cool ideas, it's just so shaved down that it has the same substance as hearing your friend tell you what the plot of the magicians is and then charging you 50 bucks for it. My players will still love this game, come hell or high wizard, but I refuse to stare into the abyss without warning other people not to blink. But that'll have to do it. I hope you enjoyed this video, be sure to leave a like, comment, subscribe, ring the bell, check out all my social media in the description below, and maybe support me on Patreon so that I can afford the medical bill for my high cholesterol after all of the salt that I just ingested. But yeah, Dabby out.